The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a fifteen-month research fellowship by Dr. Eric J. Pacuit to work with Dr. Johan van Benthem at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) in the Netherlands.
Social software is an emerging interdisciplinary field devoted to the design and analysis of social procedures. First discussed by Rohit Parikh, social software has recently gained the attention of a wide range of research communities, including computer scientists, game theorists and philosophers. The main idea behind social software is that constructing and verifying social procedures should be pursued as systematically as computer software is pursued by computer scientists. Realizing this objective requires mastering techniques from the analysis of algorithms, logic of programs, logic of knowledge and game theory. Once mastered, these techniques need to be combined and reexamined from the social software point of view. Although the analogy between computer software and social software is strong, there are some important differences. For example, two issues which are important for social software but less crucial for computer software are the exchange of (and occasional hiding of) information, and the provision of incentives. Concurrency theory, cryptography and distributed computing have all addressed the first issue. However, many of the underlying assumptions in these fields makes applying these results to social procedures unrealistic. The second issue has been more or less the province of game theory. But game theory tends to study the area in rather simple terms lacking the sophisticated tools of computer science like recursion and data types. The objective of this project is to develop a formal framework for verifying social procedures, with special attention paid to naturally modeling the flow of information in a social situation.
Collaboration with van Benthem, Robert von Rooij and other members of the ILLC community, including Ph.D. students, will be an integral part of the success of this project. The ILLC hosts an active European research community through its regular workshops on "Logic, Games and Computation".
