Team Members
PROJECT LEADER (from 1 June 2010 till 1 June 2015):
Sonja Smets is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD at the Free University of Brussels in 2001. She started as a post-doctoral researcher at the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research and became a part-time lecturer at the Free University of Brussels till 2009. In 2005-2006 she was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, and in 2008 at both the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, and the School of Informatics at Indiana University. In 2009 she worked as an Assistant Professor, holding a Rosalind Franklin Research Fellowship, at both the Faculty of Philosophy (Dept. Theoretical Philosophy) and the Faculty of Mathematics & Natural Sciences (Multi-agent Systems Group in Artificial Intelligence) at the University of Groningen. In 2009, she received a VIDI award and in 2011 she received and ERC starters grant. Her research programme ranges over Logic (in particular non-classical logics, including non-monotonic logics, belief revision, modal and temporal logic, quantum logic); Multi-agent Systems; Formal Epistemology; Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Quantum Physics, Quantum Information and Computation.
EXPERT ADVISOR AND COLLABORATOR (from 1 June 2010 till 1 June 2015):
Alexandru Baltag is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (University of Amsterdam). He is known mostly for his work in logics for multi-agent information flow (– he was one of the originators of dynamic epistemic logic) and their applications to communication, game theory, epistemology etc. He also worked on non-wellfounded set theory, coalgebraic logic, logics for quantum computation, game semantics, learning theory. His MS in Mathematics was obtained in 1989 at the University of Bucharest. He received his PhD in Mathematics in 1998 at Indiana University under the supervision of Jon Barwise. Between 1998 and 2001, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science. Between 2001 and 2011 he was a University Lecturer at Oxford University, in the Department of Computer Science.
POSTDOC TEAM MEMBER (from 16 February 2011 till 16 August 2013):
Kohei Kishida joined the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University as a postdoctoral researcher after he completed his postdoc position at the ILLC working for Dr. Sonja Smets’s VIDI project “Reasoning about Quantum Interaction”. He studied logic, philosophy, and mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and earned his Ph.D. degree in December 2010 from the Department of Philosophy, U. Pitt, under Professors Steve Awodey and Nuel Belnap. Before coming to the ILLC, he was a postdoc at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, the University of Groningen.
He is primarily interested in mathematical and philosophical logic (in particular, non-classical logics), and his primary approach to topics in logic is to apply methods and insights of category theory. His interest also lies in broad issues in philosophy, with specialization in formal epistemology and philosophy of science (in particular, the philosophy of physics and spacetime).
POSTDOC TEAM MEMBER (from 1 October 2012 till 1 June 2015):
Joshua Sack joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at California State University Long Beach as an Assistant Professor after completing his postdoc position at the ILLC were he worked with Dr. Sonja Smets on the VIDI project “Reasoning about Quantum Interaction”. He received his PhD degree in June 2007 from the Department of Mathematics at Indiana University, having studied Applied Logic under the direction of Professor Moss. After graduating, he taught at California State University Long Beach in 2007, the University of California Irvine in 2008, and then held research positions in Reykjavik University, the University of Groningen, and California State University Long Beach. His research interests are to develop logics that integrate those of probability, knowledge, time, and dynamics, and to apply these to problems in computer science (multi-agent systems, concurrency theory, and quantum computing), game theory (mixed strategies), philosophy (formal epistemology), and mathematics (with connections to topology, algebra, and combinatorics)
PHD TEAM MEMBER (from 1 October 2011 till 1 October 2014):
Jort Martinus Bergfeld has taken up the position of a teacher in Mathematics in the Netherlands after his employment as a PhD researcher on the 'Reasoning about quantum interaction'-project at the Institue for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), Universiteit van Amsterdam. Before he worked as a secondary school teacher in mathematics at the Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer, Amsterdam. He obtained his MSc in mathematics in 2009 at the Universiteit van Amsterdam under the supervision of Yde Venema. His main research interests are information theory and mathematical logic.
PHD COLLABORATOR (from 1 January 2012 till 1 June 2015):
Shengyang Zhong is a PhD student at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam (UvA). He is working on a PhD research project about dynamic quantum logic supervised by Dr. Alexandru Baltag. His PhD thesis with the title 'Orthogonality and Quantum Geometry - Towards a Relational Reconstruction of Quantum Theory' will be defended on September 9th 2015 at the University of Amsterdam. He studied and obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the Institute of Logic and Cognition, Sun Yat-sen University. His academic interest in general is the interplay among logic, mathematics, physics, computer science and philosophy, as his PhD research topic exemplifies
POSTDOC TEAM MEMBER (from 1 February 2011 till 1 February 2012):
Nina Gierasimczuk will join the AlgoLog Group at the Danish Tecnical University in Copenhagen as an Assistant Professor from January 2016 onwards. After her postdoctoral employment on the 'Reasoning about quantum interaction' project, she joined Dr Smets' ERC project on 'The Logical Structure of Correlated Information Change' (LogiCIC) at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. In 2014 she was awared with an NWO Veni grant with the title: 'Learning from each other: Formal analysis of multi-agent learning'. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2010 from the ILLC, UvA, under the supervision of Johan van Benthem and Dick de Jongh. In her dissertation, titled “Knowing One’s Limits. Logical Analysis of Inductive Inference” she explores the connections between formal learning theory and dynamic epistemic logic. Her current research interests focus on formal learning theory, computability theory, dynamic epistemic logic and belief revision.