Gaia Belardinelli

News:

• [New] Paper accepted at Advances in Modal Logic 2026, the leading conference on modal logic!

The paper is entitled "Belief Contraction in Dynamic Epistemic Logic" and it is joint work with Snow Zhang (UC Berkeley).

We propose a general mechanism to do belief contraction in standard possible world semantics, which does not require plausibility orderings or any specific property on the accessibility relation. 

• [New] On August 17-20, 2026, I will teach a course at The Nordic Logic Summer School! 

Title: Formal Models of Attention. See here for an abstract. 

Thanks so much to the PC for inviting me!

• [New] On August 3-14, 2026, I will co-teach a course at ESSLLI 2026, together with Snow Zhang (UC Berkeley)!
  Title: Awareness Modeling. 

• April 16, 2026, Invited talk at AI Fair and Hackaton at Cal Poly Pomona! 

My talk will be about Logic in AI. Thanks Alex Madva (Cal Poly Pomona) for inviting me!

• April 3-6, 2026, Talk at the 5th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning (TLLM 2026) at Tsinghua University!

My talk is entitled "The logic of attention and awareness".

• I joined the program committee of LOFT 2026!

• Talk at the workshop on attention in epistemic planning (AIEP), at DTU.

This is the kick-off workshop of the AIEP project, started in February 2025 (PI Thomas Bolander, DTU). The project focuses on: 

1. Efficient epistemic planning based on attention;

2. Implementations of attention-based planning in AI systems. 

With such implementations, AI agents will be able to attribute attentional states to other agents and deduce information about their attention. This will be an important step towards AI systems reasoning about attentional biases in humans and helping us correcting them!

My talk was about open problems in formal models of attention: what are we missing?

• I joined the program committee of AAAI 2026 and AAMAS 2026!

• August 17, 2025, Talk at TKR 2025 – 1st International Workshop on Trends in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning co-located with IJCAI 2025.

In this talk, I presented our IJCAI paper on the logic for general attention to an audience of researchers in Knowledge Representations. Great questions and discussions afterwards!

• Paper accepted at IJCAI 2025!! 

The paper is entitled A Logic for General Attention Using Edge-Conditioned Event Models, joint work with Thomas Bolander (DTU) and Sebastian Watzl (U Oslo). Thanks so much for the amazing collaboration!

We now have a logical model to represent attention to any formula in the language, including other agents' attention and higher-order beliefs. The model is based on edge-conditions, which allow to have a provably more succinct representation of earlier attention models. We apply these models to show that AI systems reasoning through them would be able to deduce the presence of discriminatory attention biases in other (human or artificial) agents.

Looking forward to the conference!

• June 23-27, 2026, I co-taught at course on Awareness Modeling at NASSLLI 2025, together with Snow Zhang (UC Berkeley)!

• I joined Mathematical Reviews as a reviewer for the American Mathematical Society!

• April 23, 2025, Guest lecture at the Spring Seminars in Logic and AI, Stanford University. 

I talked about a new DEL framework for belief revision that does not use any plausibility ordering. Joint work with Xueyin (Snow) Zhang.

• April 11, 2025, Invited talk at the Mini-workshop on next-gen philosophical foundations of AI at the University of Missouri, organized by Mike Schneider (U Missouri).

The talk is entitled Is logic a suitable foundation for modeling real human reasoning? 

• I joined the program committee of IJCAI 2025 and ECAI 2025!

• February 14, 2025, Invited talk at the Logic Colloquium, University of California, Berkeley.

The talk is entitled Belief updates under limited attention. 

• January 18, 2025, World Logic Day @ Berkeley-Stanford Circle in Logic and Philosophy.

We are organizing an informal event in celebration of the World Logic Day, where graduate students will present their works or lead discussions on logic related topics. 

Join us if you are around!

• I joined the program committee of LORI 2025!

• September 18, 2024, Talk at the Good Attention group at the University of Oslo, together with Thomas Bolander (DTU) and Sebastian Watzl (U Oslo).

The talk is entitled The Logic of Attention.

• September 11, 2024, I am organizing an interdisciplinary workshop on Implicit Biases in Humans and Machines, together with Thomas Bolander (DTU), at DTU Compute.

If you are interested in the topic, have a look at the website of the workshop, where we collected the slides from some of the workshop's speakers: https://sites.google.com/view/workshop-implicit-bias/home

•  Thomas Bolander (DTU) has been awarded a 4 years grant on a project entitled "Attention in Epistemic Planning"  that we wrote together!

I am a named postdoc in the project -- a position which I am supposed to take on after the current postdoc on implicit biases. The funding agency is the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF). You can find here a link to a short project description, but it is in Danish. 

Many congratulations to Thomas Bolander and thanks for a great collaboration!

• I joined the program committee of AAMAS 2025 and AAAI 2025!

• I have been awarded a two-year postdoctoral grant to work at Stanford University on my project about implicit bias and reasoning! The project aims at creating a formal theory of the impact of implicit bias on reasoning. 

The funding agency is the Independent Research Fund Denmark. You can find a link to the project here (although there is not much information about it yet). I am extremely grateful for this and looking forward to start!

Many thanks to Thomas Bolander (DTU), Nina Gierasimczuk (DTU), Burkhard Schipper (UC Davis), and Thomas Icard (Stanford) for supporting me in this, either as collaborators or host. 

• I joined the program committee of AAMAS 2024, AAAI 2024, and ECAI 2024!

• September 2-6, 2024, Invited talk at the workshop entitled New Perspectives on Formal Representations of Cognitive Attitudes. The workshop is part of the Logic for the AI Spring 2 summer school, held at the Lake Como School for Advanced Study, Italy.

• I joined the University of California, Davis, as a Visiting Scholar!

•  I joined the program committee of the Scandinavian Logic Symposium 2024!

• January 24, 2024, Invited talk at the Seminar in Logic & Formal Philosophy, Stanford University.

The talk is entitled How is Inattention Shaping Our Beliefs?

• December 6-19, 2023, Research visit with Thomas Bolander at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), DTU-Compute. 

Alessandro Burigana will also be there! We will work on syntactic event models together. In particular, we will try to find a syntactic way to induce updates in Dynamic Epistemic Logic.

• November 17, 2023, Invited presentation at the graduate seminar on Bayesian epistemology, at UC Berkeley.

The seminar is held by Snow Xueyin Zhang. My presentation will be about epistemic logic models of unawareness.

• I joined the program committee of LOFT 2024!

• October 5-7, 2023, Invited talk at Celia Workshop, at Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague.

The talk is entitled Attention in Dynamic Epistemic Logic.

• October 2, 2023, My PhD defense!! At University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

• July 17 - 22, 2023, Summer school Philosophy and Computer Science, University of Bayreuth, Germany.

One week summer school on philosophical themes in artificial intelligence.

Keynote speakers:  Johanna Thoma, Joseph Halpern, and Marija Slavkovik.

• June 28 - 30, 2023, Paper accepted at Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK 2023). Joint work with Burkhard C. Schipper.

The paper is entitled Implicit Knowledge in Unawareness Structures. 

It introduces a notion of implicit knowledge in Heifetz, Meier, Schipper (HMS) models for unawareness (see their 2006, 2008 papers). This is a lattice structure for unawareness that originally features explicit knowledge only. As HMS models have been applied to decision and game theory, we see this as a first step to modeling the behavioral implications of implicit cognition. 

The paper also introduces a category of Fagin Halpern (FH) models for unawareness (Fagin and Halpern, 1987). FH models originally provide an objective perspective on the epistemic situation, modeling it as seen from the outside, from a fully aware point of view. We show that models in an FH category can also provide each agent's subjective perspective, where the modeled situation is described using their subjective language only.

HMS models with implicit knowledge are shown modally equivalent to the category of FH models. By this result and the soundness and completeness a logic for explicit and implicit knowledge and awareness with respect to FH models, we get soundness and completeness of HMS models with implicit knowledge with respect to that logic. 

Yehee!

• June 18 - 22, 2023, Contributed talk at LOGICA, at The Premonstratensian Monastery of Teplá, organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. With Thomas Bolander.

The talk is entitled A dynamic epistemic logic of attention with attention change and limits on attentional capacities. 

See here for an abstract.

• I have been awarded the ASL scholarship to participate to Logic Colloquium 2023! Thank you so much! 

• June 5 - 9, 2023, Contributed talk at Logic Colloquium, at the University of Milan. With Thomas Bolander. 

The talk is entitled Attention! Dynamic Epistemic Logic models of (in)attentive agents. 

See here for an abstract.

• I have been awarded the AAMAS 2023 scholarship! I am very grateful for that and so much looking forward to the conference!

• May 30, 2023, Invited talk at Rebellion and Disobedience in AI, workshop that is part of AAMAS 2023. With Thomas Bolander.  In the talk, we will present our Dynamic Epistemic Logic model for attention-based learning and discuss situations in which robots should disobey commands that come from inattentive agents. Click here for the program!

• May 29 - June 02, 2023, Paper accepted at The 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2023). Joint work with Thomas Bolander. 

The paper is entitled Attention! Dynamic Epistemic Logic Models of (In)attentive Agents. It presents two logical models of partial learning of events due to inattention to some aspects of them. In one model, the agents remain indifferent with respect to information they did notThe event models are complex and grow exponentially large in the number of agents and announced literals, so we also present a more succinct way to describe them via a fully syntactic representation.

• December 9, 2022, Invited talk at the Good Attention group at the University of Oslo. The talk is entitled Attention! Logical Models of the Dynamics of Attention and Belief. With Thomas Bolander. 

See here for an abstract.

• December 6, 2022, Invited talk at Toulouse Workshop on Reasoning on Explanation and Epistemic Reasoning, at IRIT in Toulouse. The talk is entitled Attention! A Dynamic Epistemic Logic Model for Inattentive Agents. With Thomas Bolander.

• December 2, 2022, Talk at Zoom Mini-Workshop on New Developments in Epistemic Logic with Unawareness (online), entitled Implicit Knowledge in Unawareness Structures.

The workshop is organized by Burkhard C. Schipper and myself.

• September 12-16, 2022, Logic for the AI Spring, Lake Como School for Advanced Studies, Italy.

One week summer school about the use of logic in artificial intelligence.

Courses Followed: Automated Theorem Provers, by Joseph Urban; History of AI, by Stephanie Dick; Logics for Categories, by Alessandra Palmigiano; Multi-Agent Systems, by Michael Wooldridge.

• August 17-21, 2022,  SOCIAL LOGIC 2022, at Expo Lagazuoi, Dolomites, Italy. 

Thomas Bolander and I organized this three-day workshop to explore applications of logic and multi-agent systems to the social sciences. We had standard conference-talks for more focused in presentations, and group discussion to investigate three themes: logic as a foundation to the social sciences; logic as a methodology in the social sciences; logic and agent-based models. The participants are now writing a paper together to report our discussions. 

Thanks to CIBS and the Carlsberg Foundation for funding it!

• August 8-11, 2022, 33rd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, University of Galway, Ireland.

Courses Followed: Knowledge and Gossip, by Hans van Ditmarsch & Malvin Gattinger, Logic & Probability, by Thomas Icard & Krzysztof Mierzewski, Explainability in Integrated Cognitive Systems Combining Logic-based Reasoning and Data-driven Learning, by Mohan Sridharan. 

One week attendance.

• August 2022 - October 2022, Research visit with Thomas Bolander at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), DTU-Compute.

Working on our joint project on cognitively plausible models of attention.  We are now focusing on modeling inattentional blindness, the phenomenon according to which agents completely miss certain events, even if they happen at fixation. 

• June 23, 2022, Invited talk at LIRa Seminar at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam, entitled The dark side of knowledge: modeling implicit cognition in unawareness structures. 

See here for an abstract.

• May 21-22, 2022, Invited talk at the 8th CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Interaction at Stanford University entitled On Notions of Knowledge Beneath Levels of Awareness. With Burkhard C. Schipper.

See here for an abstract.

• April 2022 - June 2022, Research visit with Burkhard C. Schipper at the University of California, Davis, Department of Economics. 

Working on modeling implicit knowledge in unawareness structures, a lattice model of unawareness that Burkhard and coauthors created during Burkhard's PhD. We are planning to the use the resulting model to represent tacit knowledge, implicit biases, and other behaviorally relevant aspects of implicit cognition - exciting!

• February 2022 - March 2022, Research visit with Sonja Smets and Johan van Benthem, at the Institute for Logic Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. 

With Sonja I worked on logics for social network. We initiated a project with Lei Li and Anthia Solaki on cognitive (attention-based) and algorithmic filters in social networks. The basic idea is that not all the announcements posted in social media are received by the users, firstly because the algorithm filters out what is deemed not interesting to the user, and secondly because the user will only attend some of the announcements she receives.

With Johan I worked on the use of syntax in modeling cognitive and social phenomena: What does it add to the picture? In particular with respect to economics models of the same phenomena. Moreover, we explored lattice based formalizations of attention dynamics.

• November 2021 - January 2022, Research visit with Thomas Bolander at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), at DTU-Compute.

We initiated a project on modeling cognitive aspects of attention, as top-down vs bottom-up attention, inattentional blindness phenomena and other surprising aspects of attention. We are very excited to see that there are many possible applications, spanning from epistemic planning to attention economics.

• October 16-18, 2021, Contributed talk at The Eight International Conference On Logic, Rationality, and Interaction, (online) organized by Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, P.R. China. The talk is entitled Epistemic Planning with Attention as a Bounded Resource. 

• July 29-30, 2021, Contributed talk at Workshop on Automated Synthesis, (online), affiliated to ESSLLI 2021. The talk is entitled Epistemic Planning with Attention as a Bounded Resource. 

• July 26 - August 13, 2021, 32nd European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (online), organized by University of Bozen.

Courses Followed: Introduction to Deontic Logic and its Applications, by Réka Markovich & Leon van der Torre, Temporal Logics, by Valentin Goranko,  Workshop on Automated Synthesis, organized by Natasha Alechina and Brian Logan, Abstract Argumentation and Modal Logic, by Davide Grossi and Carlo Proietti.

Earlier events are listed in my CV. If you are interested in having a look, feel free to send me an email !