Keynote Speakers

There is growing interest in the concept of Resilience and justifying resources spent on increasing resilience at the expense of efficiency. From a logical perspective we are interesting in formally representing key features of resilience, design principles supporting resilience, and methods to verify system resilience given a formal (in some logic) representation. In this talk we will look at resilience in the context of a variety of systems: digital, natural, societal, ... 

We will identify some key concepts and discuss challenges in developing formal models, paying attention to which properties concern non-deterministic behaviors and which concern stocastic We will briefly present two formalisms for modeling cyber physical systems, and associated model analysis methods such as checkable properties and complexity.

The Scottish economist and Philosopher Adam Smith wrote two influential books in the 18th century. One was the famous Wealth of Nations and the other one was the Theory of Moral Sentiments.  One could say, loosely speaking, that he regarded society as run by a mixture of self interest and sympathy for other people.  What Smith did not have were some developments that would take more than 200 years after his passing, namely computers, probability, the theory of algorithms and logic.  These tools need to be used to understand structures in society.

Here is an example. Academic journals charge a lot for a subscription, so much so that even the rich universities cannot afford all of them and they are certainly hard to get in the developing world.  And yet the work of doing the research, and these days even the work of typesetting is done by academics.  So how is it that publishers acquire the clout to charge these enormous amounts of money for subscriptions?  They do not have an army, do they?

 There are structures here which are not easily explained in terms of a simple version of Adam Smith’s ideas but we do now have new tools: algorithms, logic and theory of knowledge to be able to arrive at a better understanding of society.  We can then offer an explanation of a question raised by John Searle, namely how does a piece of paper with some printing on it become money and wield power?

This talk will be a survey with one or two new results but relying  mostly on the contributions of various people in economics, philosophy and logic.

Economists have long dismissed gambling as an irrational behavior that preys on individuals’ limited understanding of basic statistics and probability. In this view, government-run lotteries that fund public education are an ironic tax on those with poor probabilistic intuition, often from lower socioeconomic classes and educational backgrounds. The rise of behavioral economics as a field offers alternatives to strict rationality assumptions and has legitimized empirical economic research related to gambling. Several studies in low and middle income countries reveal the prevalence of gambling among the poor. This talk will review this evidence and highlight the specific case of lottery play in Haiti where many individuals routinely wager 25% or more of their (limited) daily income. This case illustrates how understanding individual motivations can open new possibilities to leverage passion for the lottery as a gateway for financial inclusion.

The talk  explores the fundamental difference between humanistic logic and business logic.  And despite the common belief humanistic that ethics is hierarchically above business ethics - represented in the demand for social responsibility of business - they are irreducible games. Departing from the Greek concept of ethos as character, or guiding beliefs of a person, community or system, the idea is to show how each of the spheres operate with their specific rules and principles, emphasizing the contrasting role of chance in each of the games. While humanism tends to minimize the importance of chance, disregarding the impact of randomness throughout an individual's life, in health and wealth for instance, businesses operate under the assumption that chance is decisive and should be accounted for. While humanism obliterates chance by supposing an initial equality that should be kept at all costs, business ethics departs from an inherent competitiveness and attributes a monetary value for the undertaken risks. The article is based on a wittgensteinian way of analysis and will examine a scene in Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is asked to show mercy to Antonio. In court, the judge explicitly marks the difference between the two games, one that had been agreed upon between the two parties and a supposedly broader one, and hierarchically superior, that is not demanded by the law, but by the heart, or why not say, by God. The reference to the Shakespearean play shows how the condemnation of usury and the requirement for fairness in a christian/western/humanistic context often contradicts the rules of the game we play when in business mode.

Pierre Duhem, and later WVO Quine, argued that the data we collect in scientific experiments will always be insufficient to specify a single theory with which we can explain said data - a problem called the Underdetermination of Theory by Data. In this talk we will look at a simple example of this phenomenon constructed using "crazy dice" (dice with odd numbering and sometimes equally odd probabilistic properties). Our examination of crazy dice allow us to provide a simple demonstration that even perfect information about the probability distribution of various outcomes is insufficient to determine either the identity of the "hidden" causes (i.e., the particular dice) or the number of kinds of causes (where "kinds" are shapes and numberings.) In addition, the examples we will discuss are simple enough to be presented in undergraduate classrooms, providing us with a simple, practical pedagogical tool.

In this talk I will discuss the famous book The Zurich Axioms: The Rules of Risk and Reward Used by Generations of Swiss Bankers by Max Gunther.  I will explain in which sense  the notion of "axiom" can be understood (cf. my recent paper "What is an axiom?")  and the meaning of chance by contrast to determisnim ("Dice: a hazardous symbol for chance?"), relating these two notions with a broad understanding of money as wealth. We will furthermore see how the Zurich Axioms can be efficient in a general philosophical sense of success in life. This is connected with the famous German proverb  "No Risk, no Fun".