13 December 2012, PhD defense, Floor Sietsma

The ILLC is very proud to announce that on Thursday, December 13, 2012, 12 noon, Floor Sietsma will publicly defend her PhD thesis in the Agnietenkapel, University of Amsterdam. She is one of the youngest people in the Netherlands ever to receive a doctorate. At the time of her defence she will be 20.

Floor started the MSc Logic at the age of 15 and graduated two years later. After six months of doing smaller projects at the CWI, she started to work on her PhD, also at the CWI, under the supervision of Jan van Eijck and Krzysztof Apt. It took her about two and a half years to complete her doctorate thesis, entitled: "Logics of Communication and Knowledge".

A small summary of what she has done, by Floor herself:

I investigate knowledge transfer in communication using epistemic logic, the logic of knowledge. My research concerns many forms of communication, each with different assumptions about for example the visibility of messages to non-recipients and the knowledge of the participants about the structure of the communication network. An important part of the thesis is about complex email conversations with many CC and BCC recipients. I investigate what forms of knowledge can be achieved using these special recipient lists and what impact the use of BCC recipients has on the knowledge of regular recipients. A real-life example where such an analysis is interesting is the situation that some secret information has been revealed via email, and one has to find out who knows about this information, and where it came from.