16-20 August 2010, Workshop on Dependence and Independence in Logic, Copenhagen, Denmark

Dependence and independence are common phenomena, wherever one looks: ecological systems, astronomy, human history, stock markets - but what is their role in logic and - turning the tables - what is the logic of these concepts?

The possibility of nesting quantifiers, thus expressing patterns of dependence and independence between variables, accounts for much of the expressive power of first order logic. However, first order logic is not capable of expressing all such patterns, and as a consequence various generalizations - such as branching quantifiers, or the various variants of independence-friendly logic - have been introduced during the last fifty years. Dependence logic is a recent formalism, which brings to the forefront the very concept of dependence, isolating it from the notion of quantifier and making it one of the primitive elements of the language. It can also be added to other logics, such as modal logic. This has opened up an opportunity to develop logical tools for the study of complex forms of dependence, with applications to computer science, philosophy, linguistics, game theory and mathematics. Recently there has been an increasing interest in this topic, especially among young researchers.

The goal of this workshop is to provide an opportunity for researchers to further explore the very notions of dependence and independence and their role in formal logic, inparticular with regard to logics of imperfect information.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dependence/. This workshop is organized as part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information 2010 in cooperation with the European Science Foundation EUROCORES program LogICCC project LINT (Logic for interaction).