On Wednesday, May 6th, Arianna Betti will publicly accept her appointment as professor of philosophy of language, with her inaugural lecture entitled `Concepts in motion'.

For more information, see https://www.uva.nl/disciplines/wijsbegeerte/home/componenten-middenkolom/nieuws/

This two-day workshop at the University of Amsterdam brings together researchers, scholars, and students to engage in discussions about Quantum Logic, Foundations of Quantum Physics, and Quantum Information Theory.

For more information, see http://events.illc.uva.nl/AQL/AQL15/.

Abstract:
In the work of the game theorist Françoise Forges, nonsignalling correlations independently appear under the name of "belief-invariant communication equilibria". The motivation and the use of these objects are different than what we would expect in quantum information. Here, we explain and unify the two views and introduce the concept of "privacy compatible correlated equilibrium". We model, for example, situations where competing companies benefit from a correlated strategy, without revealing their trade secrets (seen as private inputs).
This is work in progress, together with Andreas Winter (UAB Barcelona) and Ashutosh Rai (University of Latvia).

For more information, please contact Christian Schaffner (c.schaffner at uva.nl)

This two-day workshop at the University of Amsterdam brings together researchers, scholars, and students to engage in discussions about Quantum Logic, Foundations of Quantum Physics, and Quantum Information Theory.

For more information, see http://events.illc.uva.nl/AQL/AQL15/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/LoLa/DIP-Colloquium/.

In this talk, we will construct the set of Hyperreal Numbers using the help of Model Theory. The set of Hyperreal Numbers is a field containing real numbers with the addition of "infinitely small" and "infinitely big" numbers.

We will begin with some historical background of Newton's (and Leibniz's, as well) work (differentiation) and why he needed the concept of "infinitely small" numbers. Then to construct the set of Hyperreal Numbers, we will introduce some Model Theoretic concepts (such as languages, structures, sentences and elementarily equivalence) and Los's Theorem. Then, we will construct the nonstandard extension of the set of real numbers which we will call "the set of Hyperreal Numbers" and we will proceed with examples of some actual hyperreal numbers and the extensions of some classical functions from standard analysis, such as exponential function and trigonometric functions. If time permits, we will see some basic theorems in Nonstandard Analysis, such as Robinson's Compactness Criterion.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/coollogic/ or contact coollogic.uva at gmail.com

For more information, see https://staff.uva.nl/science/news-events/events/content/events/2015/05/

Abstract:
In this presentation I focus on the 'epistemic potential' of a group of agents, i.e. the knowledge (or beliefs) that the group may come to possess if all its members join their forces and share their individual information. Among the different notions of group knowledge studied in the literature, which one can give us a good measure of a group'sepistemic potential? Hence, when exactly is the group's ability to track the truth higher than that of each of its members? I will answer these questions by paying attention to a number of different factors that may play a role, including: the group's dynamics, the structure of the social network, the individuals' different epistemic interests and agendas, etc. When we take these realistic conditions into account, an accurate formalization of a group's potential knowledge can be developed. I will illustrate the setting with examples from interrogative scenarios in which we allow inter-agent communication as the group's main knowledge-aggregation method.The results reported on in this lecture are based on on-going joint work with A. Baltag and R. Boddy.

For more information, see http://www.auc.nl/news-events/events-and-lectures/upcoming-events-and-lectures/

Just like every other research institute in the Netherlands, every six years the ILLC is evaluated. This year, the institute is up for its Midterm Review over the years 2012 to 2014. For this purpose, the Scientific Advisory Board will come to Amsterdam for a site visit.

For more information, contact illc at uva.nl

Just like every other research institute in the Netherlands, every six years the ILLC is evaluated. This year, the institute is up for its Midterm Review over the years 2012 to 2014. For this purpose, the Scientific Advisory Board will come to Amsterdam for a site visit.

For more information, contact illc at uva.nl

The CLS is happy to announce three talks about Statistical Models of Grammaticality studied within the SMOG project at King's College London. SMOG is exploring the construction of an enriched stochastic model that represents the syntactic knowledge that native speakers of English have of their language. We are experimenting with different sorts of language models that contain a variety of parameters encoding properties of sentences and probability distributions over corpora.

Speakers:
Alex Clark: On his work on theoretical results for grammar induction
Shalom Lappin: Experimental work on identifying gradience in speakers' representation of syntactic knowledge
Jey Han Lau: Experiments with unsupervised language models to predict speakers' syntactic acceptability judgements

For more information and abstracts, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/LaCo/CLS/

For more information, see http://www.uva.nl/en/news-events/events/events-calendar/item/

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/LoLa/DIP-Colloquium/.

Descriptive set theory (DST) is the study of the definable sets of real numbers and similar topological spaces. One of DST's main driving questions is: What can we say about a set if all that we know is that it is definable with a certain complexity? For example, we know that if a set is the projection of a closed subset of the real plane then it cannot be a counterexample to the Continuum Hypothesis. On the other hand, the usual axioms of set theory don't determine whether the same can be said of all *complements* of such sets!
One especially interesting space studied in DST is the Baire space, composed of the infinite sequences of natural numbers. The topology of this space has a certain computational-combinatorial flavor which makes many arguments more intuitive than in other spaces. Another nice aspect of this space is that it lends itself quite naturally to analysis by infinite games, which I hope to convince you of in this talk.
I will start with a brief description of some games which have far-reaching consequences for set theory and the foundation of mathematics. The main focus of the talk will be the games which characterize interesting classes of functions in Baire space, where I will describe results by Wadge, Duparc, Andretta, Semmes, and (time permitting) yours truly. I will assume no prior knowledge other than some basic mathematics, such as the definition of a topology.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/coollogic/ or contact coollogic.uva at gmail.com

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/alg-coalg or contact Sumit Sourabh (S.Sourabh at uva.nl).

For more information, please visit the website http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/ or contact Thomas Brochhagen (t.s.brochhagen at uva.nl), Johannes Marti (johannes.marti at gmail.com), Masa Mocnik (masa.mocnik at gmail.com) or Julian Schloder (julian.schloeder at gmail.com).

Or see here.

Speakers: Branden Fitelson, Eric Pacuit, Olivier Roy and Alexandru Baltag

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/lgc/seminar or http://www.illc.uva.nl/LoLa/LOGICiC-Seminar/.

On May 29th, Jeroen Goudsmit will defend his dissertation "Intuitionistic Rules", written under the supervision of Albert Visser and Rosalie Iemhoff in the project "The Power of Constructive Proofs". This conference is held on the occasion of said defense. The members of the doctoral examination committee will give talks on their areas of expertise, and the conference ends with a talk by Jeroen on his thesis, in which he studies the admissible rules of intermediate logics.

Speakers: Dick de Jongh, George Metcalfe, Nick Bezhanishvili, Silvio Ghilardi, Albert Visser, Rosalie Iemhoff, and Jeroen Goudsmit.

For more information, see http://jeroengoudsmit.com/theories-and-rules/