Spanning across the six Research Units, the ILLC has chosen two Key Themes as focal research areas for the institute.
-
Logic and Game Theory
In this key theme we investigate the many connections between these two domains, yielding advances in both.
In the past decade it has become increasingly clear that studying information, first and foremost, means studying the exchange of information. This acknowledgment of the inherently 'social' character of information shows up at many places in modern theory. Most strikingly, it has led to crucial contacts between logic and game theory, bringing an entirely new set of disciplines into the scope of logic, including economics and the social sciences more broadly.
-
Cognitive Modelling
In this key theme many of our research activities in modelling reasoning, language and music, using a variety of formalisms, come together.
One of the big challenges for science today is to understand how our minds work. Collaboration between many disciplines — ranging from neuroscience to linguistics — is necessary to make progress in this area. The ILLC contributes a necessary component to this interdisciplinary endeavor: building on a long experience with logic and modeling, we work on mathematical and computational models of reasoning, grammar, meaning, music, learning and decision making, at both the symbolic and the subsymbolic level.