Monograph Defence + End of Studies

For you impatient ones: here is the link to my Monograph.

Some weeks ago I had the honour of defending my Monograph, titled Dynamic Epistemic Logic: Proposals for Approaches in Probability and Applications, achieving the maximum grade and being proposed for honours, before the committee formed by don Francisco Félix Lara Martín, don Álvaro Romero Jiménez and doña Antonia María Chávez González, of the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Seville, to whom I'm sincerely grateful for their most generous assessment not only of the extent of the efforts behind this work (as effort, at least by itself and without the guide of a sensible judgement to direct it, rarely produces something of worth), but also and most crucially, of the conjunction of these efforts with a firm resolve to make a theoretical contribution of some importance, both on my part and on that of my dearest and most esteemed advisor don Andrés Cordón Franco. About this man, only the best words can be said: during the composition of my Monograph, Andrés provided me not only with priceless insights on questions of both style and content (and he also had a crucial role in preventing my thirst for writing an ever-more-encompassing treatise, otherwise known as mission creep, from getting in the way of actually finishing the project), but he also proved to be one of the kindest and most pleasant persons that I've ever had the delight of being acquainted with, on top of a great conversationalist and a true intellectual in many matters.

The Monograph, which, sadly for my English-only readers, is currently only available in Spanish (though I'm quite confident in the linguistic indifference of the more technical parts of my work), concerns mainly the area of Modal Logic, and, more concretely, of Epistemic Logic. It is likely that most of my readers have never heard about any one of these areas, as they are usually circumscribed to a more or less strictly academic context. Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that they have no connection with the real world whatsoever.

Epistemic Logic attempts to formalize knowledge-related situations, that is, situations in which several agents (who in principle may be thought of as human, though this doesn't actually have to be the case) find themselves in scenarios of asymmetric access to the information about a particular set of facts, and attempt to make judgements about the knowledge that other agents (or they themselves) may posess about the situation as a whole. Though initially it may seem that this is the description of a highly abstract field of study, one can quickly find connections with other areas that are much more familiar for those of more practical inclinations: economics, game theory and, what initially captured my interest and drew me into the study of these kinds of formalisms, the analysis of distributed systems and their protocols. Indeed, during the years in which some of the protocols that now constitute the backbone of our network infrastructure were developed, academics like Hans van Ditmarsch, Ronald Fagin and Joseph Y. Halpern were working behind the scenes trying to formally prove their presumed properties of security, stability, scalability, etc.

The main contribution of my Monograph consists of a proposal to unify two of the most well-known extensions that have been constructed on top of the basic formal system of Epistemic Logic: on the one hand, Public Announcement Logic, whose formalization is already a standard in the field, and, on the other, Probabilistic Epistemic Logic, formalized by the aforementioned Halpern and Fagin (among others) in their famous article Reasoning about Knowledge and Probability. In particular, my proposal attempts to generalise that of another great academic, Barteld P. Kooi, formalized in his article Probabilistic Dynamic Epistemic Logic.

The defence of my Monograph concludes, or so it seems, my phase in the University of Seville. I say or so it seems because, as a matter of fact, it is my intention to occasionally continue collaborating with the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (or perhaps, even, with others) in the future; as it happens, I would like to start by writing an article summarizing the proposal of my Monograph and refining some of the points which, due to temporal limitations, I wasn't able to treat with the depth that I would have wished to.

My professional gaze now looms over the endless horizon of opportunities that destiny has set there before me, eager to discover what it is that awaits me in this new stage of my life and in the unbound realms of a forever undisclosed future. But before setting out on this new and exciting journey, please let me have a few weeks of well-deserved rest!

P.s.: For anyone interested in reading the Monograph, I have included it in the beginning of this post.