Research Interests

I am a reader in Artificial Intelligence at King's College London, and visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Milan. My main research and teaching interests are in the areas of:

  • Logic, Argumentation and Dialogue

  • Philosophy and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

    Current work involves research on non-monotonic logics, argumentation theory and dialectical models of reasoning that enable distributed reasoning amongst multiple agents (i.e., argumentation based dialogue). In particular I have worked on the ASPIC+ model of logic-based argumentation, dialectical models of logic-based reasoning that are provably rational under resource bounds, and models of logic-based argumentation that accommodate reasoning about preferences and values. The latter work was awarded Winner of the AIJ 2014 Prominent Paper Award.

    More recently, my research has focussed on the ethics of AI, and development of the above models of dialectical reasoning so as to integrate human and artificial agent reasoning through dialogue. The long term aim is to not only ensure that the AI machines of the future make decisions that are aligned with human values and preferences, but moreover, that future AIs may enhance our moral understanding and calculations when we are faced with challenging ethical dilemmas.

    Previous research interests lie in the areas of default reasoning, belief revision, non-monotonic logics, modal logics, and their applications in artificial intelligence.

    Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

    Teaching

  • I currently teach a postgraduate module on The Philosophy and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. See here for a list of topics and issues covered in the module.

  • Information for Project Students

    See here for selection of courses given to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers

    Recent Invited Talks

  • Talk at Festival of Disruptive Thinking: AI, Cognitive Biases and Well Being.

  • Invited talk on Truth, Logic and Dialogue at AI3 2021.

  • Invited talk on Preferences in Dialectical Formalizations of Non-monotonic Reasoning at ArgStrength 2021.

  • Invited talk on Dialogical Scaffolding for Human and Artificial Agent Reasoning at Institute for Logic Language and Computation.

  • Invited talk on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Well Being at King's International School for Government.

    See here for selection of courses given to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers

    Projects

    See here for details of funded projects

    Media and Public Engagement

    See here for details of media and public engagement

    Recent Publications:

  • M. D'Agostino, C. Larese and S. Modgil. Towards Depth-Bounded Natural Deduction for Classical First-Order Logic. In: fCoLoG Journal of Logics and their Applica-tions,8(2), 423-451, 2021.

  • M. D'Agostino and S. Modgil. A Fully Rational Account of Structured Argumentation Under Resource Bounds. In: 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'20), 1841-1847, 2020.

  • D. Grossi and S.Modgil On the Graded Acceptability of Arguments in Abstract and Instantiated Argumentation. In: Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), (275), 138-173, 2019.

  • M. D'Agostino, D. Gabbay and S.Modgil Normality, non-contamination and logical depth in classical natural deduction. In: Studia Logica, DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-019-09847-4, February, 2019.

  • M. D'Agostino and S.Modgil Classical Logic, Argument and Dialectic. In Artificial Intelligence (AIJ). 262, 15 - 51, 2018.

    Full Publication List (by research area):

  • Logic Argument and Dialogue.

  • Logic and Proof Theory.

  • Philosophy, Ethics and Norms in AI.

  • AI in Law.

  • AI in Medicine.