Dissertation Award 2024: Mina Young Pedersen
The Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society is pleased to announce that the 2024 NAIS Dissertation Award is awarded to Mina Young Pedersen for her PhD thesis Malicious Agents and the Power of Few: On the Logic of Abnormality in Social Networks. The dissertation was supervised by Thomas Ågotnes and Marija Slavkovik from the University of Bergen, and Sonja Smets from the University of Amsterdam (NL). Dr. Pedersen’s dissertation is situated in the field of logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning, one of the foundational areas of Artificial Intelligence. Her work exemplifies the interdisciplinary character of the field, drawing on computer science, formal logic, and social science to explore urgent contemporary questions: How can we formally reason about malicious agents in social networks? And how can such reasoning be implemented computationally? These questions are particularly timely, as the need to understand and mitigate the influence of malicious actors in digital systems has never been more pressing. At the same time, the thesis contributes to deepening our understanding of the logical foundations of AI systems. The thesis stood out in the review process for several reasons: One of its most compelling qualities is the originality of its perspective. Although the use of formal logic Read more…