The research consortium proposing SMARTEST consists of 3 units, for a total of 4 permanent researchers and 3 postdocs to hire.
SMARTEST proposes a diverse set of required expertise for approaching the development of a general ontological framework for interconnected DTs with the aim of fully representing their interconnections and those with their physical counterparts, as well as verifying reliability and safety of the operations. In this light, the consortium is construed to answer to this requirement and to provide knowledge in areas ranging from formal ontology to philosophy of technology and computing to formal modelling of reasoning about non-deterministic systems and AIs in particular. We analyse briefly such competencies for each unit within the SMARTEST consortium:
The Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA, Trento) part of ISTC-CNR, has extensive expertise in formal ontology, mathematical logic, and epistemology with more than 15 years experience in formal and computational modelling in the engineering domain. The laboratory is currently composed of 5 researchers with a permanent position, 1 post-doc fellow, 1 PhD student and 2 associate researchers. LOA is member of the CLAIRE and TAILOR European consortia for research in AI and its members all have extensive research networks and are active on the major publication outlets and conferences. The main contribution of the laboratory will be within the field of ontologies for industry and manufacturing, where the unit is already strongly contributing through its participation in the consortium of the project OntoCommons, (ontology-driven data documentation for industry commons https://ontocommons.eu/) and to the Industry and Standards Technical Committee of the IAOA (International Association of Ontology and its Applications –https://iaoa.org/index.php/organization/scientific-committees/). Moreover, the research team developed and still works on one of the top-level ontologies used within the OntoCommons project, namely DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering- http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/index.php/dolce/).
UNIMI hosts one of the most active Italian and European research centres for formal and applied logics, with a particular focus on modelling and verification of real systems, including both human and AI systems and their interaction. The LUCI (Logic, Uncertainty Computation and Information) Group (luci.unimi.it) is currently composed by 3 permanent members, 4 postdocs, 3 PhDs students and coordinates the supervision of several MA students in the Reasoning, Analysis and Modelling Curriculum of the Master Degree in Philosophical Sciences. LUCI is member of the CLAIRE and TAILOR European consortia for research in AI and its members all have extensive research networks and are active on the major publication outlets and conferences. The PI of the SMARTEST Consortium contributes to the research project with extensive expertise in two of the main areas, namely: the epistemology of computer simulation (and the larger area of the philosophy of computing) and the formal modelling of non-deterministic systems through State Transition Systems Semantics. For the former, the PI has largely contributed to the literature, also with one of the latest monographs in the field [Primiero 2019] and together with the UNIME Unit leader has settled the ground for the taxonomy of identity and copies of computational systems which represents the literature reference for the work proposed by SMARTEST [Angius and Primiero 2018, submitted]. For the latter, he regularly contributes to the top conferences in the field and is currently completing the supervision of a PhD student, all work which lays the ground for the formal analysis planned in SMARTEST.
UNIME contributes with expertise in the fields of philosophy of computing, epistemology of computer simulation, and formal verification. 2 full professors, 1 permanent researcher, 1 post-doc fellow, and 2 PhD students currently work with the UNIME Unit leader on the epistemology of DL simulations. The members of the Cognitive Science Department at UNIME have strong expertise on ML and DL, covering both formal and engineering aspects, as well as philosophical ones. The UNIME Unit leader additionally has expertise on the epistemology of computer simulations and agent-based modelling, formal verification and temporal logics. The UNIME Unit leader has previously worked with the PI on the formal verification of second order security properties for copies of deterministic computational systems, which constitutes the formal basis upon which to develop the algorithmic analysis proposed by SMARTEST.
