---
title: "A Framework for Testimony-Infused Automated Adjudicative Dynamic
Multi-Agent Reasoning in Ethically Charged Scenarios"
authors: [
    "Brandon Rozek",
    "Michael Giancola",
    "Selmer Bringsjord",
    "Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu"
]
date: 2022-07-01
publish_date: "2022/07"
conference: "International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards"
isbn: "978-1-7396142-0-1"
doi: "10.13180/icres.2022.18-19.07.009"
firstpage: 47
lastpage: 66
language: "English"
pdf_url: "https://www.clawar.org/icres2022/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/ICRES2022-Proceedings-manuscript.pdf#page=61"
abstract: "In “high stakes” multi-agent decision-making under uncertainty, testimonial evidence flows from
“witness” agents to “adjudicator” agents, where the latter must rationally fix belief and knowl-
edge, and act accordingly. The testimonies provided may be incomplete or even deceptive, and
in many domains are offered in a context that includes other kinds of evidence, some of which
may be incompatible with these testimonies. Therefore, before believing a testimony and on that
basis moving forward, the adjudicator must systematically reason to suitable strength of belief, in
a manner that takes account of said context, and globally judges the core issue at hand. To fur-
ther complicate matters, since the relevant information perceived by the adjudicator changes over
time, adjudication is a nonmonontonic/defeasible affair: adjudicators must dynamically strengthen,
weaken, defeat, and reinstate belief and knowledge. Toward the engineering of artificial agents ca-
pable of handling these representation-and-reasoning demands arising from testimonial evidence
in multi-agent decision-making, we explore herein extensions to one of our prior cognitive calculi:
the Inductive Cognitive Event Calculus (IDCEC). We ground these extensions in a recent, tragic
drone-strike scenario that unfolded in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the hope that use by humans of our
brand of logic-based AI in future such scenarios will save human lives."
---

