Ramaswamy Ramanujam, born in Srivilliputtur, India, in 1959. Ph.D. from the University of Mumbai. Professor of Logic and Distributed Systems at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.
Lorentz Fellow (1 February 2010 – 30 June 2010)
COMMUNICATING AUTOMATA AND EPISTEMIC ATTITUDES
The theme of my work at NIAS was “Communicating automata and epistemic attitudes”. The stated goal of the study was the development of models of communicating automata and associated logical theories, incorporating agency, intention and epistemic attitudes.
Progress has been made in incorporating game theoretic interaction and dynamics into automata models, which leads to new game models as well. The work has opened up new automata based formulations for the analysis of social procedures, by way of large games, and this will hopefully lead to logical theories of social decision making.
Specifically, we have proved theorems on how communication medium affects equilibria in distributed games, the dynamics of large games where some players imitate others and the logical structure of games played in parallel. We have also studied mathematical foundations of strategy logics and obtained results on the algebraic theory of blind signatures and distributive encryption (used in social procedures like elections).