Autonomous Intelligent Agents are employed in many applications upon which the life and welfare of living beings and vital social functions may depend. Therefore, agents should be trustworthy. A priori certification techniques (i.e., techniques applied prior to system's deployment) can be useful, but are not sufficient for agents that evolve, and thus modify their epistemic and belief state, and for open Multi-Agent Systems, where heterogeneous agents can join or leave the system at any stage of its operation. In this paper, we propose/refine/extend dynamic (runtime) logic-based self-checking techniques, devised in order to be able to ensure agents' trustworthy and ethical behaviour.

Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs), extend Answer Set Programming (ASP) with epistemic operators. The semantics of such programs is provided in terms of world views, which are sets of belief sets, i.e., syntactically, sets of sets of atoms. Different semantic approaches propose different characterizations of world views. Recent work has introduced semantic properties that should be met by any semantics for ELPs, like the Epistemic Splitting Property, that, if satisfied, allows to modularly compute world views in a bottom-up fashion, analogously to ``traditional'' ASP. We analyze the possibility of changing the perspective, shifting from a bottom-up to a top-down approach to splitting. We propose a basic top-down approach, which we prove to be equivalent to the bottom-up one. We then propose an extended approach, where our new definition: (i) is provably applicable to many of the existing semantics; (ii) operates similarly to ``traditional'' ASP; (iii) provably coincides under any semantics with the bottom-up notion of splitting at least on the class of Epistemically Stratified Programs (which are, intuitively, those where the use of epistemic operators is stratified); (iv) better adheres to common ASP programming methodology.

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for run-time self-checking of logical agents, by means of temporal axioms to be dynamically checked. These axioms are specified by using an agent-oriented interval temporal logic defined to this purpose. We define syntax, semantics and pragmatics for this new logic, specifically tailored for application to agents. In the resulting framework, we encompass and extend our past work.

Dialogue Systems are tools designed for various practical purposes concerning human-machine interaction. These systems should be built on ethical foundations because their behavior may heavily influence a user (think especially about children). The primary objective of this paper is to present the architecture and prototype implementation of a Multi Agent System (MAS) designed for ethical monitoring and evaluation of a dialogue system. A prototype application, for monitoring and evaluation of chatting agents' (human/artificial) ethical behavior in an online customer service chat point w.r.t their institution/company's codes of ethics and conduct, is developed and presented. Future work and open issues with this research are discussed.

Multi-Context Systems (MCS) model in Computational Logic distributed systems composed of heterogeneous sources, or "contexts", interacting via special rules called "bridge rules". In this paper, we consider how to enhance flexibility and generality in bridge-rules definition and application. In particular, we introduce and discuss some formal extensions of MCSs useful for a practical use in dynamic environments, and we try to provide guidelines for implementations

Autonomous Intelligent Systems are designed to reduce the need for human intervention in our daily life. However, the full benefit of these new systems will be attained only if they are aligned with society's values and ethical principles. Adopting ethical approaches to building such systems has been attracting a lot of attention in the recent years. The global concern about the ethical behavior of this kind of technologies has manifested in many initiatives at different levels. As examples, we mention: the IEEE initiative for ethically aligned design of autonomous intelligent systems ('Ethics in Action'

We propose an approach to the definition of microservices with an Answer Set Programming (ASP) `core', where microservices are a successful abstraction for designing distributed applications as suites of independently deployable interacting components. Such ASP-based components might be employed in distributed architectures related to Cloud Computing or to the Internet of Things (IoT).

However the overall aim is not only important for equipping machines with capabilities of moral reasoning, but also for helping us to better understand morality through creating and testing computational models of ethical machines that follow a set of ideal ethical principles. Since the beginning of this century there were several attempts for implementing ethical decision making into intelligent autonomous agents using different approaches. But, no fully descriptive and widely accepted model of moral judgment and decision-making exists. In this work we propose a hybrid logic-based approach for modeling ethical machines, particularly ethical chatbots. As a matter of fact the potential of logic programming (LP) to model moral machines was envisioned by Pereira and Saptawijaya [15].

In the literature there different kind of timed logical fram eworks exist, where time is specified directly using hybrid logics (cf., e.g., [2]), temporal epistemic lo gic (cf., e.g., [4]) or simply by using Linear Temporal Logic. We propose a temporal module which can be ado pted to "temporalize" many logical framework. This module is in practice a particular kind of fu nction that assigns a "timing" to atoms. We have exploited this T function in two different settings. The first one is the formalization of the reasoning on the formation of beliefs and the interaction wi th background knowledge in non-omniscient agents' memory.

In this paper we consider Epistemic Logic Programs, which extend Answer Set Programming (ASP) with "epistemic operators" and "epistemic negation", and a recent approach to the semantics of such programs in terms of World Views. We propose some observations on the existence and number of world views. We show how to exploit an extended ASP semantics in order to: (i) provide a characterization of world views, different from existing ones; (ii) query world views and query the whole set of world views.