Paola Inverardi

Nicolas Troquard, Martina De Sanctis, Paola Inverardi et al.

The rise of AI-based and autonomous systems is raising concerns and apprehension due to potential negative repercussions stemming from their behavior or decisions. These systems must be designed to comply with the human contexts in which they will operate. To this extent, Townsend et al. (2022) introduce the concept of SLEEC (social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural) rules that aim to facilitate the formulation, verification, and enforcement of the rules AI-based and autonomous systems should obey. They lay out a methodology to elicit them and to let philosophers, lawyers, domain experts, and others to formulate them in natural language. To enable their effective use in AI systems, it is necessary to translate these rules systematically into a formal language that supports automated reasoning. In this study, we first conduct a linguistic analysis of the SLEEC rules pattern, which justifies the translation of SLEEC rules into classical logic. Then we investigate the computational complexity of reasoning about SLEEC rules and show how logical programming frameworks can be employed to implement SLEEC rules in practical scenarios. The result is a readily applicable strategy for implementing AI systems that conform to norms expressed as SLEEC rules.

Marco Autili, Paola Inverardi, Massimo Tivoli et al.

Adaptation of software components is an important issue in Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Building a system from reusable or Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components introduces a set of problems, mainly related to compatibility and communication aspects. On one hand, components may have incompatible interaction behavior. This might require to restrict the system's behavior to a subset of safe behaviors. On the other hand, it might be necessary to enhance the current communication protocol. This might require to augment the system's behavior to introduce more sophisticated interactions among components. We address these problems by enhancing our architectural approach which allows for detection and recovery of incompatible interactions by synthesizing a suitable coordinator. Taking into account the specification of the system to be assembled and the specification of the protocol enhancements, our tool (called SYNTHESIS) automatically derives, in a compositional way, the glue code for the set of components. The synthesized glue code implements a software coordinator which avoids incompatible interactions and provides a protocol-enhanced version of the composed system. By using an assume-guarantee technique, we are able to check, in a compositional way, if the protocol enhancement is consistent with respect to the restrictions applied to assure the specified safe behaviors.

Marco Autili, Paola Inverardi, Massimo Tivoli

Adaptation of software components is an important issue in Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Building a system from reusable or Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components introduces a set of issues, mainly related to compatibility and communication aspects. Components may have incompatible interaction behavior. Moreover it might be necessary to enhance the current communication protocol to introduce more sophisticated interactions among components. We address these problems enhancing our architectural approach which allows for detection and recovery of integration mismatches by synthesizing a suitable coordinator. Starting from the specification of the system to be assembled and from the specification of the needed protocol enhancements, our framework automatically derives, in a compositional way, the glue code for the set of components. The synthesized glue code avoids interaction mismatches and provides a protocol-enhanced version of the composed system.