Dr. Thomas King

I am currently a PhD student at TU Delft in the Interactive Intelligence Group of the Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics Faculty, and the ICT Section of the Technology, Policy and Management faculty. I am supervised by Dr. Virginia Dignum and Dr. M. Birna van Riemsdijk, and my promoter is Prof. Dr. Catholijn M. Jonker. Feel free to get in contact via email to discuss mine or your own research and/or working together.

Research Interests Normative reasoning (primarily legal); Institutional Reasoning; Automated reasoning and knowledge-representation; Logic-programming (Prolog and Answer-Set Programming)

PhD Research My PhD research focuses on reasoning about legal institutions (of the type Searle describes) such as national legislation, constitutions and so on. In particular, I focus on reasoning about what is dubbed by political science as 'multi-level governance' where some legal institutions are designed to govern societies (e.g. national legislation) but whose design is in turn governed by other institutions (e.g. constitutions governing national legislation). The idea is to formally represent and reason about institutions in such multi-level governance structures. In doing so, the aim is to automatically detect whether an institution such as national legislation violates the regulations of another institution (e.g. a constitution) which governs it. Any non-compliance can potentially, using established Inductive Logic Programming techniques, be rectified automatically.

Publications Some of my publications can be found at research gate or on my Google Scholar profile.