In our CPEC Young Researchers Colloquium series, we invite young CPEC researchers to present their research to all of CPEC in a short and lightweight talk. We’re happy to announce the following talk:

Friday, July 23, 2:15pm: Robin Ziemek (Technische Universität Dresden)

Probabilistic causes in Markov chains

Causality plays a fundamental building block in determining moral responsibility or legal accountability, and ultimately fosters user acceptance through an increased level of transparency. Notions of causality have been proposed within various models and form an increasingly powerful toolkit aimed at explaining why an observable phenomenon (the effect) has happened, and which previous events (the causes) are logically linked to its occurrence. All approaches essentially rely on (one of) two central paradigms that dictate how causes are linked to their effects: the counterfactuality principle and the probability-raising property. In my talk I will define a probabilistic notion of cause for omega-regular properties in Markov chains by combining the two prevailing paradigms. I will argue for the usage of these causes in monitoring applications and give complexity results on the computation of optimal causes.

The talk is based on recently submitted joint work with Christel Baier, Florian Funke, Simon Jantsch and Jakob Piribauer.