Prof. Dr. Valentin Goranko Appointed Founding Editor-in-Chief of Logics

Prof. Dr. Valentin Goranko is a professor of logic at the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Sofia University, Bulgaria, in 1989 and has over 35 years of experience in university teaching and research at departments of mathematics, computer science, and philosophy in universities in Bulgaria, South Africa, Denmark, and Sweden. His research interests broadly span the theory and applications of logic to philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, game theory, and mathematics. He has more than 140 peer-reviewed research publications, as well as 3 authored or co-authored published books: Logic and Discrete Mathematics, Logic as a Tool, and Temporal Logics in Computer Science.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Valentin Goranko, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views on the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take the role as its Editor-in-Chief?

I was attracted by the opportunity to create and develop a modern, broadly recognized and valuable journal that will provide a freely accessible forum for the dissemination of ideas and results across the foundations and a variety of applications of logic.

2. What is your vision for the journal?

I see Logics evolving into a reputable and attractive journal, which manifests both the diversity and the unity of logic. Besides regular issues, we will pursue topical Special Issues on currently ‘hot’ or emerging topics of importance and with high potential to become leading future developments in logic. We will invite and encourage both publications involving original research of interest for expert logicians, as well as overviews and position papers on important topics which will attract the attention of a wider scientific community.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?

I see the future studies in logic as increasingly interdisciplinary, blending theory with diverse applications of logical systems, of relevance to a broad and expanding spectrum of areas in natural and social sciences and humanities.

4. What do you think of the development of open access in the publishing field?

I believe that open access is the future of scientific publishing. There is a growing demand for that, not only from the scientific communities and the funding agencies but also from society, which rightly insist on free public access to the outcomes of the scientific research into which they have made valuable investments of resources and human expertise.

5. What got you interested in scientific research in the first place?

Generally, the quest for discovering the unknown, the excitement of asking questions which have never been asked before and the thrill of finding answers that nobody has known before. More specifically, I was attracted to the field of logic during my final year of undergraduate studies in mathematics, as I then saw logic as opening a broader horizon for scientific inquiry than any other mathematical field.

6. What developments are occurring in your field of expertise that excite you at this time?

The growing interdisciplinarity and wider applicability of logic, which I mentioned earlier. My main current area of research is in logics for multi-agent systems. Such logics intend to capture the formal logical reasoning about various aspects of agency, including knowledge and beliefs, actions and interactions, norms (obligations, permissions and prohibitions), as well as reasoning about agents’ abilities and existence of strategies for achieving individual and collective goals, ranging from winning strategies in game-like scenarios to qualitative strategic reasoning in a social context.

We wish Prof. Dr. Valentin Goranko every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.