Short Bio

Blaž Istenič Urh is a PhD student and a project assistant in the Theory and Logic Group of the Institute of Logic and Computation (Faculty of Informatics) at TU Wien. His research mainly focuses on developing logical methods for deontic explanations as part of the LoDEx research project, co-funded by the FWF.

He holds BA degrees in Philosophy and French and Russian Studies (all 2020) from the University of Ljubljana and a MSc degree in Cognitive Science from the École normale supérieure, Université PSL (2023). Before joining the TU, Blaž also spent one year at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam (Logic Year, 2023).

PhD Project - Deontic Explanations in Legal Reasoning

Supervised by Agata Ciabattoni and Réka Markovich

When reasoning about normative matters, it is crucial that logical systems not only reach normative conclusions but also provide explanations as to why a norm holds in a particular situation, which is something that most existent logical systems for normative reasoning (deontic logics) do not account for. Blaž’s research consists of developing methods for deontic explanations, which means extending and refining the existent logical systems (mostly preference-based deontic logics) with a particular focus on how they can representing reasoning and explanations in the legal domain.

Publications and Conferences

Conference Proceedings

• Michael A. Müller, Blaž Istenič Urh, Teodor-Stefan Zotescu, Ulle Endriss (2024) “Breaking the Cycle. Preference-Based Aggregation for Cyclic Argumentation”, In: Chris Reed, Matthias Thimm & Tjitze Rienstra (Eds.), Proceedings of COMMA 2024, pp. 157-168.
• Beiser, S. Hahn, and T. Schaub, “ASP-driven User-interaction with Clinguin,” in ICLP24, P. Cabalar, F. Fabiano, M. Gebser, G. Gupta, and T. Swift, Eds., ser. Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 416, Open Publishing Association, 2024, pp. 215–228. doi: 10.4204/EPTCS.416.19.

Presentations

• “What is there to explain?”. One-day LoDEx workshop as part of Conference on Explanations, Norms and Insights for the Governance of Machine Agents (ENIGMA 2024), University of Luxembourg, 16 October 2024.
• “Deontic Explanations in Åqvist’s systems: between ideality and actuality”. 2nd LoDEx Workshop on Logical Methods for Deontic Explanations, February 13 2025.