The Nomination for On a Semantics for Active Logic by Johan Hovold

Very briefly: Johan takes the semantics of Active Logic, as presented early 2005 by Perlis et al. at the Common Sense Workshop in Crete and shows that their claims (about paraconsistency of AL) are wrong and that their semantics is substantially flawed.

In my opinion, the work is done in an elegant way, clearly written and presents deep understanding of the problem, albeit the consequences and results are mostly negative. We have some ideas about remedying that, but this work is outside the scope of his thesis. Johan is definitely one of the smartest students I have dealt with and the thesis is the outcome of his own independent work, sometimes maybe even too independent. I would rank him substantially higher than Mikael Asker who has received the SAIS prize for 2003.

Jacek Malec