As a part of their Early Dispute Resolution initiative, the University of Dundee today hosted a meeting of Scottish mediators who visited ARG:Dundee to discuss the role of argumentation technology in mediation. To seed that discussion, we demonstrated many of the tools and projects that form a part of the group’s work, including the physical manipulation of argument resources via a Microsoft surface, as shown here.
Chris is today giving a keynote presentation at the 2nd International Conference on Logic, Argumentation and Critical Thinking, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Argumentation and Reasoning (CEAR) at
Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. A video of the keynote will be available.
The main conference for argumentation in AI, COMMA, is running this week. The Third International Conference on Computational Models of Argument, COMMA 2010, is running in Desenzano del Garda.
ARG:dundee has strong representation at the event with a total of five papers in the proceedings:
The Call for Papers for the 10th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument was made available this week. CMNA X will be colocated with ECAI in Lisbon in August 2010. The deadline for long papers is 9 May 2010, and for short papers is 6 June 2010. Paper submissions will be handled through the easychair site for the workshop. More details at www.cmna.info/CMNA10.
Chris is giving a course on argumentation technology today at the Swiss doctoral programme on argumentation, Argupolis, at USI Lugano. The course is a partner to Douglas Walton‘s earlier course on argumentation tools. The summary for the course is available here.
Floris is today giving a talk at an eSad workshop “Understanding Image-based Evidence” in Oxford. In his presentation he discusses how argumentation theory can be used by scholars that analyse ancient texts. He is also offering a sneek preview of how an argument structure modelled in OVA can be dialogically analysed with our new Google Wave App (developed by John Lawrence).
Floris today successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Evidence for a Good Story: A Hybrid Theory of Arguments, Stories and Criminal Evidence in Groningen, the Netherlands. His thesis work was supervised by Henry Prakken, Bart Verheij and Peter van Koppen.
Our SICSA Distinguished Visitor, Henry Prakken, is delivering a masterclass today aimed at PhD students on the topic of Logics for Argumentation. We will be meeting from 1pm to 4pm in the seminar room in the School of Computing.
In recent years, argumentation has become an increasingly popular topic in
the symbolic study of commonsense reasoning and inter-agent communication.
In logical models of commonsense reasoning, the argumentation metaphor has
proved to overcome some drawbacks of other formalisms. Many of these have
a mathematical nature that is remote from how people actually perceive
their everyday commonsense reasoning, which makes it difficult to
understand and trust the behavior of an intelligent system. The
argumentation approach bridges this gap by providing logical formalisms
that are rigid enough to be formally studied and implemented, while at the
same time being close enough to informal reasoning to be understood by
designers and users. In the current course the fundamental concepts and
structure of argumentation logics will be discussed.
Adam Wyner, from London, who is working with folks at UCL and Liverpool, amongst others, and who has PhDs both in linguistics from Cornell and also in computer science from Kings, is visiting us today. He will be speaking on “From Arguments in Natural Language to Argumentation Frameworks” at 1200 in the seminar room.
Prof. Henry Prakken from the Universities of Utrecht and Groningen in the Netherlands will be a SICSA Distinguished Visitor with ARG:dundee for the month of July 2009. Over that period, we will be exploring models that combine different theories of argumentation. He will also be delivering talks at Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh and offering a PhD workshop.
