Category Archives: talks

Tom Gordon visiting

Posted by chris on September 27, 2011

We are delighted to be hosting a visit from Prof. Tom Gordon from Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (FOKUS) and  Institute of Computer Science of the University of Potsdam. Tom is here to work with us on interactions between the EPSRC-funded DAM project and the EU FP7 IMPACT project, and to explore in detail connections between the AIF and LKIF (used in Tom’s Carneades system) in particular. Tom is also giving a seminar here, on Wednesday, 28 September at 12 noon in Wolfson, entitled,

The IMPACT Argumentation Toolbox for Policy Deliberations

Abstract. IMPACT is a European Framework 7 research and development project on the theme of information and communications technology for governance and policy modeling. IMPACT is conducting original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. These models will be used to develop and evaluate a prototype of an innovative argumentation toolbox for supporting open, inclusive and transparent deliberations about public policy on the World-Wide-Web. Four integrated web applications are being developed for the IMPACT toolbox: 1. Argument Reconstruction Tool; 2. Structured Consultation Tool; 3. Policy Modelling Tool; and 4. Argument Visualisation and Tracking Tool. All four tools are based on the same underlying computational model of argument and exchange arguments using the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), an XML format for argumentation schemes and arguments inspired in part by the Argument Interchange Format (AIF) developed partly at the University of Dundee’s School of Computing.

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Argumentation in China

Posted by chris on October 11, 2010

Floris is this week giving a series of invited lectures at the Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science of the
China University of Political Science and Law. A total of three lectures are scheduled: The Science of Proof, Argumentation and Legal Evidence and Supporting Legal Argumentation.

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ARG:dundee at COMMA

Posted by chris on September 6, 2010

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:

  • Floris Bex, Henry Prakken, Chris Reed: A formal analysis of the AIF in terms of the ASPIC framework
  • Katarzyna Budzynska: Argument Analysis: Components of Interpersonal Argumentation
  • Nir Oren, Chris Reed, Michael Luck: Moving Between Argumentation Frameworks
  • Chris Reed, Simon Wells, Katarzyna Budzynska, Joseph Devereux: Building arguments with argumentation: the role of illocutionary force in computational models of argument
  • Mark Snaith, Joseph Devereux, John Lawrence, Chris Reed: Pipelining Argumentation Technologies
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Liz Black visiting

Posted by chris on February 10, 2010

Liz Black who is currently at the University of Oxford working in the COSSAC group, is visiting us today. She is delivering a seminar:

Agreeing how to act

When deliberating about what to do, an autonomous agent must generate and consider the relative pros and cons of the different available options. The situation becomes even more complicated when multiple agents are involved in a joint deliberation, as each agent will have its own preferred outcome and this may change as new information is received from the other participating agents. This talk considers such joint deliberation through the use of argumentation techniques.

I will present a dialogue system that allows agents to come to an agreement about how to act in order to achieve a joint goal. During such a dialogue, an agent can use its perception of others in order to select arguments that it believes are likely to be particularly persuasive. I will discuss how an agent may develop a model of what is important to another agent and how it can then use this model to guide its dialogue behaviour.

The seminar will be in Wolfson as usual at noon.

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Simon’s CMNA9 Presentation: Argument Blogging

Posted by simon on August 3, 2009

Simon gave a presentation on the Argument Blogging project to CMNA 9 held at IJCAI in Pasadena recently. As described in a previous post argument blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the WWW and structuring them in terms of argumentative dialogues. The aim is to support distributed dialogues occuring online and to capture those interactions in a form that can be reused.

  • Abstract: “Argument Blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the web and structuring them into distributed argumentative dialogues. This paper introduces a prototype software system for performing argument blogging and storing the resultant dialogues so that they can be analysed and reused.”
  • Paper Link: wells2009blogging.pdf
  • Presentation Link: cmna2009.pdf
  • Citation: S. Wells, C. Gourlay, and C. Reed, “Argument Blogging”, (2009), in 9th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 9). IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, California, U.S.
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SICSA PhD Masterclass in Logics of Argumentation

Posted by chris on July 28, 2009

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.

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