Our SICSA visitor, Prof. Henry Prakken, is delivery a seminar today entitled, “Sense-making software for fact finding in law“. We will be in Wolfson at noon as usual. Henry will also be leading our weekly reading group session this afternoon.
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.
Here is a short film [ Download: xvid avi format (26.2MB) ] of Colin Gourlay talking about his honours project at the School of Computing 09 degree show. Colin has been working in the ARG group on the argument blogging project which captures argumentative dialogues that occur online and records them using the Argument Interchange Format. Simon will be presenting a paper describing some of the work on this project during CMNA 9 at IJCAI in July.
Prof. Guillermo Simari from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, Argentina is visiting us today. He will be delivering a seminar entitled Modeling the Accrual of Arguments in Defeasible Logic Programming at noon in Wolfson. All are welcome.
Helena Lindgren from the Computer Science Department at the University of Umeå is visiting the group this week to find out more about what we have been doing, and to kick off a collaboration for which she has won funding from VINNOVA, the Swedish funding council. Helena has experience of building decision support systems in healthcare, with prototypes running in Sweden, Korea and Japan, and she is now working to integrate argumentation structured around AIF representations into those systems.
There is a small meeting tomorrow at the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool on Argument and Evidence, organised by Floris Bex. It forms a part of Henry Prakken, Gerard Vreeswijk and Bart Verheij‘s Making Sense of Evidence project, on which Chris is a consultant. Chris has been invited to give a talk there on “Argument schemes in monologue and dialogue”. The monologic/dialogic link is one which the ARG group at Dundee is particularly focused on right now, building on a paper by Chris and Doug Walton from OSSA 2007, and the more recent AIF+ paper presented at COMMA. Tomorrow will be an opportunity to explore these ideas in an evidential context.
Today, Rafael Bordini is visiting the group and will be giving a seminar on, A Verifiable Approach to Programming Multi-Agent Systems. He will be talking at 12.30 in Wolfson.
The Dundee Contemporary Arts centre has a series of “dialogues” – public lectures on various topics, usually presented in dialogic form. Chris is giving a lecture with Jesse Hoey this evening (at 7pm in the DCA meeting room) entitled How to Build a Mind. The lecture hopes to explore the debate about symbol grounding and embodiment through some general introduction to AI systems and specific exploration of Jesse’s research and the work in ARG:dundee. The lecture is open to all and free.
This week sees the first residential graduate school on multi-agent system technology to be hosted in the Middle East: the IFAAMAS-sponsored Dubai Agents and Multi Agent Systems School (DAMAS). Iyad Rahwan, who runs the agents research group there, invited Chris to deliver a part of the course on argumentation in multi-agent systems. He’ll be giving a historical summary combined with introductions to both formal and informal approaches to argumentation, and then a detailed exploration of argumentation games in agent settings, all liberally sprinkled with practical exercises. The aim is to rapidly bring students up to speed with the key features of ArgMAS research from the last decade.
Chris is today giving a plenary talk at a workshop on effective argument hosted by the Educational Dialogue Research Unit at the OU. The event is being organised by Caroline Coffin and Kieran O’Halloran, who are working on interesting problems in the argument and education space. Chris will be talking about how effective argument can be encouraged, forced, and detected.
