The group’s new, EPSRC-funded Dialectical Argumentation Machines project is recruiting its research assistants. The advertisements for the first and second posts are now available.
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.
This is Mark Snaith presenting his senior honours project entitled “Online Visualisation of Argument” at the annual School of Computing degree show at the University of Dundee [ Download: xvid avi format (47.6 MB) ]. The main aim of this project was to provide a simple way to visualise arguments online using a flash widget to graphically render Argument Interchange Format (AIF) resources. Mark is spending the summer working with ARG:dundee to further develop the OVA software suite.
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.
The new, EPSRC-funded Dialectical Argumentation Machines project is recruiting its first team member, a PhD student. The advertisement is now available.
Argument in AI has had a dedicated workshop series in CMNA since 2001; argument in MAS has had its own forum, ArgMAS since 2004. The community as a whole has had the COMMA conference series since 2006. But folk have had to publish in an enormous variety of journals, often through special issues dedicated to argumentation. Finally, a new journal has been established to support the growing community. It is published by Taylor and Francis, who have a strong track record in both humanities and sciences, and have worked with interdisciplinary areas such as ours before. The new journal, Argument & Computation, is now open for business.
EPSRC has announced that it is funding a major new project exploring the deployment of argumentation technologies in online environments. The £0.6m initiative will use the AIF standard as a cornerstone, and will partner with high-impact online providers to deliver live systems based on computational models of philosophical argumentation theory. The Dialectical Argumentation Machines project will look at the monologue-dialogue link and the relationship between abstract and concrete argumentation in order to build systems that can bridge the gap between everyday argument and formal techniques.
The abstract of the project is available from the EPSRC, and the project has a new home page.
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.
Phew. The reviewing season is in full flow, and with ever more events in the argumentation world, it’s getting to be hard work! It’s interesting to note them as a way of seeing how things are progressing. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been reviewing for:
And this is an ‘off’ year: next year there’s COMMA and ISSA too.
