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.