Author Archives: chris

EPSRC announces new initiative in argument technology

Posted by chris on May 1, 2009

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.

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Helena Lindgren visiting

Posted by chris on April 22, 2009

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.

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Reviewing Argumentation

Posted by chris on February 25, 2009

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.

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Argument and Evidence

Posted by chris on June 16, 2008

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.

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ARG at COMMA

Posted by chris on May 21, 2008

COMMA, next week in Toulouse, is the largest gathering of computational folks interested in argumentation. The ARG Dundee group have two papers there, both involving the emerging Argument Interchange Format. The first deals with the link between AIF and argument visualisation, and the second with how dialogue can be richly represented with only very minor extensions to the initial AIF specification. We will also be showing an early alpha of Araucaria 4.0 which uses the AIF. It will be available for download after the conference.

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Rafael Bordini visiting

Posted by chris on February 27, 2008

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.

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Argumentation and Symbolic AI

Posted by chris on February 20, 2008

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.

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Eight Years of CMNA

Posted by chris on February 13, 2008

The International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA) has been running for eight years, and there is now a website that for the first time draws together all the CMNA workshops and (almost) all of the papers that have been presented at them. CMNA has a tradition of attracting a broad interdisciplinary audience with perhaps an increasing emphasis on natural, i.e. real, arguments and the computational systems that model, engage with, generate, analyse, aggregate, transform and mediate such arguments. ARG:dundee has a long association with the series – Chris has co-organised them with Floriana Grasso and other colleagues since the start in 2001, and various members of the team have had papers in very nearly every event.

CMNA is unusual because it doesn’t publish proceedings (though there was a special issue of IJIS publishing revised versions of the best papers from 2001-3, and another special issue is due). Instead, it is designed to foster creative discussion. If you’re interested, the next installment will be hosted by ECAI’2008.

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Arguing Agents in Dubai

Posted by chris on January 27, 2008

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.

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