We’re excited to announce that Debela Gemechu and Kamila Gorska this month become the first employees of ARG-tech’s commercial arm, Arg Technica Ltd.
London AI company ContactEngine recently invited Chris Reed to give an interview on AI and argument mining. They work on introducing AI into the conversations that corporates have with their customers, and have a series of interviews exploring new horizons. The interview has just been published, and is accompanied by a blog article from Mark Smith, their CEO.
Chris Reed is in San Francisco today to provide reaction to the launch (or ‘sneak preview’) of IBM’s Project Debater. You can find out more in a blog post by the head of IBM Research, Arvind Krishna, and in articles reporting the event in (amongst others) The Guardian, The Financial Times, BBC News, Wired magazine, The New York Times, Venturebeat, CNET, on radio with NPR and on the TV with CBS in the US and on BBC Breakfast in the UK.
Chris Reed’s article from The Conversation that appeared last week in Newsweek has today been picked up by The Independent. Great profile-raising for argument technology as an area of growing interest within AI.
Chris Reed has written an article that has appeared with Newsweek, and today featured on its Tech & Science homepage. It focuses on the role of AI in helping to teach and to contribute to human argument & debate.
Chris Reed has been commissioned by the BBC to write an article on Argument Technology, which appears on the BBC News website today. The article forms a part of the BBC’s Expert Network, whereby background and analysis are solicited from universities, think-tanks and other organisations that can offer context and depth to content across the BBC. The piece is aimed at a general audience and offers a unique opportunity to the field for raising the profile of computational models of argument, argument mining and argument technology in general.
Our collaboration with Jean Wagemans of UVA continues and during his recent visit to ARGtech he also gave a talk ‘A factorial approach to argument classifaction’. Jean is currently working as a senior researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication (ACLC) of the same university. He is a co-author of the Handbook of Argumentation Theory and has published articles on classical dialectic and rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and the characteristics of scientific argumentation. Find out more http://uva.academia.edu/jeanhmwagemans.
Council of Coaches (Couch) is a three year European Horizon-2020 project which has just started this month at ARG-tech (€475,500 to Dundee, €3.7M total). Couch is an international collaboration between Universities and companies from the Netherlands (the coordinating partner), Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Spain and France. The project introduces a radically new virtual coaching concept based on multiple autonomous, embodied virtual coaches, which form together a personal council that coaches older adults towards a healthy lifestyle. Each coach has their own expertise, personality and style of coaching. They might not always agree with each other, but they all share a single goal: to support the user across every aspect of well-being, including physical, social, cognitive and mental support. Within Dundee the project is led by Alison Pease, with PDRA Mark Snaith and PhD student Dominic de Franco (Arg-tech), and consultants Deborah Wake and Nicolas Conway (School of Medicine). Couch will combine state of the art 3D Virtual Avatars with language and reasoning technology and apply this to the area of lifestyle and behavior change coaching.
This week we welcome Dominic DeFranco who joins us as a new PhD student.
Dom is working on the EU H2020-funded ‘Council of Coaches’ project which
aims to use theories of argumentation and dialogue structure in
particular to contribute to the automation of personalized coaching
software.
In a week of good news, funding has just been announced for two new projects in ARG-tech. €290k has been awarded to the group by the VW foundation for a collaboration with the University of Konstanz to fund the appointment of Brian Pluss under the guidance of Katarzyna Budzynska and Chris Reed to work on Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up). Alison Pease has secured a further £125k from EPSRC for a project on Example-driven machine-human collaboration in mathematics. The project aims to develop mixed-initiative mathematics in which multiple parties, both human and machine, collaborate in order to produce novel research mathematics. Both projects will start in 2017.
