We are delighted to welcome Brian Plüss to the ARG-tech team. Brian joins us as Postdoctoral Research Associate to take part in the Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up) project. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, between 2017 and 2020, Brian will combine argumentation mining, analyses and visualisations to augment complex public deliberations in real time, working in collaboration with researchers in linguistics and political communication from the University of Konstanz and the University of Goettingen, Germany.

Before joining ARG-tech, Brian was Research Associate at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, working in the EPSRC-funded Election Debate Visualisation project, in collaboration with researchers in Political Communication and Design from the University of Leeds. Brian has a PhD from The Open University’s Computing and Communications Department for the thesis “A Computational Model of Non-Cooperation in Natural Language Dialogue”. In his doctoral research, he specialised in analysing and modelling non-cooperation in political interviews. Before this, he obtained a MSc in computer science at the National University of Rosario, Argentina. He has carried out research on virtual human systems at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles, California, and on software architectures and formal methods in Portugal, Argentina and Finland. From 2001 to 2004, he worked as a software engineer for ATX Software in Lisbon, Portugal.

We are delighted to welcome Debela Tesfaye to the ARG-tech team. Debela joins us from the University of Addis Ababa where he worked remotely with Michael Zock and others on meronyms, synonyms and other syntactic and semantic relations. He will be working as a PhD student on the topic of argument mining.

Olena Yaskorska is visiting ARG-tech from the beginning of February until the end of June 2015. Olena is currently a PhD student at the Polish National Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Katarzyna Budzynska, though she comes to ARG-tech almost directly from our colleagues at USI Lugano, where she has been based for the past year.

Olena is working on models of argument in dialogue and particularly on their automatic recognition.

We are delighted that Barbara (Basia) Konat today joins ARG-tech, employed on the TSB-funded Argument Analytics project.

She will be working closely with the PI, Katarzyna Budzynska and the company partner, J & L Technology Ltd.

Jeff Thompson from UCLA is visiting the group today and will be giving a seminar entitled, ‘Networking for Reliable Knowledge,’ looking at the connection between information-centric networking and argumentation.

Abstract. For an information system to deliver reliable knowledge, it must reliably access the raw supporting data and provide a means to evaluate the concluded knowledge based on that data. For reliable data access, we review future internet architectures for information-centric networking which address the problem of broken and compromised links, and we focus on features of cryptographic hash-based links. For evaluating knowledge, we review knowledge representation using argumentation systems with a focus on assumption-based arguments. Finally, we sketch a system which uses argumentation to deliver reliable knowledge which is supported by secure hash-based links to evidence, is independent of storage location or central authority and implements knowledge revision from new evidence.

Brief biography. Jeff has been a staff software engineer for the future internet Name Data Networking (NDN) project at the University of California, Los Angeles since 2013 where he develops networking libraries for C++, JavaScript, Python and Java. As an undergraduate, he studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. His Masters work was in microrobotics and automation at the UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. Jeff’s industry experience includes software architecture, API design and release management for a commercial cryptography library and creating tool automation and a semantic tracking database system for a micromachine manufacturing facility. As an independent researcher, Jeff develops open-source software for logic and argumentation systems for knowledge representation.

We’ll be in Wolfson in the QMB at noon, 29th August 2014. All welcome.

The Centre for Argument Technology at the University of Dundee is organising a workshop on Argument Mining under the auspices of SICSA, focusing on links with Information Extraction, Information Retrieval and Text Mining. The workshop will be opened by Marie-Francine Moens, head of the Language Intelligence and Information retrieval (LIIR) research group at Leuven and SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow.

The event is hosted by the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, 9-10 July 2014, and invites expressions of interest for participation.

More information can be found on the workshop homepage.

A busy summer of appointments concludes with Mathilde Janier joining the group as a PhD student. She will be working in cooperation with Mark Snaith on the DrEAMS project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project aims to develop an argument mapping tool underpinned by the AIF to model dialogue structures for dispute mediation.

Mathilde comes to us from IRIT Toulouse, where she worked with Patrick St Dizier on computational models of discourse.