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.
Nir Oren from the Department of Computer Science at King’s College London visited us today to talk about argumentation frameworks and evidence amongst other things. His talk was entitled “argumentation and reasoning with evidence, approaches and applications”. As usual, details of his talk can be found on the past seminars page.
Iyad Rahwan from the British University in Dubai is visiting us today to talk about ABN and other things. We have been working with Iyad for some time on the Argument Interchange Format, ArgDF and various other things.
He will be speaking On the Benefits of Exploiting Underlying Goals in
Argument-based Negotiation at 1500 in the Lecture Theatre (not Wolfson today).
ABSTRACT: Interest-based negotiation (IBN) is a form of negotiation in
which agents exchange information about their underlying goals, with a
view to improving the likelihood and quality of a deal. While this
intuition has been stated informally in much previous literature,
there is no formal analysis of the types of deals that can be reached
through IBN and how they differ from those reachable using (classical)
alternating offer bargaining. This talk bridges this gap by providing
a formal framework for analysing the outcomes of IBN dialogues, and
begins by analysing a specific IBN protocol.
Rieks op den Akker from Twente is visiting ARG today to talk about his experiences with the AMI and AMI(DA) projects:
Modeling conversations in meetings
In the talk I will present the EC projects AMI(DA) that aim at developing meeting support technology for face to face as well as remote meetings. I will concentrate on presenting the AMI meeting corpus, an exetensively annotated corpus of meeting conversations and discuss several reseach on the interactions we see in these meetings showing joint verbal as well as non-verbal behaviors for grounding. I also present an argumentation diagramming method developed at the University of Twente.
Carlos Chesñevar from the Universities of Lleida (Spain) and Nacional del Sur (Argentina) is visiting us today and tomorrow. He is presenting a seminar Wednesday (Feb 14th) afternoon at 3pm in Wolfson:
Recommender System Technologies based on Argumentation
Recommender systems have evolved in the last years as specialized
tools to assist users in a plethora of computer-mediated tasks by
providing guidelines or hints. Most recommender systems are aimed
at facilitating access to relevant items, a situation particularly
common when performing web-based tasks.
At the same time, argumentation has been gaining increasing
importance in several AI-related areas, mainly as a vehicle for
facilitating rationally justifiable decision making when handling
incomplete and potentially inconsistent information. In this
setting, argument-based approaches can be used to automatize
reasoning and decision making in several situations such as
the handling of complex policies or managing change in dynamic
environments.
In this talk we will present a first approach towards combining
recommender system technologies with argument-based inference.
The ultimate goal is to enhance practical reasoning capabilities
of current recommender system technology by incorporating
argument-based qualitative inference.
Proof of concept prototypes of the proposed approach have been
developed using using Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP),
an argument-based logic programming framework.
Some particular case studies will be discussed. One of them will
involve applying argumentation in the classification of web search
results according to preference criteria declaratively specified
by the user. We will also present an overview of an argument-based
critiquing system for language usage assessment, where
suggestions are built on the basis of the Web linguistic corpus.
The presentation will conclude by discussing some of the
relevant research lines that are currently being pursued
for developing argument-based decision making.
Main references:
– “Recommender System Technologies based on Argumentation”
(C. Chesñevar, A. Maguitman, G. Simari).
In “Emerging Artificial Intelligence Applications in Computer Engineering”.
(Series Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications).
Ilias Maglogiannis, Kostas Karpouzis and John Soldatos (eds). IOS Press,
2007 (in preparation).
– “Argument-Based Critics and Recommenders: A Qualitative Perspective on User
Support Systems”
(C. Chesñevar, A. Maguitman, G. Simari).
Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE), Elsevier, Vol.59, Issue 2, pp. 293-319,
2006.
– “An Argument-based Decision Support System for Assessing Natural Language
Usage on the Basis of the Web Corpus”
(C. Chesñevar, M. Sabaté, A. Maguitman).
Intl. Journal of Intelligent Systems (IJIS), Wiley, Vol. 21, Issue 11,
pp.1151-1180, 2006.
– “Solving Power and Trust Conflicts through Argumentation in Agent-mediated
Knowledge Distribution”
(C. Chesñevar, R. Brena, J. Aguirre).
Intl. Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems,
special issue on agent-based Knowledge Management.
Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 263-276, 2006. IOS Press.
Chris is on the programme committee for AAAI this year. It is a sign of the times — and of the increasing prominence of argumentation in AI – that this year “Argumentation” is one of the keywords for paper classification.
Simon Buckingham Shum is visiting the group today and giving a seminar this afternoon:
TITLE: Hypermedia Discourse: Contesting Networks of Ideas and Arguments Face-to-Face and on the Net
ABSTRACT: Why can’t you Google for: “inconsistent ideas” or “metaphors/analogies”? What kind of video player can skip to “the next argument in this meeting”? In this talk I will provide the rationale for, and demonstrations of, Hypermedia Discourse tools, an approach to reading, writing and contesting ideas as hypermedia networks grounded in discourse schemes. The objective is to design usable, interactive discourse representations that are both cognitively and computationally tractable: fluid enough to serve as augmentations to group working memory, yet structured enough to support long term memory. I will describe how such networks can be (i) mapped by multiple analysts to visualize and interrogate the claims and arguments in a literature, and (ii) mapped by a facilitator in real time to manage a team’s information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and decisions, particularly in time-pressured scenarios where harnessing collective intelligence is a priority. I will suggest that given the current geo-political climate, the increasingly distributed, networked nature of work, and the need for trans-disciplinary discourse for wicked problems, there has never been greater need for sensemaking tools to help diverse stakeholders build common ground.
BIO: Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer at the UK Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. He has worked on the usability and utility of hypertext for mapping meetings and argumentation since his doctoral work on design rationale argumentation in 1990 (Rank Xerox EuroPARC and Univ. York HCI Group). He co-edited “Visualizing Argumentation” (2003), which brings together for the first time the leading practitioners and researchers in argument mapping, and “Knowledge Cartography” (2007, in prep.) will update and broaden this. He is PI/Co-PI on several e-science/social science projects, and is a co-founder of the Compendium Institute whose hypertext tool supports collaborative modelling and sensemaking.
Simon has made his presentation slides available, and discusses the idea at the KMi blog.
A special issue of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems is published today which showcases the best papers from CMNA2001 (San Francisco), CMNA2002 (Lyon), and CMNA2003 (Acapulco).
