Alison has recently secured funding from EPSRC on “Example-driven machine human collaboration in mathematics”, and work has now begun. In this project she will build on investigations into example-use in mathematics, and employ third party model generators, to design and build a system which can interface to online mathematical conversations. This will draw together theories of argumentation, automated reasoning systems, and ethnographical, cognitive and philosophical studies of how people do mathematics. The prototype system will be evaluated by running it on mathematical conversations in real-time, and seeing, by a variety of measures, whether mathematicians regard it as useful, and whether they are prepared to interact directly with it. The project (EP/P017320/1) will run from May, 2017 – October, 2018.

Many congratulations to Mathilde Janier, who today successfully defended her PhD thesis on Dialogical Dynamics and Argumentative Structures in Dispute Mediation Discourse. She was examined by Prof. Thomas Gordon from the University of Potsdam and Fraunhofer FOKUS, and by Dr. Alison Pease from Dundee.

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.