Alumni Member
Brian Pluss (Alumni) 
Research Associate
I am Research Associate in the Electoral Debate Visualisation (EDV) project, working with Anna De Liddo and Simon Buckingham Shum on using technology to enhance the experience of debate viewers in the next UK General Election.
I recently completed a PhD in computational linguistics, under the supervision of Paul Piwek and Richard Power from The Open University’s Computing and Communications Department. My thesis specialised in analysing and modelling non-cooperative behaviour in political interviews. I am currently extending this work to political debates in the context of the EDV project.
Before becoming a computational linguist, I obtained a MSc in computer science from the National University of Rosario, Argentina. I have 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, I worked as a software engineer for ATX Software in Lisbon, Portugal. My duties included web interface design, database administration, quality assurance, project management and customer liaison.
Keys: non-cooperative dialogue, discourse structure, dialogue games, argument visualisation, dialogue annotation, web technologies, social engagement, e-democracy
Team: Michelle Bachler, Simon Buckingham Shum, Anna De Liddo, Simon Knight, Duygu Bektik, Thomas Ullmann
Projects
News
Publications
Plüss, B. (2009). Towards a Computational Pragmatics for Non-Cooperative Dialogue [PhD Probation Report]. Department of Computing, The Open University. https://oro.open.ac.uk/90253/.
De Liddo, A., Plüss, B. and Ardito, A. (2020). Democratic Reflection: Nudging Citizens’ Democratic Engagement with Political Election Debates. In: CSCW '20 Companion, 17-21 Oct 2020, Virtual Event, USA. https://oro.open.ac.uk/73292/.
De Liddo, A., Pedreira Souto, N. and Plüss, B. (2021). Let's replay the political debate: Hypervideo technology for visual sensemaking of televised election debates. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 145 https://oro.open.ac.uk/72223/.
Plüss, B. and De Liddo, A. (2018). Democratic Replay: Enhancing TV Election Debates with Interactive Visualisations. In: Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 8-11 Jan 2018, Waikoloa Village, Hawaii. https://oro.open.ac.uk/54067/.
De Liddo, A., Plüss, B. and Wilson, P. (2017). A Novel Method to Gauge Audience Engagement with Televised Election Debates through Instant, Nuanced Feedback Elicitation. In: Communities and Technologies (C&T) 2017, 26-30 Jun 2017, Troyes, France. https://oro.open.ac.uk/49729/.
Plüss, B. and Piwek, P. (2016). Measuring Non-cooperation in Dialogue. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2016), 11-16 Dec 2016, Osaka, Japan. https://oro.open.ac.uk/47720/.
Plüss, B. and De Liddo, A. (2015). Engaging Citizens with Televised Election Debates through Online Interactive Replays. In: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video, 3-5 Jun 2015, Brussels, Belgium. https://oro.open.ac.uk/45550/.
Plüss, B., Piwek, P. and Power, R. (2011). Modelling non-cooperative dialogue: the role of conversational games and discourse obligations. In: 15th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, 21-23 Sep 2011, Los Angeles. https://oro.open.ac.uk/40217/.
Cristiá, M. and Plüss, B. (2010). Generating natural language descriptions of Z test cases. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference, 7-9 Jul 2010, Dublin, Ireland. https://oro.open.ac.uk/21458/.
Plüss, B. (2010). Non-cooperation in dialogue. In: Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11-16 Jul 2010, Uppsala, Sweden. https://oro.open.ac.uk/21437/.
