KMi Seminars
Assumption-based argumentation
This event took place on Monday 11 June 2007 at 11:30

 
Dr Francesca Toni Imperial College London, Department of Computing

Argumentation has proven to be a useful abstraction mechanism for understanding several problems, for example non-monotonic, defeasible reasoning in artificial intelligence, legal reasoning, several forms of practical reasoning performed by intelligent agents, medical decision-making, and security.

In order to provide tools to solve these problems, several computational frameworks for argumentation have been proposed, often based upon Dung's abstract argumentation. This form of argumentation focuses on determining the "acceptability'' of arguments based upon their capability to counter-attack all arguments attacking them. In abstract argumentation these arguments and attack relation between arguments are seen as primitive notions, defined entirely abstractly, and this allows for intuitive and simple computational models, but does
not show how to find arguments and how to exploit the fact that different arguments are built from the same premises. Assumption-based argumentation is a general-purpose framework for argumentation, whereby arguments and attack relation are not primitive concepts, but are defined instead in terms of deductions from assumptions and contraries of assumptions.

In this talk I will describe assumption-based argumentation, how it relates to abstract argumentation, several computational models for assumption-based argumentation, a family of systems implementing these models and some applications. I will also discuss the limitations of these systems when deployed by non-expert users.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities