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Call for Papers: UMMS

February 1, 2010 by SP

User Models for Motivational Systems

the affective and the rational routes to persuasion

20 June 2010, Big Island of Hawaii

in conjunction with UMAP 2010

Recent years have witnessed the growth of three parallel strands of research, all directing towards a more complex cognitive model of rational and extra-rational features, involving emotions, persuasion, motivation and argumentation.

On one side, Persuasive Technology is emerging as a very strong research field, interested in the use of interactive systems to influence human thought and behavior. The international Persuasive conference is now well established at its 5th edition, and a series of other small events, like the Persuasive Technology Symposia (with AISB in 2008 and 2009), confirm the importance of the field in the research landscape.

Parallel to this, Affective Computing is interested in the use, understanding and modelling of emotions and affect in computer systems. From the early 90s, which also saw two UM workshops (at UM03 and UM05), Affective Computing is now an established discipline, with an international conference (ACII), a professional society (HUMAINE) and, recently, a new journal (IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing).

Finally, Argument and Computation is also emerged in the past decade as a research strand interested in computational models of theories of argumentation and persuasion coming from Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Again, an increasing number of events dedicated to the topic, including two annual workshop series (Argumentation in MultiAgent Systems, now at its 7th edition, and Computational Models of Natural Argument, at its 10th edition) and a biennial international conference (COMMA), have recently been complemented by a new journal (Argument and Computation).

This workshop intends to sit at the intersection between these three areas of research, and focus on how adaptive and personalised systems can motivate people, for instance to improve health, or to use sustainable resources, or to achieve goals or specific skills, by using persuasion and argumentation techniques and/or techniques involving the affective and emotional sphere.

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Semantic Stopsigns

January 29, 2010 by SP

Less Wrong is a blog sponsored by Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute: a research group devoted mostly to issues in AI development aimed at increasing human intelligence.  While many posts center on those issues, the folks over there frequently consider ideas about rationality and reasoning.  Essentially, hardcore Bayesianism rules the roost, and there seems to be an instinctive impulse towards formalism that is perhaps not as widely shared among likely readers of RAIL.  That said, at times they hit on ideas and ways of seeing things that are fascinating and useful to consider.

One of those ideas is that of a “semantic stopsign“, the mark of which is “failure to consider the obvious next question.” As the examples make clear, the upshot of this is someone’s tendency to over-rely on a particular answer to tough questions, to rely on it as something like a conversational deus ex machina.  If, for instance, I am willing to question the ability of any institution to solve social problems but seem mysteriously unable to apply the same scrutiny to “god” or “liberal democracy” or “the free market”, then those things are, for me, semantic stopsigns.  When a chain of discursive reasoning brings me to my stopsign I simply stop asking critical questions, automatically satisfied that nothing further need be said.

Semantic stopsigns seem to me to be a familiar phenomenon, but one I’ve not seen discussed very much or labeled with that sort of precision before.  One wonders what a list of common semantic stopsigns would look like, and more importantly, what argumentative strategies one might use to circumvent them.




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Call for Papers: OSSA 2011

January 28, 2010 by SP

Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA)

ARGUMENTATION: COGNITION & COMMUNITY

May 18-21, 2011

University of Windsor

Keynote speakers:

David Hitchock
, Department of Philosophy, 
McMaster University
Paul Thagard
, Department of Philosophy
, University of Waterloo
Karen Tracy, Communication Department, 
University of Colorado

Submission Information

The Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers which deal with argumentation, especially as it intersects with cognition and/or community.
Abstracts prepared for blind refereeing must be submitted electronically no later than SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 to <ossa@uwindsor.ca>  (write ‘[your last name] OSSA abstract’ in the subject line).  They should be between 200 and 250 words long. Additional information on how to prepare proposals is available on the conference website, www.uwindsor.ca/ossa.

The J. Anthony Blair Prize

OSSA wishes to promote the work of graduate students and young scholars in
the field of argumentation studies. Thus we strongly encourage submissions from this group. The J. Anthony Blair Prize ($500 CDN) is awarded to the student paper presented at the Conference judged to be especially worthy of recognition. The competition is open to all students whose proposals are accepted for the Conference.

Financial Assistance for Canadian Graduate Students

Canadian graduate students who need financial assistance in order to attend should advise the Organizing Committee when they submit their proposals. For the purpose of the Conference, a graduate student is one who has not completed the graduate program by September 7, 2010.  (Additional information about this prize will also be available on the website.)

Organizing Committee: 
H. V. Hansen – C. W. Tindale – J. A. Blair – R. H. Johnson

University of Windsor

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Call for Papers: Communication and Argumentation in the Public Sphere

January 24, 2010 by SP

Communication and Argumentation in the Public Sphere

Dunarea de Jos University, Galati, ROMANIA

Dates: May 13th -16th, 2010

Conference Website: http://www.lit.ugal.ro/caps4.htm

We are pleased to announce the fourth edition of the Conference Communication and Argumentation in the Public Sphere, organized by the Research Centre of Discourse Theory and Practice, and the Departments of French and of Applied Modern Languages of Dunarea de Jos University, Galati, Romania, from May 13th to 16th, 2010. The main aim of the conference is to provide a framework for fruitful discussion and academic evaluation of research in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences by colleagues willing to present their studies and meet scholars of related scientific areas. We will be honoured to have you as a participant in the conference and in the workshops we are organizing on this occasion.

Keynote Speakers and Members of the Scientific Committee who confirmed participation:

Emmanuelle DANBLON – Free University, Brussels

Marianne DOURY – CNRS Laboratory ‘Communication et Politique’, Paris

Frans van EEMEREN – University of Amsterdam

Christian PLANTIN – ICAR CNRS UMR, Lumière Lyon 2 University

Maria ZALESKA – University of Warsaw

Topic Areas:

  • the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation and the concept of strategic maneuvering
  • argumentation and emotions
  • argumentation in institutional contexts
  • models of argumentation and types of argument
  • argumentation in language and argumentation in discourse
  • argumentative discourse analysis
  • argumentation, topoi, loci
  • argumentative techniques and discourse strategies with argumentative aim
  • persuasion strategies and argumentative practice
  • argumentative discourse in public space and private space
  • argumentative discourse and media strategies
  • conversational approaches to argumentation
  • scientific discourse and discourse for specific purposes
  • cultural aspects in communication
  • literature and argumentation
  • cooperation and conflict in public space and in private space
  • political dialogue and polemic
  • public opinion, civic engagement, and role of contemporary citizen

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Call for Papers: DEON 2010

January 24, 2010 by SP

DEON 2010
10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science

Fiesole (Firenze), 7-9 July 2010
( http://defeasible.org/deon2010)

The biennial DEON conferences are designed to promote interdisciplinary cooperation amongst scholars interested in linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts and normative systems with computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, organisation theory and law.

In addition to these general themes, DEON2010 will encourage a special focus on the topics:

Deontic Logic and Legal Systems.

There have been nine previous DEON conferences: Amsterdam, December 1991; Oslo, January 1994; Sesimbra, January 1996; Bologna, January 1998; Toulouse, January 2000; London, May 2002; Madeira, May 2004; Utrecht, July 2006, Luxembourg, July 2008.

Selected papers from the conference will be published in special issues of Artificial Intelligence and Law and Journal of Applied Logic.

General Themes
==============

The Program Committee invites papers concerned with the following topics:

– the logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of
deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, the logic of action, and
other related areas of logic
– the formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems
– the formal representation of legal knowledge
– the formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and
autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of
rights, authorisation, delegation, power, responsibility and liability
– the formal specification of normative systems for the management of
bureaucratic processes in public or private administration
– applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity
constraints
– normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and
multi-agent decision making
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The Twelve Virtues of Rationality (!)

January 21, 2010 by SP

I found this interesting post on the twelve virtues of rationality on the blog of artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowski.   The fifth virtue, you’ll be happy to know, is argument. 🙂

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Intensive Course on Bayesian Argumentation

January 20, 2010 by SP

From Monday April 19th to Friday April 23rd 2010, the Philosophy Department at the University of Lund, Sweden, offers a one week intensive course (at upper MA to PhD level) on Bayesian Argumentation, i.e., on the application of Bayes’s theorem to issues such as argument strength, (statistical) fallacies, causal reasoning and decision making. A mathematical background is not necessary to successful complete the course. For more info and a preliminary list of references, please see:

To register and to address questions regarding the preconditions for taking this course, please contact Ylva von Gerber at:

Travel bursaries will not be offered, but help with accomodations, etc. will be available.

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Call for Papers: ESSLLI 2010 Workshop

January 20, 2010 by SP

Workshop on Theories of Information Dynamics and Interaction and their Application to Dialogue
http://www.irit.fr/~Laure.Vieu/Esslli10

Workshop organized as part of European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information: ESSLLI 2010
http://esslli2010cph.info/

August 16-20 (ESSLLI 2nd week) 2010, Copenhagen

Workshop Purpose and Topics

Theoretical approaches to communication and dialogue modeling are varied and often unrelated because separately focusing on different aspects of dialogue (speech acts, goals, beliefs, plans, questions, conventions, roles, cooperation, disputes, argumentation, reference, semantics-pragmatics interface…). On the other hand, the area of foundations of multi-agent systems is inducing new developments in logics of interaction and information dynamics, with a recent trend towards comparison and integration. Analyzing the impact of this trend on communication and dialogue modeling is timely.


This workshop aims at discussing formal theories and logics of information dynamics and interaction and their applications to dialogue and communication modeling. It is intended to bring together logicians, linguists and computer scientists in order to provide a better understanding of the potentialities and limitations of formal methods for the analysis of dialogue and communication. Its scope includes not only the technical aspects of logics, but also multidisciplinary aspects from linguistics, philosophy of language, philosophy of social reality, social sciences (social psychology, economics).

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Call for Papers: ExaCt 2010

January 20, 2010 by SP

Call for Papers

for the 5th International and

ECAI Workshop 2010 on

Explanation-aware Computing

ExaCt 2010

16-17 August, 2010, Lisbon, Portugal

Conference website: http://exact2010.workshop.hm/

Both within AI systems and in interactive systems, the ability to explain reasoning processes and results can substantially affect system usability. For example, in recommender systems good explanations may help to inspire user trust and loyalty, increase satisfaction, make it quicker and easier for users to find what they want, and persuade them to try or buy a recommended item.

Current interest in mixed-initiative systems provides a new context in which explanation issues may play a crucial role. When knowledge-based systems are partners in an interactive socio-technical process, with incomplete and changing problem descriptions, communication between human and software systems is a central part. Explanations exchanged between human agents and software agents may play an important role in mixed-initiative problem solving.

Other disciplines such as cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy of science, psychology, and education have investigated explanation as well. They consider varying aspects, making it clear that there are many different views of the nature of explanation and facets of explanation to explore. Within the field of knowledge-based systems, explanations have been considered as an important link between humans and machines. There, their main purpose has been to increase the confidence of the user in the system’s result, by providing evidence of how it was derived. Additional AI research has focused on how computer systems can themselves use explanations, for example to guide learning.

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Irrationality and the Critical Thinking Classroom

January 16, 2010 by SP

Thinking about the last post got me wondering if anyone besides myself regularly covers forms of irrationality that are studied in the social sciences in their Critical Thinking or Informal Logic classes.  It seems to me to be important for students to know about things like the endowment effect, the bandwagon effect, confirmation bias, framing problems, and groupthink (among others).  These irrational tendencies in persons and others like them certainly present obstacles to critical thinking that (we hope) can be mitigated to at least some degree by the concepts and techniques we teach.  And yet there’s not exactly a huge volume of literature bringing together critical thinking and the empirical study of phenomena like these.

What place, if any, does teaching about the empirical study of irrationality have in your overall pedagogy? Do you think it should have a place in the study of critical thinking, or should we be content to let the scientists work on it? Is it even reasonable to think that training in critical thinking help prevent these kinds of irrationality? If you do include presentations about the forms of irrationality studied by psychology, economics, &c., how do you do it?

Posted in Connections, Rationality, Teaching | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

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