Lecture Series "Visual Computing" | Katarzyna Budzynska & Chris Reed, University of Dundee, Scotland

Talk Abstract

The Centre for Argument Technology has a twenty-year track record in developing foundational theory in philosophy and linguistics that is then operationalised to take the transformative step to deployed technology. The most recent example of such application was a pilot project with the BBC that led, amongst other things, to live deployment of large-scale argument analytics in conjunction with BBC programming and offered profile-raising amongst an audience of millions. This talk tells the story of this large-scale public deployment, describing theoretical foundations provided by Inference Anchoring Theory, practical organisation and choreography of time-critical, close annotation across five timezones, and then technology engineering and BBC deployment of analytics, of learning resources and of unique interactive applications. Finally, the talk reflects on a range of insights that the intensity and scale of the collaboration offers for any project seeking high-impact outcomes.

Finally, as an application domain, we studied how bundling can be used as an efficient visualization technique for societal health challenges. In the context of a national study on Alzheimer disease, we focused our research on the analysis of the mental representation of geographical space for elderly people. We show that using bundling to compare the cognitive maps of dement and non-dement subjects helped neuro-psychologist to formulate new hypotheses on the evolution of Alzheimer disease. These new hypotheses led us to discover a potential marker of the disease years before the actual diagnosis.

Speaker's Bio

Chris Reed and Katarzyna Budzynska are part of  the VW-Stiftung project "Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up): Computational Enhancement of Large-scale Public Arbitrations in Real Time", represented in Konstanz by Annette Haulti-Janisz from the Department of Linguistics and will also be cooperating with the new DFG project on "Visual Analytics and Linguistic Analysis of the Interpretation of Deliberative Argumentation" (together with Daniel Keim and Katharina Holzinger).

Katarzyna Budzynska is an associate professor (senior lecturer) in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland), and a lecturer & Dundee fellow at Computing at the University of Dundee (UK). She is also a member of the Centre for Argument Technology (ARG-tech). Her research interests concentrate on the formal analysis of communicative processes of argumentation, dialogue and persuasion. The interdisciplinary approach links together the elements of logic, philosophy of language, rhetoric, linguistics, cognitive science, social psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science. Her projects have attracted over £680k of funding from government and commercial sources and has authored and co-authored 2 books and 70 peer-reviewed papers.

Chris Reed is Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where he heads the Centre for Argument Technology (arg-tech.org). Chris has been working at the overlap between argumentation theory and artificial intelligence for two decades and specialises in the theory, practice and commercialisation of argument technology. He has won over £5.6m of funding from government, charity and commercial sources, has over 140 peer-reviewed papers in the area including five books, and has served as a director of several technology companies. He has also been instrumental in the development of the Argument Interchange Format, an international standard for computational work in the area; he is spear-heading the major engineering effort behind the Argument Web; and he is a founding editor of the Journal of Argument & Computation.

Location

University of Konstanz, Universitätsstr. 10, Konstanz
Powerwall C202

University of Stuttgart, VISUS-Building, Allmandring 19, Vaihingen
Powerwall Room -01.116 (Live Transmission)