Caliornia Odyssey Day 3 & IJCAI Day 1

Because Doug had another conference to travel to tomorrow I elected to spend the morning with him and his wife on a walking tour around Pasadena’s Old Town area. This worked out quite well as Doug and I talked about research interests and identified a range of directions that we could look to for joint work, whilst his wife pointed out architectural features of the buildings that we shouldn’t miss and made sure that we didn’t get run over.

In the afternoon I met with Helena Lindgren to talk about some plans for research based upon our shared interests in argumentation, automated defeasible reasoning, and healthcare computing. We decided that the best way to do this was to talk whilst we walked and traveled around so we hopped on the metro and headed over to Hollywood which gave us time to chat during the hour or so journey.

After walking along Hollywood Boulevard and seeing Graumann’s Chinese Theatre we spent several hours drinking coffee and working in a Starbucks. The culmination was about six firm directions for research topics related to our shared interests that we plan to pursue as time allows. These mostly involve topics that take my expertise in dialogue game protocols, particularly as a method for doing knowledge elicitation from human experts into computational argumentation models, and marry them to Helena’s expertise in structuring healthcare oriented data according to argumentation schemes. We identified a number of interaction use cases where the correct dialogue protocols could add significantly new functionality to her existing system.

By this time we were both a bit hungry so we ate Sashimi in a nearby Japanese restaurant before listening to a free Samba band playing in the mall against the background of the Hollywood sign. How much more California can you get?

One of the nice things about California so far has been that most evenings, if you look hard enough, you can find decent, if not great music being played live for little or no cover fee. Maybe because so many talented people travel here the sheer depth of the pool of talent means that really good singers end up singing for free in local bars purely because they enjoy entertaining.