Strange Aeons

Some of my more recent research has been into new, or at least improved, ways to make the web a more conversational place. In one sense it already is, we can link to stuff and we can comment on posts. This isn't always sufficient though. In reverse order, not all sites support commenting and even when they do comment support on websites can still be done better than it is right now as it can be difficult to mine, evaluate and analyse the insightful comments. I feel that a web conversation works better when it is a part of the Web, a strand of conversation that interleaves the various sites spread across the web leading a person, whether a spectator or part of the conversation, to engage in chance discovery. Linking is the primary structure of the web. Hyperlinks enable us to create uni-directional links between one site and another, so that when we wish to refer to another site, for example, when commenting in our own blog upon a claim made in another, we link to that originating source site. These links are only one way however, so I can refer to another site, but they have to respond to me if the conversation is to be reciprocal. This does not however stop any other web users from responding to my post in any way that they see fit. This gives us a very egalitarian system, with minimal structure, in which the web itself supports conversation - it is up to the conversation's participants to engage in it and make it happen. A nice example of this kind of web conversation occurred with the recent discussion between John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Joe Wilcox of Oddly Together. This spat basically boiled down to the suggestion by Joe that Daring Fireball should allow comments on posts because otherwise Joe has to respond to Daring Fireball posts on his own blog and John's response that "you write on your site; I write on mine". I think that that is exactly how it should be and that the web is a better place for it. I think that comments enable an immediacy of response but they don't guarantee that your response will stay in place. The only way to ensure that your response stays online is to post it in a place that you control with a link back to the original. Even better, if those two hadn't disagreed then I wouldn't have discovered this post about "Conversational Journalism" by Doreen Marchionni which to me echoes the argument that Alan Rusbridger made in his Hugh Cudlipp lecture (which I commented upon before). There are also many sites that are primarily designed to support conversation such as the Web 2.0 sites like Twitter but for the most part these lead us into a walled garden, with poor support for conversational threads and, due to the limitations of microblogging, the increased use of link shorteners which, whilst not breaking the links in the web, certainly weaken its structural integrity. From the perspective of the Twitter business this makes sense, the lock-in part anyway, you want to be the only game in town, but from the perspective of the web, this is a systemic weakness because a huge portion of web traffic, much of the web conversation, is occurring on a single site, a single point of failure. This is not to say that I am "against" Twitter, far from it, I like the idea of microblogging and to me it provides the basis, but not a complete solution, for enhanced distributed web conversation. It is just that I prefer open and distributed systems to closed and proprietary ones - mainly because when things break, and things always break, you can't fix them, you have to wait for someone else to do that. The next stages, as I see it, are twofold:

1. to provide aggregation mechanisms so that we can get different views on the conversations, for example, following it in whichever direction we like, instead of just following the uni-directional links, or exploring a particular sub-thread of the conversation.
2. to provide new tools to make it easier to engage in the conversation.

The first stage can be accomplished by building upon the Argument Interchange Format, at least in the guise offered by its second version which includes support for dynamic argumentation structures, including dialogues, rather than just static, monological argument. By utilising open, distributed, web-conversation repositories to store meta-information about the relationships between conversational utterances, much like trackbacks and pings enable a form of bi-directional linking, we can start to build new interfaces to engage with and track the web conversation. The second stage will be accomplished by the tool-builders, a process that is partly happening already with the advent of tools to enable Twitter users to tweet from wherever they want and with new and improved blogging and microblogging platforms such as Tumblr and Posterous making it easy to create short posts as a part of the web conversation.

The Dialogue Academy is a Wellcome Trust supported training scheme that deals with dialogue and debate in science communication. It has been running since September 2009 and provides free training to help professional science communicators to develop ideas, tools, skills, and techniques for using dialogue and debate as a way to engage audiences in contemporary science issues.

The following topics are covered:

• Why engage audiences with dialogue
• Facilitation skills
• A dialogue activity marketplace
• Dialogue with different audiences
• Dialogue and fundraising
• What makes a good dialogue topic
• Planning your own dialogue activity
• Embedding dialogue in everyday practice

The idea is that participants plan a science communication small scale event and use the first two day workshop to learn about dialogue and debate and how to integrate these into their event. They then trial their event and give feedback to the other participants at a final workshop.

The definition of dialogue being used by the dialogue academy is as follows:

“A process of communication in which two or more participants engage in an open exploration of issues and relationships on an equitable basis. Dialogue is the exchange of ideas, opinions, beliefs, and feelings between participants – both speakers and audience. It is listening with respect to others and being able to express one’s own views with confidence. Dialogue is not silence, chaos or one person or faction monopolising the session.”

Which unsurprisingly is pretty much identical to the basic definition that I use in my argumentation and critical thinking classes on dialogue at Dundee University. Although I have to be a little more careful about using more loaded words such as beliefs which have a specific philosophical meaning as used in computer science, the basic idea of multiple speakers exchanging ideas, opinions, and establishing positions is what dialogue is all about. My Ph.D thesis was all about how to formalise these interactions into protocols that computer software, called intelligent agents, can use, the intuition being that real world dialogue enables us to interact with each other in a flexible, efficient, and robust manner and that there are two core benefits to enabling computer software to do the same:

1. Firstly, that those same benefits that humans enjoy, flexibility, efficiency, and robustness, should also be core factors in the development of computer communications, and
2. Secondly, that computer software should have available to it models of human computer interaction that are closer to those that we use in human to human interaction.

I raised a titter (excuse the pun) at the AISB symposium on Persuasive Technology when I suggested that after the nipple, one of the next most natural interfaces that humans use, and in one sense use quite well, is dialogue and argument. We take positions, argue the toss, and in an everyday sense, we get things done. We might not necessarily argue well, and we might not always manage to resolve those big arguments, but the day to day stuff gets achieved. It is this aspect of argumentative dialogue that is intriguing to me as a model for how people could better interact with computers, and how computers could better interact with each other.

An interesting article over at the Guardian that includes the following quote from Darrel Ince of the O.U.:

...if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.

My immediate response was broad agreement but on reflection I am not so sure that it is so straightforward and that quote needs to be unpacked a little because the argument, as stated, is inflammatory, definitely divisive, and possibly also a little offensive because it not only abuses the original scientist through an ad hominem (although one weasily couched in terms of opinion) but suggests that the peer reviewers are also failing in their job by approving papers that shouldn't be published. My position is that you need not always publish your sourcecode, and in some cases it might actually be unhelpful to do so, for example:

1. You need to release your data if your findings depend upon that data as an input. A corollary to this is that you also need to detail your methods for deriving your conclusion, but that just releasing sourcecode is not a sufficient substitute for that discussion of methods. If you don't release your data then nobody else can reproduced your results, hence you are NOT doing science. However, as a rule releasing the code will not affect whether or not your findings are valid or not, only reproducibility from first principles can do that, i.e. Another group reproducing your findings from the original dataset. Even better is another group reproducing findings from an independent dataset but we must accept that in domains like that of Anthropomorphic Climate Change the scale and nature of data collection makes it difficult to build such datasets.
2. If the software merely implements a formal model so that the results come from the execution of the software then there is no need to release the code, only the formal model, and possibly, but not necessarily the methods used to implement, it need to be released. However this must be done in sufficient detail so that a reimplementation can be achieved and any results can be reproduced.

By not releasing the original code, new implementation by different groups can strengthen the scientific basis for a conclusion. For example, by taking a different approach or implementing in a different language to that of the original theoretical model can uncover any bias or errors in the original implementation. This is potentially strengthening the original finding, or conversely uncovering weaknesses in the implementation. Either way, not having the code in this case will lead to greater insight into the original model. By having the original code we are tempted to reuse, or possibly merely tainted by having read a solution that colours any new approach. So, broadly, share your data, share your (formal) theoretical basis, but you don't necessarily need to share your code. If you have a formal model that underpins your findings then your peer-reviewers and editor should be picking up on whether that is sufficiently well presented to allow reuse. Similarly it is the venues that publish research who should be ensuring that the datasets which underpin it are available to the wider community. They have failed in their role if there is not enough detail, as also has the scientist who has not provided the detail. It is for the scientific community to then take up the burden of reproducing results. The peer review process should not be expected to ensure correctness of findings but merely to ensure that well written, well argued, and important research is made widely available. Just because an article has gone through this process does not mean that the matter is in any way settled. To return to the original quote, the argument that "if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, ..., the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist" does not really hold water and makes an emotive argument that polarises the debate. I am unaware of any findings based purely off of a piece of software that is not based in either an input dataset or a formal theoretical model (of which the software is merely a realisation) and it is these that must be publicised not the code that is based upon them.

I changed the strange aeons wordpress theme this afternoon from the old one which was a hacked version of the simplicity-light theme to the latest version of Thematic. I have been using an earlier version of Thematic for some of my teaching sites as it is a robust and straightforward theme if you just want to get some information across. This latest version has a much better colourscheme, plain white - nice and simple with plenty of places to add widgets for customisable layout. After much trial and error this has lead to the following layout, with the old theme on the left for comparison with the new scheme on the right: A big improvement I think. With the widgets in the footer of the page displaying lists of recent posts, recent comments, and categories, I am much happier than I was before where I thought that the categories list was getting out of hand. Now the side bar lists are condensed into drop down menus where possible and useful. I will now have to see how this pans out in usage, and how difficult it is to customise for other sites. If simple I may just adopt thematic as the default for everything and just customise with colour schemes and some judiciously selected and placed graphics.

According to Arthur C. Clarke anyway. My own blogging has had to take a back seat over the past month as I have been busy with teaching related activities and getting the websites associated with my various courses up and running again after an over enthusiastic rm-ing session on the wrong web server last summer. I had kept MySQL dumps of everything but not of the various sites themselves so I had the content but not the presentation and it takes time, a precious commodity, to get these things going. Anyway my argumentation site is up and running, as is my linux site and my agents site, covering the three broad topics that I am teaching this year. The plan has been to use publically accessible blogs, rather than blackboard, to keep a record of everything that occurs in relation to each of my modules. I have an adverse reaction to the locking up of knowledge inside little blackboard websites because they are distinctly not open. When I have been interested in various modules being delivered by my colleagues I have had to go through a process of getting added to the module lists so that I can get access. When all I really want to do is read through the slides to satisfy some sort of academic craving. What are the plans for this year you wonder. Well no resolutions. Some half-hearted, fairly vague, back of the mind ideas for things I want to do over the next year or so. Some of these things are fairly practical;

• getting to inbox 0 (currently at inbox 2 as I have 2 emails from friends that I want to give thoughtful and considered replies to) and other hacks to increase my productivity,
• getting a fellowship application in (although this is actually half-hearted as it would mean little or no teaching for 3 years or so and I now realise that it is the healthy balance of teaching and research activities that currently make me (reasonably) happy in my job),
• getting some research funding (this is more whole hearted as I want to stop self-funding my visits, get some better equipment and books, and because it is a necessary part of getting onto the career ladder as a scientist - it is not solely about what you know but increasingly about how much money you can bring to the table),
• getting those two journal papers off of my desk that have been in various states of done-ness for too long,
• getting my small publishing business up and running (as it has been in the back of my mind for a couple of years during which time several friends have written and print-on-demanded various books but would rather have turned that over to someone they know to manage so that they could write more). It should be noted that this is also a strategic move in that it looks increasingly as though only those who have a business interest in copyright will have any say in the near future over how the copyright landscape erodes. By developing a non-traditional publishing model based off of openness and sharing perhaps it will give me a stronger basis from which to argue against increased restrictions,
• finally get my personal consultancy changed over from a sole trader business into a limited company and try to build an extra income stream,
• get some new websites up and running. I have one on cooking (partnering with a friends baking website (which I also have to get running)), one for the publishing company, and one for my book blogging.

I think that that is enough to get started with...

My final day in Pasadena I had a few hours to kill in the morning because my flight wasn't until early evening so I packed, booked my supershuttle ride, checked out, left my luggage in the hotel luggage facility, and went for breakfast in the old town. I spent a couple of hours wandering around with the hope of tiring myself out so that I might sleep on the plane later. Around lunchtime I returned to the hotel had humous and flatbread sitting at the bar and got talking to the bartender. We started talking about Whisky and I pointed out that I like Bourbon and that a particular favourite is Wild Turkey. At this the bartended informs me that Wild Turkey really isn't very good and he lines up about eight glasses and proceeds to take me through a succession of top quality Bourbons, starting with something just a little more up market than Wild Turkey and finishing with a 146% proof rare single barrel. Needless to say he earned himself a very good tip and I felt that I had a good chance of falling asleep later on the aeroplane. My flight from LAX to CDG was uneventful, in the early hours of the morning I got up to stretch my legs and spent about two hours talking to a retired social worker from California named Chester who was on his way to Europe with his wife. It turned out that he had visited Dundee 30 odd years ago to attend a social work convention. He had also spent some time in England and told me what it was like to be a black man in Britain at that time. Because of heavy immigration at that time many people thought that he was West Indian and in Britain for work, rather than a U.S. citizen and skilled social worker so thinks the attitudes that he experienced then were partly as a result of that. We put the world to rights for a couple of hours before turbulence meant that we had to return to our respective seats. I arrived at CDG late morning and spent a couple of hours asleep across three seats in terminal 2E waiting for my connection to Edinburgh. Before midnight on the sunday I was home, having started travelling at around 4PM the previous day. It's good to be home.

The final day of IJCAI was much better in terms of topics that I had either an active research interest in, or at least sufficient background understanding to get something out of the sessions. Of particular interest today were the Coalitions and Coordination session and the Negotiation and Commitment session, both chaired by Michael Wooldridge, and the second Argumentation session chaired by Iyad Rahwan. Papers of particular interest today were:

1. Dialectical Abstract Argumentation: A Characterization of the Marking Criterion Nicolás D. Rotstein, Martín O. Moguillansky, Guillermo R. Simari
2. A Unified Framework for Representation and Development of Dialectical Proof Procedures in Argumentation Phan Minh Dung, Phan Min Thang
3. Labellings and Games for Extended Argumentation Frameworks Sanjay Modgil
4. Computational Properties of Resolution-based Grounded Semantics Pietro Baroni, Paul E. Dunne, Massimiliano Giacomin

That evening many of the argumentation folk me up for dinner, including Sanjay Modgil, Iyad Rahwan, Adrian Pearce, and myself. I finally got to meet and chat with Phan Minh Dung, although we spent more time talking about sport than argumentation -- go figure! After dinner Iyad, Adrian, and I went for a final pint and listened to some live music before heading back to our respective hotels. All in all I would say that IJCAI has been tremendously interesting and has given me a lot of food for thought, introduced me to many people that I might not otherwise have me, and provided me with a good list of research ideas to pursue over the next year on top of the list of things that I already have going on.

Interesting sessions on Description Logics, which I didn't have enough background to really get a lot out of but I am hearing a lot about these logics at the moment and think that it might be useful to learn about. I bought the second edition of the Description Logic handbook with my conference discount form the Cambridge publishing table. The rest of the sessions today were a little ho-hum for me. One of the problems with IJCAI is that it brings into sharp relief just how limited an individuals understanding of A.I. is as a discipline, especially at the cutting edge which is what a conference is about. I managed to get away for a couple of hours in the afternoon and visited the Huntington Library and Gardens because I needed a change of scenery. This is nearly two weeks of pretty much solid work in a different environment to usual so a little bit of a break was on the cards. I didn't investigate the library or art collection because my aim was to see the gardens which were on Monty Don's recent BBC series "Around the World in 80 Gardens". As the Huntington was only about 5 minutes drive from my hotel I got the hotel shuttle service to drop me off there. The first thing that I did was to investigate the desert garden before seeing the jungle garden then having tea and scones in the "English" tea room. After that I had time to make a quick visit to the Japanese and Chinese gardens before rounding off my visit with a trip to the hot house to see the Orchids.

Today was the first argumentation session of the IJCAI technical track chaired by Stefan Woltran. I am quite impressed that there are now two argumentation sessions in the main technical track where there didn't used to be any. Argumentation, at least in the technical sense applied in A.I. must really be making some headway and gaining popularity. That said this wasn't the most widely attended session. Papers during this session included:

1. "A Characterisation of Strategy-Proofness for Grounded Argumentation Semantics" by Iyad Rahwan, Kate Larson, and Fernando Tohme.
2. "Repariing Preference-Based Argumentation Frameworks" by Leila Amgoud and Srdjan Vesic
3. "Argumentation System with Changes of an Agent's Knowledge Base" by Kenichi Okuno and Kazuko Takahashi
4. "On the Accrual of Arguments in Defeasible Logic Programming" by Mauro Javier Gomez Lucero, Carlos Chesnevar, and Guillermo Simari

I did not attend the conference banquet but did find a nice Italian restaurant that server a nice Veal shin with Risotto which was very tasty with a glass of Pinot Noir. The good food and drink cost me much less that the conference banquet would have. Although I didn't have the opportunity to geek out with the other delegates, afterwards I did find a great bar that server reasonably priced beer, had friendly bar staff, and had great entertainment. I spent the rest of the evening listening to Sarah Daye singing live in a bar in the Paseo Colorado. She has a great voice and sings a mixture of tracks that you have heard before and tracks that you haven't. I stayed until the very end and was pleased with my evenings entertainment.

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.