Strange Aeons

Wow, where did the last month go? I am recently back from the second Argument Interchange Format (AIF) meeting which was held at the Dalmunzie Hotel in rural Scotland. The list of delegates to this meeting read like a who's who of online argumentation researchers - people who are developing argumentative tools which, in some way, communicate argumentative information between themselves and to their users. All in all the meeting went well. We achieved the aim of writing a first draft of a specification for the second AIF which includes fixes for many of the problems we have discovered since the original format was specified and introduces some new elements that many of us have noticed were glaringly omitted from the original. In terms of running and organising the event, there were some things that went really well such as:

• Ensuring that all delegates prepared a position statement beforehand so that rather than meeting and starting with "what are we going to talk about" we got straight to the job of discussing the next version of AIF.
• The first night over dinner we all wrote questions onto post it notes that framed the sorts of things that we were interested in. These were used to create a number of topic/discussion groups (which later became major organising elements of the paper draft) and whittle the 23 delegates into a manageable number of working groups with shared interests.

Other things of course worked less well, for example,

• 23 computer scientists using Google Docs to collaboratively edit documents is fine. Except when you are in rural Scotland where your internet feed is provided via two-way satellite communications which are very quickly saturated, and suffer from fairly high latency anyhow.

Some lessons learned:

• Google Docs works quite well for collaboratively editing documents. Who knew? It even works well if you are using it to collaboratively edit LaTeX source, although obviously you don't get to compile it to anything useful or check source errors within Google Docs.
• Make sure that people aren't editing offline then copy-pasting into the Google Doc, as each time they do this they reintroduce the same errors that you just got finished fixing. (This one caused both myself and John to swear quite a bit)
• If you are working with LaTeX then don't forget to install it onto your laptop before you go as you then have to shell into a remote server which has a working LaTeX environment in order to compile the aforementioned LaTeX source into a PDF.
• Set up a local network using a small wireless access point and make some shared directories available on a small server such as a mac mini so that you are not transmitting all that data over the hotel's network all the time. We caused the Hotel to have to reset their router several times over the course of the meeting.
• Investigate collaborative software, such as Gobby, or a versioning system such as Mercurial that can run on the local server to keep track of the collaborative edits rather than relying on Google Docs. Although Google worked reasonable well I still had to go through the following steps to get a PDF generated:

1. Download the document from Google Docs as a txt file & save it as .tex file
2. Run the tex file through dos2unix
3. Get rid of any final non-printable ascii characters using the following:

   $ tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' < file-with-binary-chars > clean-file

4. Compile as usual.

My favourite element of the new specification is the inclusion of support for dynamic argumentation. I had attended the meeting with a clear personal plan to ensure that the AIF2.0 include support for dialogue and I was assigned to the working group on dialogue with Bart Verheij, Raquel Mochales , and David Glasspool. One of the things that quickly became apparent was that thinking of the AIF in terms of monologic and dialogic argument was quite limiting and that other researchers had quite clear needs which wouldn't covered by an AIF which accounted for just arguments and dialogues. Instead what we developed was a model that saw the core AIF, version 1.0, as a model of static arguments and AIF2.0 as including both this as well as dynamic extensions that enable us to model not just dialogue but also other aspects of dynamic argument such as representing the order of argument elements for when analysing rhetorical and presentational aspects of an argument (thanks Raquel) and the history of the construction of an argument (thanks David).

CMNA 9 was held this year in conjunction with IJCAI in Pasadena. Like previous CMNA events that I have attended, there were a number of interesting papers presented as well as plenty of time for discussions.

• Kenneth McLeod, Gus Ferguson and Albert Burger. Using Argumentation to resolve conflict in Biological Databases
• Amin Rahati. Persuasive Argumentation in a Medical Diagnosis Tutoring System
• Douglas Walton. Enthymemes and Argumentation Schemes in Health Product Ads
• Martin O. Moguillansky, Nicolás D. Rotstein, Alejandro J. Garcia, Marcelo A. Falappa and Guillermo R. Simari. Argument Theory Change Through Defeater Activation
• Wassila Ouerdane, Nicolas Maudet and Alexis Tsoukias. Discussing Proof-Standards in the Context of Multicriteria Decision-Aiding
• Helena Lindgren. Clinical Diagnostic Hypothesis Generation and Evaluation as Formal and Natural Argumentation
• Mare Koit. Interaction with the Computer: How to Model Argumentation?
• Simon Wells, Colin Gourlay and Chris Reed. Argument Blogging
• Saul Wyner, Erin Shaw, Taehwan Kim, Jia Li and Jihie Kim. Sentiment Analysis of a Student Q&A Board for Computer Science
• Jakub Gawryjolek, Chrysanne DiMarco and Randy Harris. An Annotation Tool for Automatically Detecting Rhetorical Figures

In summation, one of the nice things about CMNA is the mix of people. Linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists mix and I am sure that this mix of researchers leads to some serendipitous collaborations and interesting pieces of joint work.

I flew into JFK on Monday evening. After remembering how the subway works, what card I needed, and understanding the map I then did a combination of subway (Airtrain, A, G, F, and Q lines) and walking to get to my hotel. By the time I got there it was dark and I had yomped my bag for a good mile or so on foot in evening temperatures that were quite a bit warmer than those I left in Dundee. So my first full day here was Tuesday. I headed up to Brooklyn College and spent some time seeing the first day of the Bridges to Computer Summer School where the kids get a taste of computer science through fun and interesting topics such as Cryptography, Graphics, Web Design, Robotics, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). I managed to get a good idea of what the scheme is about then managed to grab some time to chat with Simon Parsons about researchy stuff. They are doing some interesting work here involving agents, argumentation, and education which parallels and dovetails quite nicely with some of the topics that I have been looking at recently. I spent a bit of time explaining some of the research and teaching that I have been involved in, such as argumentation teaching, MAgtALO, DGDL, strategic argumentation, argument blogging, online visualisation of argument (OVA). I then talked about the ideas that are beginning to form for how some of these could be recombined and deployed as teaching tools in a learning support context. The main thrust is that agents and argumentation systems, both individually and separately, offer useful teaching and learning support tools that could be used in university level classes, particularly teaching introductory computer science, problem solving, and critical thinking. I also have an idea for an argumentative dialogue based online application that fits into the GoogleWave distributed collaboration mode and that uses a novel interface. Lunch was two slices of pizza and a can of juice with the kids and instructors -- I helped with serving up the food to everyone and getting it shifted to the right place at the right time. Afterwards Simon and Betsy were pretty tired from the running around organising stuff so I headed back to my hotel before heading out to get a T-Bone steak which tasted pretty bloody good. All in all a good day  was had . It was quite productive with the beginnings of a number of ideas for collaborative research. I wasn't sure how much I would like Brooklyn but I have warmed to it greatly. My last visit here was confined to Manhattan and I found that the Greenwich area was really quite nice. For evenings out I like the small quiet bars that are dotted around everywhere where the music isn't too loud, the bartenders are friendly and talkative, and there is rarely any waiting for a fresh drink. I haven't yet found a decent bar in the Sheepshead bay area that is like that -- mostly it seems to be restaurants and tourists, though I am probably wrong. Then again I have a decent shop a minutes walk from my hotel which has a fine selection of bottled beers in the chiller, at least as good a range as Tesco has back home, so I think that I can manage.

This Dilbert cartoon seemed apropo given that I am still working on my CMNA9 presentation of the Argument Blogging Project work. I managed to record a short film of Colin talking about his project at the School of Computing 09 degree show held in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. I am not a videographer but I think that I managed to capture the essence of Colin's implementation work on the project (or rather Colin managed to make a good presentation and I managed to hold the camera reasonably steadily and zoom in/out and focus on the relevant bits almost at the right times).

I will be at CMNA 9 on the 13th of July and given the nice mixture of theory and application at previous CMNA workshops, I thought that this XKCD strip would fit nciely. This year's CMNA will be held during IJCAI in Pasadena, California which means that I have some intercontinental travel coming up. First though I will be spending a week at Brooklyn College in N.Y. visiting Simon Parsons and finding out about their argumentation, intelligent agent, and  C.S. Education research. Luckily this will coincide with the Bridges to Computing summer school which should give me some food for thought on how other institutions attract and retain C.S. students. Hopegully this will be a busy, exciting, and productive east coast stopover on the way to California.

This is the day where the symposium really got going for me. Yesterday was interesting but the topics for today were much more closely aligned to my own research interests.

Randy Harris and Chrysanne DiMarco: Constructing a Rhetorical Figuration Ontology

Automated annotation of rhetorical figures in texts.

Simon Wells, Andrew Ravenscroft, Musbah Sagar and Chris Reed: Mapping Persuasive Dialogue Games onto Argumentation Structures

My presentation. Slides online here and paper here. Basis of a submitted JISC rapid innovation proposal.

Manfred Stede: Pro or Contra? Persuasion in the Potsdam Commentary Corpus

Pro & Contra texts. Diagramming arguments from "wild texts" in local regional German newspapers. Evaluating the arguments with users to measure degree of persuasiveness.

Lionel Fontan and Patrick Saint-Dizier: An Analysis of the Persuasive Strength of Arguments in Procedural Texts

Investigating arguments and explanations and the difference between facilitation (how-to) versus argumentation (why).

Bal Krishna Bal and Patrick Saint-Dizier: Towards an Analysis of Argumentation Structure and the Strength of Arguments in News Editorials

Tagging elements of arguments found in editorials incorporating persuasive effects, strength, &c.

Reporting back from day 1 of  the Persuasive Technology and Digital Behaviour Intervention Symposium held at the AISB Annual Convention in Edinburgh Conference Center.

Pierre Andrews and Suresh Manandhar: Measure Of Belief Change as an Evaluation of Persuasion

Evaluating persuasion using a ranking over preferences

Cesare Rocchi, Oliviero Stock, Massimo Zancanaro, Fabio Pianesi and Daniel Tomasini: Persuasion at the Museum Café: Initial Evaluation of a Tabletop Display Influencing Group Conversation

Experience of a museum is often improved by dialogue. Visitors talk about their experience, things that they liked, and share insights, often around a table in the cafe, away from the exhibits. This project used a digital surface that responds to the conversation topics of people around it .

Jaap Ham, Cees Midden and Femke Buete: Unconscious Persuasion by Ambient Persuasive Technology: Evidence for the Effectivity of Subliminal Feedback

Using ambient persuasive technology, for example tools like the iKat to give affective feedback on home energy usage. Talked about results of experiments comparing no feedback against subliminal and supraliminal feedback. Result: Subliminal and supraliminal feedback yields similar results, both better than no feedback.

Derek Foster, Shaun Lawson and Mark Doughty: Social networking sites as platforms to persuade behaviour change in domestic energy consumption

Behaviour change via social networking feedback on home power usage. He looked at the HCI of devices and interfaces, networking of the hardware, and finally integration of social networking: getting users to compete and publically display their power consumption stats.

R Fairchild, J Brake, N Thorpe, S Birrell, M Young, T Felstead and M Fowkes: Using On-board Driver Feedback Systems to Encourage Safe, Ecological and Efficient Driving: The Foot LITE Project

Encouraging fuel efficient and safe driving using persuasive technology. Compared OEM market where the tools to measure fuel usage are built in versus the aftermarket which uses tools like PDAs and Smartphones. Interesting because of the need to deliver feedback with appropriate hard-realtime constraints.

Lucy Yardley, Adrian Osmond, Jonathon Hare, Gary Wills, Mark Weal, Dave de Roure and Susan Michie:Introduction to the LifeGuide: software facilitating the development of interactive internet interventions

Open source intervention lab software suite. Aims to simplify the process of deploying digital behaviour intervention experiments using a graphical authoring tool, a scripting language, and a server to allow storage and playback of expeiments.

Thomas Nind, Jeremy Wyatt, Ian Ricketts, Paul McPate and Joe Liu: Effect of website credibility on intervention effectiveness

Another Dundee researcher. Thomas has been researching how to measure differences in credibility of web sites based upon differences in visual presentation of the same information.