Strange Aeons

sesquipedalia verba
Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

Twitter

My Other Sites

Affiliates

Tags

Archive

2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Dundee Students @ Yahoo! HackDay

We (meaning Andy) have run a successful Yahoo! HackDay at Dundee for the last couple of years. This year some of our students went down to the Yahoo! OpenHack event in Londidium to present their own hack: IntelliSearch, for which they won Best Mozilla Hack. Anyhow, two of the three students who developed IntelliSearch, Laurence & Chris, have been working in their spare time, on a multiplayer online game called Zandrok. Anyhow, yesterday I met with Chris to discuss his fourth year project which will use software agents in relation to Zandrok. More information will be forthcoming once we iron out what exactly we plan to achieve, but it should be an exciting project. In the meantime, here is the IntelliSeach presentation:

Posted
 

AISB Persuasive Technology Symposium Day 2

Media_httpwwwstrangea_fehmi
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.
Posted
 

AISB Persuasive Technology Symposium Day 1

Media_httpwwwstrangea_jagaf
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.
Posted
 

Encouraged Commentary

Media_httpwwwstrangea_jbeuj
I have a project in the works that I have had on the back burner for a while based around the idea of argument blogging - capturing the argumentative structure of interactions occurring online, particularly in blog posts and comments. In the meantime there are some similar technologies being developed elsewhere on the web. One of these technologies is encouraged commentary which uses JQuery to provide a nice interaction mechanism for dealing with comments on a blog. The basic idea is that you select the text you wish to respond to and a bubble fades into the screen next to the highlighted text offering you a button that you can click if you wish to respond. If you click the button then the highlighted text is copied into your comment and you get the opportunity to type in your response which then appears in the usual comment space near the bottom. Instructions for getting encouraged commentary working on your blog can be found over at Don't Trust This Guy. The system is nice, and automates some of the things that we have been doing to overcome the limitations of traditional comments, such as putting in the @user bit to indicate whose comment you are responding to. Another post about this new technology can be found over at readwriteweb. Whilst a good example of how to enhance the existing system by providing simple, natural, and intuitive tools to support the user I don't think that it goes far enough in supporting the kind of structural capture that we are looking for with the so-called nascent World Wide Argument Web (WWAW). I would like to be able to capture the actual argumentative structure that underpins these discussions and export the individual arguments as AIF and the dialogues as AIF+ so that they can be reused in argumentation specific tools like Araucaria. The approach I am taking is to specify dialogue games, using the Dialogue Game Description Language (DGDL), that give an appropriate range of performatives to associate with the act of commenting in blogs. We then use a similar technique to argument and dialogue capturing that we used in MAgtALO, where the argumentative relationships between statements are inferred from the types of moves that the players select in the dialogue game.

Posted
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
​