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).

or authority versus involvement as Alan Rusbridger describes it in his recent Hugh Cudlipp lecture in which he asks Does Journalism Exist? The us versus them refers to the idea that in the past information was held or restricted to certain authorities who controlled how that information was presented, consumed, and reused. More recently, this order has changed and the consumers are now as likely to also be the creators, the reader is no longer solely a passive consumer, but lives in

"a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgements; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority."

This struck me as interesting and succinctly defines one of my more recent research activities which has revolved around designing interactions, and associated software infrastructure, to support online argumentation. By this I mean the necessary software and infrastructure to provide support for those people who want to:

• exercise their own judgement,
• create their own content,
• articulate their own views, and
• learn from their peers

just as Alan mentioned in his lecture. Although many of these activities can already be performed by those who are sufficiently able and motivated, the supporting technology is still rudimentary. Just as we are still trying to develop the best persuasive interfaces to influence behaviour, we are still trying to develop the best interfaces to support online argumentative interaction and thereby improve critical literacy. There are at least two approaches that we can take. One approach is via education, for example, my introductory undergraduate module in problem solving and critical thinking is exactly the kind of introductory course that should be a prerequisite for anybody who wants to be able to say that they have had an education. Not that my module is perfect, far from it, just that the nature of the module; teaching students how to discover the structure of arguments, to see where there are holes or errors in the reasoning, to recognise when a rhetorical trick is begin used against them; these are all the kinds of skills that members of a knowledge society should possess. At the moment this is also the kind of topic that is left to a kind of inate ability, some people are just good at arguing, and others are good at being mislead by those in the know. However education doesn't solve the problem of lack of explicit support in the infrastructure that we use to communicate. This leads directly to my second approach: building the tools that support online argument, enabling people to create their content, whilst also guiding and supporting the process of articulating viewpoints and exercising judgements. My initial prototype for an argublogging system was outlined in a CMNA workshop paper last summer and uses nothing more than the web simpliciter, some browser situated javascript, and an aggregation server, to begin the process of supporting web users who have just read something online that they agree or disagree with and want to respond. Of course it is easy to respond online, anyone can set up a blog in minutes and link back to the original. The problem is that ordinary links carry very little information other than the fact that one place links unidirectionally to another. Much of the contextual information about how you are responding is lost, for example, to know whether I am supportive or antagonistic with respect to the quote above from Rusbridger's lecture requires a reader to read and understand this post. Wouldn't it be nicer if that relationship was recorded? Even better, wouldn't it be great if you could see whether anybody else had responded to any aspects of this post elsewhere on the web? Ideally you would structure all of those quotes and responses into a single dialogue, gatherered from all of their locations across the web, possibly you might even want to visualise this dialogue, seeing the structure of the various arguments that make up the dialogue. Essentially this is what my argument blogging system does, enables web users to harvest textual quotes and respond to them within a structured dialogue. This structure is captured and stored in a web-accessible database (AIFDB), in an RDF language that reifies the Argument Interchange Format, and thus becomes a Semantic Web data source, ripe with all of the potential that that entails.

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 was looking for inspiration for a good way to do visually-based programming. I have a domain specific language which is fairly straightforward to use but because it contains some of the traditional selection constructs, like if-elseif-then blocks, it suffers from the same kind of complexity that makes most programming languages fairly inaccessible to non-programmers. Basically I wanted something that allowed users, especially non-programming users, to understand and naturally use the iteration and selection within the language, but without having to really learn anything from outside the domain of the language. One approach that I came across whilst skimming back issues of the Communications of the ACM was that used by Scratch, a visual programming language aimed at children and non-experts. Scratch takes the familiar, to programmers, language constructs for iteration and selection and uses well designed visual artifacts that are keyed to only fit together in particular ways. Essentially, Scratch ensures that the basic selection and iteration structures are well formed by treating them as a single visual artifact. Although having already heard of Scratch, the article where I actually started finding out how it worked was "Scratch: Programming for all" which tells the story of how teaching programming is difficult but that some of those difficulties can be avoided by putting play back into the act of programming. If the interface reduces the scope for syntactic errors then the user can put more effort into surprising and delighting themselves by getting their code to do what they want it to do. The most interesting part of the article though repeats the oft-stated aphorism about young people being digital natives but goes further and explains why, although true to a degree, they still need support in developing programming skills so that they can become producers as well as consumers (p. 62)

It has become commonplace to refer to young people as "digital natives" due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It's as if they can "read" but not "write".

This, I think, exactly captures the issue. People need to become betters writers in the digital landscape rather than just readers. This realisation doesn't alter the situation but it does put it very succinctly, and I am left in the position I was in at the beginning, needing a good visual method to "hide the syntax" and allow the user to play with the language, but having looked at Scratch, I think that I have a handle on how to do it now...

---

Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner, Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, & Yasmin Kafai (2009). Scratch: Programming for All Communications of the ACM, 52 (11), 60-67

---

We are looking at just the basics of argument analysis in this module but if any of you are interested in a little more depth then there are plenty of places online to find out more. A good place to start if you want to know about what is going on in argumentation theory research is to look at the Argumentation Research Group (ARG:dundee) in our own School of Computing. So that I am not solely blowing my own trumpet, as a member of ARG:dundee, I also found this argumentation blog written by a postdoc at the University of Lugano in Switzerland. I found it whilst looking for examples of people other than ourselves using Araucaria, and discovered that both Doug Walton, a friend of ARG:dundee and author of the core text for this module, and Chris Reed, original developer of this module had attended Lugano in 2007 to speak at a seminar.

Recently a new project started in ARG:dundee, the argumentation research group at Dundee University. This project, the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project, is quite exciting and involves building tools for working with arguments on the web.The project abstract is as follows:

Humans use argument to express disagreement, to reach consensus and to both formulate and convey reasoning. The theory of argument has found wide application in artificial intelligence, providing mathematical structures for automated reasoning, communication protocols for distributed processing and linguistic models for natural language processing. A key stumbling block, however, has been joining together models that focus on abstract, mathematical relationships with those that focus on concrete, linguistic relationships. The first objective of this project is to develop for the first time a theoretical account that connects static, "monologic" argument with dynamic, multi-person, "dialogic" argument and ties together abstract, mathematical models with concrete, linguistic representations. Furthermore, models of argument have been predominantly confined to the lab. Our goal is to translate the research advances into high profile, large scale deployments using partners with enormous user bases. Prototype systems in this area have been sufficient to demonstrate the unique advantages of practical argumentation systems to potential users of this research such as those within the broadcasting domain. There is a demonstrated public demand for argument-based exploration of current issues with complex scientific and ethical dimensions, demonstrated, for example, by the longevity and success of high profile programming featuring topical issues discussed in a stylised argumentative debate format. The second objective of this project is to develop the theory into implemented components that can form a foundation for application development to support actual programmes with prototype testing Unique advantages afforded by the technology will allow users to interact with the programme material as if they were themselves contributors, allowing arguments to be probed, tested and extended, and the distinction between in-programme and post-programme content to be blurred. The interaction metaphor shifts from 'message-then-next-message' to 'question-answer-riposte-challenge...'. The rich structure is natural for users, and provides rich metadata for programme-makers. Finally, in 2007 an exciting vision of the "world-wide argumentation web" (WWAW) was laid out, in which systems such as those constructed to work alongside practical prototypes could interact, both with each other and with other debate and argumentation systems, both populist and academic. Argument fragments, expressed as resources on the Semantic Web, can cross-refer, allowing different debating systems to navigate the WWAW according to various rules of dialogue captured by dialectical games. To bring this vision of the WWAW into reality, the third and final objective of the project is to allow execution of arbitrary dialogue games on a platform that provides interfaces for human players, and both interfaces and control for computer players of dialogue games. In this way, we want to harness the enormous channel to market and the high-profile reference case that is offered by collaboration within broadcasting. At the same time, the project will be developing platform technology that can support exploitation in other areas. During the project, we will work with the Scottish Mediation Network in the context of mediation tools, with the Ontario courts in the context of judicial summaries, and with the Universities of Lugano and Groningen in the context of legal education to identify exploitation routes for the technology.

Although I am not employed by this project it has brought the opportunity to increase the size of the group with the addition of three new members, Mark Snaith, who was one of my honours project students last year working on OVA and worked with ARG:dundee over the summer developing the newlook argdb and integrating it with OVA, John Lawrence, who originally developed MAgtALO whilst an MSc student working for Chris, and Floris Bex who recently completed his Ph.D thesis, entitled "Evidence for a Good Story" supervised by Henry. These new members all bring different perspectives to the group discussion but already it seems that there are now enough of us in the group that it is less hard work to keep the discussions going. Before we all had to work harder to share the load of running a group discussion between three of us. That is much easier with six.

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.