Simon Wells

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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.

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2011 (4)
2010 (1)

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Presentation @ the Inaugural Scottish Argumentation Day

Argday
Yesterday I gave a presentation about my research at the inaugural Scottish Argumentation Day which was held at Aberdeen University, hosted by the Department of Computer Science and kindly organised by Nir Oren. I wanted to present a high-level overview of my interests and talked about my research (including MAgtALO, ArguBlogging & FireBack, Parley, Warblr and the Arguing Agents Competition) and my day job working with the governance and intelligent use of of BIG healthcare datasets. I also included a few slides talking about the Dialogue Game Description Language (DGDL) as some of the work that ARG:dundee presented earlier builds upon DGDL as a fundamental technology.
Click here to download:
aberdeen.pdf (6.46 MB)
(download)

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Paper: Using an argument ontology to develop pedagogical tool suites

  • Abstract: "The teaching of argumentation theory, argumentation skills and critical thinking has only very recently enjoyed any bespoke software support for classroom activities. As software has started to become available, it has been characterised by idiosyncratic, incompatible approaches not only to data representation and processing but also to underlying theories of argument. The rise in popularity of the Argument Interchange Format ontology offers a principled solution to this problem, and we describe here three tools (OVA, Arvina and Parley) which use the AIF to provide pedagogical applications, and a sketch is given of how these tools can complement one another and can share resources."
  • Paper Link: This will be available after the workshop
  • Presentation Link: ditto
  • Citation: C. Reed, S. Wells, M. Snaith, K. Budzynska & J. Lawrence, "Using an argument ontology to develop pedagogical tool suites", (2011), in Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic (TICTTL 2011). Salamanca, Spain.
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New Job: Software Developer @ the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression

I have a new job. I recently joined the award winning (2011 BBSRC "Innovators of the year") OMERO project. My role is to develop extensions to the existing server product in order to support data-intensive research and secure data management for healthcare informatics in alignment with NHS governance guidelines for the use of clinical data. This is a joint project between the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression (GRE) and the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee.

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Presentation @ Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression, Dundee University

Dundee

On Monday 14th January, I gave a short invited talk to members of the Open Microscopy Environment project based in the Swedlow Lab located in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression at the University of Dundee. There were a number of focii to this talk:

  • overall research interests, starting broadly with AI, then focussing rapidly to argumentative dialogue systems,
  • the broad classes of problems that I am interested in,
  • a (very) brief, software focussed overview of projects I have been involved in sketching the thread of research from my early work on multi-agent dialogue systems through formalisation of dialogue protocols in my early post-doc research, and finishing with my most recent applied work in online argumentation, pedagogical dialogue, and web-scale argumentation technologies.

Presentation Slides:

Click here to download:
dundee2011.pdf (5.7 MB)
(download)

Posted
 

Presentation @ NoSQL Autumn Conference

Nosql2010
On Saturday 20th November I  gave an invited talk to the NoSQL Autumn Conference on CouchDB for (absolute) beginners. This was a well attended event packed to the rafters mostly with local developers but also with some attendee's from further afield. I met some great people and had a great time. A round up of the event can be found in Paul Stack's blog post about the day. I think that the success of this event was mostly down to the organisation by Andy Cobley which was exemplary. A flavour of the event can be gained by checking the twitter feed from the day at #nuac.

Presentation Link:

Click here to download:
nosql2010.pdf (1.33 MB)
(download)

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Presentation @ Aberdeen University

Media_httpwwwsimonwel_fmwxi
On Friday 5th November 2010 I gave a presentation on my research interests to members of the Department of Computing Science @ the University of Aberdeen. The talk was quite short and mainly covered my research interests and plans. It started with a brief overview of the core areas that I am interested in from both a theoretic and an applied perspective before I discussed a range of projects and activities that I have involved in over the last few years. Presentation Link: aberdeen2010.pdf
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Interview with the MIT Technology Review

Media_httpwwwsimonwel_gdebv
On the 17th of September, recently back from COMMA 2010 (and barely recovered) I had the good fortune of being interviewed by an editor from the MIT Technology Review about Persuasive Technology. We talked about B. J. Foggs work on captology, the strand of Persuasive Technology that encompass non-verbal approaches, and the ethical questions that are raised as a result. What was nice was that my interview was interested in the kinds of verbal persuasion that I am interested in, that is, using dialogical systems to persuade people to come to a reasonable and justifiable decision via the application of sound supporting and rebutting arguments. Anyhow, the best part is that the Technology Review asked to use my wordle from this post about Persuasive Technology. So a slightly edited version of my wordle can now be seen in the MIT Technology Review special report on Digital Marketing.
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Paper: Building Arguments with Argumentation: The Role of Illocutionary Force in Computational Models of Argument

  • Abstract: "This paper builds upon the proposed dialogical extensions to the AIF, termed AIF+, by making explicit the representation of the role of illocutionary force in the connection between argument structures and dialogical structures. Illocutionary force is realised in the form of Illocutionary Application (YA-) nodes that provide an explicit linkage between the locutions uttered during a dialogue and the underlying arguments expressed by the content of those locutions."
  • Paper Link: This will be available after the conference
  • Presentation Link: ditto
  • Citation: C. Reed, S. Wells, K. Budzynska & J. T. Devereux, "Building Arguments with Argumentation: The Role of Illocutionary Force in Computational Models of Argument", (2010), in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2010). Desenzano del Garda, Italy.
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A bit of a new look

I changed the wordpress theme over to thematic which is current favourite shiny thing. Great widget support means that I have added live rss feeds into the footer of the site from two of my other blogs, strange aeons and cult of the green man.
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Paper: Argument Blogging

  • Abstract: "Argument Blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the web and structuring them into distributed argumentative dialogues. This paper introduces a prototype software system for performing argument blogging and storing the resultant dialogues so that they can be analysed and reused."
  • Paper Link: wells2009blogging.pdf
  • Presentation Link: cmna2009.pdf
  • Citation: S. Wells, C. Gourlay, and C. Reed, “Argument Blogging”, (2009), in 9th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 9). IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, California, U.S.
Posted
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.