University of Liverpool
University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool was founded in 1881 and is one of Europe's
leading research Universities. Members of University staff have won 8 Nobel
Prizes (in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Peace) since its
founding. The Department of Computer Science was awarded a grade of 5 in the
most recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) conducted by the British
Government in recognition of the international standing of its research. The
Department has undertaken a number of European and nationally-funded
research projects, most recently the European Fifth Framework IST SLIE
project (IST-1999-10948) and the Esperonto Services Project (IST-200134373),
aiming to bridge the gap between the current World Wide Web and the Semantic
Web. The Department is also the project co-ordinator for AgentLink III
(IST-FP6-002006), a European Co-ordination Action to support research and
development in agent technologies. Research projects have also been
undertaken for leading information technology companies, such as British
Telecom and Hewlett-Packard. The Department has a very strong group engaged
in argumentation, focusing on legal applications, e-commerce applications,
value-based argument, practical reasoning, argumentation protocols, and
computational complexity of argumentation systems.
The project participants include Professor Michael Wooldridge, founder of
the Agent Applications, Research and Technology (Agent ART) Group of the
Department, Professor Trevor Bench-Capon, Dr Peter McBurney, and Dr Sylvie
Doutre, post-doctoral researcher on the project. Wooldridge is the author or
editor of several books and over 100 publications in the agent field,
including studies of agent argumentation. He is the co-editor-in-chief of
the "Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems", and was co-chair
of the second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-03). Bench-Capon has an international reputation
in AI and Law, with publications in "Artifical Intelligence", "AI and Law",
"Informal Logic", and other leading journals. He has two decades of
experience in this field, and is the invited speaker at the 2003
International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL).
McBurney was a member of the core team which produced the AgentLink2 Roadmap
for the next decade of European research in agent-based computing, and is
the Administrative Co-ordinator of the AgentLink III project. He has
publications on argumentation in "Annals of Mathematics and AI", the
"Journal of Logic, Language and Information", and the "Journal of Autonomous
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems". Doutre holds a PhD in computer science from
Toulouse University in France. She is interested in algorithmic and
modelisation aspects of argumentation, and has published her work in the
"Journal of Logic and Computation" and in several international refereed
conferences.
