People

Current Members

Chris Reed :: Contact :: Homepage
Chris is director of the Centre for Argument Technology and has worked in the fertile area lying between argumentation and AI for twenty years. He was a founding editor of the journal Argument and Computation and has had visiting positions at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Konstanz and his research has attracted over £7m in funding and has drawn on partnership with both SMEs and corporates. He has published over 200 papers in the area, including establishing basic interoperability standards and pioneering infrastructure for the management of large scale datasets for deep learning in argumentation. Commercially, he has served as an executive director of three start-up companies, and consulted for several more. In the public sphere, Chris has appeared on TV and radio in the UK and further afield, including BBC TV, BBC Scotland, BBC Worldservice, Talk Radio (UK national), Newstalk (Irish national), and in the press with New Scientist, BBC News, Financial Times, Newsweek, The Independent, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, Newsweek and more. He has also given evidence at both the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee and the All Party Parliamentary group on AI in Westminster.

John Lawrence :: Contact :: Homepage
John is a lecturer in the Centre for Argument Technology, and manager of the centre’s Infrastructure Working Group, responsible for the design and development of argument technology software with over 20,000 users in 46 different countries. Such software includes the most widely used tools for argument analysis (OVA), storage (AIFdb), and visualisation (Argument Analytics), as well as two projects in collaboration with the BBC – Test Your Argument, and the Evidence Toolkit, deployed to over 3,000 secondary schools in the UK as part of BBC School Report 2018. John combines 15 years of professional software development experience, working with companies such as Hewlett Packard, IBM and the BBC, alongside an academic track record of over 40 publications spanning the leading journals in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. His principal research interests focus on the connection between argument mining and explainability in AI.

Alison Pease :: Contact :: Homepage
Alison is a senior lecturer in ARG-tech and works on the connections between mathematics and argumentation, particularly with respect to proof construction and discussion about proof. She has worked on computational models of collaboration between mathematicians, as well as conducting ethnographic studies. Her work lies on the threshold between mathematics, philosophy and artificial intelligence. Alison is also active in computational creativity and has developed methodology for evaluating progress in this field. She is on the Steering Committee for the International Association for Computational Creativity, and has co-chaired a meeting in the series, as well as two symposia on Mathematical Practice and Cognition. She has around 50 refereed papers.

Jacky Visser :: Contact :: Homepage
Jacky is a lecturer in the Centre for Argument Technology. His general areas of interest are argumentation and reasoning (both human and artificial) with a particular focus on persuasion and fallacies. His research involves a variety of methods such as machine learning and corpus annotation to cross the disciplinary boundaries between artificial intelligence, linguistics, logic, and philosophy of language. Jacky has published over 25 papers and taught at the Universities of Amsterdam and Dundee on various subjects in linguistics, computing, philosophy, and communication science. In addition to reviewing for conferences such as ACL and AAAI and journals such as Logic and Computation, he is a member of the editorial board of the journal Argumentation. Jacky is leading part of the Dstl-funded Serapis research project on Intelligence Analysis, and has a coordinating role in our H2020 COUCH project.

Mark K. Smith :: Contact :: Homepage
Prof. Mark K. Smith is CEO of ContactEngine and is an honorary Professor in the group. ARG-tech and ContactEngine are collabrating on innovative directions in conversational AI around the idea of Human Computer Rapport.

Dominic De Franco :: Contact :: Homepage
Dom is a PhD student working on the EU-funded Council of Coaches project. His interests are in belief and behaviour change while his current focus is on narrative persuasion. In particular he is researching if narrative persuasion can be more persuasive than traditional argument, such as those from expert opinion.

Matt Foulis :: Contact :: Homepage
Matt is a research assistant working on detecting fake news.

Rory Duthie :: Contact :: Homepage
Rory is a research assistant working on connections between argumentation and hypotheses and is currently finishing up his PhD on Ethos Mining in Parliamentary debate. This research focusses on the automatic extraction of ethos from debate, using Machine Learning and Deep Learning, as well as visualising political relationships and data trends.

Debela Gemechu :: Contact :: Homepage
Debela is working on his PhD in argument mining.

Conor McKillop :: Contact :: Homepage
Conor is a Research Assistant and PhD student working on the VolkswagenStiftung funded Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up) project. His research is focussed on the application of argumentation mining and data visualisation techniques to monitor and improve large-scale deliberative processes in real-time.

Brian Plüss :: Contact :: Homepage 
Brian currently has teaching and research responsibilities in the group. He is working on applications of argument technologies and analytics to enhance everyday communication. His research combines computational linguistics, manual and automatic analyses of dialogue and argumentation, data analytics and interactive visualisations, with a special interest on applications in political communication (e.g. political interviews, election debates, public deliberations). Brian is also part of the ADD-up project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation under the Computational Social Sciences initiative, in which he focused on deploying complex analytics to members of the public in real time.

Mark Snaith :: Contact :: Homepage
Mark is a postdoctoral research associate working on the EU-funded Council of Coaches project, examining ways in which argument and dialogue can be used to help people achieve their health goals. He completed his PhD on argument revision in ARG-tech in 2012, before working as a postdoc on the Leverhulme Trust funded DrEAMS project. His research interests lie in computational models of argument and dialogue, including but not limited to: argument dynamics and their use as a strategic tool in dialogue; extraction and analysis of dialogue structures; and implementations of argumentation systems, such as ASPIC+. Mark also leads the Centre’s Communications Group, responsible for our online presence including the website and social media channels.

Dimitra Zografistou :: Contact :: Homepage
Dimitra is a postdoctoral researcher working on argument representation and reasoning. Her interests fall into the scientific areas of Semantic Web, Graph Query Languages, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with emphasis on Computational Argumentation. She completed her PhD in Computer Science in 2019 at the University of Crete and FORTH, during which, she developed a high-level structured language for querying graphs of interlinked arguments.

Elaine McIntyre :: Contact :: Homepage
Elaine is the Centre’s secretary and PA. She is responsible for practical day-to-day support of the group’s activities, for supporting and welcoming new staff and visitors, and for helping to manage the relationships that the group maintains with academic and commercial collaborators.

Former Members

ARG-tech has had the pleasure of the company of many other individuals, in the past, including:

• Marcelo Acuña, who was a visiting researcher from Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile Jan-Mar 2011
• Floris Bex, who was a postdoc in the group 2009-2012 and is now a lecturer at the University of Groningen
• Katarzyna Budzynska, who was a Dundee Fellow then Senior Lecturer in the group 2011-2019, and is now Associate Professor at Warsaw University of Technology where she runs the Computational Ethos Lab.
• Joseph Devereux, who finished his PhD in the group in 2011
• Mathilde Janier, who finished her PhD on mediation in 2017 and is now at the University of Grenoble
• Barbara (Basia) Konat, who was a postdoc in the group 2015-16 and is now Assistant Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan
• Rolando Medellin, who was a postdoc in the group 2012-2014 and is now working at the University of Essex
• Martín Pereira Fariña who was a visitor to the group from 2016 to 2019 and is now at the University of Santiago de Compostela
• Phil Quinlan, who finished his PhD in the group in 2013, and now works at the University of Nottingham
• Glenn Rowe, a former lecturer in the School who has now retired
• Simon Wells, who was a PhD student and then postdoc in the group until 2011, and is now a lecturer at Napier University