# Argumentation-based Dialogues and their Application to Interactive Intelligent Systems
## Description
This tutorial provides an introduction to practical perspectives on formal argumentation-based dialogue systems, with a strong focus on software engineering and application aspects (while also covering the formal preliminaries). With this focus, the tutorial intends to further facilitate the application of the formal methods and models provided by the vibrant argumentation community, which is particularly promising when considering recent trends to apply dialogue systems-based artificial intelligence approaches in industry-scale systems, for example in the context of facilitating autonomy among Internet of Things devices and human-in-the-loop approaches to intelligent systems.
**Underline link**: [Here](https://underline.io/events/116/sessions?eventSessionId=3180)
**Slides:** [Here](https://people.cs.umu.se/tkampik/slides/aamas_tutorial.html#/)
**Programming tutorial:** [Here](https://github.com/Interactive-Intelligent-Systems/diarg/blob/master/examples/DialoguesAndDmn.md). Note that more programming tutorials are available in the same repository.
## Date/Time
The tutorial takes place the 3rd of May, 2021: **8:30am-12pm BST**/London time (**9:30 - 13:00 CEST**/Berlin time)
## Outline
We intend to structure the tutorial as follows:
1. **Introduction to Dialogues and Argumentation**
The first part of the tutorial provides an informal, yet comprehensive introduction to perspectives on dialogues and arguments in artificial intelligence research, as well as an initial intuition on how these concepts can be applied in real-world systems. The following fundamental questions will be explained and discussed:
* What is a dialogue?
* What is a (formal) argumentation-based dialogue?
* How can argumentation-based dialogues be applied to interactive intelligent systems?
2. **Formal Foundations of Argumentation Dialogues**
The second part of the tutorial provides an overview of the formal foundations of argumentation dialogues. It starts with a brief introduction of abstract argumentation, continues with structured argumentation, and concludes with a formal perspective on argumentation dialogues as the iterative *expansion* of an argumentation framework. The following topics will be covered:
* Abstract Argumentation: argumentation frameworks, extensions, semantics, and principles
* Structured Argumentation
* Argumentation Dialogues: iterative expansion of abstract and structured argumentation frameworks
3. **Applications**
The last part of the tutorial takes a detailed look at industry-scale knowledge-based systems to highlight limitations that can be addressed by argumentation-based dialogue systems. A hands-on engineering tutorial is provided using a [dialogue reasoner](https://github.com/Interactive-Intelligent-Systems/diarg) that is based on the well-known [Tweety project](http://tweetyproject.org/):
* Formal Dialogue Systems: Applications and Limitations
* Engineering Tutorial: Implementing Argumentation-based Dialogue Systems
All parts of the tutorial will be conducted interactively.
## Presenter Biographies
**Juan Carlos Nieves** is currently an Associate Professor at Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. Juan Carlos received a PhD degree from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - Barcelona Tech (UPC), Spain in 2008. His research interests are theoretical and applied aspects of non-monotonic reasoning and multi-agent systems. Juan Carlos has written several articles on theoretical and applied aspects of (multi-agent) dialogue systems, for example (most recently):
* Lindgren, Helena, et al. "Argumentation-based Health Information Systems: A Design Methodology". Intelligent Systems (2021).
* Kampik, Timotheus, Nieves, Juan Carlos. "Abstract Argumentation and the Rational Man". Journal of Logic and Computation (2021).
* Morveli-Espinoza, Mariela, Nieves, Juan Carlos, Tacla, Cesar Augusto. "Measuring the strength of threats, rewards, and appeals in persuasive negotiation dialogues". The Knowledge Engineering Review, 35 (2020): e36.
* Morveli-Espinoza, Mariela, et al. "An argumentation-based approach for identifying and dealing with incompatibilities among procedural goals." International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 105 (2019): 1-26.
* Yan, Chunli, Helena Lindgren, and Juan Carlos Nieves. "A dialogue-based approach for dealing with uncertain and conflicting information in medical diagnosis." Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 32.6 (2018): 861-885.
Juan Carlos has co-created and teaches several courses on artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning on undergraduate and graduate level, as well as a course on applied aspects of artificial intelligence that is aimed at industry practitioners. Since 2020, Juan Carlos is co-directing the Master's Programme on Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University. Also, Juan Carlos has organized a tutorial on *Argumentation-based Dialogue Systems for Autonomous Systems and Multiagent Systems* at AAMAS '17.
**Timotheus Kampik** is a 4th-year PhD Student (Swedish *Licentiate* completed) at Umeå University as part of the Swedish *WASP* research excellence initiative on autonomous systems, and also an innovation researcher in the product management team of [Signavio](https://www.signavio.com/), a fast-growing software startup that develops business process and business decision management products (and that has just been acquired by SAP). His research interests are the intersection of non-monotonic reasoning and decision theory, and the engineering of multi-agent systems. Timotheus lectures and tutors in several courses on artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning on undergraduate and graduate level, as well as in a course on applied aspects of artificial intelligence that is aimed at industry practitioners. Timotheus has co-developed several open source libraries and frameworks for dialogue systems and agent-oriented software engineering (and also co-authored theoretical works on formal argumentation):
* Kampik, Timotheus, and Dov Gabbay. "Towards DiArg: An Argumentation-based Dialogue Reasoning Engine." safa2020: The Third International Workshop on Systems and Algorithms for Formal Argumentation, Online, September 8, 2020.
* Lindgren, Helena, et al. "Argumentation-based Health Information Systems: A Design Methodology". Intelligent Systems (2021).
* Kampik, Timotheus, and Juan Carlos Nieves. "JS-son - A Lean, Extensible JavaScript Agent Programming Library." International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. Springer, Cham, 2019.
* Amaral, Cleber Jorge, Timotheus Kampik, and Stephen Cranefield. "A Framework for Collaborative and Interactive Agent-oriented Developer Operations." Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. 2020.
* Amaral, Cleber Jorge, Jomi Fred Hübner, and Timotheus Kampik. "Towards Jacamo-rest: A Resource-Oriented Abstraction for Managing Multi-Agent Systems." WESAAC 2020, 2020.
