Imperial College London
For more information, visit the event page on the Imperial College London website: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/eventssummary/event_8-12-2015-13-34-9
Debates, dilemmas and conflicts are key to human reasoning. They help us make sense of everyday life when decisions need to be taken with inconsistent or incomplete information. This is why we expect our doctors to weigh up different courses of treatment, and why we check various online opinions before we buy anything from books to cars.
If we are ever to value the advice of machines we need to empower them to argue. This requires in particular to give them a way to reason with general rules that admit exceptions so that they know how to reconcile conflicts in general statements such as ‘bird fly’ (except when they don’t) or it is safer to walk rather than run during a fire alarm (except when it isn’t).
Francesca Toni is working on models of logic-based argumentation to underpin reasoning in intelligent machines. In her inaugural lecture she will explore challenges of arguing logically and the impact getting it right could have in medical decision making, legal judgements, design engineering and social networks.
Interact on social media via the hashtag #machineadvice
Biography
Francesca Toni is Professor in Computational Logic in the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK, where she is the funder and leader of the CLArg(Computational Logic and Argumentation) research group. Her research interests lie within the broad area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular include Argumentation, Logic-Based Multi-Agent Systems,Logic Programming for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Non-monotonic and Default Reasoning.
She graduated, summa cum laude, in Computing, at the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1990, and received her PhD in Computing in 1995, from Imperial College London. She has coordinated two EU projects, received funding from EPSRC and the EU, and awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from The Royal Academy of Engineering and the Leverhulme Trust.
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