Paper: SUPERHUB: Integrating behaviour change theories into a sustainable urban-mobility platform

• Abstract: The SUPERHUB project (SUstainable and PERsuasive Human Users moBility in future cities) promotes the creation of a new urban mobility services ecosystem to facilitate the take-up of environmentally sustainable behaviours. It will design and test an open platform able to combine in real time all mobility offers from the relevant stakeholders together with a set of enabling mobility services able to address users’ mobility needs and to foster behavioural change. This paper explores how SUPERHUB plans to integrate behaviour change theories.
• Paper Link: Will be posted after the workshop
• Presentation Link: Will be posted after the presentation at the workshop
• Citation: P. J. Forbes, S. Wells, J. Masthoff, "SUPERHUB: Integrating behaviour change theories into a sustainable urban-mobility platform", (2012), in Proceedings of Using Technology to Facilitate Behaviour Change and Support Healthy, Sustainable Living @ HCI 2012

Visualising Timelines of Research in Argumentation Theory

One way to get an overview of research is to visualise the timeline of activities in that area. This is what I attempted to do with my timeline of dialectical/dialogue game research which will be available in an upcoming publication (currently in press, more information when I have it).

However, what I didn't like was that the journal publication is very static, and that the research is ongoing. What I wanted was something that was more dynamic and which could be easily updated with references to either new research that is performed or to newly discovered obscure publications that contribute to the story. To this end I have started The Chronos Project which uses some exciting new technologies to dynamically generate the timeline in your browser.

The aim was to produce a self-contained set of files which can be easily incorporated into any website. A Chronos distribution is simply a folder containing an html file, some javascript libraries, and some CSS to make things look nice. As well as the online visualisation, you can retrieve the pdf rendering of the timeline either from figshare or from the Chronos Git Repo.

Acknowledgements:

Chronos uses the CanViz project to render xdot files directly onto an HTML 5 canvas within your browser.

Publication: SUPERHUB Deliverable D1.1 - Scenarios

Abstract: The SUPERHUB project aims at realizing a new services mobility framework supporting an integrated and eco-efficient use of multi-modal mobility systems in an urban setting. SUPERHUB provides a user-centric, integrated approach to multi-modal smart metropolitan mobility systems by means of an open platform able to combine in real time various mobility offers and provide a set of mobility services able to address user needs, promote user participation and foster environmentally friendly and energy–efficient behavioural changes.
The deliverable D1.1, "Scenarios" provide a first version of the SUPERHUB usage scenarios and hence the functionality that SUPERHUB shall provide, informed by user research. This encompasses (i) a first identification of the stakeholders and end-users of SUPERHUB, (ii) a first identification of the most relevant usage scenarios, (iii) a first establishment of user research methodology for SUPERHUB, and (iv) the first user research into what problems citizens and other stakeholders currently experience, their opinions on the scenarios, and their expectations of SUPERHUB.
From an operational stand-point, Deliverable D1.1 marks a milestone in the project work plan, in that it will effectively kick-off the user centred design activities of WP6 and the user trial methodology activities of WP8, and provides enough insight into the envisaged SUPERHUB functionality (further elaborated in the initial requirements specification which is not part of this deliverable and will result in deliverable D1.2) to allow the technical WPs to start designing their sub systems. The scenarios elucidated in this deliverable will be refined in Deliverable D1.4 ("Final scenarios, requirements specification, KPIs and guidelines for validation ", due at M24)

Paper Link: Will be posted to & made available from the SUPERHUB EU Project website very soon.

Citation: Masthoff et al., "SUPERHUB Deliverable D1.1 - Scenarios", (2012).

Presentation @ the Inaugural Scottish Argumentation Day

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.

aberdeen.pdf Download this file

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.

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.

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

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:

Download now or preview on posterous

dundee2011.pdf (5836 KB)