Faculty Spotlight Dr. Bart Verheij:Arguments for Understanding our Complex World

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently in the center of attention, by high-profile applications in autonomous driving, big data analytics, and expert-level game play. These appealing examples of AI inspire dreams about the coming age of humanoid robots, and simultaneously lead to concerns about autonomous warfare, the demise of privacy, and human-robot competition in the labour market.

In this Spotlight, Verheij contends that realizing these dreams and countering these concerns require the same innovation in AI: the development of argumentation technology. Argumentation is a successful human activity: whether in science, in politics or in everyday life, our deepest insights have required extensive debates about different hypothetical options. In recent years, a lively community of AI researchers has started the development of argumentation technology....poster with more information.