Francesca Toni

Francesca Toni Professor at Imperial College London, UK

Title: Explaining rational decision making by arguing

Abstract: Many existing approaches to decision-making using argumentation are predominantly descriptive, in that they are inspired by what people actually do and aim at justifying decisions by equipping them with a transparent explanation. I will overview argumentative approaches to decision-making regulated by decision criteria sanctioning the rationality of decisions, while at the same time transparently explaining decisions. Moreover, I will describe an approach to  multi-agent decision making where explanation helps  agents in need to communicate with other agents to make socially optimal decisions while, at the same time, keeping private some  information that they do not want to share.

References:

Lucas Carstens, Xiuyi Fan, Yang Gao, Francesca Toni: An Overview of Argumentation Frameworks for Decision Support. GKR 2015: 32-49

Marco Aurisicchio, Pietro Baroni, Dario Pellegrini, Francesca Toni: Comparing and Integrating Argumentation-Based with Matrix-Based Decision Support in Arg&Dec. TAFA 2015: 1-20

Xiuyi Fan, Robert Craven, Ramsay Singer, Francesca Toni, Matthew Williams: Assumption-Based Argumentation for Decision-Making with Preferences: A Medical Case Study. CLIMA 2013: 374-390

Yang Gao, Francesca Toni, Hao Wang, Fanjiang Xu: Argumentation-Based Multi-Agent Decision Making with Privacy Preserved. AAMAS 2016: 1153-1161

Biography: Francesca Toni is Professor in Computational Logic in the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK, and the founder 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.