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The Web is transforming rapidly from a Web of information to a Web of Opinions, where people upload their viewpoints, ratings and comments on any conceivable topic. Unfortunately, this plethora of opinions and the corresponding arguments are effectively lost; the arguments are not uploaded as machine-processable data, they are not interlinked, and it is extremely difficult for Web users to find arguments related to a particular subject, let alone to evaluate them. DebateLab aims to conduct basic and applied research towards developing the theoretical framework for representing, mining and reasoning with online arguments. Exploiting progress in the fields of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Semantic Web, Natural Language Processsing, Information Retrieval and Machine Learning, this project aims to pave the way for a new Web paradigm, a modern agora, where the different types of arguments and human deliberation can be amenable to machine-interpretable representation and algorithmic processing. While the basic research will progress in a domain independent manner, the applied research will focus on the domain of e-Journalism, in order to produce exploitable outcome of both theoretical and practical value. DebateLab will be conducted at FORTH-ICS in collaboration with SKEL-NCSR “Demokritos”, by a balanced consortium comprising senior, principal and postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and a software engineer.
[Project website, Project information]
The implementation of robots endowed with cognitive and social skills is getting a lot of attention in Social Robotics research. From the AI research standpoint, the symbiosis of humans with robotic agents in less controlled environments foregrounds a variety of research challenges, including understanding how to operate objects not previously known, communicating with humans with socially acceptable means of interaction, exhibiting predictable and common sense behavior, as well as learning the dynamics of open, less controlled domains. SoCoLA agents will rely on their socio-cognitive skills, in order to formally describe potentially unknown domestic objects, such as the set of context-dependent actions that can be performed on them, the purpose of use of these objects in a home setting, and whether they are recommended for the person the agent is collaborating with.
