I guess one of the nice things about a couples-blog is that you have fewer dry spells with both writing. At least that’s the theory. I’m sure I’ll be a hobo-blogger myself sometimes, but for now I’ll tell you “up to what i’ve been” lately at work.

My thesis direction (it’s not a topic until I actually do the formal proposal process) has shifted in the past couple weeks. Before, I had vague designs on exploring self-modeling and emotion. I was having trouble coming up with something that was bounded, testable, and fit in with our project. What does fit in, though, is the design and production of an argumentation environment that actually understands and reasons about the arguments being constructed. It’s not something I’ve dreamed about, but sometimes one must take the opportunities that arise.

Let’s clarify that a bit more. Though yes, I am learning how to argue well (I’ve told Becky she doesn’t need to be too worried :)), the primary focus of this project is to assist in reasoning (a lot of the time via comparison), making connections, and finding examples. Computers can’t make claims and support their arguments. People can. The thing which my software will do that no one’s ever done before is this: When the person creates a claim “X is true of Y” and goes about diagramming the support they have for making that claim, they may use argument schemes like analogy or causation. “X is true of Z and Z is similar to Y.” My software will help the human judge how similar cases are, find other probably-similar cases to consider, and perform validity checking on the argument structure as well.

The field where people might actually do this regularly is intelligence analysis; indeed, the government is the funder of our research. (Why, the National Science Foundation, of course. Why would you ask that?) Analysts must document and cite evidence for their conclusions, and this is exactly something that they need (and two steps up from what they have). I’ll go into more detail about our whole project, the Situation Tracking Testbed, another time if anyone’s interested.

So it looks like I’ll be working on argumentation for the next two years. Maybe I’ll just call it ‘reasoning’ to those it won’t matter to. I’ll work on creating Data one day, but I guess it’d need to be able to argue. :)