Simon Wells

Biography

Research interests: Simon is a computer scientist with interests in Artificial Intelligence who works at the nexus of Argumentative Dialogue, Behaviour Change, and Interaction Design. His research is concerned with formal models of reasoning and communication that are based upon argumentation. He has developed theoretical and applied intelligent computational systems that support argumentation between heterogeneous groups of people and machines, and which have been deployed in pure science, educational, social and policy domains.

Career history: Simon began his career at the University of Dundee where he researched a thesis on inter-agent communication using argumentation whilst employed on the EPSRC-funded Information Exchange Project. After his doctoral research Simon stayed in the School of Computing at Dundee until 2011. During this time he lectured across the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum whilst helping establish the nascent Argumentation Research Group. In 2011, Simon joined the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) project and worked on joint research between OME and the Ninewells Hospital Health Informatics Centre. In 2012 Simon joined the School of Computing at the University of Aberdeen where he was on employed on a large EU-funded IP project called SUPERHUB. On SUPERHUB he researched the roles of persuasive technology and behaviour change mechanisms in sustainable transport systems. In 2014 Simon joined the school of computing at Edinburgh Napier as a lecturer.

Research Areas

Events

Date


25 results

Using argumentation within sustainable transport communication

Book
Wells, S. & Pangbourne, K. (2016)
Using argumentation within sustainable transport communication. In Argumentation and Reasoned Action Volume 1, 781-801. College Publications. ISBN 1848902115
In this paper we present the preliminary results of a survey of persuasive communication within the sustainable transport domain. This survey is underpinned by a reconstructi...

Large-scale Argument Visualization (LSAV)

Conference Proceeding
Khartabil, D., Wells, S., & Kennedy, J. (2016)
Large-scale Argument Visualization (LSAV). In Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis), Posters Track (2016)
Arguments are structures of premises and conclusions that underpin rational reasoning processes. Within complex knowledge domains, especially if they are contentious, argument...

Demo paper: AGADE - Scalability of ontology based agent simulations

Conference Proceeding
Farrenkopf, T., Guckert, M., Urquhart, N. B., & Wells, S. (2016)
Demo paper: AGADE - Scalability of ontology based agent simulations. In Advances in Practical Applications of Scalable Multi-agent Systems. The PAAMS Collection (256-259). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39324-7_25
Simulations of real world scenarios often require considerably large numbers of agents. With increasing level of detail and resolution in the underlying models machine limitat...

Automatically Detecting Fallacies in System Safety Arguments

Presentation / Conference
Wells, S., Yuan, T., Manandhar, S., & Kelly, T. (2015, October)
Automatically Detecting Fallacies in System Safety Arguments. Paper presented at 15th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument(CMNA15
Safety cases play a significant role in the development of safety-critical systems. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments, that are designated to demonstrat...

Introducing ALIAS

Presentation / Conference
Wells, S. & LaGreca, R. (2015, October)
Introducing ALIAS. Paper presented at 15th International Workshop on Computation Models of Natural Argument, Bertinoro, Italy
ALIAS is a Python library for constructing, manipulating, storing, visualising, and converting argumentation structues. It is available with full source code under a copyleft ...

Combinatorial Dialogue Games in Strategic Argumentation

Presentation / Conference
Wells, S. (2015, June)
Combinatorial Dialogue Games in Strategic Argumentation. Paper presented at 1st European Conference on Argumentation: Argumentation and Reasoned Action (ECA15
This paper introduces combinatorial dialogue, a formal approach to strategising within argumentative dialogue games where the moves played within a dialogue game are interpret...

Using Argumentation Within Sustainable Transport Communication

Presentation / Conference
Wells, S. & Pangbourne, K. (2015, June)
Using Argumentation Within Sustainable Transport Communication. Paper presented at 1st European Conference on Argumentation: Argumentation and Reasoned Action (ECA15), Lisbon, Portugal
See attached file.

Towards using segmentation-based techniques to personalize mobility behaviour Interventions

Journal Article
Forbes, P., Gabrielli, S., Maimone, R., Masthoff, J., Wells, S., & Jylha, A. (2014)
Towards using segmentation-based techniques to personalize mobility behaviour Interventions. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Ambient Systems, 14(4), https://doi.org/10.4108/amsys.1.4.e4
This paper describes our initial work towards a segmentation-based approach to personalized digital behavior change interventions in the domain of sustainable, multi-modal urb...

Supporting argumentation schemes in argumentative dialogue games.

Journal Article
Wells, S. (2014)
Supporting argumentation schemes in argumentative dialogue games. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 36, 171-191. https://doi.org/10.2478/slgr-2014-0009
This paper reports preliminary work into the exploitation of argu- mentation schemes within dialogue games. We identify a property of dialogue games that we call “scheme aware...

Design challenges in motivating change for sustainable urban mobility.

Journal Article
Gabrielli, S., Forbes, P., Jylha, A., Wells, S., Sirén, M., Hemminki, S., …Jacucci, G. (2014)
Design challenges in motivating change for sustainable urban mobility. Computers in human behavior, 41, 416-423. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.026
In recent years, the design and deployment of persuasive interventions for inducing sustainable urban mobility behaviors has become a very active research field, leveraging on...

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