Elizabeth Black

I'm currently a postdoc in the COSSAC IRC in Cognitive Science & Systems Engineering at the University of Oxford, where I work on a project to provide  multidisciplinary decision support for breast cancer care. I'm on the editorial board of the Automated Experimentation journal and I'm a Senior Research Associate of the Oxford University Research Group on the Philosophy of Information.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from University College London on the topic of argumentation-based agent dialogues (supervised by Anthony Hunter and John Fox). I also hold an MSci (Hons) in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from University College London.

My primary research interests are in multi-agent systems and the use of argumentation theory as a mechanism for dealing with inconsistencies that might occur either internally within an agent's knowledge or between multiple agents.

My work to date has mostly focussed on different types of argumentation-based dialogues that allow multiple agents to manage various inconsistencies that may arrise between them. I'm interested from a formal standpoint in both the structural nature of such dialogues and the choices that agents must make when deciding to enter a dialogue, when navigating a legal dialogue structure and after the termination of a dialogue. I'm also intererested in how an agent may develop models of other agents, how these models affect an agent's dialogue behaviour and how an agent may update its model of another agent as a result of a dialogue. I believe it is important to formally investigate the properties of agent dialogues so we can well understand their behaviour.