Elizabeth Black

I'm currently a Marie Curie Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Group at the University of Utrecht. 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.

Important aspects of everyday life (e.g. healthcare, commerce and leisure) increasingly rely on networks of distributed but cooperating computer systems. Given the unpredictable and uncertain nature of the domains they support, these systems must be highly adaptable and flexible; it is not possible to write precise procedural programs that tell such systems what to do in all possible situations, rather these systems (called agents) must decide for themselves how to behave. For agent technology to achieve its full potential, multifaceted interactions are necessary so that agents can, for example, persuade one another to change their representation of the world, or negotiate the use of some resources.

My current project focusses on a formal framework with which agents with conflicting information, goals and assumptions can collectively agree to some course of action by exchanging arguments in what is known as a deliberation dialogue (e.g. when one agent provides sound reasons for another to grant access to private information). I'm particularly interested in the different strategies that an agent may use to guide its dialogue behaviour in order to attempt to influence the outcome of the dialogue in its favour.

Prior to coming to Utrecht, I was a postdoc in the COSSAC IRC in Cognitive Science & Systems Engineering at the University of Oxford, where I worked 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 inquiry 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 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.