Complex decisions involve many aspects that need to be considered, which complicates determining what decision has the most preferred outcome. Artificial agents may be required to justify and discuss their decisions to others. Designers must communicate their wishes to artificial agents. Research in argumentation theory has examined how agents can argue about what decision is best using goals a...

Political scientists often theorize that an explanatory variable should have “no effect” and support this claim by demonstrating that its coefficient’s estimate is not statistically significant. This empirical argument is quite weak, but I introduce applied researchers to simple, powerful tools that can strengthen their arguments for this hypothesis. With several supporting examples, I illustra...

In this paper we present the EcoBioCap project and the modelling needs of this project in terms of argumentation based preference aggregation. The aim of the paper is to well describe the problem encountered in this context and to propose a preference logic in line with the expressivity needed by the application. We then show how to embed this logic within the ASPIC+ system. Finally, we show ho...

Decision making under uncertainty is central to reasoning by practical intelligent systems, and attracts great controversy. The most widely accepted approach is to represent uncertainty in terms of prior and conditional probabilities of events and the utilities of consequences of actions, and to apply standard decision theory to calculate degrees of belief and expected utilities of actions. Unf...