My principal research goal is to build AI systems which will help us to save the world!
I believe AI has the potential to offer really useful solutions to some of our most pressing problems, such as understanding our environment and helping us to develop it sensitively and sustainably. Most of my research is on environmental and ecological applications of AI techniques, such as constructing computer tools for ecologists, modellers, foresters or land planners. My current research project is STEM : Sustainable Telematics for Environmental Management, an EC funded project for which I'm the coordinator.
Aside from applied work, my theoretical (PhD) work is on argumentation and disagreements. I have built a system, called FORA, to represent arguments involving many points of view. I've done this with the aims of helping people to make decisions when faced with conflicting opinions, and of supporting formalisation of knowledge which may be inconsistent. This research integrates ideas from work in distributed AI, argumentation, dialogue and paraconsistency.