Saturday, February 17, 2007

A New Iteration of the 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference?

Tim van Gelder wrote in one of his blogs:
This is day 1 [Jan. 29, Melbourne time, but Jan. 28, New York City time] of the Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings conference in New York. Probably never before have so many argument mapping aficionadoes been gathered at one place before. It is only a small conference - maybe 75 people total - but the concentration of interest is remarkable. I’d only met two of these people before, and then only briefly, but “knew” dozens of them in varying degrees by internet association or being otherwise acquainted with their work. In addition to the academics there are a number of lawyers and others coming from a more commercial direction, and their presence/interest is an indication of how structured argumentation, argument visualisation, etc., are starting to get traction outside of narrow academic niches. There’s a good chance that in 10-20 years it will turn out that this conference was a pivotal moment in the field of argument mapping - a bit like the 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence workshop.
For another image of some people (Chris Reed & Tim van Gelder) at the conference see Pierre Pilon's posts for January 28, 2007.