Trevor Bench-Capon (born 1953) is a British computer scientist and an Honorary Visiting Professor of computer science at the University of Liverpool, where he taught from 1987 until his retirement in 2012. He is the author of work on computer science and ontology and is one of the editors in chief of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal.
After reading Philosophy and Economics at St John's College, Oxford, Bench-Capon took the research degree of D. Phil at Oxford. He then worked in the policy and computer branches of the British Government's Department of Health and Social Security, after which he researched logic programming as applied to legislation at Imperial College London. Since 1987 he has been an academic in the Computer Science department of the University of Liverpool, first as lecturer, then from 1992 senior lecturer, from 1999 Reader, and from 2004 as Professor of Computer Science. [1] With Kevin D. Ashley and Giovanni Sartor he is an editor in chief of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal. [2]
Bench-Capon's interests are all aspects of advanced informatics systems, with a specialism in the application of such systems to law. [1] He has been called "one of the world's recognised experts on AI and the law". [3]
In 1975 Bench-Capon was a member of the St John's College University Challenge team, and in 1978 he married Priscilla Bradley, who had represented St Anne's in the competition earlier that year. Their sons James and Michael appeared in the University Challenge teams of Clare College, Cambridge, and Oriel College, Oxford, in 2002 and 2003 respectively. [4]
Cyc is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations.
Knowledge representation and reasoning is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can utilize to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets.
Douglas Bruce Lenat is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning program, AM. He has worked on machine learning, knowledge representation, "cognitive economy", blackboard systems, and what he dubbed in 1984 "ontological engineering". He has also worked in military simulations, and numerous projects for US government, military, intelligence, and scientific organizations. In 1980, he published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism. He authored a series of articles in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence exploring the nature of heuristic rules.
John Florian Sowa is an American computer scientist, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer design, and the inventor of conceptual graphs.
In philosophy, practical reason is the use of reason to decide how to act. It contrasts with theoretical reason, often called speculative reason, the use of reason to decide what to follow. For example, agents use practical reason to decide whether to build a telescope, but theoretical reason to decide which of two theories of light and optics is the best.
Logic in computer science covers the overlap between the field of logic and that of computer science. The topic can essentially be divided into three main areas:
Robert Anthony Kowalski is a logician and computer scientist, whose research is concerned with developing both human-oriented models of computing and computational models of human thinking. He has spent most of his career in the United Kingdom.
Legal informatics is an area within information science.
Patrick John Hayes FAAAI is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. As of March 2006, he is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida.
Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she holds an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Research Constellation. She is working in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust.
Dov M. Gabbay is an Israeli logician. He is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Group of Logic, Language and Computation, Department of Computer Science, King's College London.
Norms can be considered from different perspectives in artificial intelligence to create computers and computer software that are capable of intelligent behaviour.
A design rationale is an explicit documentation of the reasons behind decisions made when designing a system or artifact. As initially developed by W.R. Kunz and Horst Rittel, design rationale seeks to provide argumentation-based structure to the political, collaborative process of addressing wicked problems.
Dr. Robert L. Simpson Jr. is a computer scientist whose primary research interest is applied artificial intelligence. He served as Chief Scientist at Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc. (ASI) working with Dr. Norman D. Geddes, CEO. Dr. Simpson was responsible for the creation of the ASI core technology PreAct. ASI has since changed its name to Veloxiti Inc.
HYPO is a computer program that models reasoning with cases and hypotheticals in the legal domain. It is the first of its kind and the most sophisticated of the case-based legal reasoners, which was designed by Ashley for his Ph.D dissertation in 1987 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the supervision of Rissland. HYPO's design represents a hybrid generalization/comparative evaluation method appropriate for a domain with a weak analytical theory and applies to tasks that rarely involve just one right answer. The domain covers US trade secret law, and is substantially a "common law" domain. Since the Anglo-American law is operated under the doctrine of precedent, the definitive way of interpreting problems is of necessity and case-based. Thus, HYPO did not involve the analysis of a Statute, as required by the PROLOG program. Rissland and Ashley (1987) envisioned HYPO as employing the key tasks performed by lawyers when analyzing case law for precedence to generate arguments for the prosecution or the defence.
A legal expert system is a domain-specific expert system that uses artificial intelligence to emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert in the field of law. Legal expert systems employ a rule base or knowledge base and an inference engine to accumulate, reference and produce expert knowledge on specific subjects within the legal domain.
Computational law is a branch of legal informatics concerned with the mechanization of legal reasoning. It emphasizes explicit behavioural constraints and eschews implicit rules of conduct. Importantly, there is a commitment to a level of rigor in specifying laws that is sufficient to support entirely mechanical processing.
Knowledge acquisition is the process used to define the rules and ontologies required for a knowledge-based system. The phrase was first used in conjunction with expert systems to describe the initial tasks associated with developing an expert system, namely finding and interviewing domain experts and capturing their knowledge via rules, objects, and frame-based ontologies.
Danièle Bourcier is a French lawyer and essayist, who has contributed to the emergence of a new discipline in France: Law, Computing and linguistics.
Argument technology is a sub-field of artificial intelligence that focuses on applying computational techniques to the creation, identification, analysis, navigation, evaluation and visualisation of arguments and debates. In the 1980s and 1990s, philosophical theories of arguments were leveraged to handle key computational challenges, such as modeling non-monotonic and defeasible reasoning and designing robust coordination protocols for multi-agent systems. At the same time, mechanisms for computing semantics of Argumentation frameworks were introduced as a way of providing a calculus of opposition for computing what it is reasonable to believe in the context of conflicting arguments.
