Henry Prakken

I am a lecturer in the Intelligent Systems Group of the computer science department at Utrecht University, and professor of Law and IT at the Law Faculty of the University of Groningen. I have master degrees in law (1985) and philosophy (1988) from the University of Groningen. In 1993 I obtained my PhD degree (cum laude) at the Free University Amsterdam with a thesis titled Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument. My main research interests concern logical and dialogical aspects of argumentation, and the application of argumentation in multi-agent systems, normative systems and other areas.

LATEST:

Mark Snaith at ARG@Dundee developed an ASPIC+ demonstrator.
Two PhD positions at Utrecht and Groningen in Forensic-Science applications of argumentation, narrative and Bayesian networks. Application deadline January 15th, 2012.
Call for papers of COMMA 2012, Vienna (Austria), September 10-12, 2012. The submission deadline is March 26th, 2012.
Call for papers of DEON 2012 (11th Intl. Conf. on Deontic Logic in Computer Science). The submission deadline is March 5th, 2012.
Argumentation research has made it into the New York Times.
Some press about the recently finished making Sense of Evidence project:
- The Dutch press about Susan van den Braak's PhD thesis on Sensemaking Software for Crime Analysis.
- The Dutch press about Floris Bex's PhD thesis.
- Floris Bex's weblog entry for a Cornell law School weblog.
A new journal Argument and Computation.
Recent and forthcoming papers:
- My JURIX 2011 paper with Giovanni Sartor On modelling burdens and standards of proof in structured argumentation.
- My IJCAI 2011 papers with Bas van Gijzel and Sanjay Modgil.
- An overview paper on formal models of argumentation.
- My 2009 paper with Giovanni Sartor on A logical analysis of burdens of proof.
- My chapter On the nature of argument schemes in a Festschrift for Douglas Walton.
- An article An abstract framework for argumentation with structured arguments, published in Argument and Computation.
  - An application of this framework to legal reasoning (accepted by the Knowledge Engineering Review; typos in Figures 2, 4 and 6 corrected January 30, 2012).
- An article in Artificial Intelligence with Tom Gordon and Doug Walton on The Carneades model of argument and burden of proof.
- My article on Coherence and Flexibility in Dialogue Games for Argumentation, Journal of Logic and Computation 15 (2005): 1009-1040.