Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric along with the PhD in Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor invite you to a talk by
Dr. Paul Bello
US Office of Naval Research
“Steps Toward Visual Reasoning: Grounding Causal Representation and Inference in Perception”
Abstract: When we think about argumentation, rhetoric, and informal reasoning, the image is usually of two people having what amounts to a purely verbal exchange. Many of these discussions involve who did what to whom, when, why, and to what effect. Points are exchanged back and forth about the particulars of the circumstances in hopes of changing hearts and minds or assigning blame. While not always true, sometimes the content in question is decidedly of a physical nature. Think about doing an after-action analysis of what happened during a poorly organized evacuation from a building during a fire drill, or a similar kind of analysis if you are a police officer investigating the scene of a traffic pileup. In both cases, you need to draw on your layperson's knowledge of physics to think through what was and what could have been in order to determine what happened and who the blame rests with. In any case, these activities involve visual reasoning in some form or another, whether making causal judgments that are roughly contemporaneous with the events in question, or whether engaging in post hoc analysis. In this talk, I will deliver a high-level synthesis of work being done in my lab on several independent but related aspects of causal reasoning. In particular I discuss progress that we've made in developing a computational cognitive architecture that is capable of making human-like causal judgments given video clips of simple physical interactions. Following this work, I discuss recent efforts at extending our results to video clips containing greater amounts of complexity, in which causal judgments are much more variegated. I wrap up with a discussion of near-term plans for being able to handle causation by omission, and using the sum total of what we have done to springboard toward a system capable of making moral judgments.
Friday, March 23, 2018
3:00 pm
Memorial Hall, Room 105
All are welcome