PhD defence: Arguing with incomplete information - Formalisms, algorithms and applications in law enforcement

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PLEASE NOTE: The candidate gives a layman's talk prior to the defense of the dissertation; therefore, the livestream will start fifteen minutes earlier.

Every year, the Dutch police receives tens of thousands of reports on online trade fraud. Two subtasks within the process of handling these reports are the intake with the citizen and the investigation of potentially mala fide web shops. A significant part of the tasks consists of routine work, but some reports and web shops require detailed manual investigation. Neither humans nor automatic procedures are able to quickly perform these tasks on their own, but maybe they can complement each other. Can we develop AI systems that support humans in decision-making? In law enforcement, it is essential that AI systems are transparent. Therefore, I focus on AI techniques that, just like humans, are able to reason with rules (and exceptions) or with earlier (precedent) cases. These types of reasoning can be modelled using formalisms from the fields of computational argumentation and AI & Law. However, in most research in these areas it is assumed that all information that is required for making a decision is available, which is not the case for our use cases. In my dissertation research, I therefore extend these formalisms so that they can express the possibility that additional, yet uncertain, information can change some conclusion and if so, which information is still relevant to investigate. Although this is, mathematically speaking, a difficult task, I developed fast algorithms that discover which questions are still relevant to ask to a user or expert. These algorithms are applied for fraud intake and web shop classification at the Dutch police.

Start date and time
End date and time
Location
Hybride: online (livestream link) and for invited guests in the Utrecht University Hall, Domplein 29
PhD candidate
D. Odekerken
Dissertation
Arguing with incomplete information - Formalisms, algorithms and applications in law enforcement
PhD supervisor(s)
prof. dr. F.J. Bex
prof. dr. mr. H. Prakken
Co-supervisor(s)
dr. A. Borg
More information
Full text via Utrecht University Repository