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		   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                                       
		      Computer Science Department
                                       
			  C O L L O Q U I U M
                                       
		       Wednesday March 15, 1995
                                       
				 3:00pm
		       (Coffee served at 2:30pm)
                                       
			 Seminar Room / MCS 135
                                       

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	ARGUMENTATION AND INTELLIGENT ANALYTIC SKILLS TRAINING

			   Brant A. Cheikes
			The MITRE Corporation
		    Artificial Intelligence Center
			Bedford, Massachusetts
			brant@linus.mitre.org

  "Explanatory analysis" is an information processing task that involves
  researching and formulating explanations of past or predicted events.
  Skill in conducting explanatory analysis is central to problem solving
  in a wide variety of domains, and demands an ability to process and make
  decisions on the basis of knowledge that is incomplete, inconclusive,
  inconsistent and unreliable.  At the MITRE Corporation's Artificial
  Intelligence Center, we have been developing PROPA, an intelligent
  tutoring system intended to teach basic explanatory analysis skills in
  the domain of satellite activity.  Key to our approach is the use of
  argumentation as the conceptual model for both problem solving and
  instruction.

  In this talk, I will characterize the particular analytic skills
  training problem we are trying to address and motivate our
  argumentation-based approach.  I will describe PROPA's design, focusing
  on its "argument palette", a graphical tool on which students build
  representations of arguments supporting alternative hypotheses.  We will
  examine the techniques and supporting representations that PROPA uses to
  provide hints in response to student requests, evaluate their strengths
  and weaknesses, and discuss on-going and planned extensions to the
  system.

Host: Prof. Wayne Snyder
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For colloquium info, including directions, see http://cs-www.bu.edu/colloquium
   For more information contact Prof. Mark Crovella <crovella@bu.edu>
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