Alejandro Javier Garcia

In enthymeme-based dialogues, involved participants create assumptions in order to decode arguments from the exchanged enthymemes. This work introduces the concept of assumptions operator, which formalizes the mechanism for generating these assumptions, and proposes a set of principles to guide the construction of these operators. Said principles are inspired by Grice’s Maxims of Conversation, as well as Govier’s ARG conditions for cogent arguments. Then, in order to analyze how the used operator influences the dialogue and how that dialogue differs from the one in which the original argument is sent, we propose a framework to compare both scenarios, the former being the enthymemic one and the latter the complete one. Finally, we formally show that if the used assumptions operator complies with a set of the aforementioned principles, then most arguments in the complete dialogue have their counterpart in the enthymemic one. Furthermore, we show that under certain conditions, the enthymemic dialogue preserves some semantic properties from the complete one, specifically: conflict-freeness, acceptability and admissibility.

In this article, we focus on multi-agent multi-criteria decision problems in dynamic environments where autonomous vehicles need to cooperate to make decisions. When a group of agents faces these problems, each agent may have a different preference about which criteria are more relevant. Hence, agents’ preference rules will be used to generate arguments that represent all the agents’ points of view. Our approach performs an argumentation-based analysis to entail the best alternatives and explains how it arrives at its conclusions. We provide various scenarios to show how our proposal behaves in different situations. We formally show some results about how our current proposal behaves in dynamic environments regarding the computation of the solution of the problem.

Decision support tools are key components of intelligent sociotechnical systems, and their successful implementation faces a variety of challenges, including the multiplicity of information sources, heterogeneous format, and constant changes. Handling such challenges requires the ability to analyze and process inconsistent and incomplete information with varying degrees of associated uncertainty. Moreover, some domains require the system’s outputs to be explainable and interpretable; an example of this is cyberthreat analysis (CTA) in cybersecurity domains. In this paper, we first present the P-DAQAP system, an extension of a recently developed query-answering platform based on defeasible logic programming (DeLP) that incorporates a probabilistic model and focuses on delivering these capabilities. After discussing the details of its design and implementation, and describing how it can be applied in a CTA use case, we report on the results of an empirical evaluation designed to explore the effectiveness and efficiency of a possible world sampling-based approximate query answering approach that addresses the intractability of exact computations.

The 3Cat-4 mission is a 1-unit CubeSat platform that serves as a technology demonstrator and educational platform for students at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Promoted by the UPC Nanosatellite and Payload Laboratory (UPC NanoSatLab), the most notable subsystems that innovate in the nanosatellite scenario are (1) the Flexible Microwave Payload - 1 (FMPL-1) [1], a cost-effective payload to execute Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R), and L-band microwave radiometry experiments using a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software-defined radio (SDR) and (2) the Nadir Antenna Deployment Subsystem (NADS) [2], an in-orbit deployable high-directivity antenna used by Earth Observation (EO) payloads. This paper presents the findings of the 3Cat-4 mission during Phase D, the qualification and production phase of the project. Since the publication of the first introductory work for this mission in 2019[3], several sections of the subsystems have been redesigned and upgraded to correct previous design flaws or to meet new requirements. In addition, this paper addresses the educational perspective of this mission, analyzing its performance and usefulness in the aforementioned subject.