Overview of Trevor Bench-Capon's research

across a number of topics in computer science. In this introduction we give a brief overview of his main contributions, with no hope to be complete. Looking at Trevor Bench-Capon’s published work, one main development can be recognised: from knowledge representation to argumentation. In his earlier work, the main focus was on principled knowledge representation (often in logic programming) while the reasoning was secondary in that it followed the meaning of the representations. This focus is apparent from the title of a textbook on AI he wrote in 1990, titled Knowledge Representation: An Approach to Articial Intelligence [6]. In his later work instead the focus was on forms of reasoning that go beyond the meaning of the representations. It is here that the notion of argumentation is central. In Bench-Capon’s published work this shift becomes apparent roughly towards 2000. However, as Bench-Capon himself describes in [11], he has always had an interest in argument (meant to be persuasive) as opposed to proof (meant to be valid). This interest goes back to his years as a philosophy student in Oxford and as a trainee policy maker in the UK civil service. Some traces of this early part of his career can be found in his earlier publications, but that work is mainly on knowledge-based systems, with special emphasis on legal applications. Besides knowledge representation, this earlier work also concerned principled engineering methods for knowledge-based systems, with special emphasis on ontologies, which were a computing concept in their infancy at the time, and on validation and maintenance. This strand of work was very inuential on more practically-oriented work in knowledge-based systems. His later work on argumentation is more foundational in nature since it laid the groundwork for a perspective on practical reasoning that is rooted in ideas from philosophy. Above all, Bench-Capon has put the persuasiveness of arguments and the importance in this respect of societal values on the research agenda of articial intelligence. As can be seen from inspecting his substantial personal bibliography, BenchCapon has a vast collection of collaborators and rarely worked alone. His coauthors span various disciplines, both within and outside of computer science, and as such his collaborative work covers a rich variety of topics. Below we