Generative AI and the Future of Research Speaker Series: Francesca Toni

Francesca Toni is Professor in Computational Logic and Royal Academy of Engineering/JP Morgan Research Chair on Argumentation-based Interactive Explainable AI (XAI) at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK, as well as the founder and leader of the CLArg (Computational Logic and Argumentation) research group and of the Faculty of Engineering XAI Research Centre. She holds an ERC Advanced grant on Argumentation-based Deep Interactive eXplanations (ADIX).  Her research interests lie within the broad area of  Explainable AI, at the intersection of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Machine Learning, Computational Argumentation, Argument Mining, and Multi-Agent Systems.  She is EurAI fellow, IJCAI Trustee, in the Board of Directors for KR Inc., member of the editorial board for the Argument and Computation journal,  Editorial Advisor for Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, and associate editor for  the AI journal, as well as the general chair for IJCAI2026.

Abstract:
AI has become pervasive in recent years, and the need for explainability is widely agreed upon as crucial towards safe and trustworthy deployment of AI systems, especially given the plethora of opportunities for misinformation, hallucinations and malicious behaviour in data-driven AI. In this talk I will overview approaches based on computational argumentation for explaining veracity-checking in a number of incarnations, including  for fact checking, for detecting scientific fraud, and for claim verification. I will advocate computational argumentation as  ideally suited to support explainable veracity  checking that can (1) interact to progressively explain outputs and/or reasoning as well as assess grounds for contestation provided by humans and/or other machines, and (2) revise decision-making processes to redress any issues successfully raised during contestation.

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Spring with a new theme of “Generative A and the Future of Research.” Our speakers will share their research on the opportunities and risks associated with the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI usage in scholarship.

We meet most Wednesdays, 9am-10am Central time, in Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend. More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series website. For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list. Our Spring series is led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.