[Colloq] PhD Seminar Tuesday, March 5, 4pm 149CN

[Rachel Bates]

Tuesday March 5, 2002
4:00-5:00 149 Cullinane Hall
Talk will be followed by tea at 5pm.

Example- and Argument-based Models of Judgmental Decision Making in Hard
Cases

Prof. Carole Hafner

Abstract

Judgmental decisions occur in domains (called "theory-poor" domains) that
lack an adequate set of rules for making decisions algorithmically, such as
law, business, medicine and engineering design. Hard cases in these domains
occur when there are good reasons for deciding a question Pro or Con. In
this talk, I describe computational and logical models of decision-making in
hard cases, based on two approaches:

a. finding similar prior situations and generalizing their results to the
current situation ("case-based reasoning")

b. constructing the best arguments pro and con, and evaluating their
relative strength.

Using examples from the legal domain, I analyze two difficult issues in
making these techniques useful: the problem of teleology, and the problem of
temporal context.