Broadly speaking, I am interested in persuasiveness, and what it takes to achieve effective (and affective) communication. I approach this problem from two points of view:

1. •high level discourse modelling and rhetoric: I am interested in pragmatics issues (such as modelling the speaker's goals and strategies to generate persuasive discourse), and I gather insights from theories from classical argumentation in philosophy. It’s somewhat a shame that these (hard!) problems seem to have disappeared from mainstream computational linguistics events, and that there has been very little cross-fertilisation with the philosophy of argument, but there you go.
   

1. •cognitive modelling: I am interested in studying how to model and reason with extra-rational characteristics, besides knowledge and beliefs, such as opinions, values, emotions. I am especially concerned with how values/emotions enter into argumentation, and how these contribute to dynamics like cognitive dissonance or motivated belief revision. 
   

One of my major application areas for this research is  health informatics, where I have look at how to provide personalised and persuasive information or advice on healthier lifestyles.

If I must position myself somewhere, I am part of an increasingly big crowd of folks working on Argument and Computation. A good sense of what this is all about can be obtained here, or here.

My PhD thesis is titled “Characterising Rhetorical Argumentation”, awarded by the Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, under the superb supervision of Alison Cawsey. My examiners were Jean Carletta and Keith Brown, to whom both I’m indebted for an enjoyable and gratifying viva, and for being kind enough to let me pass with the proverbial “no corrections!”.