Francesca Toni

My role within Computing:

Professor in Computational Logic, Deputy Head of Department and Leader of the CLArg (Computational Logic and Argumentation) Group.

About me:

I come from a small coastal town in Tuscany (alas famous for steel manufacturing, rather than renaissance art) and studied  Computer Science at the nearby University of Pisa, a pioneer in Computing within Italy. I had intended to study Mathematics until the last year of high school, but then switched to Computer Science because of the intriguing prospects of AI, then, like today, attracting huge attention. I decided on a career in academia early on, because of the freedom it offers on researching all sorts of ideas and the opportunities for world-wide collaborations. After a PhD at Imperial and a brief internship in industry in Japan and a postdoc in Greece, I became a lecturer in the Department of Computing and have been here since, with brief visiting positions at universities in France and Italy.

Area(s) of research:

Since my undergraduate days I have been doing research in AI, with a focus on Computational Logic within Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: I started with Abduction (the form or reasoning that makes us hypothesise in order to explain) and then moved to Argumentation (the form of reasoning that makes us unearth and resolve conflicts). I am currently working on methods for explaining the outputs of other AI methods (for reasoning or learning) by developing argumentative abstractions of these methods from which discoursive explanations can be drawn to engage humans and make them trust the methods' outputs.

What I love about Computing:

Computing is all about problem solving, and I love finding neat solutions to problems! 

What inspires me:

Working at my allotment! Digging, weeding and growing vegetables frees my mind from clutter and brings out my best ideas.

Something people might not know about me is:

I used to be a committed basketball player in my hometown team, until I stopped growing.