Dr. Ephraim Nissan

Dr. Ephraim Nissan Visiting scholar
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College, University of London,
25-27 St. James, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, England, U.K.

A scholar with nearly 350 publications of all kinds, of which nearly 130 are journal articles. He has been a guest editor for journals about 20 times since the late 1990s, and has been founding joint editor or associate editor of four scholarly journals since the late 1980s, of which two at present.
He has been engaged in artificial intelligence research within computer science (e.g., innovative tools for engineering resulted), but he also has quite a substantial record in the humanities, and in the latter, he has a honorary fellowship at the University of Manchester. His employment record has encompassed departments in either computer science, or the humanities.
Click here to access a full publication list,
Click here to access a compact list of select publications from cultural studies.
Click here for a humanities-oriented index by area.
Click here to access an annotated list of a broad selection of publications, these being from the humanities or law (but excluding computer science papers, unless they are interdisciplinary and relevant to either the humanities, or law).
In computer science, his most innovative contributions include:

Modelling the reasoning about legal evidence, a field within AI & Law that he has bootstrapped into existence, in both an authorial and organisational and editorial capacity, and on which he has authored a book in two volumes, Legal Evidence, Police Investigation, Case Argumentation, and Computer Tools (front cover here). Click here to access the publisher's webpage for this book. Click here to access a detailed table of contents of both volumes.
His earliest project in this domain, in the late 1980s, was ALIBI, which like Thaggard's ECHO, was seminal in the domain.
Episodic formulae for representing narratives of various kinds. Applications thus far have included public policy, embodied agents, historical narratives, mistaken or misappropriated identity, group identity, social attitudes and prejudice, law or misconduct, scientific controversies, folklore of popular culture, play plots, and otherwise the belles letters.
Generation of narrative explanation, either realistic (ALIBI), or humorous (the ongoing GALLURA project).
Humour studies (in which he is editor of two journals) are cross-disciplinary, and in particular, computational modelling of humour is an area within artificial intelligence. Click here or here for Nissan's activities in the domain.
He is also editor-in-chief of a book series published by Benjamins in Amsterdam, Topics in Humor Research. As to the journals, click here and here.

In 1986-2001, Nissan made a significant and sustained contribution (see publications) to an economically important domain in engineering: in-core fuel management (fuel reload design). Both the ruleset-based version, and later on, the evolutionary computing version of the automated refueller were for a while the most most efficient of their kind. The ruleset-based refueller was the first working software of its kind. Nissan was also guest-editor on AI for power generation.
Further innovative (but older) projects in computer science are enumerated later.

In his research in the humanities, Nissan has adopted narrative-oriented, anthropological, philological, literary, or linguistic approaches (and from humanities computing, too). His research in the humanities appears in journals that include for example Semiotica, American Journal of Semiotics, Quaderni di Semantica, Pragmatics & Cognition, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Annali dell'Istituto Orientale di Napoli (AION), Aula Orientalis, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Fabula, Ludica, and the European Review of History.

Journal special issues with him as guest-editor include ones in the journals Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 2008; Applied Artificial Intelligence, 2004 and 2009; Artificial Intelligence and Law, 2001; Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), 1999; Computational Intelligence, 2009; Computers and Artificial Intelligence,1998; Computing and Informatics, 2001; Cybernetics and Systems, 2003 (two double issues), and 2008; Information and Communications Technology Law, 1998, 2001; International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, 2007; Journal of Educational Computing Research, 1997; Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, 2007; Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 2008. For New Review of Applied Expert Systems, he edited thematic sections in 1998 and 1999.

More projects in computer science:

Already in the mid-1980s, Nissan advocated deeply nested database relations (whereas others who researched nested relations wanted them only shallowly nested). He described them in metaschemata in his CuProS specification language (Cupros stands for Customization Production System). He directed his students in the implementation of versions of CuProS-based query processors, the most sophisticated being implemented in 1989 in Prolog by J. Ell-Sana (who grew to become a scholar, too). Later on, independently, from the mid-1990s, deeply nested relations described by metaschemata became fashionable, with the rise of XML.
In computational linguistics, in the 1980s Nissan developed ONOMATURGE, a word-formation expert system for nonconcatenative lexical derivation and compounding, which moreover evaluated and ranked the expected psycho-linguistic transparency of candidate neologisms it formed out of an input definition. The ranking was calculated, in the face of the polysemy of both the lexical morpheme and derivational morpheme resorted to in forming the coinage. Terms already in the lexicon of the given natural language, as well as lexical roots, and lexical derivation patterns (or possibly affixes) had metadata about them (e.g., semantics, or some metrics of usage) described in deeply nested relations. This project was prized.
Just like CuProS being in the 1980s a forerunner of the status that XML eventually gained, and ALIBI being in 1989 one of the seminal projects of AI modelling of the reasoning about legal evidence (a filed that gained momentum around 2000 especially because of several editorial initiatives of Nissan himself, intended to produce to specification a critical mass of research), there also were other forerunners, which were instead tools or ideas from relatively minor projects that only resulted in one published paper:

In 1993, Nissan published Cyberspace for Animal Husbandry, in the journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 8(3), pp. 251-259, a precursor by almost twenty years of virtual environments with animal instead of human subjects. The idea was first presented in that paper.
In 1987, he published a paper describing a piece of software, implemented by his students under his direction, An Expert System for Gastronomy and Terminal Food-Processing, published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, 6(4), pp. 207-215. The tool, suggesting what to cook in a large kitchen based on the inventory of available ingredients, this being a function that eventually found finds a parallel in a function of the Microsoft Home in 2004. Even though the latter uses radio-frequency identification tags for inventory tracking, the basic function is like that of the 1987 project.
In 1996, Nissan published (with S.E. Shimony) TAMBALACOQUE: For a Formal Account of the Gist of a Scholarly Argument, in the journal Knowledge Organization, 23(3), pp. 135-146. It proposed a markup for argumentation. In 1999, a different, independently developed markup for argumentation was tentatively claimed to be the first, in a paper by J.-F. Delannoy (see here).

Ephraim Nissan