Purposes of the ParisinLA project

In its initial formulation the project was conceived by Hayward R. Alker as having the goal of building at USC in Los Angeles a Prototype Action -Recommending Information System (hence "PARIS") supporting the Conflict Early Warning Systems Research Program of the International Social Science Council, headquartered at UNESCO in Paris (hence "in LA"). As the project progressed, it became clear that the "support" functions of such a system should be signaled by referring to a Prototype Action-Recommenders' Information Support System, thus more clearly placing the responsibility for any recommendations developed with the use of the PARIS System squarely on the shoulders of the humans who make them.

Most fundamentally, action-recommending is seen as a kind of practical reasoning, i.e. situational specific reasoning connecting actions to concrete goals. In the present context, these are efforts in the international domain pointed toward extending conflict management practices within the post-Cold War UN system beyond traditional Wilsonian Collective Security functions to include "Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping," to quote the subtitle of UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's Agenda for Peace. Alker has found Douglas Walton's elaborated conception of practical reasoning as "Goal-Driven, Knowledge-Based, Action-Guiding Argumentation" particularly helpful in connecting this traditional, policy-oriented concern for peace with the Artificial Intelligence literature on "precedent logic" and "case-based reasoning." Together, these concerns suggest that precedentially organized repertoires of textual case descriptions (including judgmental information on action mixes, their successes and failures) are the most important contents of any PARIS System, combined with computational tools for retrieving, analyzing and synthesizing cases suggestive of policies relevant to particular situations of present interest.

This web site is designed to help others share in, and continue, our learning about what informational and analytical components of multi-source, PARIS type systems should look like in current and future practical settings.