[IAAIL] Prof. Trevor Bench-Capon, In Memoriam 2024
Michał Araszkiewicz
Trevor
was born in 1953 in Malta, with his family later moving to the UK. He
started his academic journey reading Philosophy and Economics at St
John's College Oxford, where he also took a D. Phil, producing a thesis
titled “Can God be an Object of Reference?”. Trevor met and
married fellow Oxford student and mathematician Priscilla Bradley in
1978 and they went on to have three children together. After graduating,
Trevor joined the UK Civil Service, working for six years in the
Department of Health and Social Security, in policy and computer
branches. He then returned to academia, joining Imperial College London
as a post-doctoral researcher to conduct research into logic programming
applied to legislation, building on the practical experience he had
gained in the Civil Service and working on the Alvey Demonstrator
project, developing the advanced knowledge-based artificial intelligence
(AI) of that time.
Trevor then moved to join the Department of
Computer Science at Liverpool, securing a position as a Lecturer in
1987. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1992, Reader in 1999, and
Professor of Computer Science in 2004. He then went on to serve as Head
of Department of Computer Science from 2005 – 2008. Trevor’s research
contributed to new topics for the department and firmly put Liverpool on
the international map as a centre of excellence, specifically in AI and
law, and computational models of argument, a topic on which he---with
Paul Dunne at Liverpool---started the biennial COMMA conference series.
In
the 1980s, AI and law was a nascent topic but the increasing interest
from various international groups led to the birth of the International
Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL). Trevor published a paper in the
proceedings of the first edition of this conference in 1987 and every
edition since – a record he was extremely proud of. For the related
annual JURIX conference series that started in 1991, he had papers in
almost all proceedings (with only a couple of exceptions). Trevor’s
dedication to the community resulted in him being elected as President
of the International Association for AI and Law, which runs the ICAIL
conference, for the term 2002-2003. Trevor also supported the community
by serving for many years as Co-Editor-in-Chief, alongside Kevin Ashley
and Giovanni Sartor, of the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal. And
he participated in some key collaborative projects on AI and Law, such
as the ESTRELLA and IMPACT projects.
Trevor retired as a
Professor in 2012, but he retained solid links with his department at
Liverpool as an Honorary Visiting Professor, continuing to publish
prolifically and engaging in applied research projects on AI and law
being conducted at Liverpool. His research profile is made up of over
300 peer-reviewed publications, 101 of which are journal papers. Over
his research career Trevor collaborated with a very wide range of
authors (158 according to DBLP!), including key figures in the field. At
the first ICAIL conference, as well as a sole-authored paper he also
had a paper with Marek Sergot and colleagues at Imperial on logic
programming for law. In the 1990s he did a lot of work on legal
knowledge-based systems, publishing prolifically with Frans Coenen, then
in the 2000s Trevor worked with Henry Prakken, to flesh out
argumentation theories for law, and with Giovanni Sartor, contributing
some key work on theory construction for case law. For their collective
work on legal argumentation theory, Trevor, Henry and Giovanni were
awarded the 2023 CodeX Prize. Trevor has had a long standing, productive
and close collaboration with Katie Atkinson, starting in the early
2000s when she was his PhD student and throughout her subsequent time as
a colleague at Liverpool, where they published extensively on
argument-based models of legal case-based reasoning, and applications of
these. Trevor has also collaborated with a number of IAAIL Presidents,
including Edwina Rissland, Tom Gordon, Bart Verheij and Floris Bex, on a
variety of lines of investigation within the topic of argument-based
reasoning about legal cases.
As well as his own research
contributions, Trevor cared deeply about supporting the next generation
of researchers. He evidently enjoyed detailed discussions with PhD
students about their research ideas and was extremely supportive of
students getting their work published and presented at conferences.
Indeed, Trevor enjoyed many long and fruitful collaborations with PhD
students and post-docs, including Maya Wardeh, Latifa Al-Abdulkarim, and
Adam Wyner, many of whom went on to be colleagues with whom Trevor made
key contributions to the AI and law literature.
Trevor’s
personality left as much of an impression on his audience as his
research did. It was evident how much he enjoyed attending conferences
and engaging in coffee break and conference dinner discussions about
intricacies of concepts and new formal theories. He had a staggering
memory for recalling who published which advancement, where and when, as
well which notable events happened at which conferences over the
years. Many people in the community will have their own story to tell
about an animated question or discussion started off by Trevor’s
reaction to a paper or presentation.
The AI and law community
has lost a giant. Trevor cared very deeply about this community and the
devoted efforts he made to developing it through his research and
leadership activities ensure that there is a thriving movement in place
today to build upon this legacy.
Trevor’s funeral will be held on Friday 14th June at St Bridget's Church, West Kirby, UK, which he attended for over 36 years.
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Selected websites presenting Trevor's scientific achievements:
https://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~tbc/
https://dblp.org/pid/b/TJMBenchCapon.html
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8qMKdPwAAAAJ&hl=en
