Misc. July 2010 News

July 2010- Keith McGreggor and Maithilee Kunda organize the AAAI-2010 workshop on Visual Representation and Reasoning in Atlanta. Keith also gives a talk on “A Fractal Analogy Approach to Raven’s Test of Intelligence” to the workshop.

Ashok Goel gives the keynote talk on “Meta-Reasoning for Self-Adaptation in Intelligent Agents” to the AAAI-2010 workshop on Meta-Cogniton.

Ashok Goel gives an invited talk on “Reflection in Action” to the AAAI-2010 workshop on Goal-Directed Autonomy.

Joshua Jones gives a talk on “Effects of Faulty Knowledge Engineering on Structured Classification Learning” to the AAAI-2010 workshop on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation.

Julia Svoboda joins DILab as a post-doctoral fellow. She will work on the EMT project on learning about complex systems in middle school science.

Misc. May 2010 News

May 2010- Swaroop Vattam successfully defends his thesis proposal entitled “Mediated Analogy: From Practice to Theory to Technology.” His thesis committee includes Professors Janet Kolodner, Mary Lou Maher, Nancy Nersessian and Jeannette Yen.

Maithilee Kunda presents the paper “Can the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Intelligence Test Be Solved by Thinking in Pictures?” to IMFAR-2010 in Philadelphia.

Joshua Jones graduates with a Ph.D. in Computer Science! Congratulations Josh!

Josh is now a postdoctoral research scientist with Marie des Jardins and Tim Oates at University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Adity Dokania, Shantanu Gupta, Rohan Tewari, Bryan Wiltgen and Deepak Zambre graduate with a M.S. in Computer Science! Congratulations all!

Adity is joining The MathWorks in Boston, Deepak is joining Microsoft in Seattle, and Bryan is joining the Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Kunda wins Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

April 2010- Maithilee Kunda wins the 2010 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Congratulations, Maithilee!

Briefly, building from Temple Grandin’s “Thinking in Pictures” hypothesis about people with autism spectrum disorders, Maithilee has identified Raven’s intelligence test as a context for understanding analogical representations of visuo-spatial knowledge. She, along with Keith McGreggor, has developed a computational model of the Raven’s test using only affine transformations over analogical representations of the input images. She has found that this novel computational technique performs about as well on the Raven’s test as a ten year old typically developing child. Way to go!

Papers accepted to CogSci 2010

The following two papers have been accepted for publication in Proc. 2010 Cognitive Science Conference:

Ashok K. Goel, Swaroop S. Vattam, Spencer Rugaber, David Joyner, Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver, Rebecca Jordan, Sameer Honwad, Steven Gray, Suparna Sinha. Functional and Causal Abstractions of Complex Systems. To appear in Proc. 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cogntive Science Society, Portland, August 2010.

Maithilee Kunda, Keith McGreggor & Ashok Goel. Taking a Look (Literally!) at the Raven’s Intelligence Test: Two Visual Solution Strategies. To appear in Proc. 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cogntive Science Society, Portland, August 2010.

Kunda and McGreggor participate in AI symposium

November 5-6, 2009- Mathilee Kunda and Keith McGreggor participate in the the AAAI Fall Symposium on Multi-representational Architectures for Human-level Intelligence in Washington, DC, and present the “Addressing the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test of ‘General’ Intelligence.”

Paper accepted to 2010 IMFAR Conference

February 22, 2010- The following has been accepted for presentation to the 2010 IMFAR conference:

Maithilee Kunda, Keith McGreggor & Ashok Goel. Can the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Intelligence Test be Solved by Thinking in Pictures? To be presented to the Tenth Annual International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR-2010), Philadelphia, May 2010.