Gongbo Zhang, a Master’s student in Computer Science, has joined DILab. He will work on the Biologically Inspired Design project. Welcome, Gongbo!

Keith McGreggor gave an invited talk at the Lean Launchpad Educators Program for the NCIIA at UC-Berkeley. The Lean LaunchPad, taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech

Keith McGreggor kicked off the sixth I-Corps cohort for the NSF in Arlington, VA.

David Joyner presented a poster at the Georgia Tech Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Expo. David’s poster described his research on metacognitive tutoring in an interactive learning environment for supporting scientific modeling and inquiry in middle school science.

The Biologically Inspired Design undergraduate research team competed in Round 1 of the Georgia Tech Inventure Prize Competition. The competition is a faculty-led innovation competition for undergraduate students at Georgia Tech. Team members Nahla Osman, Marika Shahid, and Cherish Weiler presented a poster detailing their work on a fog and rainwater capturing device. They spoke with multiple judges and GT faculty members on their research, prototype details, and business model. They are currently testing and building the device and plan to debut a final product at the end of the Spring 2013 semester.

Maithilee Kunda successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Visual Problem Solving in Autism, Psychometrics, and AI: The Case of the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Intelligence Test.” Her dissertation committee consisted of Professors Gregory Abowd, Ashok Goel (Chair), Nancy Nersessian, Eric Schumacher, Brian Scassellati and Isabelle Soulieres. (Congratulations Maithilee!)

Swaroop Vattam graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Swaroop led the development of several interactive technologies: ACT, that enables middle school children learn about ecological systems; DANE, that provides a digital library of biological systems for supporting biologically inspired design (http://dilab.cc.gatech.edu/dane/); and Biologue, that uses a technique of model-based semantic annotation for affording online retrieval of biology articles relevant to design problems. He won the 2012 College of Computing Outstanding GRA Award, and his Ph.D. Dissertation was selected as one of four Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertations in the College of Computing during 2011-12. Swaroop will join NIST, where he will work on “big data, big knowledge.”(Congratulations Swaroop. Way to go!)

Daniel Connelly graduated with a MS in CS. At DILab, Daniel worked on the Meta-Thinking project, and helped with the software architecture, code and documentation of the interactive game environment called GAIA. He also converted several CommonLisp programs in Peter Norvig’s Paradigms of AI Programming into Python as a general educational resource. Daniel will join Google in Germany. (Congratulations Daniel! Way to go.)

Marshall Gillson graduated with a MS in CS. Marshall worked on the Meta-Thinking project at DILab. In particular, he helped extend an interactive game environment called GAIA in which game playing agents use meta-reasoning to adapt themselves to new rules. He will join Google in Boston. (Congratulations Marshall! Way to go.)

Keith McGreggor presented a paper (oral presentation) entitled “Fractal Analogies for General Intelligence” at the Fifth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence at St. Anne’s College in Oxford, UK. The AGI conferences are the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.