DILab wins IES grant

June, 2009- DILAB wins major grant from IES! The US Dept. of Education’s Institute for Education Science has awarded a three-year grant entitled “Systems and Cycles: Using Structure-Behavior-Function Thinking as a Conceptual Tool for Understanding Complex Natural Systems in Middle School Science.” This is an inter-disciplinary, inter-university project involving the Graduate School of Education and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University and the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Visual thinking paper accepted to AAAI Fall Symposium

June, 2009- Mathilee Kunda, Keith McGreggor and Ashok Goel’s paper “Addressing the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test of ‘General’ Intelligence,” has been accepted for presentation at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Multi-representational Architectures for Human-level Intelligence at MIT in October 2009.

BID paper accepted to Creativity and Cognition

June, 2009- Swaroop Vattam, Michael Helms & Ashok Goel’s paper “Nature of Creative Analogies in Biologically Inspired Innovative Design,” has been accepted for presentation at the Seventh ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, Berkeley, California, October 2009.

Murdock works with IBM’s Watson

April 27, 2009- DILAB alum Bill Murdock is playing a central technical role in IBM’s plan to enter a computer into the Jeopardy quiz show to compete with human players on TV. His work has been focusing on question understanding (i.e., understanding what a question really is asking) and has achieved an accuracy rate of 60-70% for understanding questions of the kind typically asked on Jeopardy (which is about twice as much as other question understanding systems). Way to go, Bill!

Paper presented at AERA

April 2009- The paper “Modeling Practices as a Function of Task Structure,” coauthored by Rebecca Jordan, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Steven Gray, Ashok Goel & Spencer Rugaber was presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, California, April 2009.