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.

Goel to co-organize DIAGRAMS 2010

March 2009- Ashok Goel, Mateja Jamnik (University of Cambridge, UK) and Hari Naryanan (Auburn University) to organize DIAGRAMS 2010, the Sixth International Conference on Theory and Application of Diagrams. The conference will be held on August 9-11, 2010, in Portland, Oregon, in conjunction with the 32nd meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Goel presents at DARPA

February 23-24, 2009- Ashok Goel presented DILab’s work on story analysis to the DARPA Workshop on Experience-Based Narrative Memory (En-Em) in Washington, DC. See the STAB project for more details.

Paper published in AI in Engineering Design Journal

February 2009- The paper “Structure, Behavior & Function of Complex Systems: The SBF Modeling Language,” coauthored by Ashok Goel, Spencer Rugaber & Swaroop Vattam is published in the International Journal of AI in Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (Special Issue on Developing and Using Engineering Ontologies, 23: 23-35, 2009.)

Goel presents at NSF CreativeIT PI Workshop

January 15, 2009- Ashok Goel presented DILAB’s work on biologically inspired design to the NSF CreativeIT PI Workshop in Washington, DC. A link to Ashok’s talk, “Creative Analogies: Learning About and Learning Through Biologically Inspired Design,” is available here.