Our suite of agents Jill Watson, Jill Watson Social Agent, and VERA, under the team name ’emPrize’ made it to the top 10 in the IBM XPrize Competition. To know more about the projects and team members, please visit our emPrize website.

To read the full story: https://ai.xprize.org/prizes/artificial-intelligence

Ashok Goel has been recognized by the University System of Georgia for his dedication to innovative teaching and learning.

To read the full story, please visit this website.

The VERA team of DILab have teamed up with the Jill Watson group to create a 10 video online course on the Scientific Way of thinking. This truly revolutionary course also has access to Jill Watson through a slack channel, so that anyone in the world can ask questions to Jill about VERA. The video series can be found here:

The DILab team working on VERA are pleased to announce that their project can now be found on Smithsonian’s Encyclopedia of Life’s front page.

Ashok Goel presented at the IBM Watson Developer Conference about his work on the Jill Watson virtual TA.

The full video is available here: https://youtu.be/qzHvdNi-4HY

Goel, A. K., Rugaber, S., & Vattam, S. (2009). Structure, behavior, and function of complex systems: The structure, behavior, and function modeling language. International Journal of AI in Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, Special Issue on Developing and Using Engineering Ontologies, 23: 23-35, 2009

Ashok Goel recently gave a talk about the Jill Watson project at TEDxSanFrancisco. You can watch the full talk here.

Help us develop AI to address ecological and environmental sustainability!

Georgia Tech’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory (http://dilab.gatech.edu/) seeks to hire a research engineer for its new NSF sponsored project on “Using Big Data for Environmental Sustainability: Big Data + AI Technology = Accessible, Usable, Useful Knowledge!”. A Spoke initiative of the NSF South Big Data Hub (http://www.southbdhub.org/),  this multi-university, interdisciplinary effort also engages Smithsonian Institution, IBM, and several other universities. Thus, the research engineer will work in an intellectually dynamic environment on a project with significant potential for real-world impact.

Project Description: Scientists need access to data on biodiversity for modeling ecological phenomena. Smithsonian Institution’s Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is the world’s largest database of biological species and other biodiversity information. This project seeks to make EOL and related biodiversity data sources accessible, usable, and useful, by integrating extant artificial intelligence tools for information extraction, modeling and simulation, and question answering:

• MILA-S: helps construct conceptual models of ecological phenomena and automatically spawns simulation models; uses MILA-S with EOL TraitBank to generate and test explanatory hypotheses as well as make predictions about ecosystems,
• Cognopsi: semantically annotates documents in EOL by using controlled vocabularies for specific domains within ecological and environmental science, and
• Watson+: adds semantic processing to IBM’s Watson system to act as a virtual research assistant; trains Watson+ to answer questions about biological species using EOL.

Position Description: The research engineer will help integrate the above technologies into one system for enabling citizen scientists to rapidly build conceptual and simulation models of ecological phenomena. Thus, the position will require significant experience and skills in building interactive software systems, as well as an ability to work in a large team on an interdisciplinary project. The ideal candidate would have a B.S. degree in computing with a several years of experience in software development, or a M.S. in computing and a few years of experience, or a Ph.D. in computing. The position is located in the Atlanta. Remuneration is competitive.

Contact: For more information, please contact Professor Ashok Goel at goel@cc.gatech.edu.

Ashok Goel and David Joyner recently gave a GVU seminar talk about their experiences in designing, developing, and delivering an online course on knowledge-based artificial intelligence as part of the Georgia Tech OMS in CS program. You can watch the full talk here.