Paper accepted to Educational Technology and Society

March 31, 2010- The following paper is accepted for publication in Educational Technology and Society:

Swaroop S. Vattam, Ashok K. Goel, Spencer Rugaber, Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver, Rebecca Jordan, Steven Gray & Suparna Sinha. Understanding Complex Natural Systems by Articulating Structure-Behavior-Function Models. Accepted for Educational Technology & Society, Special Issue on Creative Design; to appear in print fall 2010.

Papers accepted to Design Theory and Methods

March 27, 2010- The following two papers are accepted for presentation to the 2010 ASME Conference on Design Theory and Methods to be held in Montreal, Canada in August 2010.

Michael Helms, Swaroop Vattam & Ashok Goel. The Effects of Functional Modeling on Understanding Complex Biological Systems. To appear in Proc. 2010 ASME Conference on Design Theory and Methods, Montreal, Canada, August 2010.

Swaroop Vattam, Michael Helms & Ashok Goel. Biologically Inspired Design: A Macrocognitive Account. To appear in Proc. 2010 ASME Conference on Design Theory and Methods, Montreal, Canada, August 2010.

DILab has strong presence at International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Diagrams

August 2010- Ashok Goel, Mateja Jamnik (Cambridge) and Hari Narayanan (Auburn) chaired the Sixth International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams in Portland, Oregon. The conference was big success.

Michael Helms presents two papers to the 2010 ASME IDETC/CIE Conference on Design Theory and Methods in Montreal, Canada. The first was entitled “The Effects of Functional Modeling on Understanding Complex Biological Systems,” and the second “Biologically Inspired Design: A Macrocognitive Account.”

Sameer Honwad presents a joint Rutgers-Georgia Tech paper “Connecting the Visible to the Invisible: Helping Middle School Students Understand Complex Ecosystem Processes” to the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Portland, Oregon.

Ashok Goel presented two poster papers to the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Portland, Oregon: “Taking a Look (Literally!) at the Raven’s Intelligence Test: Two Visual Solution Strategies,” and “Learning Functional and Causal Abstractions of Classroom Aquaria.”

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.

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.

Paper accepted to ICLS

January 30, 2010- The following paper has been accepted for presentation to the 2010 ICLS conference in Chicago, June 2010:

Suparna Sinha, Steven Gray, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Rebecca Jordan, Sameer Honwad, Catherine Eberbach, Spencer Rugaber, Swaroop Vattam & Ashok Goel. Appropriating Conceptual Representations: A Case of Transfer in a Middle School Science Teacher. To appear in Proc. Ninth International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Chicago, June 28-29, 2010.

Vattam, Helms, and Goel attend Creativity and Cognition

October 27-30, 2009- Swaroop Vattam, Michael Helms & Ashok Goel participate in the Seventh ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, Berkeley, California. Swaroop presents the paper “Nature of Creative Analogies in Biologically Inspired Innovative Design” to the conference. Ashok Goel hosts a GVU reception for the conference participants and it is fun time!

Jones accepted postdoctoral position at Maryland

September 2009- Joshua Jones takes a postdoctoral position at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. AT UMBC, Josh will work with Marie des Jardins and Tim Oates. Way to go, Josh! We will miss you but are happy for you.

The paper “A Computational Model of Visual Analogies in Design. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research,” coauthored by Jim Davies, Ashok Goel & Nancy Nersessian is published in the Journal of Cognitive Systems Research. (Special Issue on Analogies – Integrating Cognitive Abilities, 10:204-215.)

The paper “Biologically Inspired Design: Products and Processes,” coauthored by Michael Helms, Swaroop S. Vattam & Ashok K. Goel is published in the journal Design Studies (30(5):606-622).