DILab wins CreativeIT Grant

August 2009- DILab wins a major grant from the NSF CreativeIT program. The project is entitled “Computational Tools for Enhancing Creativity in Biologically Inspired Design”, and represents a collaboration between DILab and the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design.

DILab advertises for two postdoc positions

July 2009- Design & Intelligence Laboratory advertises two postdoctoral research scientists positions. One position is in AI Game Playing and Software Agents (the GAIA project) and the other is in AI, Learning Sciences and Educational Technology (the ACT project).

Goel gives talk at IJCAI-09 Workshop

July 11, 2009- Ashok Goel gives an invited talk to the IJCAI-09 workshop on Grand Challenges in Reasoning from Experiences in beautiful Pasadena, California. His talk is entitled “Biological Inspired Design: Human Reasoning from Nature’s Experences.”

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.

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!

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.