Keynote Speakers at KES-IDT 2010
Professor Gheorghe Tecuci
Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering and Director of the Learning Agents CenterGeorge Mason University
Intelligence Analysis as Agent-Assisted Discovery of Evidence, Hypotheses and Arguments
Abstract:
The purpose of Intelligence Analysis is to answer complex questions arising in the decision-making process. Arguments, often stunningly complex, requiring both imaginative and critical reasoning, are necessary in order to establish and defend the relevance, believability, and inferential force of evidence with respect to these questions. We present a computational approach to intelligence analysis which is viewed as mixed-initiative discovery of evidence, hypotheses and arguments by an intelligence analyst and a software agent capable of learning, analytic assistance and tutoring. Sample intelligence analyses are used to illustrate the abductive process of discovering hypotheses that explain our observations, putting a discovered hypothesis at work to deductively discover additional evidence, and building a Wigmorean probabilistic inference network to inductively infer the likelihood of a given hypothesis or answer. The examples illustrate how the Disciple cognitive assistants developed in the Learning Agents Center can help the analysts in coping with the astonishing complexity of intelligence analysis. The talk is concluded with a generalization of the obtained results to other domains requiring evidence-based reasoning (law, scientific discovery, medicine, critical thinking in everyday reasoning, etc.)
Biography:
Gheorghe Tecuci is Professor of Computer Science in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering and Director of the Learning Agents Center at George Mason University (http://lac.gmu.edu). He is also Visiting Professor and former Chair of Artificial Intelligence at the US Army War College. Dr. Tecuci has followed a career-long interest in the development of a computational theory and technology that allows non-computer scientists to develop intelligent assistants that incorporate their problem solving expertise, and can assist them in problem solving and decision making. He has published over 175 papers with contributions in machine learning (particularly multistrategy learning and instructable agents), artificial intelligence, cognitive systems, and their applications. He was elected member of the Romanian Academy and received the Academy's Award (for research excellence on learning systems). He has also received the US Army Outstanding Civilian Service Medal ("for groundbreaking contributions to the application of Artificial Intelligence to Center of Gravity determination"), the lifetime IT&E Outstanding Research Faculty Award, the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and the Deployed Application Award from the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.
Dr Jens G. Pohl
Executive Director of the Collaborative AgentDesign Research Center
California Polytechnic State University
Intelligent Software for Ecological Building Design
Abstract:
Building design is a complex process because of the number of elements and issues involved and the number of relationships that exist among them. Adding sustainability issues to the list increases the complexity of design by an order of magnitude. There is a need for computer assistance to manage the increased complexity of design and to provide intelligent collaboration in formulating acceptable design solutions. Software development technology today offers opportunities to design and build an intelligent software system environment that can serve as a reliable intelligent partner to the human designer. In this paper the authors describe the desirable capabilities of such an intelligent design environment and discuss the software methodologies that can be drawn upon to implement these capabilities within a service-oriented architecture paradigm.
Biography:
Dr. Jens Pohl holds the positions of Professor of Architecture, Executive Director of the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC, www.cadrc.calpoly.edu), Director of the Knowledge Management Laboratory (KML Center) at Scott AFB, IL (www.cadrc.calpoly.edu/kml/), and Graduate Studies Coordinator, in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, California. Since 2002 he also holds the positions of Chief Technology Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors, CDM Technologies, Inc. (www.cdmtech.com), a California Corporation and sustaining sponsor of the CADRC Center at Cal Poly.
Under his direction the CADRC Center and CDM Technologies, Inc. have over the past two decades developed several distributed computing systems for military applications in which multiple computer-based and human agents collaborate in the solution of complex problems. Professor Pohl is the author of two patents (US), several books, and more than 90 research papers in artificial intelligence, human cognition, collaborative problem solving and decision making, engineering design, and systems integration. He is a Fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, the Australian Institute of Building, and a member of IEEE.