Creativity, Cognition, & Computation
The Design & Intelligence Laboratory conducts research into computational design and creativity. The goals of our research are to model human creativity in practical tasks such as conceptual design of complex systems, develop interactive tools for aiding humans in creative tasks, and build creative machines. Our research posits analogical reasoning, visual reasoning, and meta-reasoning as fundamental processes of creativity. Computer-aided design and computer-supported learning provide two real-world domains for exploring analogical, visual and meta-reasoning. Current projects explore analogical reasoning in biologically inspired engineering design, visual reasoning on intelligence tests, meta-reasoning in game-playing software agents, and learning about ecological and biological systems in science education.
News
January 2011 Professor Cindy Hmelo-Silver presents a join Rutgers-Georgia Tech paper on “Foregrounding Behaviors and Functions to Promote Ecosystem Understanding” to the Ninth Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu.
November 2010 Bryan Wiltgen presents the paper “DANE: Fostering Creativity in and through Biologically Inspired Design” to the 1st International Conference on Design Creativity in Kobe, Japan.
September 2010
Professor Jeannette Yen presents a joint CBID-DILab paper entitled “Evaluating biological systems for their potential in engineering design” to the 3rd International Conference on Bionics Engineering in Zhuhai, China.
Professor Mary Lou Maher gives a talk on “Understanding Creativity Through Computation” to the Creativity + Cognition + Computation seminar series and visits DILab.
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 Cogntive 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.”
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.
June 2010 Suparna Sinha presents a joint Rutgers-Georgia Tech paper “Appropriating Conceptual Representations: A Case of Transfer in a Middle School Science Teacher” to the Ninth International Conference of the Learning Sciences in Chicago.
Maithilee Kunda presents the paper “Can the Raven's Progressive Matrices Intelligence Test Be Solved by Thinking in Pictures?” to IMFAR-2010 in Philadelphia.
Joshua Jones graduates with a Ph.D. in Computer Science! Congratulations Josh!
Josh is now a postdoctoral research scientist with Marie des Jardins and Tim Oates at University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyAdity Dokania, Shantanu Gupta, Rohan Tewari, Bryan Wiltgen and Deepak Zambre graduate with a M.S. in Computer Science! Congratulations all!
Adity is joining The MathWorks in Boston, Deepak is joining Microsoft in Seattle, and Bryan is joining the Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech in AtlantaMaithilee Kunda wins the 2010 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Congratulations, Maithilee!
Briefly, building from Temple Grandin's "Thinking in Pictures" hypothesis about people with autism spectrum disorders, Maithilee has identified Raven's intelligence test as a context for understanding analogical representations of visuo-spatial knowledge. She, along with Keith McGreggor, has developed a computational model of the Raven's test using only affine transformations over analogical representations of the input images. She has found that this novel computational technique performs about as well on the Raven's test as a ten year old typically developing child. Way to go!ACM awards the 8th International Conference on Creativity and Cognition to Georgia Tech with Ashok Goel as the Chair.
Deepak Zambre to join Microsoft Research
Jing Li receives Honors Program Challenge Fund Scholarship from the Georgia Tech Honors Program.
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
March 2010
Maithilee Kunda is Finalist for the Anita Bord Google Scholarship!
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
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.
Professor John Gero from George Mason University visits DILab.
February2010
Ashok Goel visits Carnegie-Mellon University and gives an invited talk on "Design, Analogy, Creativity."
The following has been accepted for presentation to the 2010 IMFAR conference:
Maithilee Kunda, Keith McGreggor & Ashok Goel. Can the Raven's Progressive Matrices Intelligence Test be Solved by Thinking in Pictures? To be presented to the Tenth Annual International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR-2010), Philadelphia, May 2010
Professor Paul Thagard from University of Waterloo, Canada, visits DILab
Professor Rosalind Picard from MIT Media Lab visits DILab
Dr. Dorrit Billman from NASA Human Systems Integration Division visits DILab
Dr. Rangam Subramanian from Idaho National Laboratory visits DILab
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
Dr. Haym Hirsh from NSF visits DILab
Professor Benjamin Kuipers from the University of Michigan visits DILab
Keith McGreggor participates in the First International Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Keith presents the paper "A Fractal Approach to Visual Analogy."
December 2009—
December 2009 - Keith McGreggor and Maithilee Kunda's.proposal for a AAAI-2010 workshop on Visual Representation and Reasoning is accepted. Please see the
workshop website for details.
Lee Martie joins DILab as full-time research scientist. Lee will work primarily on the Game AI project called GAIA. In addition, he will help DILab with technical issues. Welcome Lee
