cohen

Brief biography: I attended UCSD as an undergraduate, UCLA for a MA in Psychology, and Stanford University for a PhD in Computer Science and Psychology. I graduated from Stanford in 1983 and became an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. I directed the Experimental Knowledge Systems Laboratory at UMass for twenty years, before moving with my wife, Carole Beal, to USC's Information Sciences Institute in 2003. Carole directs the Learning and Development Center and the K12@USC project. I serve as Deputy Director of the Intelligent Systems Division and Director of the Center for Research on Unexpected Events.

My research is in artificial intelligence, though that designation has never excluded much. I think it is worth understanding human cognitive development and emulating it in siico, with robots or softbots in game environments as the "babies" we're trying to raise up. I am particularly interested in the sensorimotor foundations of human language. Several of my projects in the last decade have developed algorithms for sensor-to-symbol kinds of processing in service of learning the meanings of words. More recently, I have been working in what one might call "Education Informatics," which includes intelligent tutoring systems, data mining and statistical modeling of students' mastery and engagement, assessment technologies, ontologies for representing student data and standards for content, architectures for content delivery, and so on. Living in Los Angeles with a seventh-grader and the director of the K12@USC project I see many opportunities to develop and apply AI technologies to provide high-quality education for all students. Another part of my research that has both practical and theoretical aspects is what we might call the statistical foundations of security. It bothers me that we know so little about the expected error rates of algorithms for group detection, link discovery, and so on. Not surprisingly, we find that good statistical foundations lead to better algorithms, as well as characterizations of expected error rates. The fourth half of my research is methodological. I think that good problems and instruments produce good science, so I design challenge problems and methods, and advise various sponsoring agencies on the design and conduct of evaluations.

Paul Cohen