Paul Cohen

paul
Center for Research on Unexpected Events (Director)
Intelligent Systems Division (Deputy Director)
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey CA 90292-6695

cohen at isi dot edu, 310 448 9342
Professor (Research)
Department of Computer Science
University of Southern California
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
Recent Talks and Tutorials
Center for Research on Unexpected Events
Learning and Development Center
K12 @ USC
Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences
Wubble World


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 methodologicalI 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.


Recent News:

November, 2008. Workshop Announcement!!! With Carole Beal and Niall Adams, I am organizing a workshop on Education Informatics and the International Internet Classroom at the 2008 AAAI Fall Symposium in Arlington, VA.

February, 2008. Workshop Announcement!!! Unfortunately, we didn't get enough submissions for the workshop on Education Informatics and the International Internet Classroom at the 2008 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Patras, Greece, but see the announcement above about the same workshop being held at the AAAI Fall Symposium in November.

January, 2008. Learn arithmetic (well, actually, arithmetic in finite fields). Can Markov decision processes help students move through a curriculum? Help us find out by participating in an online experiment, designed by Yu-Han Chang. It will take an hour of your time. Thanks!

December, 2007:  The Future of AI Workshop near Mt. Fuji. Group photo. My summary.  

October, 2007:  The Wubbles are Here!

 allegra-and-wubble

June, 2007:  With Alex Kacelnik of Pembroke College, Oxford, I am helping to organize an NSF-EUCognition Workshop on Natural and Artificial Cognition.

March, 2006:  Happy times:  A Festschrift for Edward A. Feigenbaum.  Congratulations, Ed!!!  My brief talk honoring Ed.

February 2006:  The new CRUE website is up and running.  Also check out the Learning and Development Center and the K12@USC sites.