RISC News

 

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  • Congratulations to Ray Crookes, who is headed to graduate school at Columbia University!

  • Congratulations to Amanda Funk, who is headed for graduate work at Lehigh University!

  • Congratulations to both Amanda and Ray on completing their honors theses!

  • Welcome to new graduate student, Steve Weisberg!
  • Ken Forbus, SILC Faculty member and Professor of Computer Science and Education at Northwestern University, will be giving a talk at Temple on November 3, 2009, from from 9:30-11:00 in the Hamilton Library on the 6th floor of Weiss Hall.
    • CogSketch: Sketch understanding for cognitive science research and for education

      Sketching is a powerful means of working out and communicating ideas. Sketch understanding involves a combination of visual, spatial, and conceptual knowledge and reasoning, which makes it both challenging and potentially illuminating. This talk will describe how a team of AI researchers, cognitive psychologists, learning scientists, and educators is attempting to build the intellectual and software infrastructure needed to achieve more human-like sketch understanding software. We are creating CogSketch, an open-domain sketch understanding system that will serve as both a cognitive science research instrument and as a platform for sketch-based educational software. These missions interact: Our cognitive simulation work leads to improvements which can be exploited in creating educational software, and our prototype efforts to create educational software expose where we need further basic research. CogSketch incorporates a model of visual processing and qualitative spatial representations, facilities for analogical reasoning and learning, and a large common-sense knowledge base. Our vision is that sketch-based intelligent educational software will ultimately be as widely available to students as graphing calculators are today. I will start by describing the basics of open-domain sketch understanding and how CogSketch works. Some cognitive simulation studies using CogSketch will be described, to illustrate that it can capture aspects of human visual processing. The potential use of implicit, software-gathered measures of
      expertise for assessment will be discussed, based on a recent experiment with sketching in geoscience. Two prototype educational software efforts will be summarized. The first, worksheets, provides a simple way to see if students understand important configural relationships, e.g., the layers of the Earth. The second, the Design Buddy, is intended to help students learn how to communicate via sketching in the context of learning engineering design.
      While CogSketch is a work in progress, the current prototype is publicly available, and we seek community feedback and collaboration. CogSketch can be downloaded at http://www.silccenter.org/working_groups/sketch_index.htm
  • Nora Newcombe is highlighted in an article in the September 4 edition of Science Magazine. Follow the link to read the entire article: 1190-b
  • Kelly Fisher will be giving a a presentation for teachers on October 6, at Zipporah S. Abramson Center for Early Childhood Education (address: 239 Welsh Rd, Maple Glen, PA 19002). Jessa Reed and Justin Harris will also be a part of this talk.
  • Nora Newcombe is highlighted in the July/August issue of the APS Observer. Follow the link to read the full article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2532
  • Congratulations to former postdoc, Xiaoang Irene Wan, has obtained the position of Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China!
  • The lab welcomes Ross Littauer (B.A., Haverford) as a new full-time research assistant, and Kinnari Atit (B.A., George Washington University) as a new graduate student.
  • Best wishes to departing RA, Chris Schilling, who has left to attend graduate school at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
  • Congratulations to Raymond Crookes, RISC 2009 lab summer intern, for winning a MARC fellowship.

    The Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) is a national NIH program that aims to increase the number and competitiveness of underrepresented minorities engaged in biomedical research. The program is coordinated by Dr. Elisabeth Russell-McKenzie, and directed by Dr. Jacqueline Tanaka and Dr. Diana Woodruff-Pak. It works to strengthen the science curricula at minority-serving institutions and increase the research training opportunities for students and faculty.  This is Temple University’s first year participating in this program with a cohort of 8 students.  The program requires a minimum GPA, weekly lab time, and full-time lab work in the summer

  • The lab welcomes Andrea Frick and Daniele Nardi as new postdocs, and Dominique Dumay (B.A., Temple ) and Christopher Schilling (B.A., Moravian College ) as new full-time research assistants.
  • Congratulations to Alexandra Twyman for winning an NSERC Fellowship.
  • Congratulations to Kristin Ratliff on her postdoc position at the University of Chicago.
  • Best wishes to departing postdoc, Irene Wan, who is returning to Urbana, Illinois.
  • Check out this news article relevant to RISC: http://www.slate.com/id/2194486/entry/2194525/