Research Interests

Though I am doing my Ph.D. in computer science, I have always considered myself primarily a cognitive scientist. My supervisors here at Waterloo are Dr. Paul Thagard and Dr. Chrysanne DiMarco. I am primarily affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Lab.

I have a wide variety of research interests, though all of them fit into the broad category of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Each broad category is listed below, with a description of the particular research I am doing (or have done).

Scientometrics

My current research interest at the current time is focusing on the automatic processing of citations in scientific writing. This research is twofold: First, since citations are not typically manually classified by authors, methods are needed to automate this classification. Second, once classification is complete, how can the network of classified citations be best used to assist the scientific community?

My hope is that information from citation classification can be usefully combined with other information derived from scientific articles, such as that generated from various analyses of textual content (e.g. latent semantic analysis), to better classify or otherwise help navigate the scientific literature.

In addition to my supervisors, this work has been supported by Dr. Bob Mercer at the University of Western Ontario.

Affect and Cognition

Previously I have worked on understanding the connection between "hot" and "cold" cognition. More particularly, I am interested in the impact of emotion and affect on human social interaction and belief change. I hope that an understanding of these phenomena in humans will help to shed light on associated problems (autonomous agents, belief revision) in the development of artificial intelligence.

Natural Language Processing

My second major research focus is on the processing of natural language by computers. My Master's degree, under the supervision of Dr. Fred Popowich and Dr. Paul McFetridge at Simon Fraser University, was in this area. More specifically, I created a tool to assist non-linguists in generating linguistically motivated text retrieval rules for the purposes of information retrieval. This technology is now being developed by Axonwave Software (formerly gavagai technologies)

Other Interests

I have numerous other interests that I have not "officially" pursued - perhaps I will pick up some of these areas in the future. These areas include: connectionism, philosophy of mind and consciousness, language development, and the psychology of human memory.

Published Papers