Areas of Interest: computer science, computers, cognition, World Wide Web, Internet, artificial intelligence, robotics.
As director of the Computers and Cognition Group (CCG), I am interested in understanding such issues as whether computers can behave intelligently, what it would mean if they could be intelligent, and how they can help us to be more intelligent.
The CCG currently has two federally funded research projects: The Semantic Web: The existing web is very good at letting people share information, but it is not so good at letting computers understand that information. We are collaborating with the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT to build next-generation web infrastructure. This project involves both some specific hacking projects - gluing existing systems together, for example - and some technical work in philosophy and semantics. Rethinking CS101: We have designed a new and somewhat radical way to teach introductory computer programming. In this project, we're exporting that curriculum to other institutions and building a web version. We'll also prepare the infrastructure for this spring's Olin Software course.
In addition, we have some smaller projects: Gender and Science: We have an annotated bibliography of readings; we'd like to turn it into a web site, expand it, and connect it with some other resources out in the world. We'd especially like to hook it up with the efforts of the Institute for Women and Technology. Robotics and Education: We are working to publish the proceedings of a workshop on this topic in 2001.