|
Ten years ago, I thought the world was really exciting. I could not have
imagined how more exciting the world can become in another ten years. We
have not only seen how the world becomes smaller and
“flat” due to
the Web, but also how people are “connected” by social media such as Facebook, Twitter, online communities, through mobile
phones. These technologies have
converted the cyberspace to a world of social interactions, which form
complex networks of many type. This new era of the Web raises many
interesting questions. For example,
·
How to predict the dynamic behaviors of
networks and the influence to such networks?
·
How to characterize the level of trust about
relationship in a network and the information spread in the network through
these relationships?
·
How to facilitate information dissemination
to the right people at the right time through these networks?
To address the first two questions, Dr. Prasenjit Mitra and I launched
the Cancer Informatics Initiative for
analyzing large-scale health-related social network, and to develop models
for predicting their dynamic behaviors. Our progress in this area includes identifying
emotion contagion and influential users of American Cancer Society’s Cancer Survivors Network.
To address the third questions, we have developed an agent technology (R-CAST), inspired by Recognition-Primed
Decision (RPD), to facilitate leveraging human experiences. The formal
foundation of R-CAST is an extension of SharedPlans
theory, developed by Drs. Barbara
Grosz and Sarit Kraus, using semantics of
communication acts, developed by Drs. P. R. Cohen and H. J. Levesque. We are
currently using this technology as a basis for enhancing cyber situation
awareness from a human-centric perspective.
We are also developing a scalable cyber infrastructure to enable the
intelligent processing of text messages (e.g., tweets) for enhancing the
preparedness and the response for extreme events like the earthquake in
Haiti and Japan. More information
about this very exciting project can be found at EMERSE project page.
For more information about my research, please visit Cancer Informatics Initiative and Laboratory for Intelligent Agents.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California,
Berkeley in 1986. My thesis advisor is Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh, the father of
fuzzy logic. Between 1986 and 1989,
I was the main architect at USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) for an
AI architecture that pioneers a knowledge-level integration involving
semantic-Web knowledge representation technologies. From 1989 to 2001, I
was on the faculty at Texas A&M University, where I founded and
directed the Center for Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems Research.
In 2001, I joined IST@PennState, which was
created in 1999. I became Professor-in-Charge from 2003 to 2007, and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate
Programs from 2007 to 2009. I was the Vice President of Publication for
IEEE Neural Networks Council, now IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. I received the NSF Young Investigator
Award in 1992, and was named a Fellow of IEEE in 2000.
|
