Events on This Day...

Title of Event: Dr. Ken Forbus, Northwestern University, Research in Spatial Cognition (RISC) Lab Visiting Speaker
Date: 2009-11-03 from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM
Location: Hamilton Library Weiss Hall 6th Floor
Contact: Diane Burton | Phone 215-204-7361 | E-Mail dburton@temple.edu
About This Event

CogSketch: Sketch understanding for cognitive science research and for education

Kenneth D. Forbus, Northwestern University
 
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.html.