Paul Cohen
Professor and Head
Department of Computer Science
University of Arizona
Gould-Simpson Building
1040 E. 4th Street
Tuscon, AZ 85721
cohen at cs dot arizona dot edu
Biography
I attended UCSD as an undergraduate, UCLA for a MA in Psychology, and Stanford University for a PhD in Computer Science and Psychology. I graduated from Stanford in 1983 and became an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. In 2003 I moved to with my wife, Carole Beal, to USC's Information Sciences Institute where I served as Deputy Director of the Intelligent Systems Division and Director of the Center for Research on Unexpected Events . In 2008 we joined the University of Arizona.
My research is in artificial intelligence, though that designation has never excluded much. I think it is worth understanding human cognitive development and emulating it in siico, with robots or softbots in game environments as the "babies" we're trying to raise up. I am particularly interested in the sensorimotor foundations of human language. Several of my projects in the last decade have developed algorithms for sensor-to-symbol kinds of processing in service of learning the meanings of words. More recently, I have been working in what one might call Education Informatics , which includes intelligent tutoring systems, data mining and statistical modeling of students' mastery and engagement, assessment technologies, ontologies for representing student data and standards for content, architectures for content delivery, and so on. Living in Los Angeles with a seventh-grader and the director of the K12@USC project I saw many opportunities to develop and apply AI technologies to provide high-quality education for all students. Another part of my research that has both practical and theoretical aspects is what we might call the statistical foundations of security. It bothers me that we know so little about the expected error rates of algorithms for group detection, link discovery, and so on. Not surprisingly, we find that good statistical foundations lead to better algorithms, as well as characterizations of expected error rates. The fourth half of my research is methodological. I think that good problems and instruments produce good science, so I design challenge problems and methods, and advise various sponsoring agencies on the design and conduct of evaluations.
Recent News
January - March, 2009. "Science that Transforms". A series of six public lectures sponsored by the University of Arizona College of Science. I'll be giving a lecture on Artificial Intelligence.
January, 2009. Carole, Yu-Han and I won a DARPA award to develop the idea that curriculum is a sequence of nonindependent decisions, for which we can learn MDP or POMDP policies. UA News wrote an article.
August, 2008. Carole and I are joining the University of Arizona. I'll be head of the Computer Science department and Carole will be professor of Cognitive Science and director of K12 programs for the College of Science.
November, 2008. Workshop Announcement!!! With Carole Beal and Niall Adams, I am organizing a workshop on Education Informatics and the International Internet Classroom at the 2008 AAAI Fall Symposium in Arlington, VA.
January, 2008. Learn arithmetic (well, actually, arithmetic in finite fields). Can Markov decision processes help students move through a curriculum? Help us find out by participating in an online experiment, designed by Yu-Han Chang. It will take an hour of your time. Thanks!
December, 2007: The Future of AI Workshop near Mt. Fuji. Group photo. My summary.
October, 2007: The Wubbles are Here!
June, 2007: With Alex Kacelnik of Pembroke College, Oxford, I am helping to organize an NSF-EUCognition Workshop on Natural and Artificial Cognition.
March, 2006: Happy times: A Festschrift for Edward A. Feigenbaum. Congratulations, Ed!!! My brief talk honoring Ed.