Research Interests

What makes a person creative?  Why are some people considered to be creative, while others are simply imitators of what goes on around them?   How do people learn from reading?  Can you learn from reading fiction or does it have to be "scholarly" works?   When you read, how does your memory pull-up the concepts which are necessary for the comprehension of the material?  What if you do not have all of the needed concepts?  How far do you hurl the book across the room as a result?  If you do succeed in the reading process, how does anyone else know that you have comprehended the material?

These questions and other related ones represent the nexus of my research.  I call it creative understanding.   Creative understanding is the ability which we humans seem to possess that allows us to read a text with unfamiliar concepts and to comprehend the material.   It is the aspect of comprehension which allows the understanding of novel concepts to occur.

The theory of creative understanding is embodied in a computer model known as ISAAC.   ISAAC reads "short-short" science fiction stories without being given all of the necessary background information.   Afterwards, it is possible to evaluate ISAAC's level of comprehension and to determine if he was able to create the concepts which were required without creating bizarre concepts which served no purpose.

The subareas of my research include:

• Natural language understanding
• Creativity
• Reading
• Memory retrieval
• Explanation
• Ontology
• Emotional intelligence

In recent years, my research has shifted to explore the relationship between reading and navigation. It is interesting that the hippocampus is used for navigation in mammels, but has been repurposed in humans to be the seat of episodic memory, a mental element crucial to story understanding. It is also interesting to realize that early stories were driven by the need for navigation.

In addition to my primary focus, I have several other interests in research.

• Computational modeling of the mammalian auditory system
• Intelligent web browsing: Been a goal of a lot of people for a lot of time---how to make web searching more intelligent
• Tracking system (BJ McCreary): Store information regarding your location, interests, etc. and allows you to interact with the web via a natural language interace
• Intelligent spelling correction (with Becca Abney): Analyze misspelled words by taking into account key positions and the possibility of simply hitting the wrong key.
• The reverse dictionary: Type in a description of a concept and the system will give you the word.
• Small-scale robotics: Using Lego Mindstorms to teach robotics at the undergraduate level

Click here for my list of publications.