Research
[Work in progress]Quantum Interaction
Quantum Interaction refers to an emerging field that investigates quantum mechanics (QM) in non-quantum domains such as human language, cognition, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, finance/economics, and social interaction. The Quantum Interaction group can be found here and we also have a wiki.The QM of Semantic Space
Recently a serendipitous and potentially far reaching connection was made: The formalisation of Quantum Mechanics (QM) shows striking similarities to a class of semantic model emerging from cognitive science. Such models have an impressive track record of replicating aspects of human information processing such as word association norms. This project aims to explore this intriguing connection with the goal of producing a new genre of formal and operational models of human sub-symbolic reasoning related to information processing and retrieval. The general thrust of this research is to provide the groundwork for technology which can genuinely and reliably enhance human awareness in complex information environments.
[The above research is funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP077334)]Collaborators:
- Professor S. Malin (Colgate University)
- Professor C.J. (Keith) van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow)
- Professor J. Woods (University of Bristish Columbia)
- Dr. D. Widdows (Google)
- Professors D. Nelson and C. McEvory (University of South Florida)
Web service discovery
Our view of web service discovery is not only concerned with the retrieval of relevant web-based services but also helping the user discover what it is (s)he needs to know in order to close the agenda at hand. Free text documents in service environments provide an untapped source of information for augmenting the epistemic state of the user and hence their ability come to know what it is they need to know. A quantitative approach to semantic knowledge representation is adopted in the form of cognitively motivated semantic space models. Knowledge of the user’s agenda is promoted by associational inferences computed from the semantic space model. These inferences are abductive in nature and are intended to guide the user from fuzzy search goals to a better understanding of the problem space surrounding the given agenda.
[This project is funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage grant (LP0669924)]Error
This project takes the position that the semantics of the information processed in technology should be socio-cognitively motivated. Put crudely, crucial aspects of semantics of information are cognitively situated and evolve and develop in communities. It is assumed that information flow is carried by messages. (Our focus will be unstructured messages, e.g., text). A message is typically presented in order to convey a meaning, that is to create a certain belief state in the presentee (receiver), and it is this meaning that is often used in ongoing processes. For each message, the sender and receivers need to create a joint construal of what the sender is to be taken to mean by it. In a highly dynamic environment, one cannot be sure that this joint construal actually manifests properly, e.g., the agents may be cognitively loaded, or their attention divided. For example, the receiver may be in a state of mind in which the contrast between his knowing that A and his merely thinking that he knows that A is phenomenologically inapparent. This gulf between “knowing” and “thinking we know” can obviously lead to errors, or misunderstandings, which can propagate into ongoing processes. This project will attempt to gain both theoretical and practical insights into these tricky issues...[This research is partially funded by National ICT Australia (Limited)]