Reader in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence
Department of Informatics
School of Science and Technology
University of Sussex
Member of the Representation and Cognition group
My Informatics profile web page
Research Interests
- Human reasoning/problem solving (esp. with external representations)
- Clinical reasoning (eg. diagnostic reasoning)
- A.I. in education/interactive learning environments
- Individual differences
Research activity/projects
Interactive learning environments
- PATSy is a web-based multimedia database shell that makes 'virtual patients' available to trainees, educators, clinicians and researchers in various clinical professions and cognate academic disciplines. It is used by around 30 UK university departments. The case content represented includes developmental reading disorders, neuropsychology, neurology/medical rehabilitation and speech and language pathologies.
- A PATSy-related project on Vicarious Learning began in June 2004: Vicarious Learning and Case-Based Teaching of Clinical Reasoning Skills, funded under Phase III of the ESRC's TLRP programme. Here is a press release. The project's website can be found at www.vicarious.ac.uk
- I am currently an Advisory Group member of the ESRC TLRP-Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) Programme
- I am also an international affiliate of the Openproof logic education software project at Stanford. One of our activities is the educational data mining of an extremely large dataset (1.8 million student submissions to an online grading system). We have published papers at CogSci08 and Diagrams08 (see Publications). In connection with this work I was recently awarded a joint US Social Science Research Council/UK ESRC Visiting Americas Fellowship.
Diagrammatic reasoning
- Some of my research has looked at how people select, construct and use external representations (eg. diagrams) in their solutions to problems such as constraint satisfaction puzzles and in systems (eg switchERII) that support those activities
- An EPSRC-funded project is studying how external representations are used by students learning to program in Java CRUSADE - Coordination of multiple external Representations in program UnderStAnding and DEbugging (with Ben du Boulay, Rudi Lutz and Pablo Romero)
- I was Program Chair for the Diagrams 2006 Conference which was held at Stanford University, June 28-30. and I currently serve on the steering committee of the the international conferences on the theory and application of diagrams.
Publications
Teaching
- Psychological methods for system evaluation (Human-Centred Computer Systems MSc)
- Solving Real-World Problems (Cognitive Science Interdisciplinary Program)
- Knowledge Engineering (CSAI)
- Research Methods in CSAI (DPhil, MRes)
- Interactive Learning Environments (u/g, MSc, DPhil)
- Multimedia Systems (MSc)
DPhil/PhD supervision
- Beate Grawemeyer: AIVE- User-adaptive information visualisation for information retrieval
- Evgenia Vagianou: Enhancing computer science students' learning of algorithmics
- Grecia Garcia Garcia who is studying External representations in the UK National Curriculum, children's comprehension of diagrams
- Marina Casarino: Computer-supported diagramming for supporting maths students
Previous posts, past projects...
From 1991 to 1998 I was a member of the Graphics and Language Working Group at HCRC, University of Edinburgh. I was also a member of the Edinburgh AI in Education group. I maintain links with Edinburgh as an Honorary Fellow in the Division of Informatics.
