B. Chandrasekaran
Professor Emeritus, Senior Research Scientist
How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?
William Blake
Professional Data
Effective
My retirement plans: No retirement. Full-time research. Retirement has reduced the number of excuses I have for not implementing my writing plans.
My address, etc.
Email: chandra@cse.ohio-state.edu
Office: 591 Dreese Lab
Phone: (614) 292-0923 (has answering machine)
Mail:
Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
Department of Computer and Information Science
395 Dreese Lab
2015 Neil Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1277 USA
Fax: (614) 292-2911 (CSE) (Make sure my name is written prominently
on the front page as the recipient.)
Home:
Directions to my house: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~chandra/Directions-to-2053-Iuka-Ave.htm
My CV: Click here for my CV.
AI-interested
applicants to Graduate Programs, please click here for information before writing
to me
My Research
Interests
Primarily, my research interest is in understanding intelligence from a computational perspective. I am particularly interested in intelligence as expressed in high-level cognitive activities such as problem solving, understanding, and explanation.
The LAIR research team has concentrated its efforts on creating theories about intelligence, in addition to building socially, technologically useful tools which embody these theories. We have been analyzing diagnostic and design tasks, which in turn, have led us to a study of how causal processes are understood and used. I have also begun research in how visual representations are used during problem solving. All this research is done in various real-world domains; engineering and medicine provide us with most of our challenges.
Selected Recent
Publications
My recent focus has been mostly on issues related to diagrammatic reasoning. See the section below on this topic. I have also been doing quite a bit of work experimenting with use of our Seeker-Filter-Viewer architecture for multi-criterial decision-making, specifically for Course of Action planning and as a data mining tool to understand a decision space. See the section below on this topic.
Click here for a selected list of past publications by me and co-authors, organized by subject.
The following recent papers/drafts can be downloaded. Comments are solicited. They are either in Acrobat or Postscript form as indicated.
Diagrammatic Representation
Click Diagrammatic Reasoning to look at a description of a recent book that I co-edited.
B. Chandrasekaran, Diagrammatic
Representation and Reasoning: Some Distinctions, an invited paper presented
at the AAAI Fall 97 Symposium Series, Diagrammatic Reasoning,
B. Chandrasekaran, Multimodal Perceptual Representations and Design Problem Solving, an invited paper to be presented at VISUAL AND SPATIAL REASONING IN DESIGN: COMPUTATIONAL AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES, 15-17 June 1999, MIT, Cambridge, USA.
Multimodal
Representations as the Basis of Cognitive Architecture, a talk I gave
at the Cognitive Science Colloquium Series at Georgia Tech on
B. Chandrasekaran, "Multimodal Representations as Basis for Cognitive Architecture: Making Perception More Central to Intelligent Behavior," in Intelligent Information Processing, Mark Musen, Bernd Neumann, & Rudi Studer, Eds., IFIP International Federation for Information Processing Series, Vol. 93. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp: 13-16, 2002. ISBN 1-4020-7171-X.
B. Chandrasekaran, John R. Josephson, Bonny Banerjee, Unmesh Kurup and Robert
Winkler, "DIAGRAMMATIC
REASONING IN SUPPORT OF SITUATION UNDERSTANDING AND PLANNING,"
Proceedings of Army Science Conference, Dec 2002, Orlando, FL.
"What does it mean for a computer to do diagrammatic reasoning?," keynote talk given at the Diagrammatic Reasoning 2002 Conference, Callaway Gardens, GA, April 18, 2002.
B. Chandrasekaran, John R. Josephson, Bonny Banerjee, Unmesh Kurup and Robert Winkler, "DIAGRAMMATIC REASONING IN SUPPORT OF SITUATION UNDERSTANDING AND PLANNING," Proceedings of Army Science Conference, Dec 2002, Orlando, FL.
B.
Chandrasekaran, Unmesh Kurup, Bonny Banerjee, John R. Josephson and Robert Winkler, “An
Architecture for
Problem Solving with Diagrams,” in Diagrammatic Representation and Inference, Alan Blackwell, Kim Marriott and Atsushi Shomojima, Editors, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2980, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2004, pp. 151-165.
This is a talk which I gave at the Pavia Model-Based Reasoning Conference in December 2004: Diagrams as Models: An Architecture for Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning. This talk includes an interesting application of DR for entity-reidentification.
B.
Chandrasekaran, What
Makes a Bunch of Marks a Diagrammatic Representation, and another Bunch a
Sentential Representation?, Proc. AAAI Spring Symposium
2005, Reasoning with Mental and External Diagrams: Computational
Modeling and Spatial Assistance.
B. Chandrasekaran, Unmesh Kurup and Bonny Banerjee, A
Diagrammatic Reasoning Architecture: Design, Implementation and Experiments,
Proc. AAAI Spring Symposium 2005, Reasoning with Mental
and External Diagrams: Computational Modeling and Spatial Assistance.
B. Chandrasekaran, "Multimodal Cognitive Architecture: Making Perception More Central to Intelligent Behavior," Proceedings of the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2006, pp. 1508-1512.
Decision Support Systems
Architecture for Multi-Criterial Decision Assistance
We developed an architecture for multi-criterial decision assistance, which was first applied to exploring large design spaces -- see paper by Josephson et al, in the section on Design. But, the recent emphasis has been on other decision problems such as planning. Here is a recent paper.
Richard Kaste, Janet O’May, Eric Heilman, B. Chandrasekaran and John Josephson, FROM SIMULATION TO INSIGHTS: EXPERIMENTS IN THE USE OF A MULTI-CRITERIAL VIEWER TO DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING OF THE COA SPACE, Proceedings of US Army Research Laboratories Collaborative Technology Alliances Symposium, April 29-May 1, 2003, University of Maryland Conference Center, College Park, MD.
There is an in-principle gap between simulation models and reality. This suggests that the real challenge is not optimal decisions as much as robust decisions, robust in the face of deep uncertainties, Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” Here’s a white paper on how one might think about these issues: B. Chandrasekaran, From Optimal to Robust COAs: Challenges in Providing Integrated Decision Support for Simulation-Based COA Planning, A White Paper, Feb 2005.
“Decision-Making and the Cognitive Architecture of Problem Solving,” Keynote Talk, First IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM 2007), Honolulu, HI, April 3, 2007.
Cognitive Science/AI Foundations
B. Chandrasekaran, and Susan G. Josephson, "Separability Hypothesis," (pdf), draft of paper arguing that AI is better off to have as its working hypothesis that it is concerned only with cognitive functions rather than accounting also for subjectivity and consciousness.
Task Structures, Ontologies
B. Chandrasekaran, Generic tasks in knowledge-based reasoning: High-level building blocks for expert systems design, IEEE Expert, 1, 3, 23-30, 1986.
Johnson, T. R., Smith, J. W., and Chandrasekaran, B. (1992). Task-specific architectures for flexible systems. In P. S. Rosenbloom, J. E. Laird, & A. Newell (Eds.), The Soar Papers: Research on Integrated Intelligence. The MIT Press.
B. Chandrasekaran, T. Johnson, and J.W. Smith, "Task Structure Analysis for Knowledge Modeling," Communications of the ACM , Vol. 33, No. 9, September 1992, pp. 124-136; anthologized in Knowledge Oriented Software Design, ed., J. Cuena, North-Holland (Amsterdam), 1993, pp. 1-22.
Chandrasekaran, B. & Johnson,
T. R. (1993). Generic
tasks and task structures: History, critique and new directions. In J.-M. David, J.-P. Krivine, & R.
Simmons (Ed.), Second Generation Expert Systems (pp. 232-272). Berlin:
Springer-Verlag.
B. Chandrasekaran, "Intelligent Control at the Knowledge Level," (Acrobat) which was presented at the 1994 AAAI Fall Symposium. This paper seeks to answer the question, "What is common as a task between the thermostat and Allen Greenspan, both of them engaged in the task commonly called 'control'?" The paper is really pretty schematic and awaits a longer treatment.
B. Chandrasekaran , J. R. Josephson and V. R. Benjamins, "Ontology
of Tasks and Methods," (Acrobat), 1998
Functional Representation
B. Chandrasekaran and John R. Josephson, "Function in Device Representation," Engineering with Computers, Special Issue on Computer Aided Engineering, (2000) 16:162-177. In this paper, we finally got a chance to set down a whole bunch of ideas on device representation, especially on how to be clear about what one means by terms such as structure, behavior and function. We also relate how devices arise in response to needs in the world, and how needs are transformed into device functions. This builds on our earlier paper on "Representing Function as Effect" (see below), and makes connections with the earlier FR work.
B. Chandrasekaran and J. R. Josephson "Representing
Function as Effect", (Acrobat) Preprint of paper presented at AAAI-96
Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning about Function,
B. Chandrasekaran, and H. Kaindl, "Representing
Functional Requirements and User-System Interactions," (Acrobat)
Preprint of paper presented at AAAI-96 Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning about
Function,
Design
B. Chandrasekaran, "Design Problem Solving: A Task Analysis," AI Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 4, Winter 1990, pp. 59-71. Also appears (in Japanese), Nikkei Artificial Intelligence Quarterly , Summer 1991, pp. 142-154, and anthologized in Knowledge Aided Design, M. Green, ed., Academic Press, London, 1992, pp. 25-46.
John R. Josephson , B. Chandrasekaran , Mark Carroll , Naresh Iyer, Bryon Wasacz, Giorgio Rizzoni , Qingyuan Li , David A. Erb, An Architecture for Exploring Large Design Spaces, Proc AAAI-98. This paper is a product of research under a recent DARPA project.
See the paper Multimodal Perceptual Representations and Design Problem Solving listed in the Diagrammatic Representation section above.
The S-F-V Multi-Criterial Decision Architecture
It was first applied to exploring large design spaces, see paper by Josephson et al, in the section on Design. But, the recent emphasis has been on other decision problems such as planning. Here is a recent paper.
Richard Kaste, Janet O’May, Eric Heilman, B. Chandrasekaran and John Josephson, FROM SIMULATION TO INSIGHTS: EXPERIMENTS IN THE USE OF A MULTI-CRITERIAL VIEWER TO DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING OF THE COA SPACE, Proceedings of US Army Research Laboratories Collaborative Technology Alliances Symposium, April 29-May 1, 2003, University of Maryland Conference Center, College Park, MD.
Cognitive Modeling for Simulation
B. Chandrasekaran and John R. Josephson, Cognitive Modeling For Simulation Goals: A Research Strategy for Computer-Generated Forces, presented at the 8th Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, 11-13 May 1999, Orlando, FL. This paper argues that fidelity considerations are closely connected to the goals for which the simulation is intended, that current research often pursues fidelity independent of the task, and that there is a need to develop a systematic body of knowledge relating simulation tasks to the degree of fidelity required of the models. The arguments make use of our earlier work on generic tasks and task structures.
Current Research
Grants
I am currently one of PIs of the following research project: Army Research Labs Advanced Decision Architectures Collaborative Technology Alliance. This is an alliance between ARL and a consortium of universities and industrial organizations to advance the state of the art in decision assistance for Army decision makers. I am the technical lead for one of technical areas. Army decision making is rich with examples of problems LAIR is or has been active in: planning, multi-criterial decision making, diagrammatic reasoning, and abductive inference.
Some Other Activities
I am on the editorial board of a number of journals, one of which is
The Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence
Personal Data
Professor Sandra Mamrak, also in CIS at OSU, is my wife. In this picture, our daughter, Mallika, is seen with her mother in the Yellow Mountain Region of China where we were on a visit in May 1995.
