Greetings,
I'm John Josephson research scientist in the Laboratory for Artificial
Intelligence Research in the Computer and Information Science
Department at Ohio State. I'm looking for a good research problem
with certain characteristics.
Background:
I recently finished editing/authoring a book:
Josephson, J. R., & Josephson, S. G. (Eds.). (1994). Abductive
Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology. New York: Cambridge
University press.
Abduction is inference to the best explanation, a pattern of reasoning
that occurs in such diverse places as medical diagnosis, scientific
theory formation, accident investigation, language understanding, and
jury deliberation. My technical work on abduction has centered on
building knowledge-based systems that perform abductions, especially
for problems where what is needed is to build up and criticize
composite explanatory hypotheses. I have been working mainly with
medical diagnosis, medical test interpretation, and speech recognition
(which I treat as layered abduction).
Present:
Now I want to find a good scientific problem in which to work on
"semi-automated theory formation" a.k.a. "knowledge discovery in
scientific databases" a.k.a. "robot science." I prefer working in
bio-med somewhere, and more specifically on the biology of aging.
I'm in the process of preparing a proposal to the Nat'l Library of
Medicine in which I do not expect to have chosen the precise
biomedical problem before I submit the proposal. (This may be a long
shot for funding, but maybe not, and in any case this will be just the
first attempt). I will propose that an early phase of the research
will identify a small set of problems that offer the most promise for
making a genuinely new discovery by making significant use of
automated reasoning and online databases. To be credible, my proposal
must provide for advice and consultation with one or more "domain
experts."
I invite email communication from potential advisors to this project
with strong biomed credentials, and from anyone who has a good idea
for a specific problem which seems ripe for high-level computational
assistance.
Sincerely,
John Josephson
Research Scientist, Associate Director,
Laboratory for AI Research (LAIR)
Department of Computer and Information Science
The Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio
web: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~jj/
