Yolanda Gil
Location: (Los Angeles, CA)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.isi.edu/~gil
Keywords: intelligent user interfaces, knowledge collection from web volunteers, knowledge-rich problem solving, artificial intelligence in social networking sites, semantic web, scientific workflows.
Posted on: Monday, June 1st, 2009
Broad Research Area: AI / Machine Learning / Robotics / Vision, Databases / Information Retrieval / Data Mining, Information Systems / Information Science, Numerical/Scientific Computing / HPC / Data-Intensive Scalable Computing, Scientific/Medical Informatics, Social Computing / Social Informatics, Software Engineering
Research Interests:
My research interest has always been human-computer collaboration, in particular how to assist people in performing complex, knowledge-rich tasks that cannot be fully delegated to a computer program. This raises many research questions: How can people provide a computer with enough knowledge about the task domain and the user’s context to provide adequate assistance? How could we make it easier to provide the knowledge needed? How do we know that the computer understands the knowledge that it is given and can make effective use of it? How can a computer be proactive in asking questions about what it does not know and is needed to improve its behavior? All these questions span a number of research areas including knowledge acquisition (or knowledge capture), intelligent user interfaces, knowledge representation and reasoning, problem solving and decision making, and lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction.
Many of my current projects focus on the knowledge-rich task of scientific data analyses that lead to discoveries. We cast complex analyses as computational workflows, which represent complex compositions of software components and the dataflow among them. Workflow systems can then support scientists by automating low-level aspects of the process, providing detailed records of each analysis and its products, and enabling rapid reuse of software compositions.
Other recent projects focus on information trust, knowledge collection from web volunteers, and learning complex procedures from human tutors.
