October 8, 2004
4-5:00, LH 102

From Document Networks to the Adaptive Web: Applications to Bioinformatics, Social Networks, and Recommendation Systems

Luis Rocha

Abstract:
Human organizations and cognition are undergoing extraordinary transformation with the ubiquitous presence of electronic information resources. Given that we as humans are naturally prone to assimilate technology into our ever evolving cognitive apparatus, we should study and produce tools that can best enhance the human-machine cognitive interplay. Indeed, we need to build systems that can foster the creativity, diversity, and adaptability of our interaction with external knowledge resources.

Towards this goal, in this talk I describe our development of Informatics and Distributed Artificial Intelligence technology to discover, integrate, and recommend relevant items stored in large collections of documents. Our approach is based on the bottom-up methodology of complex systems theory, namely it uses biological metaphors to produce applications that are reactive, adaptive, and evolving. In particular, I will present the three main layers of the Active Recommendation Project: the extraction of co-occurrence (associative) networks from large collections of documents and textual data, the discovery of implicit associations in these networks, and an adaptive architecture which leads the associative networks to adapt to and evolve with the behavior of their users. We refer to these evolving, associative networks as adaptive webs.

Throughout the exposition of the project's several layers, I will present examples of their application in such problems as: knowledge discovery in biomedical databases, analysis of social networks, and recommendation systems for digital libraries.

Biography:
Currently Luis Rocha is an Associate Professor of Informatics, Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science, and a Core Faculty in the Cognitive Science Program at IUB. Between 1997 and 2004 Dr. Rocha was a technical staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory with the Modeling, Algorithms, and Informatics Group where he led the Complex Systems Modeling Research team and focus area. He also directs the Mathematical and Computational Biology Collaboratorium at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia where he is a member of the Computational Biology Steering Committee, which oversees the associated Ph.D. program in computational biology.