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Seminar

Exploring autistic reasoning and applying it to multiagent systems

Boris Galitsky
Univ of Girona

Date: Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Location JEC 3117 - 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Abstract:

Autistic subjects are an invaluable source for exploration of human reasoning. Unlike most children, when autistic ones reach verbal age, their reasoning is still rudimentary. They make reasoning mistakes comparable with what software agents do in various domains. Therefore, exploration of foundations of human reasoning becomes possible. We involve autistic children in various interaction scenarios and track their reasoning patterns. The primary focus is reasoning about mental states; we also consider autistic reasoning about actions, induction and deduction, counterfactual and non-monotonic, and time and space. Study of autistic reasoning led to certain models which were evaluated as training exercises. If autistic trainees complete these exercises successfully we conclude that the respective reasoning model's formalism is adequate. We apply the reasoning models to a number of practical problems where simulation of behavior of human and software agents is required, including prediction, recomendation and decision support systems, as well as detecting suspicious behavior.

Bio:

Boris Galitsky has been exploring autistic reasoning for a decade, building software for autistic rehabilitation. He has been working with autistic children in Russia, UK, and USA, teaching them proper reasoning patterns and evaluating how it helps these children in real world behavior. Boris Galitsky received his MS and PhD in Computer Science at the Institute for the Information Transmission Problems in Moscow, Russia, and spent most of his time with Silicon Valley startups after that. Boris was the co-founder and CTO of iAskWeb (now Knowledge-Trail), which has been providing question answering services to major portals like H&R Block, CBS MarketWatch, and GE Finance. Boris has built search technologies for Loglogic and Xoopit (recently sold to Yahoo!) and recommendation engines for IMShopping and Uptake, where he was the Founding Scientist. Boris has multiple patents, over 70 publications and a book on natural language question answering technologies.

Last updated: October 20, 2009