Welcome to the Homepage of
Gordon Shippey
[ Vision | Bio
| Projects | Publications
| People ]
Left:
My idea of a true learning system (artist's concept). Right:
Me trying to figure out how I'm going to do it.
Heads Up!
With apologies to the film Armageddon, I've set up a countdown timer. It's counting down to the end of 1999. I've committed to finishing my Ph.D. before this clock runs down. If I'm late, the entire WWW will know. Click on the timer to get an update of how my work is progressing.
Research Vision
Building
Human-Level Intelligence From Scratch May Be Impossible, but...
"Catching Fire"
This phrase, "catching fire" is a metaphor for what happens when an
artificial intelligence can learn to learn. This sets up
a powerful feedback loop. The better an artificial intelligence can learn,
the more it can learn, and some of the knowledge it acquires could again
improve its ability to learn, and the cycle repeats. The artificial intelligence
grows and expands, consuming and integrating more and more of the knowledge
around it like a flame consuming fuel, its rate of growth increasing the
more it grows.
Bio
Right now I'm a Ph.D. student at The
AI Lab at Georgia Tech
in the College of Computing.
I received my B.A. in Computer Science / Mathematics and Psychology from
Emory University in 1994, graduating
with Highest Honors. My honors thesis investigated human perception of
the intersection of planes in 3-D space.
Current Research Project
Planning
to Learn
In any realistic learning situation, there are
a near-infinite number of concepts that could be learned. To learn effectively,
an agent must pick and choose which concepts to learn first. Sometimes
learning one concept depends on learning others, e.g., learning to multiply
large numbers requires an understanding of multiplication tables. For this
reason, learning can be viewed as a planning task, and traditional planning
techniques can help an agent create a sequence of actions aimed at learning
a particular concept.
Publications
AlgoNet2
papers from the ONR
Workshop and ICLS
These Are Some People in my Neighborhood
My research advisor and all-around guru. Learned artificial intelligence
directly from Roger Schank. Wrote the AQUA system, which reasons about
typical news stories such as terrorist bombings in the middle east Also
responsible for some small bits of the ubiquitous EMACS text-editor.
Renaissance man. This guy knows something about everything,
from computer science to animal locomotion to web site design. He
does Artificial Intelligence for a living and writes science fiction just
for fun. His current project is NICOLE, which features a very human-like
memory system.
The reading machine. Ken is a big SF fan too (Heinlein in particular).
Has been known to read a lengthy novel in a single day. No big surprise,
then, that his research interests are in natural language. He has just
finished his PhD dissertation on ISAAC, his science-fiction-story-reading
AI system.
The Denny's of research. This guy never stops working (or at
least we've never seen him stop). He studies creativity, focusing on the
discoveries of Alexander Graham Bell.
Gordon Shippey
shippey@cc.gatech.edu
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280