Summer is conference season, and College of Computing members are truly around the world and across the continent sharing their research at gatherings.

Right here in Atlanta, Interactive Computing professors Ashok Goel and Mark Riedl are co-chairing the 3rd Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems. The conference runs through Saturday in TSRB.

The goal of Advances in Cognitive Systems is to bring together researchers with a focus on high-level cognition and decision making; rich, structured representations; a systems-level perspective; use of heuristics to handle complexity, and incorporation of insights about human thinking. The meeting provides a venue for the original, yet unanswered, question of Artificial Intelligence: how do we create computational artifacts that will supply a broad range of human cognitive abilities? The conference seeks to address some of the original problems of artificial intelligence through modern techniques.

“We are entering a new golden age of artificial intelligence, one driven by exciting near-term, but incremental applications,” Riedl says. “We are trying to be inclusive of researchers working on near-term challenges as well as pursuing longer-term visions of what artificial intelligence can achieve.”

Other organizations and universities in attendance included: Carnegie Mellon, Naval Research Laboratory, Northwestern University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Also participating from Georgia Tech were GTRI and GVU. Sponsors included National Science Foundation and Microsoft.