Dr. John Yen

Interview with Dr. Yen

WMV(66MB) MP4(22M)

Publications

Books

Research Interests and Short Bio:

This is an exciting time to be.  We have seen how the world becomes smaller and “flat” due to internet, Web, and a broad range of information and communication technologies.  While these technologies have enabled us to have access to a large amount of information; getting relevant information to the right people in time remains a challenging problem because we (human) have limited cognitive capacity in processing and interpreting information.  Many research advancements in the academics and innovations in the industry in the 21^st century have (and will continue to) contribute toward developing a comprehensive solution to this problem for a wide range of applications.

One critical piece of this solution, we believe, is the capability to quickly and accurately link what people needs to choose/decide in a rapidly changing environment to what information they need to have.  To achieve this, we need a technology that can understand “the context” of decision-makings, anticipate relevant information requirements from the context, and proactively assist decision making teams in seeking and sharing relevant information.  Toward this vision, our research team (in collaboration with Dr. Mike McNeese) has developed a novel intelligent agent technology, R-CAST, inspired by a cognitive model about human decision-making under time stress, namely Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) developed by Dr. Garry Klein.     Using a computational collaborative RPD model, R-CAST agents to support and collaborate with human decision-making teams as both "smart aids" as well as an "effective teammates" by anticipating, investigating, seeking, and interpreting informatoin relevant to decision-makings. A key feature of R-CAST is that the proactive sharing of information relevant to decision making is automatically generated by the computational RPD model. The formal foundation of this feature, published in an AI Journal article, is an extension of SharedPlans theory, developed by Drs. Barbara Grosz and Sarit Kraus, using semantics of communication acts, developed by Drs. P. R. Cohen and H. J. Levesque. Our current projects include the following:

• Decision Support for Dynamic Target Engagement (sponsor: Office of Naval Research)
• Human-agent collaboration, trust, and learning (collaborator: Dr. Mike McNeese; partner: SA Technologies; sponsor: Army Research Laboratory)
• Agent-based modeling of coordination of NGO's for disaster relief (collaborator: Dr. Carleen Maitland and Dr. Andrea Tapia, sponsor: NSF)

For more information about R-CAST and related research, please visit Laboratory for Intelligent Agents. Below is a shor bio:

Yen received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 1986. His thesis advisor is Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic.  Between 1986 and 1989, he was the main architect at USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) for an AI architecture that pioneers a knowledge-level integration involving semantic-Web knowledge representation technologies. From 1989 to 2001, he was a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Center for Fuzzy Logic, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems at Texas A&M University. He joined Penn State's new information school (i.e., College of Information Sciences and Technology) in 2001, and became Professor-in-Charge from 2003 to 2007. He is currently the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs of the college. Yen was the Vice President of Publication for IEEE Neural Networks Council, now IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.  He received the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992, and is a Fellow of IEEE.  He is currently the Chair of IEEE FIPA Working Group on Human Agent Communications, a Sponsoring co-Chair of AAMAS 2008, and a member of ACM Senior Member Committee.