Professor Ashok K. Goel

Ashok K. Goel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is Director of the School’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory and a Co-Director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design. He is affiliated with the GVU Center, the RIM Center, the HSI Center. He is a Co-Coordinator of the School of Interactive Computing faculty consortium on Creativity, Learning & Cognition, and a Co-Coordinator of the Georgia Tech interdisciplinary faculty consortium on Creativity, Cognition, & Computation.
 
Ashok conducts research into artificial intelligence and cognitive science, with a focus on computational design, modeling, and creativity. The goals of his research are to model human creativity in practical tasks such as conceptual modeling and design of complex systems and to develop interactive tools for aiding people in creative tasks. His research posits analogical reasoning, visual reasoning, and meta-reasoning as fundamental processes of creativity.
 
Current projects explore analogical reasoning in biologically inspired engineering design, visual reasoning on intelligence tests, meta-reasoning in self-adaptive game-playing agents, and Ashok also conducts research into learning science and technology, with a focus on learning about complex systems. learning about ecological systems in middle school science and about biological systems in interdisciplinary education in biologically inspired design.
 
Each fall term, Ashok typically teaches the undergraduate course CS 4635 and the graduate course CS 7637 on Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. In the spring term of alternative years, he teaches the interdisciplinary graduate course CS 6795 Cognitive Science, and CS 4610/CS 7615 on Modeling and Design that covers computational design, modeling and creativity. In Spring 2013, he will co-teach a new interdisciplinary course for Georgia Tech freshmen on Inventing.
 
Ashok was Chair of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition held at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in November 2011, and Co-Chair of the NSF Workshop on Bioinspired Design held at DCC 2012 in June 2012. He is a member of the organizing committee of the First International Conference on Cognitive Systems to be held in California in December 2012, and a member of program committees of several conferences, workshops, and symposia in 2012, including the Thirty Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2011). In 2012, he gave invited talks to the NSF Workshop on Design Knowledge Modeling, and the Sixth Biomimicry Education Summit.
 
He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Intelligent Systems, ASME Transactions: Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering (JCISE), Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), and the journal Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (Elsevier). He also serves on the editorial boards of AAAI’s AI Magazine, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI), Advanced Engineering Informatics (AEI), and the new journal Design Creativity and Innovation (Taylor & Francis). Along with Robert Stone and Daniel McAdams, Ashok is presently coediting a volume on “BioInspired Design: Computational Methods and Tools” that will be published by Springer later this year.
 
Ashok serves on the Board of the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute and the Bioinspired! digital magazine. He is a life member of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the ACM, IEEE, ASME, the Cognitive Science Society and the Design Society SIG on Design Creativity.
 
Watch Biologically Inspired Design, Ashok Goel.