Radu Luchian(ov): Portfolio:
Cognitive Science
"What is my field of study? Knowledge, of course..."
-- Robert Heinlein: To Sail Beyond the Sunset
[posters and presentations][papers][experiments]
I'm into CogSci - and everything else I do - for what I am learning, not for the grades or a career. See the bottom of this page for my plans, and this page for my PhD research plan.
About me: I'm half way through my third year of the 
CogSci Ph.D program at Carleton University. I joined this program hoping to continue my research in human and automated learning, knowledge engineering and human-computer interaction. My goal right now is to bring these three research interests to realization in one of the areas where they intersect: intelligent interfaces (that is, self-optimizing IDEs, electronic tutors/textbooks or [storage,context,time-]optimized knowledge repositories)
My background is rather diverse, since I spent lots of time dabbling in Internet technologies, DTP and Multimedia, Anthropology, Archaeology, Simultaneous and Protocol-based Translation and a smattering of Computer Science theory, [micro]Electronics, Solid Mechanics (with specific applications in Mechanical and Construction Engineering), Physics and Organic Chemistry (the latter two I hope to study more). I hope to find in Cognitive Science the tools to allow me (and anyone else), to access a knowledge horizon wider and more integrated than the average unaided human mind can afford.
It may be obvious already that I'm interested in too many things to list here, so click here for a more detailed list of my interests.
In my opinion, the single most pressing question in Cognitive Science today is the terminological one: convergence in the description of phenomena which would lead to better communication among specialists. But because of the complex interdependencies among the problems our multi-discipline field addresses there's an abundance of paradoxes to avoid and vicious circles to break. There are several challenges on which I'd love to see some real advance:
If I'd have to single out one adjective to describe Cognitive Science, it would be "undefined". There are as many approaches as there are cognitive scientists.
If you use any of this in your research, please: either give me credit specifically, in-text, or use the commercial route
some Posters&Presentations:
- What Happens First? (seminar presentation) Representation paradoxes in (and around) software design.
- Multilingualism and JITF (seminar presentation) one of the aspects of Fast Access, Just-in-Time feedback, made a bit more complex by communication in multicultural environments.
- Fast Access and Multilingualism (student poster) keeping track of problems arising out of developing collaboration tools for people of different cultures (and so-called 'low technical background').
- MonDoc engine demo (presentation) CapCHI meeting March 21, 2002,
- Tracking Experiments Online (presentation, part of Laboratory: Internet Resources in Cognitive Science) 6th International Summer School in Cognitive Science Sofia, NBU, July 12-31, 1999,
- WARPe. Using a MUD as source of decision-making data. (student session poster) 5th International Summer School in Cognitive Science Sofia, NBU, July 13-25, 1998.
For CogSci or CHI projects still on the drawing board, please see my list of current ones. My other portfolios available now are: Generic, WebDesign and Programming.
Some record of my CogSci dabbling that's really accessible now is in some of my on-line commentary pages.
At Carleton there was no research position that I could find (maybe I don't understand their system), so I was stuck with TAing 23.100. I also TAed 95.307 (Scheme and Prolog).
Only two on-line experiments till now:
Here are my Carleton papers, in the order I write them:
- Knowledge as Information, Data and Signals (Proseminar CS680 F2000)
- Concepts in Action (C&C 49.402A F2000)
- Conscious Content (PhiOfCogSci 07.504 F2000)
- How Do I Think? (Proseminar CS680W2001)
- Production Systems: Cognitive architectures or Rational Automata? (ACT-R 49.516 W2001)
- MonDoc: Effective, personalized active-data documents (HCI 40.580M W2001)
- MonTaGe: Expect the Unexpected (PsychComp 07.695 F2001)
- Structural vs. Functional Language (Syntax 07.5917 F2001)
- Linguistics: a situated view (Cognition and Language 07.503 W2003)
- planned (NeuroComp 07.695 W2003?)
- planned (CompSciComp 07.695 W/F2003?)
- planned (Directed Study XX.XXX F2003?)
- planned (Dissertation Prospectus XX.XXX F2003?)
- planned (Dissertation XX.XXX F2004/W2005?)
I was a technical/research assistant in the NBU COGS Research Lab and now I moderate its discussion group.
Two on-line experiments:
- What do we measure in scaling experiments? (PSY201)
- Effects of everyday activity on subjective word frequency (COG505)
Here are my NBU papers, in the order I wrote them:
- The Mind Builder (COG311)
- Human memory, the complex Time axis (COG330)
- Cell and molecular mechanisms of habituation and sensitization (COG303)
- The Communicative Mind (COG422)
- Naming References (COG424)
- When we compound imitation with reasoning (COG408)
- Conscious and Unconscious Errors in the view of an Information Processing Theory of Communication (COG521)
- COGS MoStaCon: usability study for an experiment-design tool (COG699, 903k pdf)