Welcome to the Cognitive Computing Lab (CCL) at Indiana University, Bloomington. The lab is directed by Dr. Michael Jones and focuses on computational and experimental studies of language and knowledge representation in humans and machines. We are generally interested in understanding the computational mechanisms used by the human brain to learn, represent, and use environmental information to structure knowledge, as well as how this knowledge degrades. Further, we study how knowledge of human cognitive systems can be used to enhance intelligent machine systems in practical tasks, and how information environments can be optimally structured for humans and machines to work together.
Interest in practical applications is generally directed to algorithms for intelligent search, knowledge abstraction from large textbases, automatic open-question answering, and various AI-based learning technologies.
The CCL is located on the top floor of the Hillcrest Psychology Research Center at 674 East Cottage Grove Avenue (just a few blocks from the Psychology and Informatics buildings). The lab is affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, School of Informatics and Computing, and the Computational Linguistics Program at IU, and with Google Research.
The lab is well equipped with computational and eye-tracking technologies, and is particularly well suited to build and evaluate large-scale computational models of cognition due Indiana's supercomputing resources, most notably Big Red, Libra, and the Quarry cluster.
Our research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Indiana CTSI, and by Google Research.
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LAB NEWS
Updated:3/1/2014March/2014: Sadly, Thomas Landauer passed away March 26th. Tom was a great man and outstanding mentor. His contributions to the field of cognitive science cannot be overestimated. He will be greatly missed. His obituary is here.
Feb/2014: Mike will be leading this year's crosscutting symposium at APS, titled Big Data: Understanding Patterns of Human Behavior.
Jan/2014: "Teaching Computers to Think Like Humans" FABBS interview on the CC Lab's work.
Dec/2013: Mike has been named the new Editor-in-Chief of Behavior Research Methods, effective March 1.
Sept/2013: Lab alumus Brendan Johns is one of the invited speakers at the first Complex Data and Analytics in Medical Research Symposium hosted by HPCVL.
Dec/2012: Mike received the 2012 Early Career Investigator Award from FABBS.
Dec/2012: Congrats to Dr. Gabriel Recchia for successfully defending his dissertation! Off to postdoc at the Institute for Intelligent Systems!
July/2012: Congrats to Dr. Brendan Johns for successfully defending his dissertation! On to postdoc w/ Rich Shiffrin! [party pic] [grad pic]
June/2012: The CCL is part of a mutlisite team with U Colorado, Wash U, UT Austin, and U Mich to win $2.5 million for large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data as part of the NIH Neurotechnology program. Click Here to read the press release.
Feb/2012: Mike was selected as one of five assistant professors across the university to receive the IU Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.
Feb/2012: While I'm pretty sure we don't say any of these things in the paper, it is nice to see that the media has taken an interest in our recent Psyc Review paper. See: Science Daily, io9.com, and my favorite, LifeHacker
Jan/2012: Mike has been appointed the new Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Jan/2012: Lab alumus Dr. Brian Riordan's work on modeling the spread of 'infectious ideas' is featured in Wired's Danger Room
Nov/2011: Congrats to Brent for winning the Castellan Award for Best Student Paper at this year's SCiP conference for his semantic visualization software and paper. The work is now in press at BRM.
July/2011: Congrats to Brendan Johns for winning the Marr Prize for Best Student paper from the Cognitive Science Society [pic]. Also, congrats to Greg Cox for winning the Higher-Level Cognition Modeling Prize [pic], and to incoming Melody Dye for winning the IES Developmental Modeling Prize. Great showing at the 2011 Cognitive Science Conference!
April/2011: Congrats to Melody for winning an NSF Graduate Fellowship....great job, and well deserved!
April/2011: Congrats to Mike who won a very prestigious NSF CAREER award to study models for integrating perceptual and linguistic information. The grant provides $453,674 in funding for the Semantic Pictionary Project and related computational modeling.
April/2011: Congrats to previous lab postdocs Vanessa Taler and Brian Riordan. Vanessa (now at University of Ottawa) just won the Quality of Life Young Investigator Award from the Alzheimer's Society of Canada, and Brian (now at Aptima Inc.) was part of the "Mixed Initiative Machine for Instructed Computing" group winning the best technical achivement award from Aptima.
April/10: Congrats to Greg Cox on winning an NSF Graduate Fellowship, and to Sean Matthews for honorable mention in ths very competitive competition. Great job guys!
Lab News Archive
We will be recruiting undergraduate research assistants for next semester. Click here to see the flyer.
