Dr. Ashwin Ram is a Research Fellow at PARC and manager of the Augmented Social Cognition area, focusing on social computing technologies to augmented human cognition. He is on leave as Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Director of Georgia Tech’s Cognitive Computing Lab. He has also been an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology, and an Adjunct Professor in Department of Math & Computer Science at Emory University. He has founded three Georgia Tech spinoffs: Enkia Corporation, an artificial intelligence software company, Inquus Corporation (OpenStudy), an e-learning company, and Cobot Health Corporation, a healthcare information company.

Dr. Ram received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1982, and his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University for his dissertation on “Question-Driven Understanding: An Integrated Theory of Story Understanding, Memory, and Learning” in 1989. ACADEMIC GENEALOGY

Dr. Ram’s research interests lie in the areas of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, combining fundamental research with an emphasis on real-world problems. His current focus on AI for computer games and virtual worlds, healthcare informatics, and educational technologies. The research emphasis is on knowledge-based machine learning, case-based reasoning, cognitive modeling, and natural language processing. He has more than 100 research publications in these areas. He is a co-editor of a book on Goal-Driven Learning and a book on Understanding Language Understanding: Computational Models of Reading, both published by MIT Press.

Dr. Ram is a member of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center, the Human-Centered Computing program, the Intelligent Systems and Cognitive Science groups, the Robotics & Intelligent Machines center, and the Health Systems Institute.

Dr. Ram’s research is/has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research (AFOSR), the Army Research Lab (ARL), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the EduTech Institute, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Yamaha Motor Corporation, and the Georgia Research Alliance.