Ram D Sriram - Explorations in Artificial Intelligence: A Personal Journey

11:30
Thursday
20
Sep
2018
  • Séminaire LIG
Place: 
Organized by: 
Ahmed LBATH
Speaker: 
Ram D. Sriram
Ram D. Sriram

 

Ram D. Sriram is currently the chief of the Software and Systems Division, Information Technology Laboratory, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Before joining the Software and Systems Division, Sriram was the leader of the Design and Process group in the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, where he conducted research on standards for interoperability of computer-aided design systems. Prior to joining NIST, he was on the engineering faculty (1986-1994) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was instrumental in setting up the Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory. Sriram has co-authored or authored more than 250 publications, including several books on artificial intelligence.   Sriram was a founding co-editor of the International Journal for AI in Engineering. Sriram received several awards including: an NSF’s Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989); ASME Design Automation Award (2011); ASME CIE Distinguished Service Award (2014); the Washington Academy of Sciences’ Distinguished Career in Engineering Sciences Award (2015); ASME CIE division’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2016); and CMU CEE Lt. Col. Christopher Raible Distinguished Public Service Award (2018).  Sriram is a Fellow of ASME, AAAS, IEEE and Washington Academy of Sciences, a Member (life) of ACM and a Senior Member (life) of AAAI. Sriram has a B.Tech. from IIT, Madras, India, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.x

My first exposure to Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in the summer of 1981, when Carnegie Mellon University was tasked with the development of a knowledge-based expert system (KBES) to aid in the trouble shooting of the Atlanta People Mover. I was a student member of this team and went on to do my dissertation on AI in Design. Later, I joined MIT as an assistant professor (in 1986) and with my students built one of the most comprehensive computational frameworks for Internet-based collaborative design – called DICE. The DICE framework introduced several novel concepts in AI, including an active object-oriented blackboard, constraint satisfaction using asynchronous teams, merging qualitative geometry with traditional modeling, knowledge representation schemes for product and process models, and design rationale. In 1994, I moved to NIST and continued work on knowledge representation for the entire product life cycle until 2010, when I took over as the chief of Software and Systems Division. Here, I have provided technical leadership for several AI projects, which include extending deep learning techniques in biomedical image processing, extracting protein-protein interaction sentences from documents, developing a novel natural language term extraction system based on Sanskrit, and applying Category Theory for AI knowledge representation. In this talk, I will describe my journey over nearly four decades with a particular focus on my recent work at NIST on knowledge representation, machine learning, and natural language processing.