Ashwin Ram, American computer science educator. Recipient Research Initiation award National Science Foundation, Washington, 1990. Member Interat. Conference Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, Cognitive Science Society, American Association Artificial Intelligence.
Background
Ashwin Ram was born in New Delhi, India, on July 27, 1960. He is a great-grandson of Sir Ganga Ram and is the eldest of three children. He grew up in New Delhi with a brief stint in Bombay, and attended one of India"s oldest boarding schools, Mayo College.
Education
He then traveled to the United States, graduating with his Master of Surgery in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Yale University for his dissertation on "Question-Driven Understanding: An Integrated Theory of Story Understanding, Memory, and Learning" in 1989, under advisor Roger Schank.
Career
Known for serving as Chief Innovation Officer at Palo Alto Research Center, he has also published two books and over 100 scientific articles and helped start at least two companies. Ram received his Bachelor of Technology Georgia Technical
He joined the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Technical) in 1989.
He was associate professor in the School of interactive computing in the College of Computing, an associate professor of cognitive science, an adjunct professor in the School of Psychology, and an adjunct professor in math and computer science at Emory University.
In 1995 Ram co-edited (with David B Leake) a book on goal-oriented learning. He co-edited (with Kenneth Moorman) a book on natural language understanding.
Ram founded Enkia Corporation in 1998 (which was purchased by Sentiment360 in 2011). He then co-founded Inquus Corporation, which operates OpenStudy, an online social learning network for students and faculty, and medical information company Cobot Health Corporation.
Ram directed the Cognitive Computing Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology starting around 2006.
He led research in artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence) and cognitive science. His projects focused on Artificial Intelligence for computer games and virtual worlds, consumer health and wellness, and educational technologies. Topics include knowledge-based machine learning, case-based reasoning, cognitive modeling, and natural language processing.
He has more than 100 research publications in these areas.
He was program chair and conference co-chair of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) in 1994, conference co-chair of the Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences (ICLS) in 1998, and program co-chair of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR) in 2008. Palo Alto Research Center
Ashwin Ram became an innovation fellow at Palo Alto Research Center (formerly, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), around September 2011, and then chief innovation officer
His team creates social computing technologies to augment human cognition in application areas including health and wellness. He was program co-chair of the International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) in November 2011, with Nirmalie Wiratunga.
In June 2013, he was interviewed on Australian radio about the trends toward finding medical information on the Internet, and was invited as a keynote speaker at the Amplify Festival.
Membership
Member Interat. Conference Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, Cognitive Science Society, American Association Artificial Intelligence.
Connections
Married Preetha Sarathy, December 27, 1984.