Human-Like Computational Reasoning: Diagrams and Other Representations

Abstract

In this chapter I give a personal account of my experience in Alan Bundy's DReaM group in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh between the years of 1995 and 1998. Of course, the impact of this experience has been profound and long-lasting to this day. The culture and the nature of research work, the collaborations, the interests and the connections have endured, evolved and multiplied throughout this time. My own work in the DReaM group started by investigating human "informal" reasoning and formalising it in a diagrammatic theorem prover. After leaving Edinburgh, this work naturally evolved into combining diagrams with other representations in a uniform framework, as well as applying visual representations in other domains, such as reasoning with ontologies. But one of the fundamental questions remained unanswered, namely, how do we choose the right representation of a problem and for a particular user in the first place?1 The DReaM research environment Few factors influence a researcher's ethos regarding their work more than where and with whom they did their PhD project. I arrived to Alan Bundy's DReaM research group in the autumn of 1995, fresh from finishing a post-graduate Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. This was not exactly planned: I actually applied to do a PhD in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of Edinburgh. I was interested in humans, not machines. But given that I was a mathematician by my undergraduate degree and that I just finished a post-graduate degree in Computer Science, my application made it to Alan Bundy in the Department of Artificial Intelligence. I am so glad for this serendipity, because the privilege has been immeasurable.