Researchers in the artificial intelligence group are focused on developing intelligent computer systems, particularly those related to health informatics, game design, and robotics. The areas they examine include the perception of natural terrain and 3D foot placement in robotics; natural language processing in law and biology; the use of relational agents in health monitoring systems, computational sensing; user interfaces for preventive medicine; machine learning in intrusion detection; the analysis of MRI scans; recognition of emotion in speech; and models to map different writing styles and languages into common representations. Northeastern’s robotics group takes a computational approach to advancing robotics. Research projects range from system-level control of articulated robots with fifty or more joints to mesoscale issues in compliant actuation and reliable sensing.
Members of the group regularly collaborate with researchers in other fields, including biology, psychology, health sciences, art and design, and law. They also work closely with their College of Computer and Information Science colleagues involved with information retrieval, data mining, and human–computer interaction.
Team Achievements
- Created an animated virtual nurse that educates hospital patients about their health conditions and post-discharge self-care, encourages people to exercise and take their medications as prescribed, and uses natural language processing to simulate face-to-face conversations between patients and health professionals
- Developed legal ontologies to support legal planning and document drafting systems
- Created relational agents developed using technology testbeds for human–machine dialogs
- Developed new artificial intelligence models of agent behavior and scalable probabilistic frameworks for behavior modeling to address problems in security policy, international conflict, and international development
- Created multi-agent systems used for interactive narratives and game environments
- Developed tools to characterize and extract knowledge from biomedical literature
- Developed operator interface for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission
- Recognized with NASA Software of the Year Award for 2004
- Awarded grants from DARPA and other federal agencies to develop models to map different writing styles and languages into common representations
- Serving as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Computers in Entertainment, and the International Journal on Entertainment Computing
- Served as lead designer for Endless Web, an experimental game that tightly integrates procedural content generation into both game mechanics and aesthetics
