| Ashwin Ram | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 27, 1960 New Delhi, India |
| Residence | Atlanta, Georgia, USA |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science |
| Institutions | Georgia Tech, GVU Center, Enkia Corporation, Inquus Corporation |
| Alma mater | Yale University, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Mayo College |
| Doctoral advisor | Roger Schank |
| Doctoral students | Mark Devaney, Anthony Gerald Francis, Kenneth Moorman, Juan Carlos Santamaria, Michael Thomas Cox, Saurav Sahay |
Dr. Ashwin Ram is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing of the Georgia Institute of Technology, 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 is the Director of Georgia Tech's Cognitive Computing Lab. He has founded two Georgia Tech spinoffs, Enkia Corporation www.enkia.com, an artificial intelligence software company, and Inquus Corporation, an e-learning company.
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Dr. 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.
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. Dr. Ram was married to Preetha Ram in 1984. They live in Palo Alto with their three children, Nikhil, Maya, and Naveen.
Dr. Ram currently directs the Cognitive Computing Lab (CCL) at Georgia Tech.Dr. Ram's research interests lie in the areas of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. His current projects 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. He is a member of numerous academic journals and professional societies, including AAAI, and CogSCI.
Dr. Ram is currently conference co-chair of the Fourth Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence IICAI in Tumkur, India in 2009. He was program co-chair of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition AIPR in 2008, conference co-chair of the Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences ICLS in 1998, and program chair and conference co-chair of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society CogSci held at Georgia Tech in 1994.
Dr. Ram is a member of the GVU 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 has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Advanced Research and Development Activity, the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, the Army Research Lab, the Office of Naval Research, the EduTech Institute, Digital Equipment Corporation, Yamaha Motor Corporation, and the Georgia Research Alliance. He has received numerous awards, including College of Computing “gus” Baird Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award, the College of Computing Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award, a National Science Foundation research initiation award, a President of India’s Gold Medal for best undergraduate performance at IIT Delhi, and the Rajiv Bambawale award for best undergraduate final project at IIT Delhi.