Cognac.cs.fiu.edu Website Review

How does culture shape our understanding of the world? What makes stories so powerful? How can computation shed light on these questions? Culture surrounds us and affects our behavior and thoughts in ways large and small.  Narratives are everywhere, and we know of no culture or society that does not use it as a fundamental form of communication for activities as diverse as explanation, education, and entertainment. The Cognac lab investigates these and related questions from a computational and cognitive point of view, and the unifying interest of researchers in the lab is the computational modeling of culture, narrative, language, and their interaction with cognition. For the purpose of scope we construe culture in a broad sense, as any set of shared knowledge structures that mold the behavior of a group of people. Researchers in the lab conduct inter-disciplinary research spanning artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and the digital humanities, and use techniques drawn from machine learning, natural language processing, linguistic annotation, knowledge representation, computational inference to tackle key questions in this space, including: How is shared knowledge—commonsense and cultural—represented in language and narrative?  How do people and how can machines extract this shared knowledge from data? And how do we apply these insights to achieve advances in machine intelligence, educational practice, health and medicine, social science theory, and the humanities?  For recent work, current and former students, and more details generally, visit The Cognac Lab is now an internal partner with CREST CACHE at FIU. Deya Banisakher and Joshua Eisenberg (Ph.D. candidates at Cognac) are working on building a system to enhance literature search in the environmental sciences and hydrology domains. This project is an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Distributed Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory, represented by its director, Dr.