John Gero
Research Professor
George Mason University
A Situated Cognition Approach to Social Modeling of Teams in Complex Systems

Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

Situated cognition, an emerging area of cognitive science, holds that, apart from genetics, cognition is founded on an organism's interactions with its environment, its ability to construct memories, and the structuring of its past experiences into situations that give meaning to what is currently experienced and build expectations of what is being sensed. This seminar develops a set of principles for situated cognition. It then demonstrates the application of those principles through computational social science implementations in areas ranging from individual teams through to team to team interactions in complex systems. Application examples include:

• generating ideas - how team interaction influences the number of ideas generated; and
• teams interacting with ideas or products produced by other teams - how the values teams employ in decision-making are changed by their interactions with ideas/products and other teams.

John Gero is Research Professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study of George Mason University, and was formerly Professor of Design Science and Director, Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney. He is the author/editor of 50 books and over 600 research papers the fields of design science, design computing, artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, design cognition and cognitive science. He has been a Visiting Professor of Architecture, Civil Engineering, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Design and Computation or Mechanical Engineering at MIT, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia and CMU in the USA, at Strathclyde and Loughborough in the UK, at INSA-Lyon and Provence in France and at EPFL-Lausanne in Switzerland.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline LeMoigne

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040