4 May 10:00 Eric Baumer: Computational Analysis to Foster Critical Thinking

Eric Baumer from the Informatics Department of UC Irvine, CA, will give a talk on Tuesday 4.5. at 10:00 in Spektri 3rd floor meeting room.

Title: Computational Analysis to Foster Critical Thinking

Abstract: Significant research effort has been devoted to developing data mining techniques and machine learning algorithms for the analysis of large data sets. However, less work has sought to understand how these approaches
may be employed for purposes beyond analysis, especially in the context of user tools. My research examines the development of such computational techniques and their incorporation in tools that focus not solely on analytic tasks or on information extraction, but rather on supporting human thought and reflection. In this talk, I will present work on a tool called metaViz, which identifies potential metaphors in political blogs to encourage critical and creative thinking about those metaphors. This work includes initial ethnographic work on blog readers, the development of a computational technique to identify potential metaphors, the implementation of the metaViz tool, and user studies evaluating its capacity to foster critical thinking. I will conclude be presenting directions for future work, as well as describe how this research suggests an alternative perspective on the relationship between computation and human intelligence.