Tatiana Gavrilova

“ Ontologies for teaching and learning "

Friday, January 21, 2005
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Room 404, IS Building

You are invited to meet the speaker before the talk
from 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM in the Large Commons Room of the IS Building

Abstract: The talk presents one approach aimed at understanding and mapping human knowledge and developing teaching strategies based on the principles of knowledge engineering. The research framework is targeted on the development of methodology and related technology that will scaffold the process of knowledge structuring both for research and teaching.

The structuring procedure is aimed at ontology development. Ontologies or conceptual models  that describe the main concepts of exemplar domains are used  for better understanding, knowledge sharing and assessment. Special stress is put on visual design as a powerful learning mindtool.

The examples are taken from the courses on the foundations of artificial intelligence and intelligent systems development. These courses are delivered by the author at St.Petersburg State Polytechnical University in the School of Computer Science.

Biography: Prof. Dr. Tatiana Gavrilova is full professor at Intelligent Computer Technologies Department in St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, head of Intelligent Systems Lab at Institute for High Performance Computing and Data Bases. Also she works as a consultant on information technologies in BAE consulting company in St. Petersburg. In 1986 she got PhD in Computer Science at St. Petersburg State Technical University, and in 1996 was awarded a Doctor of Science Diploma (habilitation) in the same university. She is Head of St. Petersburg Division of Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence (RAAI), member of the Board of Russian Association for AI, member of Petersburg Scientific Union. Dr. Gavrilova has published over 100 journal articles and conference papers (45 in English), she is the author of 3 books, one of which if first Russian text-book on AI and knowledge engineering for universities. For her work she received first prize for fundamental studies in 1994 from RAAI. Dr.Gavrilova  was lecturing in Warsaw First Independent University and Gdansk Polytechnic University (both in Poland), Juvyaskyla University ( Finland ), Tartu University ( Estonia) as  a visiting professor.

After a period of expert system research and teaching, Dr.Gavrilova has worked in the broad field of the theory and applications of knowledge engineering technology to support knowledge base design and development of intelligent tutoring systems and knowledge management. She has coordinated a number of large research projects in Artificial Intelligence for Russian Foundation of Basic Research and International Science Foundation. She took part in many international conferences  on AI and education as a member of programme committees and as a referee.

In 1998 she has been Fulbright Visiting Senior Research Scholar in Pennsylvania State University, and now she is a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer in University of Pittsburgh in School of Information Sciences with course on knowledge engineering. Her recent research has been focused on methodologies and tools to support knowledge acquisition and ontology design and, more fundamentally, on formalisms for visual informal knowledge structuring and mapping.