Faculty of Arts
Member of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and thereby authorized to supervise theses.
Throughout my research, I have been passionate about how to get machines to reason about information, starting with my Ph.D. thesis (“The Complexity of Automated Reasoning”). My work in logic programming at Bell Northern Research focused on using logic as a knowledge representation language and on an automated method — constraint logic programming — for reasoning about numeric relations on real intervals.
My interest in reasoning about information broadened to email content-analysis at Entrust. I developed systems for drawing inferences about the likely meanings of emails using evidence from terminology and automated classifiers. That technology enables organizations to prevent e-mail extrusion and ensure legislative compliance.
Prior to my appointment at the University of Ottawa, my research at NRC’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) focused on recommender systems for digital libraries, using information about the behaviour of end-users and the patterns of article citations. My more recent interest in the process of harmonizing heterogeneous scientific research datasets is about drawing inferences about commonalities among disparate metadata schemas.
I am also interested in the philosophical and cognitive science aspects of Artificial Intelligence as they pertain to the structural differences between human and machine reasoning.