Professor of Computer Science
echown@bowdoin.edu
207-725-3084
Computer Science
Searles Science Building - 221
Eric Chown
As computer science enters the post-PC era, basic computing paradigms are shifting to take advantage of mobile platforms such as phones and tablets. Covers all aspects of programming for mobile devices including development environments, programming languages, the use of touch screens for input, and associated sensors such as accelerometers and GPS. Students engage in a series of introductory projects before taking on a large self-designed term project that highlights the differences between mobile applications and more traditional applications designed for the desktop.
Eric Chown
Robotics is a challenging discipline that encourages students to apply theoretical ideas from a number of different areas—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, operations research—in pursuit of an exciting, practical application: programming robots to do useful tasks. Two of the biggest challenges are building effective models of the world using inaccurate and limited sensors, and using such models for efficient robotic planning and control. Addresses these problems from both a theoretical perspective (computational complexity and algorithm development) and a practical perspective (systems and human/robot interaction) through multiple programming projects involving simulated and actual robots.
Besides teaching computer science courses in artificial intelligence, cognitive architecture, and computer programming, Eric Chown also enjoys researching the learning in humans and machines. Three years ago, he was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Grant that was used to buy specialized robots for his project - "Computational Models of Space in Navigation and Other Domains." Chown has used these robots in several of his classes.
Journals
Chown, E. (1999). Making predictions in an uncertain world: Environmental structure andcognitive maps. Adaptive Behavior, 1-17.
Chown, E., Kaplan, S. & Kortenkamp, D. (1995). Prototypes, Location and AssociativeNetworks (PLAN): Towards a unified theory of cognitive mapping. Cognitive Science., 19, 1-52.
Kaplan, S., Sonntag, M. & Chown, E. (1991) Tracing recurrent activity in cognitive elements(TRACE): A model of temporal dynamics in a cell assembly. Connection Science, 3, 179206.
Highly Refereed Conferences
Chown, E. (2002). Reminiscence and arousal: A connectionist model. To appear in theProceedings of the Twenty Fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Chown, E. & Dietterich, T. G. (2000). A divide and conquer approach to learning from priorknowledge. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, Langley, P. (ed.), Morgan Kauffman, 143-150.
Chown, E., Jones, R.M., & Henninger, A.E. (2002). An architecture for emotional decision-making agents. To appear in the proceedings of The First Annual Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems
Forbell, E., & Chown, E. (2000).Lexical contact during speech perception: A connectionist model. In Proceedings of the Twenty Second Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M. & Chown (2003). Behaviors that emerge from emotion andcognition: Implementation and evaluation of a symbolic-connectionist architecture. To appear in the proceedings of The Second Annual Conference on Autonomous Agents & MultiagentSystem.
Kortenkamp, D. & Chown, E. (1993). A directional spreading activation network for mobilerobot navigation. From Animals to Animats 2, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Meyer, J.-A., Roitblat H. L. and Wilson,S.W. (eds.), MIT-Press.
Book Chapters
Chown, E. & Boots, B. (2005). Learning Cognitive Maps: Finding Useful Structure in an Uncertain World. To appear in Jefferies, M. & Yeap, A. (eds.) Robot and Cognitive Approaches to Spatial Mapping.
Chown, E. (2004) Cognitive Modeling. In Tucker, A. (ed.) Computer Science Handbook. Chapman & Hall.
PDF preprint »
Chown, E. (1999). Error tolerance and generalization in cognitive maps: Performance withoutprecision. In Golledge, R. (ed.) Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes., 349-369 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Commentaries
Chown, E. (1995). Reverberation reconsidered: On the path to cognitive theory. Behavioral andBrain Sciences, 18, 628-629.
Chown, E., Booker, L.B., & Kaplan, S. (2002). Perception, Action Planning, and CognitiveMaps. To appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Chown, E. & Kaplan, S. (1992). Active symbols, limited storage and the power of naturalintelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15:3, 442-443.
Other
Chown, E., Foil, G., Work, H., & Zhuang, Y. (2006). AiboConnect: A simple programming environment for robotics. To appear in The proceedings of the 19th International FLAIRS Conference.
PDF preprint »
Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M. & Chown, E. (2003). Behaviors that emerge from emotion and cognition: Implementation and evaluation of a symbolic-connectionist architecture. To appear in The proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems '03.
PDF preprint »
Chown, E., (2002). Reminiscence and arousal: a connectionist model. In The proceedings of the 24th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 234-239.
PDF preprint »
Chown, E., Jones, R.M., & Henninger, A.E. (2002). An architecture for emotional decision-making agents. In The proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems '02.
PDF preprint »
Jones, R.M., Henninger, A.E., & Chown, E. (2002). Interfacing emotional behavior moderators with intelligent synthetic forces. Proceedings of the 11th Computer Generated Forces and Behavior Representation Conference.
PDF preprint »
Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M. & Chown, E. (2002). Behaviors that emerge from emotion and cognition: A first evaluation. Proceedings of the '02 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Orlando, FL.
PDF preprint »
Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M., & Chown, E. (2001). A symbolic-connectionist framework for representing emotions in computer generated forces. Proceedings of the '01 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Orlando, FL.
PDF preprint »
Chown, E., & Dietterich, T.G. (2000). Learning in the Presence of Prior Knowledge: A Case Study Using Model Calibration. Poscript preprint. In the Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning. P. Langley (ed.). Morgan Kauffman, pp 143-150.
Chown, E. (2000). Gateways: An approach to parsing spatial domains. In ICML-2000 Workshop on Machine Learning of Spatial Knowledge, 1-6.
Jones, R.M., Chown, E., & Henninger, A.E. (2001). A hybrid symbolic-connectionist approachto modeling emotions. In AAAI Fall Symposium Emotional and Intelligent II: The Tangled Knot of Social Cognition. Technical Report FS-01-02. AAAI Press.
Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M., and Chown, E. (2002). Behaviors that emerge from emotion andcognition: A first evaluation. In the Proceedings of Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), 2002. Orlando, FL
Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M., and Chown, E. (2001). Framework for Attention, Cognition andEmotion in Synthetic Forces. In the Proceedings of Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), November 26-29, 2001. Orlando, FL.
Chown, E. (1994). Consolidation and Learning: A Connectionist Model of Human Credit Assignment. Doctoral dissertation. The University of Michigan.
(1999). Fitting Parameters to Ecosystem Models Using Surface Data. 1999 NASA Workshop onData Mining and Data Fusion
(2000). Gateways: An approach to parsing spatial domains. ICML-2000 Workshop on MachineLearning of Spatial Knowledge.
Undergraduate Honors Thesis Supervision
Eric Forbell, Bowdoin College
Anthony Roy, Bowdoin College
Doug Vail, Bowdoin College
Byron Boots, Bowdoin College
Masters Committee Membership
Russ Tedrake, University of Michigan
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