Guelph prof is working to make tomorrow's computers more intuitive
BY ANDREW VOWLES
It's all just ones and zeros — and yet it's so much more than that, says computing and information science professor Judi Thomson. “I have a fascination with information or how we can augment efficiency and creativity with something as simple as a bunch of bits. The things we can do with ones and zeros fascinate me.”
Or, at least, what captivates her are the things she hopes to be able to do with tomorrow's successors to those rather clueless laptop and desktop computers now occupying her Reynolds Building office. What the world needs, she says, is a more intuitive computer.
Imagine a laptop that makes educated guesses about your wants and needs — one that understands the context of your online query and can give you, say, 10 likely hits rather than 1,000 dubious ones. That's the idea behind so-called adaptive systems studied by this recently arrived U of G professor.
“It's an application of artificial intelligence techniques,” says Thomson, who's originally from Saskatchewan and came to Guelph in 2004 by way of a government research lab in Washington State.
Suppose you Google the word “Hawaii.” If your computer knew you were planning a trip, it would automatically limit its search to information on flights, hotels and sunscreen brands. If it knew you were completing a Grade 6 project on the state, then it might give you information about landforms and history. Or, identifying you as a university researcher interested in environmental issues, it might direct you to pertinent journal articles. Call it a smarter and less smart-alecky version of Microsoft Office Assistant.
Or call it the “semantic web” — the term used by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee a few years ago. “We want the web to be meaningful, not just navigable,” says Thomson.
Adaptive systems are a relatively new field that draws on artificial intelligence, databases and information theory, even psychology. Not that we're talking about futuristic machines able to carry on a conversation with you, she cautions.
“It's teaching the computer to understand information to support what's needed.”
Thomson says adaptive systems are of interest to governments and to companies looking for better information on their competitors. They're also getting a look from marketing and promotional companies interested in targeting their advertising more closely.
Closer to home, such a system might be useful for tutoring or online learning, roughly akin to a project she helped plan as a student in Saskatoon. The system matches up students with online tutors, based on the computer's knowledge of both.
Thomson grew up in small-town Saskatchewan, where her first exposure to a computer was playing painfully simplistic games on an Apple II Plus her family acquired in 1980.
She completed her computing studies at the University of Saskatchewan, having returned to school after a decade spent as a schoolteacher.
Despite her high-tech field, Thomson doesn't rely on fancy electronic gizmos in the classroom. Instead, she uses time-tested techniques, partly because she thinks students prefer them.
“Students have seen so much. They almost prefer blackboards now. It's almost gone full circle.”
Before coming to Guelph, she worked for the U.S. Department of Energy in Richland, Wash., for four years. There she used computers to mine stores of data for information, a project with echoes in her current work on extracting meaning from amorphous data.
Thomson embraced the chance to return to Canada last year, along with her partner, Chuck Bush, and her two children. She's enjoying her work in a relatively small department: “Everyone's research fits here.”
The family has also found a neat fit in other ways. Longtime martial arts aficionados, she, Chuck and her son, Daniel, attend karate classes three times a week at the Fighting Griffin Martial Arts Club in Guelph.
Thomson, a black belt in tae kwon do, says with a laugh: “It's sort of like a master's degree — you've learned just enough to be dangerous to yourself.” More seriously, she says the discipline helps her develop patience, perceptiveness and self-awareness — qualities that translate readily to the classroom and the lab.
“I like the form, mentally and physically. Martial arts is a form of moving meditation.”
(So, in a sense, is being interviewed. Thomson spends the entire time perched atop an exercise ball: good for maintaining balance and posture, she explains.)
