Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science

Artificial intelligence is one of the most promising fields to aid human-computer interaction. Creating methods to give computers the functionality of imitating intelligence by adapting their own responses to information they are given or utilizing machine-learning techniques to expect or anticipate needs has the intended benefit of simplifying human interactions with computers (Dinsmore and Moehle 13). One of the more troubled areas of artificial intelligence is voice recognition. Computers function in specific binary (digital) commands, and human language is laden with ambiguous lexical terms, internal contradictions, cultural references and tonal and inflectional differences. How are artificial intelligences to cope with these complexities to become fluent in human verbal communication? This paper will examine how artificial intelligences cope with tonal and inflectional differences and the absence of a contextual awareness in speech recognition.

Categorization is one of the most essential features of cognition. Categorization is the beginning of meaning and the way in which the result of cognition is stored. There are two basic types of cognitive systems that are capable of categorization, biological and artificial systems. These two types of cognitive systems approach categorization with somewhat different processes and with different levels of proficiency on different types of categorization. There is an obvious difference in the hardware in use for each type of cognitive system, this paper aims to explore the differences that go beyond hardware and also explore some of the similarities.

Group project. Our group interviewed ceramic artists at UNC Charlotte to determine their needs in terms of design changes to systems in their environment. Through our evaluation we discovered that the only difficulty with which we could assist but not interfere in their process was to design a better way to load kilns. We used several design prototypes until ultimately we selected a web-based prototype which could be extended. We took the prototype to our users to get their feedback and they responded positively to our design. This report describes our entire adventure.