Janet Burge |
Research Interests
My primary research has been in the area of Design Rationale (DR): the reasons behind making design decisions. Design Rationale differs from other forms of design documentation because it captures not only what the designer developed as a final product but also captures the reasoning behind their choices and any alternatives that were considered and rejected. DR is considered a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence in Design because it is both a Knowledge Representation problem and because AI techniques can be used in the capture and use of the rationale.
I am currently working on two related DR projects that both focus on how rationale could be used. One is the continuation of my work on the Software Engineering Using RATionale (SEURAT) system. SEURAT uses rationale to assist in software maintenance by allowing maintainers to assess the impact of changing requirements, constraints, and assumptions on an existing software system by inferencing over the previously captured rationale. SEURAT currently focuses on rationale associated with the code but is being extended to allow rationale to be associated with other development artifacts (such as design models). The other DR-based project, which I am working on with several colleagues in the Computer Science and Systems Analysis department, is Ontology-based Rationale for Collaborative Argumentation (ORCA). ORCA looks at rationale for Engineering Design and how that rationale can be used to both support design collaboration and evaluation of design decisions. The two projects, ORCA and SEURAT, are complementary since they share the same rationale representation and inference engine.
More information on SEURAT can be found in my dissertation and defense presentation. An example of SEURAT in action is also available in PDF form. A word file giving the screen shots may be helpful since the conversion to PDF loses much needed resolution. My PhD advisor was Dave Brown. My PhD committee members were George Heineman and Carolina Ruiz. and external member Feniosky Pena-Mora, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
My Master's thesis was on Knowledge Elicitation. This involved building the Design Ordering Elicitation System (DOES), a Java application used to do web-based knowledge elicitation to determine the ordering of design subproblems using a combination of direct and indirect knowledge elicitation techniques.
I have also worked on several SBIR projects that involved applying different AI techniques to decision support systems. Most of this work was in using genetic algorithms for battle planning, enemy action prediction, and rapid replanning. Other areas of interest are Knowledge Elicitation (techniques for obtaining implicit and explicit knowledge from domain experts) and Human Computer Interaction. This work was performed at Charles River Analytics.
Design Rationale Publications:
J. Burge, D.C. Brown, “ Reasoning with Design Rationale”, Artificial Intelligence in Design ‘00, J. Gero (ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 2000, pp. 611-629
J. Burge, "Design Rationale for Software Maintenance", Doctoral Symposium Abstract: Automated Software Engineering, Coronado CA, 2001.
J. Burge, D. C. Brown, "Integrating Design Rationale with a Process Model", Workshop on Design Process Modelling, Artificial Intelligence in Design '02, Cambridge, UK, 2002.
J. Burge, D.C. Brown, "Rationale Support for Maintenance of Large Scale Systems", Workshop on Evolution of Large-Scale Industrial Software Applications (ELISA), ICSM '03, Amsterdam, NL, 2003.
J. Burge, D.C. Brown, "An Integrated Approach for Software Design Checking Using Rationale", Design Computing and Cognition '04, J. Gero (Ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 2004, pp. 557-576
J. Burge, D.C. Brown, "Rationale-based Support for Software Maintenance", Rationale Management in Software Engineering, A. Dutoit, R. McCall, I. Mistrik, and B. Paech, Springer, 2006.
Technical Reports:
J. Burge, and D. C. Brown, " NFRs: Fact or Fiction", Computer Science Technical Report, Worcester Polytechnic University, WPI-CS-TR-02-01, 2002.
J. Burge, and D. C. Brown, "Discovering a Research Agenda for Using Design Rationale in Software Maintenance", Computer Science Technical Report, Worcester Polytechnic University, WPI-CS-TR-02-03, 2002.
Other Publications (available from Charles River Analytics):
Burge, J., Gonsalves, P., and Call, C. (2005) “Integrated Belief Network-based Situation Awareness Model Development and Adaptation,” Proceedings of SPIE, AeroSense, Orlando, FL.
Gonsalves, P, Burge, J. (2005) “Multi-objective Optimization to Support Rapid Air Operations Mission Planning,” Proceedings of SPIE, AeroSense, Orlando, FL.
Rosenberg, B, Burge, J., and Gonsalves, P. (2005) "Applying Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization to Mission Planning for Time-sensitive Targets" Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2005 - Late Breaking Papers. Washington, DC, 2005.
Gonsalves, P., Burge, J. (2004) "Software Toolkit for Optimizing Mission Plans (STOMP)," the AIAA 1st Intelligent Systems Technical Conf., Chicago, IL.
Gonsalves, P., Burge, J., and Harper, K. (2003) "Architecture for Genetic Algorithm-Based Threat Assessment," 6th International Conference on Information Fusion, Cairns, Australia, 2003.
Gonsalves, P., Burge, J., and Popp, B. (2003) "Decision Support System for Theatre Missile Defense," National Symposium on Sensor and Data Fusion, San Diego, CA.
Gonsalves, P., Burge, J., and Popp, B. (2003) "Decision Support System for Theatre Missile Defense,” Proceedings of SPIE, Volume 5096, AeroSense, Orlando, FL.
Ruda, H., Burge, J., Aykroyd, P., Sander, J., Okon, D., and Zacharias, G. (2001) "FOX and CADET: Successful Integration of Command and Control Components" Proceedings of the Federated Laboratories Capstone Symposium, College Park, MD (March)
Ruda, H., Burge, J., Aykroyd, P., Sander, J., Okon, D., and Zacharias, G. (2001) “Distributed Course of Action Planning using Genetic Algorithms, XML, and JMS,” Proceedings of SPIE, Volume 4396, AeroSense, Orlando, FL (April).
