David C. Brown

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Experimentation using microcontrollers such as Arduino is becoming common in several university courses and capstone projects due to their low cost. But students often face challenges with microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators. Novice learners in Mechanical, Electrical, and Robotics Engineering struggle with wiring components, coding, and interp...

3D printing is widely used in prototyping projects, but low-cost, open-type 3D printers can produce defects, wasting time and material. This project’s goal was to develop a system to detect defects automatically during the printing process to prevent that waste. We developed DaR3D, a monitoring system that can detect slippage in 3D printed parts an...

This research is motivated by the fact that the 3D printing process can be daunting for novices, particularly students in academic institutions. Creating high quality G-Code for prospective 3D parts requires knowledge of a multitude of potentially confusing settings, including printing materials, infill density, and printer resolution. Novices also...

Design creativity - Volume 32 Special Issue - Katherine Fu, Mark Fuge, David C. Brown

This paper describes an initial investigation into models that might be useful to describe and compare computational design creativity (CDC) systems. An existing approach to creative system comparison, the FACE model, is critiqued, and discovered to be a weak match with design systems. Informed by this discovery, an alternative more design-oriented...

In memory of Clive L. Dym - Volume 30 Issue 4 - David C. Brown, Yan Jin, William P. Birmingham

Affordances in design - Volume 29 Issue 3 - David C. Brown, Jonathan R.A. Maier

This paper presents a simple framework for computational design creativity evaluation, presenting its components with rationale. Components are linked to recent computational creativity research in both art and design. The framework assumes that the product, not the process, is being evaluated, and that evaluation is done by comparison with descrip...

This paper describes the development and evolution of research themes in the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) conference. Essays containing reflections on the history of DTM, supported by an analysis of session titles and papers winning the “best paper award”, describe the development of the research themes. A second set of essays describes the...

The underlying hypothesis of this paper is that the rigor needed to build computational design creativity systems will produce insights that will increase our understanding of creativity. The paper points to a variety of factors that will need to be studied and understood in detail in order to build such systems. It examines selected technical lite...

This chapter is an edited conversation on the topic of computational evaluation of artistic artefacts. The participants were Harold Cohen, Frieder Nake, David Brown, Jon McCormack, Paul Brown and Philip Galanter. It began at the Dagstuhl seminar on computers and creativity, held in Germany in 2009 and continued over a period of several months via e...

Contrary to a lot of popular mythology, the designs of popular products and successful systems do not appear suddenly, or magically. The authors believe that symbolic representation, and related problem-solving methods, offer significant opportunities to clarify and articulate concepts of design to lay a better framework for design research and des...

This paper weaves together some of the basic ideas about surprise, and creativity, in the context of design. Situations in which design surprise might occur are identified, and a few are discussed in more detail. The goal is to identify areas where additional theoretical, experimental and computational research might be beneficial, leading to the u...

This paper describes a generic, knowledge-based mechanism for selecting among a fixed set of alternatives. The mechanism, termed sponsor-selector has been used as a control mechanism in a number of different knowledge-based systems including problem-solver integration applications in routine design, diagnostic problem-solving, and navigational plan...

Three-dimensional (3-D) geometry can be described in many ways, with both a varying syntax and a varying semantics. As a result, several very diverse schemas and file formats can be deployed to describe geometry, depending on the application domain in ...

A key characteristic of the modern market place is the consumer demand for variety. To respond effectively to this demand, manufacturers need to ensure that their manufacturing practices are sufficiently flexible to allow them to achieve rapid product development. Fixturing, which involves using fixtures to secure workpieces during machining so tha...

Computational design creativity is hard to study, and until fairly recently it has received very little attention. Mostly the focus has been on extreme non-routine cases. But there are hard sub-problems and others ways of moving towards creative systems that are worth considering. This paper presents three of the alternatives, discussing one in mor...

It is common wisdom that people should be given tasks that computers can’t do well, and computers should be given tasks that people can’t do well. So in design computing why are we attempting to study computational design creativity? The main answer is that the field (like many others) progresses by tackling simpler problems

The design studio has been, and will probably continue to be, the cornerstone of design education. Its major feature is the one-on-one desk critique (crit), in which student and teacher discuss the student's work in progress on a regular and frequent ...

Recommender systems suggest resources to users based on collaborative filtering techniques, typically by exploiting correlations between individual user ratings of the resources they are interested in. Tags are a new form of metadata increasingly used in social bookmarking sites by users to annotate bookmarked resources. Our goal is to harness the...

This short paper presents a collection of after-the-event reactions raised by attending the

The special issue of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AI EDAM) has published invited papers that deal with problem solving methods (PSM). The objective of the issue is to examine the potential of PSMs, determine the existence of difficulties, and to make predictions about their use in the future developmen...

ABSTRACT Continuous time-series sequence matching, specifically, match- ing a numeric live stream against a set of predefined pattern sequences, is critical for domains ranging from fire spread tracking to network traffic monitoring. While several al- gorithms exist for similarity matching of static time-series data, matching continuous data poses...

Analyzing complex scientific data, e.g., graphs and images, often requires comparison of features: regions on graphs, visual aspects of images and related metadata, some features being relatively more important. The notion of similarity for comparison is typically distance between data objects which could be expressed as distance between features....

Many decisions have to be made when developing a software system and a successful outcome depends on how well thought out these decisions were. One way that the decisions made, and alternatives considered, can be captured is in the rationale for the system. The rationale goes beyond standard documentation by capturing the developers’ intent and all...

Scientific data is often analyzed in the context of domain-specific problems, for example, failure diagnostics, predictive analysis, and computational estimation. These problems can be solved using approaches such as mathematical models or heuristic methods. In this paper we compare a heuristic approach based on mining stored data with a mathematic...

A completed software product is the end result of many decisions that must be made throughout the development lifecycle. Unfortunately, the rationale for these decisions is usually not captured and is therefore lost. The Software Using RATionale (SEURAT) system integrates with the Eclipse Interactive Development Environment to support rationale cap...

The AI EDAM journal published its first issue in 1987. Now, amazingly, 20 years later, this issue starts the journal's third decade.

This paper focuses on distance metric learning for graphical data. We deal with graphs plotting scientific functions in the form of a dependent versus an independent variable. To compare such graphs it is often important to consider various features, e.g., critical regions, statistical observations and absolute position of points. These features co...

In keeping with a user capability and product demand approach to product assessment, this paper examines the cognitive demands placed on users when interacting with consumer products. The eventual aim is to develop a set of cognitive capability scales that could be used in the analytical evaluation of product interfaces. We explore the dimensions o...

In scientic domains, knowledge is often discovered from experiments by grouping or clustering them based on the similarity of their output. The causes of similarity are an- alyzed based on the input conditions characterizing a given type of output, i.e., a given cluster. This analysis helps in applications such as decision support in industry. Clus...

The results of experiments in scientific domains such as Materials Science are often depicted as graphs. The graphs we refer to plot a dependent versus an independent variable showing the behavior of the experimental processes [5, 11]. They serve as good visual tools for analysis and comparison of the corresponding processes. Performing an experime...

Fixtures accurately locate and secure a part during machining operations such that the part can be manufactured to design specifications. To reduce design costs associated with fixturing, various computer-aided fixture design (CAFD) methods have been developed through the years to assist the fixture designer. One approach is to use a case-based rea...

This research experiments with representations of function using analogical matching, trying to determine the benefits of using environment-centric (EC) vs. device-centric (DC) representations. We use the Structure Mapping Engine for matching, and seek to show the effect on quality and quantity of analogical matches when the representation is varie...

Experiences lead to preferences being formed. With those preferences come assumptions. Designers tend to assume normal situations. They tend to make assumptions about the match between the current design situation and one where their chosen technique worked well before. They tend to make incorrect abstractions across all the situations where partic...

Experimental results in scienti c domains are often plotted as graphs of process variables. Clustering such graphs is useful for applications such as process comparison in which cluster representatives form at-a-glance depictions of each cluster. Randomly selected representatives are seldom ef-fective in incorporating semantics, user interests and...

One of the many difficulties encountered while performing software maintenance is determining the impact of potential changes on what already exists. One way to address this difficulty is to give the maintainers access to the Design Rationale of the original system. This rationale would provide the e intent behind the design and implementation deci...

This chapter presents some ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) research can be used to improve the way that agents (people or machines) design things (i.e. design process improvement).There are a variety of definitions of AI, influenced by the goals of the researchers involved (Russell and Norvig, 2003). The best known is Marvin Minsky's sta...

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to clarify the concept of affordances, as introduced by Maier and Fadel, to relate affordances to function, to try to reduce confusion about both of these terms by providing a detailed model, and to expose some of the existing research on function to a wider audience. The paper starts by constructing a model...

Data sets with a large number of nominal variables, some with high cardinality, are becoming increasingly common and need to be explored. Unfortunately, most existing visual exploration displays are designed to handle numeric variables only. When importing data sets with nominal values into such visualization tools, most solutions to date are rathe...

Fixtures are designed to accurately locate and secure a part during machining operations such that the part can be manufactured to design specifications. To reduce the design costs associated with fixturing, various computer-aided fixture design (CAFD) methods have been developed through the years to assist the fixture designer. One approach is to...

An innovative approach has been developed for discovering better design methodologies that is based on simulating the design process using a multiagent system that mimics the behavior of a design team. The system implements a knowledge-based model of design in which highly specialized knowledge from expert sources is applied to synthesize a design....

Design Rationale (DR), the reasons behind decisions made while designing, offers a richer view of both the product and the decision-making process by providing the designer's intent behind the decisions. DR is also valuable for checking to ensure that the intent was adhered to throughout the design, as well as pointing out any unresolved (or undocu...

In this paper we examine the roles that features can play in KIC systems. We also examine the definition of the term “feature”, and attempt to shed some light on the reason for the profusion of types of features that have been discussed in the literature. We revisit the general definition of the term, and attempt a definition that uses concepts fro...

Software maintenance has long been one of the most difficult and expensive phases of the software life-cycle. Maintenance is especially difficult for large-scale systems. The more code involved, the larger the chance that there may be unexpected interactions that may cause problems when updates and corrections are made during maintenance. The large...

Requirements, derived from the customers' needs and desires, are used to guide software development and to determine if the completed system is what the customer needs. Require- ments Engineering (RE) captures and repre- sents system requirements so that they can be traced through to both implementation and testing to ensure that the resulting syst...

Keywords: In this paper we examine the definition of the term "feature", and "functional feature" in particular. The goal of the paper is to shed some light on the reason for the profusion of types of features that have been discussed in the literature, to revisit the general definition of the term, and to attempt a definition that uses concepts fr...

An innovative approach has been developed for discovering better design methodologies that is based on simulating the design process using a multi-agent system that mimics the behavior of a design team. The system implements a knowledge-based model of design in which highly specialized knowledge from expert sources is applied to synthesize a design...

this paper, we first describe the representation for our software design rationale (Section 2), and then we describe the argument ontology developed to support semantic inferencing (Section 3). This is then followed by a discussion of the inferencing supported by the system (Section 4), and the proposed system (Section 5). We then conclude with a s...

Data sets with a large number of nominal variables, some with high cardinality, are becoming increasingly common and need to be explored. Unfortunately, most existing visual exploration displays are designed to handle numeric variables only. When importing data sets with nominal values into such visualization tools, most solutions to date are rathe...

In this paper we examine the definition of the term “feature”, and “functional feature” in particular. The goal of the paper is to shed some light on the reason for the profusion of types of features that have been discussed in the literature, to revisit the general definition of the term, and to attempt a definition that uses concepts from Artific...

Design Rationale (DR) consists of the decisions made during the design process and the reasons behind them. Because it offers more than just a "snapshot" of the final design decisions, DR is invaluable as an aid for revising, maintaining, documenting, evaluating, and learning the design. Much work has been performed on how DR can be captured and re...

this paper, we examine the first four questions. First, we begin by discussing the definitions of "functional requirement", "non-functional requirement", "software requirement", and "function." We then examine NFRs to see if the reasons that normally distinguish them from functional requirements are valid in the context of the definition of functio...

An adaptive Web site molds itself to the user, creating a unique interaction, providing a more enjoyable experience, and increasing the success of an interaction. We studied the effect of Web page adaptations on information-finding tasks. Although many user interface components, such as page content and Web links, can be altered to produce adaptati...

One goal for having a process model is to guide the decisions made while designing. It is also useful to be able to describe the reasons behind the decisions, the design rationale. There are different types of rationale that may be involved in designing: rationale about the process, about the type of item or system being designed, and about the res...

Design Rationale consists of the reasons behind decisions made while designing. This information would be particularly useful during software maintenance. In this paper, we describe a study performed to investigate the content, structure, and use of design rationale during maintenance. The major goal of this study was to discover an agenda for furt...

I am very pleased to have been appointed to be the new Editor of the AIEDAM journal: only the third in its 15 years of existence. My involvement with AIEDAM started early in the life of the journal, due to my professional interactions with Professor Clive Dym, its first Editor. Clive put the journal on a very sound footing, and set the high standar...

For a number of years, members of the artificial intelligence (AI) in design community have studied design rationale (DR), the reasons behind decisions made while designing. A record of what decisions were made, and why, is especially valuable for software maintenance. One reason for this is that the software lifecycle is a long one. Large projects...

As the World Wide Web continues to grow, people find it impossible to access even a small portion of the information generated in a day from Usenet news, e-mail, and Web postings. Automated filters help us to prioritize and access only the information in which we're interested. Because opinions differ about the importance or relevance of informatio...

Recommender systems provide personalized suggestions about items that users will nd interesting. Typically, recommender systems require a user interface that can intelligently " determine the interest of a user and use this information to make suggestions. The common solution, explicit ratings", where users tell the system what they think about a p...

: This paper presents some results of our research on design simplification by analogical reasoning. It first defines what we mean by a simplification problem. Then it describes our approach to solving design simplification problems by analogical reasoning and presents an implementation of this approach. One of the important contributions of the re...

This chapter discusses the use of fine-grained agents to investigate conflicts during multi-agent design. Our goal is to study in detail the interactions, conflicts and conflict resolution that is possible with such a multi-agent system. The approach is to use Single Function Agents (SiFAs), each of which can perform a very specialized task, from a...

This paper describes our experiences with the Webware, Interfaces and Networking Experimental #WINE# Laboratory. The WINE Lab was created to assist in teaching the topics of computer networks, user interfaces and webware. The goal of the lab is to provide students the opportunity to complete projects, experiment with relevant techniques and make co...

Introduction and Aims of the Research Introduction The scope of this research is the multi-disciplinary design of engineered systems. The research aims to develop and explore a new approach to discovering design methodologies for multi-disciplinary design problems. The objective is to demonstrate the generation of specific design methodologies usin...

. In this paper we present an AI-based approach for the discovery of design methodologies for multi-disciplinary design situations. The approach is based on simulating the design process using a multi-agent system that mimics the behavior of the design team. The system activates the pieces of design knowledge when they become applicable. The use of...

this paper we refer to the experts in charge of creating design systems as developers, and to

This paper describes our experiences with the Webware, Interfaces and Networking Experimental (WINE) Laboratory. The WINE Lab was created to assist in teaching the topics of computer networks, user interfaces and webware. The goal of the lab is to provide students the opportunity to complete projects, experiment with relevant techniques and make co...

This paper describes our experiences with the Webware, Interfaces and Networking Experimental (WINE) Laboratory. The WINE Lab was created to assist in teaching the topics of computer networks, user interfaces and webware. The goal of the lab is to provide students with the opportunity to complete projects, experiment with relevant techniques and ma...

The Delaunay MM project is concerned with creating a customizable layout-driven approach to querying multimedia digital libraries. Delaunay MM layouts can be fully specified from scratch by a layout designer to accommodate different classes of users and tasks. In this paper, we overview the main aspects of the Delaunay MM project and present our ap...

: In this paper we discuss the need for learning in multi-agent design systems, and the variety of forms it might take. We propose a particular method of guiding learning in these systems, describe an architecture for its implementation, and discuss how the learning should be evaluated. 1. INTRODUCTION This paper is concerned with the use of Machin...

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the requirements for a general set of tests that would both test any Configurer, and allow different Configurers to be compared. Introduction It would be nice if there was a good, general way to compare different configurers according to different criteria. The obvious approach is to produce a test suite, in s...

Learning Expectations in Agent-based Design (LEAD) is a multi-agent system for parametric and configuration design. Design problems typically have a very large number of problem states, many of which cannot be anticipated at the onset of the design. Some design problem states are characterized by as many as hundreds of parameters. Given these amoun...

The current methodologies for multi-disciplinary product design are based on compromising between different disciplines rather than integrating them. These methodologies do not use a systematic and holistic approach to the problem of multi-disciplinary design and thus are piecemeal rather than comprehensive. This paper presents a new approach to pr...

This paper describes research in progress whose goal is to synthesize design methodologies for rapid product development in multi-disciplinary design situations. The potential outcome is superior design methodologies that facilitate integration and collaboration between different disciplines, conduct design tasks concurrently, and apply to a wide r...

The capability to manage network operations on a day-to-day basis has become an important area of concern given the rapid expansion of computer networks. A related, but much less studied area, is the impact that the design of a network has on the ease with which it can be serviced. Evaluating the ease of servicing the network and its components doe...

The basis of Knowledge Intensive CAD (KIC) is that "intensive life-cycle knowledge regarding products and design processes must be incorporated in the center of the CAD architecture." We would like to extend this concept slightly by concentrating on the presentation of designs and design information to the designer. In this we argue that knowledge...

need to be handled using a distributed, concurrent and integrated approach. Consequently the environment will be very complex. DCB 5 RELIABILITY r highly reliable design needed Usual methods: r Reuse known reliable designs u less able to do this here r Build and test u expensive & slow r Simulate u Virtual build and test u Virtual Reality u Simulat...

This paper is intended to serve as part of the context in which the other papers in this special issue should be read. Its main goal is to revisit the basic definition of the configuration task, on which many people depend, to show some of its flaws, and to point out how it shapes thinking about the problem. We are concerned about characterizing th...

this paper we intend to analyze some of the ingredients of learning specific to a multi-agent design system. The considerations presented so far suggest that it is necessary to establish a set of dimensions under which to consider possible learning patterns. Modelling multi-agent design in terms of primitive agent functionality (SiFAs) provided us...

Introduction Our premise is that Design Expert Systems can be built using many small, cooperating, limited function expert systems, called Single Function Agents (SiFAs). We expect to be able to investigate and discover specific design-related primitive problem-solving and interaction patterns. The approach should also lead to a deeper understandin...

This paper reports on some initial experiments on learning in multi-agent design systems. These experiments have several goals. The first is to study the ease with which simple learning techniques fit into the multi-agent paradigm we are using. The second is to determine the performance of these techniques. The third is to study the application of...

asing the design capabilities of the agents; . increasing the negotiation capabilities of the agents. Amajor issue which remains to be answered is "what" should be retained after the negotiation process. There are three major possibilities to be taken into account [Bond, 1989]: 1. permanently retain the incoming information and store/integrate it i...

The paper presents experiments in learning in a multi-agent design system. Inductive techniques are used to construct models of other agents' behaviors, by relating design requirements to design proposals. The models are used to anticipate future design proposals and reduce the amount of interaction needed to find solutions for parametric design pr...

ocess for achieving a solution. Such costs can be measured in time, or in the size of the search space that has to be explored, or in the number of internal conflicts that have to be resolved on the path to a solution. 3. System functionality: Learning can extend a design system's capabilities with functionality that was not initially available. Pr...

The linking of research in machine learning with research in knowledge-based design is such that each of the two areas benefit from the consideration of the other. The use of machine learning in design addresses the perceived need to support the capture and representation of design knowledge, because handcrafting a representation is a difficult and...

This issue of AIEDAM is based on a workshop on Machine Learning in Design held at the 1996 Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design, AID'96 (Gero & Sudweeks, 1996), the third of such workshops, with the previous two being held at AID'92 (Gero, 1992) and at AID'94 (Gero & Sudweeks, 1994). The first two workshops also resulted in special issue...

Many of the design systems developed in recent years incorporate some machine learning. The number of such systems already available, and the multitude of design learning opportunities that are slowly being revealed, suggest that the time is ripe to attempt to put these developments into a systematic framework. Consequently, in this paper we presen...

. This paper describes research on the simplification of designs using analogical reasoning. We present a definition of simplification and some examples, and then describe a prototype system that has been built to support our preliminary investigations of this problem. 1.0 Introduction This research is concerned with the representations and reasoni...

This paper discusses the types of knowledge associated with design objects, examines some of the representational needs of each type, and considers how they might be used for analogical reasoning. 1. KNOWLEDGE TYPES The purpose of design is to produce knowledge about a designed object which can then be used to manufacture that object. Obviously thi...

The complexity of the design process demands a richness of reasoning that contrasts with the highly simplified worlds and restricted domains often used to develop and demonstrate artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Developing a knowledge base that is rich enough to allow valid experimental analysis of a design system or algorithm often require...

This paper is a report of the discussions of three working groups at the KIC-2 workshop. The groups were assigned to discuss System Architectures, Representations, and Delivered Systems, and were charged with addressing topics from the point of view of Research Achievements, Research Issues, and Industry Needs.

Pennington and Hastie's cognitive model of the juror's decision making process, the Story Model, re*cts recent attitudes of many cognitive scientists who see an increasing role for stories in human cognition. A computer model of their theory was developed through the use of artificial intelligence techniques. During the design process, the original...

this paper we showed that information displays can be viewed as a design problem, and how, based on this, the presentation process can be modeled as a design process. Functional design is an important part of the design of presentations. Interesting problems are raised in the domain of representing and reasoning about the functions of designed obje...

. In this paper we are concerned with generating parametric design systems based on cases from existing design systems. Issues that distinguish this particular application of CBR in design from those commonly seen are highlighted. In summary: we are trying to reuse past knowledge of the design process rather than design results; Adaptation could be...

This research originates in the work started several years ago at Worcester Polytechnic Institute dedicated to the investigation, modelling and evaluation of multiagent based design. The main thrust behind our approach is the idea of finding elementary patterns of agent problem-solving and interaction in design tasks. To achieve this goal we introd...

We are interested in investigating the different types of knowledge and mechanisms that cause design problem-solving to become routine. We use the model of Routine Parametric Design incorporated in the language DSPL (Brown & Chandrasekaran, 1989), where both the parameters to be given values and the design knowledge needed are known in advance.(Rec...