The goals of this project, called "Academic Institutional Memory" (AIM), are to: refine a set of tools that encourage researchers to increase their use of electronic information sources during research;incorporate machine learning mechanisms that are capable of transforming these researchers' browsing behaviors into self-organizing information structures; and analyze the information structures built manually by the researchers and automatically by the learning mechanism as "artifacts", created by the cultural process of science. In addition to its contribution to machine learning and the philosophy of science, this kind of theoretical analysis is necessary to understand how new information retrieval tools can become part of the infra-structure coordinating the activities of modern scientists. The work under this award will revolve around three related themes: the development of a theory of science and scientific activity as a cultural process; implementation of a prototype of the AIM system as a data collection technology that will permit the testing of hypotheses from the theory; and development of computational models that capture the regularities predicted by the theory.
