Spring and Construction

Ahh, spring break is over. The little one is back to school and the new DARPA proposal calls are out. And I am at a crossroads as to whether I should bother, but am itching to attack one of the topics because I am certain I could win. One of my new business advisers understands this quite well: do you take the government money and the obligations that it entails to follow-through on the research agenda (commercialization is never directly covered in these grants) or do you focus on the main line of business and the growth model that you have projected?

The DARPA topic is particularly interesting to me because my approach to solving the problem would invoke a psychological model known as "construction-integration" (CI). In CI, when someone is learning something, they are integrating prior knowledge with situational knowledge as they read or study the topic. This is closely allied with the educational model known as constructivism, but has some specific and measurable aspects when applied to textbook learning that takes it out of the softer realm of educational theory.

Specifically, CI has been used to explain some odd results in text comprehension where those who are well-versed in a topic area learn better when given relatively incoherent texts about a related topic. Now I don't mean that the texts are simply gibberish but merely that they are not measurably as "coherent" as other texts. That is, there are fewer linking ideas between paragraphs, more pronominal references are used and there is more of a burden put on the reader to fill in the gaps. Not surprisingly, for those with little understanding of a topic area highly coherent texts improve their ability to learn those new ideas. Machine-based methods can even score coherence fairly well, which is part of the technology used for automatic essay grading methods.

My application of CI and coherence would be applied to a novel domain, however, to fulfill the DARPA needs. The call looks for a realizable system in 3-5 years, which is an astounding timeframe to my mind in this age of internet acceleration and souped-up disintermediation. And if I took it on, I would have to think about it in that kind of timeframe, something that carries with it a bit of cynicism in that you don't want to move too terribly fast lest you make yourself ineligible for future funding by actually bringing a product to market.

Push, pull. Either way, it is better to have an embarrassment of riches than none at all, I suppose.