About me
My name is Benjamin Adams and I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science with an emphasis in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research interests include knowledge representation, the semantic web, and computational models of place. In particular, my research focuses on an observation-driven approach to geographic knowledge discovery, representation, and exploration. I received the Best Research Demonstration award at the 2012 NGA NARP Symposium and Workshops for my work on discovering and mapping thematic knowledge about places from natural language descriptions. I was also program manager for the Cognitive Science program at UCSB from 2010-2012, and prior to graduate school I worked in industry as a web programmer and designer.
At NCEAS I am a postdoc on the Scientific Observations Network (SONet) project, where I work on the semantic modeling of scientific observations to aid data integration and interoperability. I am motivated by the desire to develop semantic technology solutions that help domain scientists better share and discover data relevant to their research interests. In addition to traditional knowledge modeling, I use bottom-up approaches, including natural language processing, to populate ontologies with terms and concepts that are used by working scientists.
