Peter Jansen

Special Note: Dr. Jansen is currently looking for student(s) with demonstrated interest in automated scientific discovery.

Peter Jansen a broadly interdisciplinary artificial intelligence researcher specializing in natural language processing. He is generally interested in automated inference, knowledge representation and virtual world simulators, as well as applications in automated scientific reasoning. He has a joint appointment between the University of Arizona College of Information Science and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2).

In terms of virtual environments, he explores how we can use text-based video games as a vehicle for studying scientific and common-sense reasoning, particularly by creating new virtual environments to encourage and measure these capacities for reasoning. These include projects like ScienceWorld, a high-fidelity simulation of 30 science exam experiments, TextWorldExpress, a text-game simulator capable of running up to one billion experiments per day, and DiscoveryWorld, a 2D (and text-based) game about making novel scientific discoveries on “Planet X”.

He has also worked extensively in methods of automated inference that produce explanations for their reasoning, particularly in the context of scientific knowledge and common-sense reasoning skills. The Explanation Bank contains many such resources for explanation-centered inference, including WorldTree and EntailmentBank (book).

Jansen uniquely has two distinct educational backgrounds, one in natural language processing, cognition, and computer science, the other in physics, electrical engineering, and sensing. He maintains active outreach in grounding science education through sensing, largely in the form of open-source hardware like the tricorder project, and projects like the open-source computed tomography scanner. This work has been widely featured in over 50 international news media articles, including Reuters, Forbes, WIRED, MSNBC and the Washington Post, as well as an invited talk at TEDxBrussels 2012. In 2015, his open-source science tricorder was honored by being placed on permanent exhibit at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin.