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Professor
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To exploit fully the potential of computers for information
processing, knowledge must be encoded into computers. Dr. Stephens'
research interests include knowledge representation, distributed problem
solving, and expert system technology. He collaborated with the
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation on Cyc, a large-scale knowledge
representation system. His recent research involves the classification
of semantic relations for large knowledge bases, multiagent robotic
systems, mediators for information agents in healthcare systems, and
coordination parameters for interacting systems of multiagent teams.
Dr. Stephens was granted a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of South Carolina in 1968 and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 1974 and 1977, respectively. He is currently Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina and a member of the Center for Information Technology. Prior to his academic career, he served for four years as a U.S. Naval officer assigned to Naval Reactors Program, Washington, DC. There he was responsible for technical coordination in the manufacture and operational aspects of reactor components for nuclear-powered submarines and surface ships.
From 1988 to 1989 he was on leave as a consultant to the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas. At MCC he conducted research on distributed knowledge-based systems, reasoning architectures for synthesis tasks, and plausible inferencing based on the properties of semantic relations. While at MCC, he did extensive work with the Cyc common-sense reasoning project. His current research interests include the fundamentals of knowledge representation, design of ontologies, and information retrieval from heterogeneous information sources. His previous research includes design and microprogramming of a multicomputer system and computer graphics. Dr. Stephens is a senior member of IEEE, and member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Phi Beta Kappa, and AAAI.
