Luc P. Beaudoin’s Home Page at SFU

Affiliations

At SFU:

• Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education
• Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science

( In the Private Sector:

• President of CogZest: Publications and training related to cognitive science.
• President of CogSci Apps Corp.: Software applications of cognitive science.

)

Academic web presence

• As of April 2015, my SFU-based academic web presence is mainly on this page. (SFU retired its wordpress installation, and with it blogs.sfu.ca/people/lpb and http://www.sfu.ca/education/cognitive_productivity/.)
• My scholarly blog posts are mainly on the CogZest blog.
• I have web pages on the web site of the Faculty of Education of SFU.
• I also figure on the SFU Cognitive Science web site.

Publications

• My SFU publications web page.. (The Faculty of Education also maintains a list.)
• My Research Gate publications page.

Most of my writing, however, is internal to the organizations for which I work (and have worked), mainly in the form of functional specifications. Much of my writing and thinking is technical (software requirements, software design, and theoretical AI.

Interests, projects and activities

I strive rigorously to develop theories and new applications of knowledge; and them. I also write for a general readership.

I like to address problems in broad cognitive science that involve the interplay of diverse mental mechanisms. I explain what I mean by “broad” cognitive science in my book, Cognitive Productivity — basically: that involve cognition, affect, conation and ancillary information processing. (This is an attempt to broaden cognitive science, for it do more than pay lip service to affect and conation. That has been a theme of my R&D since my Ph.D. thesis, which was a model of breadth. I’ve also worked in an affective science lab.) I have argued that cognition and affect are neither separate, nor merely intertwined, but blended. (See also Pessoa’s (The Cognitive Emotional Brain).)

Many of my projects are described on CogZest.

• cognitive productivity and meta-effectiveness (abilities and propensities to use knowledge and information technology to become more effective — I am mostly interested in high functioning adults, particularly knowledge workers and effectant students),
• productive practice (deliberate practice, test-enhanced learning with technology —here, again, I am mostly high functioning adults, particularly knowledge workers), which is a subset of the previous bullet,
• having developed theoretical and practical frameworks for learning from expository knowledge, since 2013 I’ve increasingly been interested in learning from fiction and other forms of art,
• sleep onset and insomnia (I’ve developed a prolegomenon to a theory of sleep onset and insomnia, from which I’ve derived several cognitive techniques, including the “cognitive shuffle” (which includes serial diverse imagining amongst others), and other techniques that as of 2018–01–21 are still unpublished),
• affective cognitive science (affective dimensions of attention, processing of goals and other motivators; perturbance (tertiary emotions); autonomous agent architectures, including design-based AI; emotion regulation). I am particularly interested in “perturbance” and limerence.

I’m a productivity geek.

Current doings

• I’m interested in “assessing and enhancing knowledge workers’ meta-documentation and self-testing”. For more details on the framework, see Cognitive Productivity.
• Sleep Onset and Cognitive Treatments for Insomnia Research Project. I am currently extending my theory of insomnia and affective information processing at sleep onset.. Some new concepts: super-somnolent mentation, cognitive shuffle, serial diverse imagining.
• I am collaborating with other academics and CogSci Apps Corp. on research on the latter. (With Prof. Nancy Digdon at MacEwan we are comparing the cognitive shuffle/ serial diverse imagining with cognitive restructuring. With Prof. Julie Carrier & Dr. Jessica Massicotte-Marquez at Université de Montréal we are comparing serial diverse imagining with an enhanced version of backward counting. The comparisons involve SomnoTest, a branch of mySleepButton®, described below.)
• I am also interested in emotion regulation. The cognitive shuffle is an emotion regulation technique. I presented some new ideas about this at International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE) 2015.

Bio

I am a bilingual Canadian (French/English).

2010-present:

• Adjunct Professor of Education (Faculty of Education), Simon Fraser University
• President of CogZest (publications and training in applied broad cognitive science).

2014-present:

• Co-founder, president CogSci Apps Corp. (Apps based on my cognitive science research).

2014-

• Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Simon Fraser University.

2002–2009:

• Research Associate of Prof. Phil Winne @ Simon Fraser University. (Dr. Winne was then Canada Research Chair in Self-Regulated Learning and Learning Technologies. He is a fellow of several research societies.) I led the software development teams of gStudy (the Learning Kit Project) and nStudy. These applications are designed to support and study self-regulated learning.

1995–2001:

• I was an at-founding employee of two of Canada’s most successful high tech startups, as measured by their exit valuation: Tundra Semiconductor Corporation and Abatis Systems Corp. This got me interested in knowledge workers information processing with technology. I noticed that information technology didn’t adequately support the learning we professional knowledge workers need to do (it still doesn’t); and that knowledge workers weren’t necessarily processing information in a manner that accords with cognitive science. That led to my R&D here at SFU and Cognitive Productivity. I’ve proposed several enhancement to knowledge workers’ information processing; I’ve developed software requirements, designs and implementations to better support such experts.

1994–1995:

• I was a lecturer and then Ast. Prof. of Military Psychology and Leadership at the Royal Military College of Canada. Amongst other things, I developed a new course on Motivation and Performance Enhancement which was perhaps the first course on the subject ever to draw deeply on cognitive science and AI (including my Ph.D. thesis research).

Education

• Ph.D. in Cognitive Science. University of Birmingham, England. My Ph.D. research was part of the the Cognition and Affect project. I was jointly supervised by Prof. Aaron Sloman (Computer Science) and Glyn Humphreys (Psychology). Prof. Margaret Boden of Sussex University was my external Ph.D. examiner. My Ph.D. thesis was on Goal Processing in Autonomous Agents.. This was a deeply theoretical thesis, involving computer simulation of our AI models of affect. It seems to remain the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of goals in the literature. It also concluded with suggestions for practical applications. These are the foundations of all my subsequent R&D in broad cognitive science. You should read it.
• I was an Honour’s Student of Prof. Claude Lamontagne (himself a 1976 Ph.D. in AI from Edinburgh University). My honour’s thesis was A computational investigation of the evolution of vision. (See http://www.sfu.ca/~lpb/pubs.html. That was a deeply theoretical thesis, my first detailed attempt to apply the designer approach (AI) to very hard problems of cognitive science.

You can read more on CogZest.

Books

• Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective
• Other books

The framework for my research is described in my first book, Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. This book serves many purposes. It describes problems and opportunities adults face in processing knowledge and transforming themselves with it (i.e., “learning”). It presents broad cognitive science that is pertinent to the problem. It also presents very practical solutions to the problems. It describes ways of use information technology to improve cognitive productivity. The book can be used to potentiate bibliotherapy. It can also help psychologists help their clients transfer therapeutic knowledge.

Here is a list of key concepts discussed in that book, the main one of which is meta-effectiveness.

Apps

CogSci Apps Corp., of which I am a founder, has developed several apps pertinent to my R&D.

• mySleepButton, which applies my invention of the cognitive shuffle. It also implements the first personalized body and peripersonal space scan.
• SomnoTest, the research version of mySleepButton, designed to measure the effectiveness of various deliberate mentation techniques supposed to decrease sleep onset latency.
• We are also developing several apps to help people apply knowledge (to improve their cognitive productivity while working with knowledge resources.)

Blogging

I blog mainly on CogZest and mySleepButton. But I also occasionally blog at SFU. Later in 2018, I will also blog at CogSci Apps.