SOO@RED.RUTGERS.EDU.UUCP (03/27/87)
THE III, AN INFORMAL SEMINAR FOR AND BY STUDENTS, --- INITIATES ITS SPRING SEASON --- Title: Automating Theory Formation -- Postulation of Enzyme Kinetic Models and Experimental Design Date: April 7th, Tuesday Time: 11:00 AM Place: Hill 423 Speaker: Von-Wun Soo This is a practice talk for my Ph. D. thesis defense. I would like to present the work that I have been involved for the past five years. I cordially invite you to come, support, and make comments before my final defense. Abstract: In this talk I discuss how expert reasoning in scientific research such as designing biochemical experiments or postulating kinetic mechanisms can be modeled. Broadly speaking, designing an experiment, an important compoent of scientific theory formation, can be viewed as a process of searching and testing plausible decompositions of a hypothesis space. In my thesis, I show how the results of qualitative reasoning and a set partition method can be used to select experimental setups that discriminate a set of plausible models. The interpretation of experimental results, the critiques of previous experiments, and comparisons of similarities and discrepancies among experiments are all related issues that lead us to the automation of scientific discovery. -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------