Ashwin Ram was born in
New Delhi, India, on July 27, 1960. He is a great-grandson of Sir
Ganga Ram and is the eldest of three children. He grew up in New Delhi with a brief stint in Bombay, and attended one of India's oldest boarding schools,
Mayo College. Ram received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the
Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1982, where he received the
President of India's Gold Medal for best undergraduate performance. He then traveled to the US, graduating with his M.S. in computer science from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. He received his Ph.D. degree from
Yale University for his dissertation on "Question-Driven Understanding: An Integrated Theory of Story Understanding, Memory, and Learning" in 1989, under advisor
Roger Schank and Gerald DeJong.
Georgia Tech He joined the faculty at the
Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1989. He was associate professor in the School of
interactive computing in the College of Computing, an associate professor of
cognitive science, an adjunct professor in the School of
Psychology, and an adjunct professor in math and computer science at
Emory University. In 1995 Ram co-edited (with David B. Leake) a book on
goal-oriented learning. He co-edited (with Kenneth Moorman) a book on
natural language understanding. Ram founded Enkia Corporation in 1998 (which was purchased by Sentiment360 in 2011). He then co-founded Inquus Corporation, which operated OpenStudy, an online social learning network for students and faculty, and medical information company Cobot Health Corporation. OpenStudy was acquired in 2016 by
Brainly. Ram directed the Cognitive Computing Lab at the
Georgia Institute of Technology starting around 2006. He led research in
artificial intelligence (AI) and
cognitive science. His projects focused on AI for computer games and virtual worlds, consumer health and wellness, and educational technologies. Topics included knowledge-based machine learning,
case-based reasoning,
cognitive modeling, and
natural language processing. He was program chair and conference co-chair of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) in 1994, conference co-chair of the Third International Conference on the Learning Sciences (ICLS) in 1998, and program co-chair of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition in 2008.
PARC Ashwin Ram became an innovation fellow at
PARC (formerly Xerox PARC), around September 2011, and then chief innovation officer. His team created social computing technologies to augment human cognition in application areas including health and wellness. He was program co-chair of the International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) in November 2011, with Nirmalie Wiratunga. In June 2013, he was interviewed on Australian radio about the trends toward finding medical information on the Internet, and was invited as a keynote speaker at the Amplify Festival. ==Amazon==