When engineers develop new designs, they have to get to a fairly detailed stage before they can apply CAD tools to refine and evaluate the model. However, the decisions made during the early stages of conceptual design are very important, and have already shaped the process and the product significantly. Yumi Iwasaki is working on a project that will help designers make these early decisions. In the ``how things work'' project, she and her colleagues are working on a prototype that can access an abstract design, generate a model, and simulate the behavior of the product, so that designers can get quick feedback as to whether the design is likely to accomplish an assigned goal. She is also refining the representation of functions-what needs to be accomplished and how. If she can make functional representation more rigorous, she can apply it to evaluate a design by verifying whether the predicted behavior accomplishes the function.
The big question is deciding how to model the design. Deciding on an appropriate model depends a lot on what questions the designer asks. How do we find the relevant piece of a knowledge base, perhaps just one percent of it? How do we build just the right model? Part of Iwasaki's work concerns reasoning about the relevance of knowledge to formulate the right model. Answers to these questions will do much to further the field of design.
As a shy person and often the only woman, Iwasaki was uncomfortable in her undergraduate physics classes and ended up switching to math. In graduate school, she was more comfortable in her research groups because they were small, even when she was the only woman. She also got extra encouragement from her graduate advisor, building her self- confidence.
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