The Nature of a Problem, Problem Diagnosis, and Engineering Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work has been motivated by the authors’ past explorations into engineering culture and engineering design which have both exposed the importance of and lack of problem definition in the engineering design process. This paper builds on those previous works and reviews literature from the fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence as well as medical science. Studies in cognitive science have identified that experts perform much better in the complex task of problem identification than novices and that scheme-based instruction can greatly ameliorate novice diagnostic performance in an ill-defined complex domain such as medical science. The authors argue that these results will transfer to the analogous ill-defined and complex domain that is engineering design. In this case, the conclusion of this work is for engineering educators to develop schemes (templates) to describe in broad strokes the “universe of problems” in their particular field to aid their students in diagnosing problems for the purposes of engineering design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".