One branch of the causal reasoning project is educational. The Dept. of Education has funded us to build web-based software to teach causal reasoning with statistical data. We are now constructing modules that have interactive Java applets to teach these concepts, and have a number of projects that would benefit from an undergraduate research project. We believe that humans learn about causal structure in a different way than our computer algorithms do, but we don't know. Research is needed into how humans learn about causation, and how they might be trained to do so more effectively.
Many powerful programs exist for finding proofs in formal logical systems or for teaching logic.
The community would benefit enormously from a repository of documented and downloadable software. Extending the Intercalation Calculus to Elementary Set Theory would be mathematically interesting and be useful pedagogically. Many powerful algorithms exist for finding proofs in formal logical systems. Some are explicitly built to use strategies that mimic human experts, and some not, even though little is known about how novice and experts actually search for proofs. Research needs to be done on how human expertise in proof search can be used to help computers become more efficient.