“Hello Cognitive Systems Students,

Hope your end of term wrap- up and exam prep is going well. I would like to invite you to join us at SFU for the SFU COGS Undergraduate Seminar, April 25 – 27.

Everyone keeps telling you to network…this will be a great networking experience for students interested in Cognitive Science issues!

Have a look at our website for all the details. It’s designed to offer the chance to experiment and learn from each other, have some fun, and work with a visiting scholar in an area of study we wouldn’t have a chance to take a class in, within our student’s regular BA coursework.

Its networking other Cogs students and its building networks without programming. So its about problem-solving and making a robot do something interesting while working in a team of cognitive science SFU and UBC students.

Our Cognitive Science Student Society enjoyed meeting up with some of you last fall for a fieldtrip and social. Lets do it on a larger scale — a seminar in neural network modelling and a group of cogs friends you spent some time with and got to know.

Dates and times: Its happening After exam period and before the next semester begins

· Apr 25 10am to 7pm: Lab with Ulysses Bernardet and Kim Voll, pizza night and discussion with Michael Picard

· Apr 26/7 10am to 5:30pm, Apr 26 10 to 4pm: Teams develop their best solutions to their robot challenge.

· Apr 27 4pm Showcase/presentation of team challenge solutions/robots in action Followed by group dinner with faculty.

Cost and other stuff: The Program office and Student Society are sponsoring most of the cost. The reg fee is a nominal $30 for 3 days. The reg form includes a place for you to write and tell us in a few words about background and interests you bring to the group and what you hope to get out of this seminar experience to register, (this will also assist the instructors Ullyses Bernardet and Kim Voll place you in group.)

Touched on neural networks in class? Why not build one? See it in action. Make something happen. Our website has all the details.
Find the Websurvey Reg form link there or here.

Hope this is your best term yet. Best regards from me in the Program office and your friends in the Cognitive Science Student Society,

Shamina

Shamina Senaratne
Manager, Academic and Administrative Services, Cognitive Science Program
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6

Office: RCB 8115, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Tues, Wed, Thursdays

Tel: 778-782-7127 (local 27127)
Fax: 778-782-7128
email: ssenarat@sfu.ca”

Any further inquiries should be directed to the CUJCS committee at
cujcs-inquiries@sfu.ca

Sound and Meaning Regularities in Language

“It has long been claimed that the relation between form and meaning is arbitrary. In this talk, I will focus first on one of the most basic linguistic distinctions, that between nouns and verbs, and present data that suggest that the relation between sound and grammatical class is predictable rather than arbitrary. I will also present some other fundamental processing differences between English nouns and verbs, including prosodic and morphological differences. A final study will examine speaker and listener interactions (speaker gender and grammatical gender) in Spanish, showing that the acoustic features associated with the sex of a speaker influence the speed and accuracy of making a linguistic decision about the grammatical gender of a word. Taken together, these data raise questions regarding the assumption of arbitrariness in language and its concomitant effects on processing as well as the independence of linguistic and cognitive processes.”

Joan Sereno is a lead researcher with the University of Kansas Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (KUPPL). Her area of expertise is psycholinguistics. Her research interests include psycholinguistic investigations of language structure, second language learning, language perception and production processes, auditory and visual word recognition, neurological bases of language, and cognitive science. Her particular approach is to seek converging evidence from language comprehension and language production, with the ultimate goal of relating these data to specific brain processes. Her current research focuses on language learning, specifically the training and learning of non-native language contrasts. Joan is an Associate Editor of the journal Language and Speech.http://www2.ku.edu/~kuppl/sereno/index.html

http://www.sensorimotor.pwias.ubc.ca

Presents

Prof. Randy Flanagan
Department of Psychology
Queen’s University

Planning and control of human object manipulation tasks

Thursday, March 21, 2013, 11:00am-noon
Room X836 (Boardroom), Department of Computer Science
Map: http://tinyurl.com/gph9y

Abstract

The remarkable manipulative skills of the human hand are neither the result of rapid sensorimotor processes nor of fast or powerful effector mechanisms. Rather, the secret lies in the way manipulatory tasks are organized and controlled by the nervous system. Skilled object manipulation involves the interplay between predictive and reactive control mechanisms. For example, when lifting an object, the brain estimates its weight to predictively scale fingertip forces. At the same time, the brain prepares context-dependent corrective actions that are quickly engaged when predictions go awry. In this talk I will discuss the nature of these control mechanisms, and the memory and learning systems the support them. In addition to evidence from behaviour experiments, I will discuss recent functional neuroimaging work examining the neural mechanisms underlying the planning of manipulation tasks.

Biosketch

Although scientists have invented chess programs that can rival grand-masters, we have yet to design a robot that comes close to matching the manual dexterity of a 5-year old child. The focus of Randy Flanagan’s research is to understand the cognitive, computational, and neural processes that underlie dexterous object manipulation, in particular, and human motor learning and control, in general. Together with his trainees and collaborators, Randy Flanagan uses a variety of tools to study eye-hand coordination, sensory-motor adaptation, and links between action and perception.

Randy Flanagan studied kinesiology at the University of Alberta before returning to his hometown to complete a Ph.D. with David Ostry at McGill University. He then trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Alan Wing at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit (now the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit) in Cambridge, U.K. before taking up a position at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1995, he moved to Queen’s University where he is now a professor in the Department of Psychology and a member of the Centre for Neuroscience Studies.

Please contact Becky Laturnus if you have any questions.

ABSTRACT: In this talk, I will discuss how principles from Cognitive Systems Engineering, CSE, might be used to design Visual Analytics systems to support intelligence analysts. In designing systems to control processes such as nuclear power generation, CSE has been used to determine and model a priori the functional relationships that relate the performance of the processes with system outcomes. Visual forms are then created to represent these invariant relationships in ecological interface designs. Can cognitive systems engineering be applied to the domain of intelligence analysis? And if yes, how might this be? And how should CSE principles be applied to the design of visual representations in intelligence analysis to take advantage of the benefits we have seen when CSE is applied to causal systems?

Dr William Wong is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Head, Interaction Design Centre, at Middlesex University’s School of Science and Technology, London, UK. His research interest is in the representation design of information to support decision making in naturalistic environments. Recipient of over US$7.1 million in grants, and project coordinator for several projects, he is currently investigating the problems of visual analytics in sense-making domains with high information density and variability, in contexts such as intelligence analysis, financial systemic risk analysis, and low literacy users.

Date and Time: February 6th, 2013, 5:30-7pm.

Location: Forestry Sciences Building, Room 1005

RSVP to: Lavana@magic.ubc.ca

Digital media technologies are opening a world of possibilities in communications, in the economy and in personal relations.

These technologies allow us to communicate and process information with unparalleled ease, and to spread ideas, learn, offer help, resolve problems, connect with people, and develop new businesses in unprecedented ways. The changes coming in the next 10 to 20 years in the further development of ubiquitous technologies, augmented and virtual reality, persuasive technologies, mobile technologies, and cognitive systems, to name but a few, will transform how we live, work and learn, just as programmable computing did previously. As positive as the possibilities afforded by these technologies are, many have growing concerns about the velocity of change and our ability to properly adapt to it; about potential threats to privacy and security; and about increasing risks of social isolation, technology addiction, and mental health risks. These concerns raise important philosophical and practical questions, such as: what does it mean to be human in the digital era? What is human identity and how do these technologies contribute to its formation? If human identity is linked to the preservation of individual and collective memory, how can we preserve it in the context of these new technologies? What values are being, and should be, designed into technology and how transparent should these values be to users of the technology? Where does intentionality reside when cognition is distributed between human and machine? Should individuals have the right to control their own data? Should they have the right to be forgotten? Is privacy necessary and, if so, how do we protect it? How are these technologies affecting the rhythms of rest, silence and reflection which are necessary for healthy human development? Can we trust these technologies? How can we, and who can we, hold to account when harm is caused in using these technologies? Given the transformations that we are already seeing in society in the digital era and the further transformations we can expect, the challenge is urgent to provoke thinking and interdisciplinary dialogue on the theme of values, human identity and technology.

Panellists:

Izak Benbasat is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Canada Research Chair in Information Technology Management at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He received the LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievements in Information Systems from the Association for Information Systems in 2007, and was conferred the title of Distinguished Fellow by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) Information Systems Society in 2009. He was awarded the UBC Killam Research Prize in 1998 and the Killam Teaching Prize in 1996.

Luciana Duranti is Chair and Professor of Archival Studies at SLAIS. She is Director of the Centre for the International Study of Contemporary Records and Archives (CISCRA – www.ciscra.org) and of several research projects about digital records, among which InterPARES, Digital Records Forensics, and Records in the Cloud.

Caroline Haythornethwaite is Director and Professor, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (The iSchool@UBC), University of British Columbia. She has an international reputation for research on social networks, computer media, and e-learning, and is a founding member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research. She is co-author and editor of E-learning Theory and Practice (2011), and the Handbook of E-learning Research (2007) with Richard Andrews, and The Internet in Everyday Life (2002) with Barry Wellman.

Eric Meyers is an Assistant Professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (The iSchool@UBC). He teaches and conducts research on the digital media practices of young people in academic and everyday contexts. His research in children’s virtual environments explores how human values (e.g., privacy, autonomy, agency, and sustainability) are reflected and instantiated in children’s immersive technologies and their related textual ecosystems.

Reverend Joseph Soria is is a native of Spain (1932). He graduated as a physician from the University of Valladolid, and attained his doctorate in Canon Law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (Angelicum) in Rome. After his ordination as a Catholic priest he worked nineteen years in Rome. He has been professor of Pastoral Medicine and of Catholic Doctrine at the Pontifical Lateran University of Rome, Apostolic Examiner of the Clergy in the Vicariate of Rome, professor of the Diocesan Centre of Theology also at Rome, and General Postulator of Opus Dei. He is the author of several books on topics of spiritual, moral and pastoral theology.

They are still recruiting volunteers who get t-shirts and can win prizes! Check out their website for more details.