Newsletter

June 2009

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

Welcome to the June issue of the CTSB newsletter. This month's faculty spotlight features Professor and CTSB affiliate Dedre Gentner (Psychology). Our featured student is Ph.D. candidate Kevin Livingston (EECS) and the project spotlight is NetLogoLab: Linking agent-based models to the physical world.

I hope everyone had a successful year. Thanks to everyone for coming out for CTSB events. We hope to continue to see you this summer at our monthly TCIF lunches!

- Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB) and Lindsey Lumley (Newsletter Editor, CTSB)

EVENTS

Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar:

Colloquium Series

The TSB Colloquium has concluded for the academic year. Thank you to our fantastic speakers: Jonathon Grudin, Gloria Mark, Michael Tanenhaus, Michael Schober, Pierre Dillenbourg, Brian Scassellati, and Judy Olson. Thanks to everyone who attended the talks this year and for making the speaker series a great success.

Thank CTSB It's Friday!

Due to end of the year commitments and absences, the newsletter did not go out on June 1st as originally planned. The TCIF event was held on June 5th. We hope to see you next month at our TCIF lunch to be held July 10, 2009 in Francis Searle, room 2-431. If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this summer or next fall quarter, please contact Lindsey Lumley at l-lumley@northwestern.edu.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Dedre Gentner

Dedre Gentner is the Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor of Psychology and Education and the Director of the Cognitive Science Program. She is the Director of the Cognition and Language Lab and is Co-Principal Investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center. Gentner holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Cognitive Science Society. She is a past fellow of the Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Before coming to Northwestern in 1990 she was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and of the University of Washington.

Professor Gentner’s research focuses on learning and reasoning and on the development of cognition and language. She is best known for her Structure-mapping theory, which provides a framework for the use of analogy and comparison in learning and reasoning. She also pioneered progressive alignment, which uses repeated, increasingly disparate comparisons to guide children’s understanding of relations. Recently, Gentner and colleagues were awarded a multi-institutional NSF Science of Learning Center grant to increase understanding of spatial learning processes and develop new programs and technologies to improve educational practice. As part of this collaboration, she has led the Center’s investigation of the effects of language and analogy on spatial representation and reasoning.

Student Spotlight: Kevin Livingston

Kevin Livingston is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department under the advisement of Professor Chris Riesbeck. Kevin is part of the Learning Reader project with Professors Chris Riesbeck, Ken Forbus, and Larry Birnbaum. The goal of the Learning Reader is automatic acquisition of new knowledge from simplified English texts. Kevin's focus is on Direct Memory Access Parsing (DMAP), a system for mapping text to existing knowledge structures as text is read, creating new structures only as needed to fill in gaps. Kevin is interested in extending how semantic and episodic knowledge can be leveraged early in reading by DMAP in order to improve or accelerate its understanding. More broadly he is interested in understanding how semantic and episodic memory needs to be structured for use by intelligent systems and how its use can benefit other AI problems beyond reading.

Kevin is currently working on completing his dissertation and seeking employment. When not writing, he enjoys getting out to the parks and museums of Chicago, playing board games of all types, or playing saxophone. He received his Master's Degree from Northwestern in 2004. Prior to that, he was employed by several companies of various sizes and industries. Kevin earned his Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from the University of Dayton.

Research Spotlight: NetLogoLab: Linking agent-based models to the physical world

The NetLogoLab project is a collaboration between Uri Wilensky (Education and Social Policy and EECS) and Paulo Blikstein (Stanford School of Education). The goal is to investigate the connections between computer simulations and the physical world. They are building a set of systems which connect multi-agent-based models to physical manipulatives in a variety of topics, such as chemical equilibrium, gas laws, and heat transfer. Multi-agent-based simulation is a useful tool to understand complex natural phenomena. They want to extend it by connecting agent-based models to the physical world, providing students with tools to build physical counterparts for computer simulations. They believe this symbiotic relationship between on-and off-screen modeling and simulation to be greatly beneficial in terms of breadth of projects, their potential for deep investigation as well as student motivation. For more information, visit http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogolab/index.html.

Faculty & Student News Roundup

Communication professors and CTSB affiliates Pablo Boczkowski, Noshir Contractor, Darren Gergle, Exzter Hargittai, and Jennifer Light presented their work at International Communication Association (ICA) 2009 in Chicago this past month.

Eszter Hargittai (Communication) and graduate students Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, and Kristin Thomas were awarded the ICA 2009 Top 2 Faculty Paper for their piece, "Trust on the web: How young adults judge the credibility of online content".

ICA 2009 featured many TSB and MTS graduate students, including: Lauren Scissors, Dave Huffaker, Jeffrey Treem, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino, Kristen Thomas, Su Jung Kim, Eugenia Mitchelstein, Brooke Foucault, Thomas Ksiazek, Zeina Atrash, Bhuvana Narayanamurthy, Brian Keegan, and Elizabeth Lenaghan.

Bryan Pardo (EECS), Larry Birnbaum (EECS), and EECS graduate student Jiahui Liu co-wrote "Spectrum: Retrieving Different Points of View from the Blogosphere", which they presented at the Proceedings of the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2009) last month in San Jose, CA.

Nicole Immorlica (EECS) with EECS Ph.D. student Ning Chen, Anna Karlin (University of Washington), Mohammad Mahdian and Atri Rudra (University at Buffalo) co-authored "Approximating Matches Made in Heaven", which they will present at ICALP 2009 in July in Rhodes, Greece.

Funding Opportunities

Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities.

NSF Science, Technology, Society

STS considers proposals that examine historical, philosophical, and sociological questions that arise in connection with science, engineering, and technology, and their respective interactions in society. STS has four components: Ethics and Values in Science, Engineering and Technology (EVS), History and Philosophy of Science, Engineering, and Technology (HPS), Social Studies of Science, Engineering and Technology (SSS), Studies of Policy, Science, Engineering and Technology (SPS). The components overlap, but are distinguished by the different scientific and scholarly orientations they take to the subject matter, as well as by different focuses within the subject area. STS encourages the submission of hybrid proposals that strive to integrate research involving two or more of these core areas. STS provides the following modes of support: Scholars Awards, Standard Research Grants and Grants for Collaborative Research, Postdoctoral Fellowships, Professional Development Fellowships, Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants, Small Grants for Training and Research, Conference and Workshop Awards, and Other Funding Opportunities. Proposals due August 1, 2009.

AT&T Labs Fellowship Program

The Fellowships are available to outstanding under-represented minority and women students who are U.S Citizens or Permanent Residents and who are pursuing Ph.D. studies in computer and communications-related fields. The ALFP program awards a three-year fellowship and is contingent on an annual review demonstrating that the recipients are making satisfactory progress toward their Ph.D. Each fellowship recipient participates in a research summer internship during their first summer in the program. During the summer, students work as a part of research teams on various projects within AT&T Labs. Students must be seniors in the current academic year or in their first or second year of graduate school. Applications are accepted beginning September 5, 2009 and must be complete by January 31, 2010.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grants

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is unique among foundations in its focus on science and technology. Grants in the Science Education program area promote access to the scientific enterprise, provide information about scientific and technical careers, and encourage innovation to the structure of scientific training. Its six major program areas are: Science Education, Public Understanding of Science, Economic Performance and the Quality of Life, Select National Issues, and Civic Initiatives. Subprograms include: Anytime, Anyplace Learning, Science Education for Underrepresented Groups, Digital Information Technology and the Dissemination of Knowledge, History of Science and Technology, and many more. Grant proposals are accepted year round. Visit the Foundation website for more information on submitting a proposal.

CTSB Exploration Grants

We encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. We are interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. Please contact Chris Riesbeck c-riesbeck@northwestern.edu for further details.

Conference Submission Deadlines

HCSNet Workshop From Social Butterfly to Urban Citizen: A HCSNet workshop on social and mobile technology to support civic engagement at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia (July 13-14, 2009). Submissions due June 19, 2009.

CHI 2010 Computer Human Interaction conference in Atlanta, GA (April 10-15, 2010). Submissions due September 17, 2009.

Speech Prosody 2010 Speech Prosody, 5th International Conference in Chicago, IL (May 11-14, 2010). Papers due October 15, 2009.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

JCDL 2009 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Austin, Texas (June 15-19, 2009).

MTT'09 Fourth International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory in Montreal, Canada (June 16-18, 2009).

CASA 2009 Computer Animation and Social Agents in Amsterdam, Netherlands (June 17-19, 2009).

TLS'09 Workshop on Terminology and Lexical Semantics in Montreal, Canada (June 19, 2009).

Reading Groups

If you would like to advertise a reading group, write ctsb@northwestern.edu to let us know.

Employment Opportunities

The CTSB is looking for an undergraduate administrative assistant to help run the CTSB and Articulab. Tasks include supporting the program assistant with budget reconciliation and maintenance, arranging travel, planning and carrying out events, and writing the monthly newsletter. Organization, multi-tasking, and excellent communication abilities are a must. Prior experience in administration and/or accounting a plus. This position will work 10 hours per week and will start as soon as possible. If you are interested in applying, please email your resume and cover letter to l-lumley@northwestern.edu.

If you would like to advertise job openings within your research group or lab, please e-mail l-lumley@northwestern.edu, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required.