Newsletter

March 2008

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

Welcome to the March edition of the Center for Technology & Social Behavior (CTSB) monthly newsletter. We hope that your quarter is going well, and remember . . . just a few more weeks until spring.

As always, we have a feature-packed issue, with spotlights on CTSB faculty affiliate Professor Lance Fortnow and Ph.D. student Katya Otis. Additionally, we turn the resources spotlight on the CTSB grant office, with support available to faculty affiliated with the Center. We also feature upcoming events for this month, including our regular first Friday event, Thank CTSB it's Friday!

We continue to hope that you will find this newsletter useful for finding out more about other CTSB faculty and students, upcoming conference and grant deadlines, and CTSB events. Please get in touch with us if you have announcements, news, and achievements you would like to share, or resources or employment you'd like to offer (please contact the CTSB newsletter editor, Alastair Gill <alastair [at] northwestern.edu>).

So, without further ado, please sit back and enjoy our newsletter, and we look forward to seeing you at one of our forthcoming CTSB events.

-- Justine Cassell (Director, CTSB) and Alastair Gill (Research Scientist, CTSB)

EVENTS

Exciting CTSB events to mark in your calendar are:

Colloquium Series

This year's CTSB Colloquium Series has focused on the theme of 'Social Technologies', and we enjoyed talks by Luis von Ahn and Sara Kiesler last month. The CTSB Colloquium will be taking a rest over spring break, but will return with Rosalind Picard in April. Wendy Kellogg who was originally scheduled to talk in March will now join us in May. The full program can be found online, and here you can also view abstracts of all Colloquium talks. Please note that the winter and spring talks will take place in the ITW auditorium on the 2nd floor of the Ford Building.

CTSB colloquium speakers are available for individual meetings with faculty and students, and attend a CTSB graduate student-only lunch. If you would like to meet with either of the following speakers please contact CTSB program assistant Elisa Revello <e-revello [at] northwestern.edu>. Upcoming talks are:

• Roz Picard (MIT) - April 17 (4pm)
• Wendy Kellogg (IBM Research) - May 15 (4pm)

Thank CTSB it's Friday!

We welcome you back for more Thank CTSB It's Friday (TCIF) this month. Our regular first Friday meeting will take place next Friday, March 7, from 4-6pm at the CTSB HQ (room 2-431, Frances Searle Building). Please join us for drinks, good food and conversation. TCIF is primarily social in nature, and we hope that it will be a good opportunity to learn more about each other's research and explore opportunities for collaboration. If you have specific ideas of research you would like to discuss, please get in touch with Alastair Gill <alastair [at] northwestern.edu>.

TCIF dates for this quarter are: March 7, and April 4 from 4pm - 6pm in the CTSB.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Lance Fortnow

Lance Fortnow joined Northwestern in January 2008 as Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He also has a courtesy appointment in the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and has an adjunct professorship at the Toyota Technological Institute-Chicago. Previously he was a professor at the University of Chicago (twice) and worked as a research scientist at the NEC Research Institute, Princeton.

Fortnow's research spans computational complexity and its applications. His major results on interactive proof systems and time-space lower bounds for satisfiability led to his election as a 2007 ACM Fellow. In addition he was an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow from 1992-1998 and a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 1996-97 at CWI and the University of Amsterdam. Among his many activities, Fortnow is the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transaction on Computation Theory and serves as vice-chair of ACM SIGACT, and served as chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity from 2000-2006. Fortnow co-authors the popular Computational Complexity weblog (weblog.fortnow.com). Please see the CTSB Faculty News Roundup for details of Fornow's upcoming EECS 'Meet the Faculty' talk.

Student Spotlight: Katya Otis

Katya Otis is a second-year student in the Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. program, where she works with CTSB Faculty affiliate Sid Horton. She previously managed Doug Medin's lab (also in Cognitive Psychology) before joining the graduate program at Northwestern. Her undergraduate work was done at tiny, innovative Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., on the philosophy of language.

Katya's research concerns how and why conversations are different between older adults than between younger adults. She is currently investigating the impact of mutual eye gaze on reference-making, and whether gaze is especially helpful for older adults. Her other research addresses whether or not we detect sparse (but reliable) patterns in others' speech errors, and the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. Katya is also a participant in the CTSB collaborative project on "grounding tables" (contact her for more details). When she is not thinking about language, Katya enjoys training to be a restaurant critic.

Resources Spotlight: Collaborative Research Grant Administration

CTSB is equipped to provide a full grants administration service to faculty affiliates who collaborate on writing a grant proposal, and submit the grant through CTSB. Assistance can be given throughout the entire grant application process, from budgeting and writing to submission. Additionally, by submitting collaborative grants through CTSB, Faculty members are then eligible for advantageous financial overhead arrangements.

One current grant that was submitted by Sid Horton, Darren Gergle and Justine Cassell through the CTSB collaborative grants program came from the NSF's Human Centered Computing Program, and is entitled "Coordinating Communication: Visual, Social, & Biological Factors in Grounding for Humans and Agents". If you are interested in finding out more about possible opportunities for collaboration or grant submission, please contact CTSB Director, Justine Cassell <justine [at] northwestern.edu>. We also hope that through the Thank CTSB It's Friday events, you will get a chance to discover common research interest and develop collaborations. More details of these events can be found above!

Faculty News Roundup

Justine Cassell (Communication, EECS, and Learning Science) has just received the 2008 Women of Vision award for Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, which "recognizes a woman who has led an important technology development or innovation, made a significant contribution to the technology industry, and inspired others".

Ed Colgate's (EECS) article 'Causes of Microslip in a Continuously Variable Transmission' has just appeared in the Journal of Mechanical Design.

Lance Fortnow and Peter Dinda (EECS) are both participating in the EECS 'Meet the Faculty' talks series. Fortnow's talk "Computational Awareness" will take place on February 29 and Dinda's talk "The User in Experimental Computer Systems Research" is on March 7, both at 4pm (Tech L324, and Ford ITW Auditorium, respectively).

Eszter Hargittai's (Communication) chapter "The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence" is to appear in the book "The Hyperlinked Society" (Edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui) published by the University of Michigan Press.

Jack Tumblin's (EECS) work is featured in the March-April edition of American Scientist. The article entitled 'Computational Photography' notes Tumblin's work examining object velocity to remove motion blur.

Funding Opportunities

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

NSF - Informal Science Education (ISE) - The program invests in projects that develop and implement informal learning experiences designed to increase interest, engagement, and understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by individuals of all ages and backgrounds, as well as projects that advance knowledge and practice of informal science education. Projects may target either public audiences or professionals whose work directly affects informal STEM learning. ISE projects are expected to demonstrate strategic impact, innovation, and collaboration. Closing date for letters of intent is March 20 (closing date for full proposals is June 19).

NSF - Ethics Education in Science and Engineering (EESE) - The program accepts proposals for research and educational projects to improve ethics education in all of the fields of science and engineering that NSF supports, especially in interdisciplinary or inter-institutional contexts. Proposals must focus on improving ethics education for graduate students in those fields, although the proposed programs may benefit advanced undergraduates in addition to graduate students. Closing date for full proposals is April 3 (letter of intent not required).

TRIF - Doctoral Dissertation Grants - Awards are made by The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF) to asist Ph.D. candidates in a number of priority areas, including the use of technology in the delivery of English language instruction. Deadline for submission of proposals is April 30.

NIH - Methodology And Measurement in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (R21) - The program encourages the investigation of the impact of social and behavioral factors on health and disease, the participating Institutes and Centers invite qualified researchers to submit research grant applications on methodology and measurement in the behavioral and social sciences. Methodology and measurement encompass research design, data collection techniques, measurement, and data analysis techniques. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged. Deadlines for full proposals are March 16, July 16, and November 16 (letters of intent not required).

NSF - Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure (STCI) - The program is designed to support work leading to the development and/or demonstration of innovative cyberinfrastructure services for science and engineering research and education that fill gaps left by more targeted funding opportunities. In addition, it will consider highly innovative cyberinfrastructure education, outreach and training proposals that lie outside the scope of targeted solicitations. Closing date for full proposals is August 14.

CTSB Exploration Grants

A reminder about the recently launched CTSB "exploration grants" program. If you would like to collaborate with another CTSB-affiliate from a department other than your own (faculty, research scientist or graduate student) on a project that might potentially lead to a larger grant proposal, then you are eligible to apply for these funds. We are particularly interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. If you are interested, please contact Justine Cassell <justine [at] northwestern.edu> to discuss possibilities.

Conference Submission Deadlines

LONDIAL 2008 11th SEMDIAL Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue London, UK (June 2-4). Submission deadline is March 21.

FG 2008 8th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition Amsterdam, The Netherlands (September 17 - 19, 2008). Submission deadline is March 22.

Diagrams 2008 5th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams Herrsching (Munich), Germany (September 19-21, 2008). Submission deadlines are March 22 (Abstracts), April 1 (Papers and Tutorials) and April 11 (Posters).

Telluride 2008 Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop Telluride, Colorado (June 29 - July 19, 2008), is an intense three week workshop. Application deadline is March 23, see website for instructions.

EPIROB-08 8th Epigenetic Robotics Annual Conference Brighton, UK (July 31 - August 2). This year's theme is Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems. Submission deadline is April 1.

Reading Groups

If you would like to advertise a reading group, let Alastair <alastair [at] northwestern.edu> know. 

Currently the autism reading group meets on Fridays at 3pm in the CTSB (Frances Searle, room 2-431). This month's meetings will take place on February 1, 15, and 29. If you would like to join the group, please contact Alastair.

Employment Opportunities

If you would like to advertise any kind of job openings within your research group or lab, then please contact Alastair Gill <alastair [at] northwestern.edu>, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required.