Newsletter

May 2009

In this issue:

EDITORIAL

Welcome to the May issue of the CTSB newsletter. This month's faculty spotlight features Professor and CTSB affiliate Andrew Ortony (Learning Sciences, Psychology, and EECS). You will also meet Ph.D. student Michelle Hoda Wilkerson-Jerde (Learning Sciences) and will learn about this month's featured research project, Direct Memory Access Parsing, by Ph.D. candidate Kevin Livingston (EECS).

Please join us on Thursday, May 21st for the final 2008-2009 TSB Colloquium talk by Judy Olson (UC Irvine) called Distance Collaboration: What makes it successful?.

This month's Thank CTSB It's Friday event will take place on Friday, May 1st. Please join us for delicious barbecue fare from Hecky's. Enjoy reading this issue and we look forward to seeing you at upcoming events.

- 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 resumes this month for a final talk by Judy Olson (UC Irvine) called Distance Collaboration: What makes it successful? in Francis Searle 2-370. Visit the CTSB colloquium page for further details and event updates. If you would like to arrange a meeting with any of the CTSB speakers, please contact Patti Bao pattibao@northwestern.edu.

Thank CTSB It's Friday!

TCIF will be on May 1st in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431) from 12pm-2pm. Join us for a delicious lunch and engaging conversations! If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this spring quarter, please contact Lindsey Lumley at l-lumley@northwestern.edu.

SPOTLIGHTS

Faculty Spotlight: Andrew Ortony

Educated in Britain, Andrew Ortony gained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Edinburgh majoring in philosophy, followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of London's Imperial College of Science and Technology. In 1973 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and started to investigate questions having to do with knowledge representation and language understanding. Ortony’s approach to research problems is strongly interdisciplinary, as is evident from the diverse perspectives on metaphor represented in his edited book, Metaphor and Thought.

In 1981 Ortony started a long collaboration with Gerald Clore (now at the University of Virginia) working on the relationship between emotion and cognition. This culminated in the publication (with Allan Collins) of their book The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, which proposes a computationally tractable model of the cognitive basis of emotion elicitation. This model, which in the affective computing community has come to be known as the OCC model, is now one of the standard models for emotion synthesis used in that community. Since moving to Northwestern University in 1989, Ortony has become increasingly interested in emotion research as it relates to various aspects of Artificial Intelligence, including the design of intelligent agents. While his primary appointment is in the School of Education and Social Policy, he holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Psychology and in EECS, so it is perhaps fitting that his closest collaborators at NU are William Revelle in Psychology, and Ian Horswill in EECS.

Recently Ortony has embarked on a major new research initiative in Singapore under the auspices of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore’s national agency for promoting research in science and technology. Located in the Advanced Computing research cluster of the Institute for High Performance Computing (IHPC), the initiative goes by the name of Computation Cognition for Social Systems (CCSS). In broad outline, CCSS can be thought of as an attempt to develop what might be called Social Cognitive Science. It focuses on developing agent-based models of plausible, contextually appropriate, social interaction. To this end, Ortony is assembling an interdisciplinary team of young researchers with backgrounds in areas such as social and cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, decision theory, cognitive architectures and multi-agent systems, and social robotics.

Student Spotlight: Michelle Hoda Wilkerson-Jerde

Michelle Hoda Wilkerson-Jerde is a Ph.D. student in the Learning Sciences Program working with Uri Wilensky and the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL). Her research focuses on mathematics cognition, representation, and constructionist approaches to mathematics education. For her dissertation, she is investigating how agent-based modeling can be used to help grant more and younger students access to many of the ideas that underlie calculus and differential equations, and how building those models can help students better understand the relationship between the mechanisms of scientific and social systems and the mathematical trends that they produce. Before joining Northwestern, Michelle earned a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Elementary Education from the University of San Diego, and worked at the University of California, San Diego on the Ubiquitous Presenter project, an interactive Tablet-PC based interactive classroom system. When not working on research, Michelle can be found tinkering with and building things, jogging, or eating some form of peanut butter.

Research Spotlight: Direct Memory Access Parsing

Direct Memory Access Parsing (DMAP) is a computational model of natural language understanding whose core process is identifying the existing or new knowledge of objects and events to which a text refers. Standard syntactic-semantic approaches defer such actions until the very end. DMAP does them as it reads and parses. As Hagoort and Berkum (2007) note, "…a wide range of ERP and fMRI findings ... consistently point to a one-step model of language interpretation." DMAP is part of the Learning Reader project whose goal is the automatic acquisition of new knowledge from simplified English texts. The Learning Reader knowledge base, extracted from Research Cyc, has over 1.2 million predicate logic assertions and nearly 120,000 phrasal patterns. This has forced the development of algorithms in DMAP that can resolve ambiguous references given large amounts of underlying knowledge of varying quality. This work is the focus of Kevin Livingston's Ph.D. dissertation research (advisor Chris Riesbeck).

Faculty & Student News Roundup

Dedre Gentner (Psychology and Education) with Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) co-wrote "Why some spatial semantic categories are harder to learn than others: The Typological Prevalence hypothesis," a chapter in the recently published book, Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin.

Eszter Hargittai (Communication) and Nicole Zillien (University of Trier) co-authored "Digital Distinction: Status-Specific Internet Uses" to appear in an upcoming issue of Social Science Quarterly.

Lance Fortnow (EECS) and Luis Antunes (Porto University) wrote "Sophistication revisited," to appear in the June issue of Theory of Computing Systems.

Eva Lam (Learning Sciences, Asian American Studies) with doctoral student Enid Rosario-Ramos (Learning Sciences) co-authored "Multilingual Literacies in Transnational Digitally-Mediated Contexts: An Exploratory Study of Immigrant Teens in the U.S." for the March issue Language and Education.

Jason Hartline (EECS) and two other NU faculty members, Dean Ho (Biomedical Engineering) and Frank Calegari (Mathematics), have received Faculty Early Career Development Awards from the National Science Foundation recognizing those most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

Don Norman (EECS and Psychology) is featured in Dwell Magazine's May issue where he offers his expert opinion on the design of modern faucets.

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.

NSF Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS)

The VOSS program supports scientific research directed at advancing the understanding of what constitutes effective virtual organizations and under what conditions virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific, engineering, and education production and innovation. Levels of analysis may include (but are not limited to) individuals, groups, organizations, and institutional arrangements. Disciplinary perspectives may include (but are not limited to) anthropology, complexity sciences, computer and information sciences, decision and management sciences, economics, engineering, organization theory, organizational behavior, social and industrial psychology, public administration, and sociology. Full proposals are due May 26, 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 PhD. 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

ACNCN 2009 5th Australian Cognitive Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Research Forum at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia (July 16-17, 2009). Papers due May 8, 2009.

SBM2009 Workshop on Social Behavior in Music in Vancouver, Canada (August 29, 2009). Papers due May 10, 2009.

ALT 2009 Algorithmic Learning Theory at the University of Porto, Portugal (October 3-5, 2009). Papers due May 10, 2009.

BUCLD Boston University Conference on Language Development in Boston, MA (November 6-8, 2009). Submissions due May 15, 2009.

VHI 2009 Virtual Healthcare Interaction in Arlington, VA (November 4-7, 2009). Papers due May 15, 2009.

SIGIR 2009 Workshop on the Future of IR Evaluation in Boston, MA (July 23, 2009). Submissions due May 18, 2009.

ICMI-MLMI 2009 The 11th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and the 6th Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction in Boston, MA (November 2-6, 2009). Submissions due May 22, 2009.

CSCW 2010 Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Savannah, Georgia (February 6-10, 2010). Papers due June 1, 2009.

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

NLPCS 2009 The 6th International Workshop on National Language Processing and Cognitive Science in Milan, Italy (May 6-7, 2009).

CILC 2009 International Conference on Corpus Linguistics at the University of Murcia, Spain (May 7-9, 2009).

CGAT 2009 2nd Annual International Conference on Computer Games and Allied Technology (May 11-13, 2009).

HMI Human Media Interaction Conference: Towards a Standard Markup Language for Embodied Dialogue Acts in Budapest, Hungary (May 11-12, 2009).

ABSHLE Agent-Based Systems for Human Learning and Entertainment Workshop at AAMAS 2009 in Budapest Hungary (May 12, 2009).

PhiLang 2009 Philosophy of Language and Linguistics in Lodz, Poland (May 14-15, 2009).

EAMT 2009 13th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation in Barcelona, Spain(May 14-15, 2009).

NODALIDA 2009 Workshop Multimodal Communcation: From Human Behaviour to Computational Models in Odense, Denmark (May 14, 2009).

ICAD 2009 15th International Conference on Auditory Display in Copenhagen, Denmark (May 18-22, 2009).

CMMR 2009 6th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval in Copenhagen Denmark (May 18-22, 2009).

HSI'09 The 2nd International Conference on Human System Interaction in Catania, Italy (May 21-23, 2009).

ASA Special Workshop Cross Language Speech Perception in Oregon (May 22-23, 2009).

AI 09 The 22nd Canadian Conference on AI in Kelowna, Canada (May 25-27, 2009).

Multimodality and Grammatical Integration in Paris, France (May 27-29, 2009).

Syposium on Multimodal Approaches to Communication in Verona, Italy (May 27, 2009).

Reading Groups

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

Employment Opportunities

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.