Colloquia, Workshops, Dialogues And Tutorials
2023-2024
Fall
CogSci Kickoff!
Date: October 2nd / 4-6pmLocation: Five and Dime
RSVP Required: RSVP Here
Daniel Müllensiefen, Goldsmiths, University of London
Date: October 26th, 5:00pmLocation: Ryan Center for the Musical Arts, Regenstein Masterclass Room
Website: About Daniel Müllensiefen
(Local Host: Steve Morrison, Joint event with Music Studies)
Title: I’ve Got the Music in Me: Using cognitive psychometrics to identify, measure, and model musical abilities
Abstract:
Musicality is a crucial concept for music learning, music teaching, and empirical music research. But how musicality is defined and how it should be assessed is contentious, assumed to be fully understood by some researchers and hotly debated by others. This talk will highlight three different approaches for identifying musical abilities and will introduce the Cognitive Psychometrics of Music as a new framework for musical test construction. Different approaches for modelling the relationships between different musical abilities may give rise to differing notions of musicality.
Earl Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: November 28th, 4:00pm, Virtual ColloquiumLocation: Zoom, Register for the Zoom link here: https://bit.ly/MillerColloquium
Website: About Earl Miller
(Local Host: Robin Nusslock)
Title: Cognition is an emergent property
Abstract:For a long time, the brain was thought to function like clockwork, with specialized parts working together due to physical connections. However, in recent decades, our understanding has undergone a major shift. While the individual parts and anatomical connections are still important, many cognitive functions are driven by emergent properties - higher-level properties that arise from the interactions between the parts. A key aspect of these emergent properties are brain waves, oscillating rhythms of electrical activity that allow millions of neurons to self-organize and control our thoughts, much like a crowd doing 'the wave'.
New CogSci Faculty Flash Talks
Date: December 12th, 2023 - 4:00-5:00pm (Reception to follow)
Location: Swift 107
- Tessa Charlesworth, "Long-term change in attitudes and stereotypes about social groups"
- Matt Groh, “Augmenting human problem solving with AI assistance”
- Peter van Elswyk, "The semantics and pragmatics of the declarative clause"
Winter
Large Language Models and Politics: A Multidisciplinary Discussion
Date: January 30th, 2024 - 4:00-6:00pm
Location: Zoom, Register here
(Local Host: Megan Hyska)
Panelists:
- Emma Rodman, Political Science, UMass Lowell
- Amy Zhang, Computer Science, University of Washington
- Annette Zimmermann, Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Recent years have seen profound developments in the ability of machines to generate natural language. Trained on massive bodies of existing linguistic data, large language models (LLMs) like those behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Meta's LlamaChat, or Anthropic's Claude have astonished the public with their general-purpose ability to generate naturalistic text: to write poems and recipes; social media posts and term papers; legal briefs and instruction manuals; reference letters and manifestos. They have also raised urgent questions about the risks and potentials that this technology holds for our lives, including our political lives. How will LLMs amplify the threats of mis- and dis-information? How can they avoid replicating the biases found in the datasets they were trained on? How will they interfere with mechanisms of both institutional and grassroots political action? Whose labor will they replace, and to whose benefit? Who gets to control them, and how? And how might they enhance the creativity that we bring to devising political strategies and theorizing our political lives?
This online event brings together scholars from computer science, political theory and philosophy to examine these and other questions about large language models and politics from a variety of angles.
CogSci Faculty Flash Talks
Date: February 20th, 2024 - 4:00-5:00pm (Reception to follow)
Location: Swift 107
- Emma Alexander, "Bio-Inspired Computer Vision"
- William Brady, "Algorithm-mediated social learning in online social networks"
- Eszter Ronai, "Sources of variability in pragmatic inferences"
- Daniel Shanahan, "Iterated Learning Provides New Perspectives on Theories of Optimal Tempo"
CogSci+Arts Panel
Date: March 8th, 2024 - 4:00-6:00pm Location: Guild Lounge
Spring
Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University
Date: April 16th, 2024 - 4:00pmLocation: Swift Hall 107
Website: About Oriel FeldmanHall
(Local Host: Mary McGrath)
Title: How do humans adaptively navigate their social worlds?
Abstract:
The success of the human species depends on our ability to interact with and rely on each other. Social interactions, however, are some of the most uncertain situations we encounter. Other people’s intentions are hidden from us and are constantly changing, which makes figuring out who to trust or cooperate with a persistent challenge. My lab's research explores the mechanisms that guide adaptive social learning and decision-making—e.g., how do we predict another’s moral motives and leverage that information to trust the right people? We use a multi-discipline approach to identify the neural machinery underlying human social behavior, including applying theories from animal models, borrowing methods from computational neuroscience, and capitalizing on various state of the art neuroimaging techniques. By observing humans in both controlled laboratory settings and out in the wild, we are able to interrogate a spectrum of behaviors, from decisions made during dyadic interactions to the social tensions that play out across entire communities. This talk will give a glimpse into how humans are able to learn about their social worlds in order to make more adaptive decisions to trust and cooperate with the right people at the right time.
Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Tech
Date: April 30th, 2024 - 4:00pmLocation: Swift Hall 107
Website: About Munmun De Choudhury
(Local Host: Nell O'Rourke, Joint event with the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design)
Title: Does Social Media Support or Worsen Mental Well-Being? What Quasi-Experimental Studies Can Tell Us
Abstract: