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Colloquia, Workshops, Dialogues And Tutorials


2023-2024

 

Fall

CogSci Kickoff!  
Date: October 2nd / 4-6pm
Location: Five and Dime
RSVP Required: RSVP Here

 

Daniel Mullensiefen

Daniel Müllensiefen, Goldsmiths, University of London
Date: October 26th, 5:00pm
Location: 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

Earl Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: November 28th, 4:00pm, Virtual Colloquium
Location: 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



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:

Description:
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

CogSci+Arts Panel
Date: March 8th, 2024 - 4:00-6:00pm
Location: Guild Lounge
(Local Host: Dan Shanahan)

Spring

Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University
Date: April 16th, 2024 - 4:00pm
Location: Swift Hall 107
Website: About Oriel FeldmanHall
(Local Host: Mary McGrath) 

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Tech
Date: April 30th, 2024 - 4:00pm
Location: Swift Hall 107
Website: About Munmun de Choudhury
(Local Host: Darren Gergle, Joint event with the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design) 

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA
 
CogSci Fest!
Date: TBD
Location: Bob's Pizza