Philosophy of the Seminar:
Today, we have a number of laboratories (Anderson, Mitchell, Touretzky, Lee, Lewicki, Matsuoka, McClelland, Plaut, Liu, Hopkins, Blum, Atkeson and Veloso) within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon that are using a variety of techniques to address various issues in brain and cognitive sciences. This seminar seeks to facilitate communication and collaboration among these laboratories and the interaction between these laboratories and the broader SCS community. It is considered a working seminar because it is intended to be informal and it encourages drop-by informal occasional participation by CS faculty and students. We will focus our attention on one small specific problem each time. It could be a showcase of success or, better still, a project in progress. Therefore, even though the seminar is open to the public, it will be held in a relatively small conference room to maximize interaction.
Format:
The presentation should be short and to the point. It should provide basic introductory information appropriate for CS audience as well as specific information pertinent to the project. The talk should be interruptible and last for 35-40 minutes (15 minutes on background and 25 min max on the project) leaving 20 min for discussion. The presentation could be delivered by the professor or, better still, by a graduate student or postdoc. A number of discussants will be invited as well for each seminar. Given we are all very busy people, we can only hope for occasional participation, depending on people's interests and schedule. We have the seminar room until 6:30 p.m., but the participants will be given an opportunity to leave at 5:10 p.m and at 5:30 p.m. They can stay longer for further discussion.
Speakers' Guide: Please limit the presentation to 40 minutes or less, leaving
ample time for discussion and brain-storming.
Provide minimal but sufficient background and motivation on the topic.
Focus on ONE interesting small target problem that can serve as a discussion ice-breaker.
The spirit of the seminar is not simply to educate, but more importantly
is engage the audience, and to pick their brain and learn
from them so as to advance research or foster collaboration.
An on-going project or an unsolved problem
is the most appropriate topic for presentation and discussion.
We hope some of the seminars will catalyze the formation of a working group to continue
working on a particular problem, which will then report progress in
Brain Seminar later on, and some evolve into funded collaborative research projects.
There is a projector in Wean 4601. Speaker and discussants are welcome to
bring in transparencies or laptops.