Professor Peter Todd was awarded a prestigious grant from the Mellon Foundation to study food from the perspective of cognitive science, please check out this link:

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/19234.html

"Causal Graphical Models for Computational Social Science"

Speaker: David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
When: Thursday July 28, 3:00-4:30pm
Where: Informatics East room 130

Abstract: Over the past 25 years, a surprising and impressive body of work has accumulated on algorithms for inferring causal dependence from observational data. This work has shown how patterns of observed statistical dependence can constrain the space of possible joint causal models, often to the point of uniquely identifying specific causal dependencies. Most of this work has been limited to very simple types of data, typically independent and identically distributed instances. Recently, my students and I have begun to extend this work to the analysis of more complex models whose causal dependencies also have spatial and temporal extent. This work draws on graphical models, social network analysis, statistical relational learning, and quasi-experimental design. I will describe some of this work, and provide an extended historical example of how it could significantly alter the practice of computational social science.

Bio: David Jensen is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His current research focuses on causal discovery in relational data, computational social network analysis, fraud detection, and privacy. He serves on the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and on the program committees of the International Conference on Machine Learning and the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. He received the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Natural Science at UMass. From 1991 to 1995, he served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. He received his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992.
http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/people/jensen/

The third annual Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference is on April 2nd -- In ONE WEEK!!

We are looking forward to a great conference next Saturday. The schedule of talks and abstracts has been POSTED! Check it out on our schedule page:
http://mucsc.info/schedule.php

A few people have asked about parking -- There is free parking at the Fee Lane Garage, located on South Fee Lane near the Kelley Graduate School. Here is a map -- http://mucsc.info/images/map.jpeg

(http://mucsc.info) Cognitive Science Program (http://cogs.indiana.edu) Indiana University, Bloomington cogsconf@indiana.edu

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Career events: January/February 2011

There will be two notable career events on campus this January/February:

First event:
For all students: Internship Fair will be held on Wednesday, January 26, from 10a.m to 3p.m., in the Alumni Hall at Indiana Memorial Union

Second event:
For students interested in computers: there will be Spring Career Fair hosted by School of Informatics and Computing, on Wednesday, February 16, from 11a.m. to 3 p.m., in the Alumni Hall at Indiana Memorial Union