Massive congratulations to Dr. Melody Dye, who is the recipient of this year's Glushko Dissertation Award from the Cognitive Science Society. This very competitive award is highest honor in our field for a graduate student, won for Melody's doctoral dissertation "Bridging Levels of Analysis: Learning, Information Theory, and the Lexicon."   It also comes with $10k, so that isn't bad either. 

Melody will receive the award and give a talk on her dissertation work at this year's Cognitive Science Society Conference in Madison. 

Congrats to lab alumna Melody Dye, who was presented with the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the IU Cognitive Science Program for her work adapting information theory to study optimal language and nominal systems design. 

Melody is currently a Sloan/Moore Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Information, UC Berkeley. 

The lab's IES funded project with the Karpicke lab at Purdue was briefly covered in the recent issue of Science. The special piece was  spotlighting recent projects funded by IES to translate science of learning findings from the lab into practice in the classroom to boost learning and retention. 

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE. 

Farewell to Dr. Fatemeh Torabi Asr! 

Fatemeh has been the leader of the IU end of our IES project on automated learning technologies with the Karpicke Lab at Purdue Unviersity. Fatemeh leaves us to take a position at Simon Fraser University in Canada. 

Best of luck, and you will be greatly missed!

Huge congratulations to Dr. Melody Dye on successfully defending her PhD dissertation!

Melody has taken a position as a prestigious Berkeley Data Science Fellow, working with Marti Hearst at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

Farewell Mel, and good luck from us all!

Huge congratulations to Melody Dye for winning this year's David Marr Award from the Cognitive Science Society! The Marr Award is widely considered the most prestigious CogSci student award in the world...only one is given out each year for the best student paper. The award will be presented to Melody at the 2017 CogSci conference in London, UK. 

Melody won a very competitive position as a Berkeley Data Science Fellow, and will begin working with Marti Hearst at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science as soon as she defends her PhD next month! 

Congrats Mel!

Yogi's Bar and Grill has been the standard Friday afternoon watering hole for the cognitive science labs for well over a decade now. Sadly, it abuptly closed down, and we have no good home for after lab meetings. 

Many great ideas came from meetings in the area pictured to the left. Here is the final ever picture of the group brainstorming at Yogi's. 

Congrats to Dr. Janelle Szary, who leaves the lab next month to take up a prestigious Insight Data Science Fellowship in New York. Janelle will be working with the best in the world to bridge her computational skills from academia into industry to solve real problems! 

Best of luck from us all Janelle! 

Mike will present Modeling Human Learning to Inform Machine Learning as one of the invited plenary speakers at this year's High Performance Computing Symposium, Canada’s premiere Advanced Research Computing (ARC) conference, bringing together top researchers from across Canada and around the world, as well as major industry partners.

IU Bloomington Emerging Areas of Research program makes inaugural grant


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Can machines learn to think like children? An interdisciplinary team of cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and computer scientists at Indiana University Bloomington has received the campus’s inaugural Emerging Areas of Research funding award to explore that question.
Called “Learning: Brains, Machines and Children,” the first Emerging Areas of Research initiative is led by Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of psychological and brain sciences in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences. The research team will receive up to $3 million for the four-year project.  

[News Release]   [Project Description]