IU Cognitive Computing Laboratory
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Welcome to the lab Dr. Szary!

10/2/2015

 
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The lab welcomes Dr. Janelle Szary as a new postdoctoral research associate. Janelle recently completed her PhD at UC Merced working with Rick Dale and Chris Kello. She specializes in complexity theory and understanding information flow in complex networks. Janelle will be extending her work on collaborative cognition while at IU, studying how dyads and groups learn and solve problems together. 

Read—Don't Just Talk—to Your Kids

8/12/2015

 
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Our new study, just published in Psychological Science, is getting a bit of press coverage now. The general finding was that interleaving ambient speech with reading picture books to young children introduces precious statistical variability that can potentially explain developmental phenomena as a function of the statistical environment (i.e., independent of maturation, per se). Read the press summary at Pacific Standard. Original paper: 

Montag, J. L., Jones, M. N., & Smith, L. B. (2015). The words children hear: Picture books and the statistics for language learning. Psychological Science.

Update: OK, now our study has been mentioned in the New York Times! It is fantastic that the general public is taking notice of the importance of statistical diversity in early language learning, but most of the press coverage kind of skims over the important finding. It is true that children experience more unique word types when we read from books vs. the ambient speech environment--I mean, how could that not be true? Reading Dr. Seuss makes me say lots more weird words than I do when I'm cooking. The important point is that the diversity distribution has a very different shape in books vs. speech. Now this makes sense. When humans were able to offload memory to external symbolic devices (such as books), we loaded them with connections in the tail of the Zipf Distribution. When we read to kids, they don't need to know what the words mean. It introduces them to statistical connections that boost everything else they already know. This may well be the reason that we see many so-called developmental phenomena such as the "vocabulary burst"

This makes the point clearer with an artificial language experiment: 

Jones, M. N., Johns, B. T., & Recchia, G. (2012). The role of semantic diversity in lexical organization.Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 121-132.
 

Brent Leaves for Google

7/17/2015

 
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Congrats to Dr. Brent Kievit-Kylar, who leaves the lab to take a position at Google next month! Brent was both a PhD student and Postdoc in the lab, and will be taking his research and skills in data mining and semantic modeling to help engineer better practical information systems. Brent will be at Google's new Cambridge (Mass) campus.  Good luck!

CCL Receives new IES Grant

6/2/2015

 
In collaboration with Jeff Karpicke's Cognition and Learning Lab at Purdue University, the Cognitive Computing Lab has just received a $1.5 million grant from IES to develop a guided retrieval-based practice system for use in elementary classrooms, BeagleGuide. 

We are currently recruiting a postdoctoral fellow in the lab to work on development of the algorithms for automated scoring of open-ended text responses from students in scaffolded learning. Click here for the postdoc ad. 

Congrats to Jon, Jessica, and Brendan

5/14/2015

 
Congratulations to Jon Willits and Jessica Montag, who have both taken faculty positions at the University of California, Riverside. 

Also, congrats are due to Brendan Johns, who also begins his tenure-track position at the University of Buffalo in the fall. 

Great job guys, and best of luck!!

Memory Research and Passwords

2/24/2015

 
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Mike's OptEd on Fastwords and memory models assisting cybersecurity makes its way around capital hill.

Mike wins Psychonomic Society award

11/10/2014

 
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Mike was honored with the Psychonomic Society Outstanding Early Career Award at the 2014 Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA, for theoretical development in computational cognition.

Click here for the Psychonomic Society Press Release 

Congrats to Gabe!

9/16/2014

 
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Congratulations to lab alumnus Gabriel Recchia on his new position at the University of Cambridge! After finishing up a fruitful postdoc at the FedEx Institute for Intelligent Systems, Gabe is off to England to the Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge.

Congrats to Dr. Kievit-Kylar!

8/14/2014

 
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Congrats to Brent Kievit-Kylar, who successfully defended his dissertation on computational models of mutlisensory and linguistic integration. 

Everyone now has to call him "Dr. Brent"

What Big Data Means For Psychological Science

6/3/2014

 
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Mike led this year's crosscutting symposium at APS, titled Big Data: Understanding Patterns of Human Behavior. Other speakers included Tanzeem Choudhury (Cornell), Brian D'Onofrio (Indiana), Tal Yarkoni (UT Austin), and Susan Dumais (Microsoft Research). 


“Each little piece of data is a trace of human behavior and offers us a potential clue to understanding basic psychological principles,” said Jones. “But we have to be able to put all those pieces together correctly to better understand the basic psychological principles that generated them.”

In memory of Tom Landauer

3/27/2014

 
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Sadly, Thomas Landauer passed away March 26th. Tom was a great man and outstanding mentor. His contributions to the field of cognitive science cannot be overestimated. He will be greatly missed. His obituary is here.

Old lab news...

2/4/2014

 
We have switched over from the old website, and I don't feel like typing all of our history in again with corrected time stamps. So here is an archive of all previous lab news back to 2006: 

Jan/2014: "Teaching Computers to Think Like Humans" FABBS interview on the CC Lab's work.

Dec/2013: Mike has been named the new Editor-in-Chief of Behavior Research Methods, effective March 1.

Sept/2013: Lab alumus Brendan Johns is one of the invited speakers at the first Complex Data and Analytics in Medical Research Symposium hosted by HPCVL. 

Dec/2012: 
Mike received the 2012 Early Career Investigator Award from FABBS.

Dec/2012: Congrats to Dr. Gabriel Recchia for successfully defending his dissertation! Off to postdoc at the Institute for Intelligent Systems!

July/2012: Congrats to Dr. Brendan Johns for successfully defending his dissertation! On to postdoc w/ Rich Shiffrin! [party pic] [grad pic]

June/2012: The CCL is part of a mutlisite team with U Colorado, Wash U, UT Austin, and U Mich to win $2.5 million for large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data as part of the NIH Neurotechnology program. Click Here to read the press release.

Feb/2012: Mike was selected as one of five assistant professors across the university to receive the IU Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.

Feb/2012: While I'm pretty sure we don't say any of these things in the paper, it is nice to see that the media has taken an interest in our recent Psyc Review paper. See: Science Daily, io9.com, and my favorite, LifeHacker

Jan/2012: Mike has been appointed the new Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Jan/2012: Lab alumus Dr. Brian Riordan's work on modeling the spread of 'infectious ideas' is featured in Wired's Danger Room

Nov/2011: Congrats to Brent for winning the Castellan Award for Best Student Paper at this year's SCiP conference for his semantic visualization software and paper. The work is now in press at BRM.

July/2011: Congrats to Brendan Johns for winning the Marr Prize for Best Student paper from the Cognitive Science Society [pic]. Also, congrats to Greg Cox for winning the Higher-Level Cognition Modeling Prize [pic], and to incoming Melody Dye for winning the IES Developmental Modeling Prize. Great showing at the 2011 Cognitive Science Conference! 

April/2011: Congrats to Melody for winning an NSF Graduate Fellowship....great job, and well deserved!

April/2011: Congrats to Mike who won a very prestigious NSF CAREER award to study models for integrating perceptual and linguistic information. The grant provides $453,674 in funding for the Semantic Pictionary Project and related computational modeling.

April/2011: Congrats to previous lab postdocs Vanessa Taler and Brian Riordan. Vanessa (now at University of Ottawa) just won the Quality of Life Young Investigator Award from the Alzheimer's Society of Canada, and Brian (now at Aptima Inc.) was part of the "Mixed Initiative Machine for Instructed Computing" group winning the best technical achivement award from Aptima.

April/10: Congrats to Greg Cox on winning an NSF Graduate Fellowship, and to Sean Matthews for honorable mention in ths very competitive competition. Great job guys! 

March/10: Read the CCL story in "Mind Reader" the cognitive science newsletter.

Dec/09: The CCL wins $50k from Google Research as a seed grant to explore neural binding operations for integrating perceptual information into vector space models! IU Press Release here.

Nov/09: Congratulations to Brendan for winning the Castellan Award for Best Student Paper at the Society for Computers in Psychology Annual Conference in Boston. Great job! IU PBS Release.

May/09: Mike was invited to speak on the future of cognitive modeling at the NSF-sponsored Future of Cognitive Science Conference at UC Merced [PIC]

April/09: Congratulations to Brendan Johns for winning a prestigious NSERC postgraduate research scholarship for three years. Awesome job! 

Feb/09: The CCL lab has been selected as one of only 12 funded proposals for the NIH Center for Biomedial/Translational Research competition.....Click here for the press release

Nov/08: LMOSS beta version is released (thanks to Gabe Recchia). You can download it here.

Nov/08: Congratulations to Gabe Recchia for winning the Castellan Award for Best Student Paper at the Society for Computers in Psychology Annual Conference in Washington. Great job! The paper has been published in BRM.

Oct/08: Congrats to R'nld for completing the Chicago Marathon!

Sept/08: The CCL wins $65,615 from FRSP to develop computational models of memory degradation in Alzheimer's disease in collaboration with the Center for Neuroimaging at the IU School of Medicine. 

Jan/07:In collaboration with Peter Todd's ABC Lab, the CCL was awarded $67,746 from FRSP to study "Mechanisms of Cognitive Search in Humans."


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Phone: 812-855-5604