Time:9:00 - 11:00am, Oct 27（Thursday）
Venue:F310, ME building A
Speaker:Prof. Shimon Edelman, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, USA
Inviter:Prof. Gao Feng
 
ABSTRACT: Throughout  development, an  infant's raw experience of embodied and situated interaction with  the  world ---  sensorimotor, social,  and eventually linguistic  --- is structured  as a directed  graph.  Early on, the edges of this graph represent the serial order of experience, with its vertices pointing to episodic records of encountered objects and events. As the  learner assimilates its experience through seeking and acting upon opportunities  for abstraction and generalization, the graph grows  into a hierarchically  structured probabilistic "grammar" that  supports  various   computations  needed  for  interpreting  and generating  behavior,  including  situated language  processing.   The growth and  transformation of this grammar of  behavior is facilitated by  the  plethora of  cues  to structure  that  are  available in  the multimodal stream of experience, many  of which are actively traded by embodied and socially situated interlocutors.  To date, only a few algorithms have been developed that attempt unsupervised induction of a generative grammar from   large-scale  unannotated   corpora  of transcribed child-directed  speech. Although the performance of these algorithms amounts to a significant achievement, it falls far short of that of human  learners.  Given  that much  more is  known  now about cognitive development and language learning  in humans, it is time for grammar  induction   to  be  approached   as  a  problem   in  reverse engineering. The new  approach should ground grammar in  the record of experience  from which  it is  being distilled,  and should  take full advantage  of the  richness of  that experience,  integrating language with visual, motor, conceptual, and social cues, as babies do.
 
 
About the speaker: 
Prof. Shimon Edelman received the B. S. degree from Technion – Israel Institute of Techological in 1978, and M. S. and Ph. D. degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He had been Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Biological Information Processing. of Cambridge since 1988-1991. As a senior researcher of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in Rehovot, Israel since 1998.He is currently professor of Department of Psychology. Cornell University.  His interest in all aspects of cognition; his main research themes are vision and language. Because cognition is computation, his approach integrates computational theory development and computer modeling with behavioral studies carried out in his lab and with published data from the neurobiology literature.
 
University Service:
 Director of computing (1992-1996, Dept. of Applied Math & CS, Weizmann Institute)
Sub-Dean for Graduate Affairs (1998-1999, School of Cognitive and Computin Sciences, University of Sussex)
 Co-Director, Cornell Cognitive Studies Program (2000–2001).
 Director, Cornell Cognitive Studies Program (2001–2004).
 Member, Cornell Computing and Information Science Council (2006–2007).
 
Teaching Experience
 Visual perception and computer vision (Spring 1991)
 Formal Computational Skills (Autumn 1998)
 Issues in Cognitive Psychology (Cornell Psych 214; Fall 1999, Fall 2000)
 Modeling of Perception and Cognition (Cornell Psych 416; Spring 2000)
 Representation of Structure in Vision and Language (Cornell Psych 530 / Ling 530;
Spring 2000, Spring 2002, Spring 2004)
 Topics in High-Level Vision (Cornell Psych 465 / CS 392; Spring 2001, Spring 2003,Spring 2005, Spring 2009, Spring 2011)
 Mind and Reality in Science Fiction (Cornell Psych 531; Spring 2003, Spring 2005)
 Cognitive Psychology (Cornell Psych 214 / 614 / 501; Fall 2001, Fall 2002, Fall2003, Fall 2004, Fall 2006, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Spring 2010, Spring 2011)
 Neuroscience as the Quest for Perfect Self-Knowledge (Cornell Psych 531; Spring2004, Spring 2007, Spring 2008)
 Language Acquisition in Humans and Computers (Tel Aviv University Computer Science; Fall 2005; Cornell Psych 426; Spring 2007)
 Computation in the Brain (Cornell Psych 465, Spring 2008)
 Consciousness and Free Will (Cornell Psych 231, Spring 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011)
 Computational Principles of Psychology (Korea University BRI 606, Fall 2009)
 Embodied Cognition (Cornell Psych 465, Spring 2010)