Douglas Hofstadter wins the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for I Am a Strange Loop On April 25, 2008, the Los Angeles Times honored 2007's most accomplished authors at its 28th annual Book Prizes ceremony at UCLA's Royce Hall, held on the eve of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Douglas Hofstadter, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University won the award for best science and technology book. The rise of the emotional robot How people view robots may inform what future robots can do, but it seems that gender and nationality feed into our reaction, too. Cognitive scientist Paul Schermerhorn and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington asked 24 men and 23 women to cooperate with a machine-like robot on solving a mathematical problem and filling in a survey form. The robot consisted of a base with metre-high posts either side supporting a head with two cameras that looked like eyes. A voice synthesiser allowed it to speak. The team found that men thought of the robot as "more human-like" than women and engaged well with it at a social level, while women felt socially aloof and described it as "more machine-like". More at http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19826506.100-the-rise-of-the-emotional-robot.html (Scroll to the bottom). I.U. Researchers Show that Infants Use Datamining to Determine Word Meanings The research of Drs. Linda Smith and Chen Yu, professors in the Indiana University Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, and core faculty members of the Cognitive Science Program, was showcased in the February 4 issue of Science Daily. They report results showing that infants use sophisticated datamining techniques to connect words to their meanings. For example, in one of their studies, published in the journal Cognition, Yu and Smith attempted to teach 28 12- to 14-month-olds six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image. After viewing various combinations of words and images, however, the children were surprisingly successful at figuring out which word went with which picture. Children are apparently not just learning one word at a time, but rather are building up multiple word meanings at the same time. Study Confirms: When given the choice for a mate, men go for good looks. Researchers led by IU Cognitive Science professor Peter Todd report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that their study found humans were similar to most other mammals, "following Darwin's principle of choosy females and competitive males, even if humans say something different." See cnn.com article. What Makes Scientists Tick and Think? IU Professor of Cognitive Science Colin Allen was interviewed by MSNBC on the nature of science and scientists. Graduate Student Wins Marr Prize David Landy won the Marr Prize for Best Student Paper at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society held August 1-4, 2007 in Nashville, Tennessee. He won the prize for his paper "Grounding Symbol Structures in Space: Formal Notations as Diagrams." In this paper, he argues that mathematical reasoning is not based on purely symbolic, formal structures, but rather the physical form of mathematical notation also has a profound influence on reasoning. Through psychological experiments and computational modeling, he argues that doing math involves perceptual processing of spatial objects, not only formal reasoning. The New York Times, April 9, 2007 The work of Professor Peter Todd and colleagues on the different aspirations that men and women set when searching for mates using speed dating was discussed by New York Times columnist John Tierney in his NYT blog on April 9, 2007. WIRED Interview with Douglas Hofstadter The March 2007 issue of WIRED Magazine contains an interview with Douglas Hofstadter on the occasion of the release of his new book, I Am a Strange Loop. This book returns to some of the topics covered in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: consciousness, self-awareness, and identity. In this interview he explains why he considers himself to be foremost a cognitive scientist, and how it can be that "I am a mirage that perceives itself." The book is also favorably reviewed in the March issue of Scientific American. Newsweek, November 2006 Colin Allen, professor of Cognitive Science and History and Philosophy of Science, was quoted in an article Vanity, Thy Name Is… published in the November 13, 2006 issue of Newsweek. He addresses the mirror experiment as a way to measure self-awareness in animals. Embodied Cognition Olaf Sporns, associate professor of Cognitive Science and in the Department of Psychological and Brain Science, and University of Tokyo roboticist Max Lungarella have created a new way to objectively quantify an idea that philosophers, educators and psychologists have discussed for decades -- that the many ways in which our bodies interact with our environment produces better information that helps the brain. Their findings, published in the journal Public Library of Science Computational Biology on Oct. 27, have been the subject of numerous news stories: When robots see red Good information -- it’s not all about the brain Hand-eye co-ordination vital for intelligent robots Scientists look at brain-body development. Professor Studies Speed Dating Turns out dating can be just like playing poker. It involves luck and strategy — knowing when to stay with your hand (or potential mate) and when to keep playing for a better one. Peter M. Todd, an Indiana University professor of cognitive science, informatics and psychology, studies the search for a mate using a scientific approach. Read the full article in The Herald-Times. Nature, May 2006… The work of Cognitive Science Postdoctoral Fellow Karola Stotz is discussed in the news feature "What is a gene?" of the most recent issue of Nature (Volume 441, 25 May 2006.) In an NSF funded study,  "Representing Genes: Testing competing philosophical analyses of the gene concept in contemporary molecular biology," she and her collaborator Professor Paul Griffiths, now at the University of Queensland, developed a questionnaire and administered it to 500 biologists. The aim of the study is to map the many different usages of the term 'gene' onto different fields of contemporary biology. Last year this project was featured in a report of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO reports 6 (9), 2005). The project was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh. Stotz and Griffiths have both moved on but are still working on the analysis of the data. You can see the questionnaire and other information about the project, including a list of publications, at the project's website and at Paul Griffiths' Biohumanities site. More information about the work of Karola Stotz, including ongoing projects, can be found at her personal homepage. The Cognitive Science of Love, April 2006… Indiana University Professor of Cognitive Science, Informatics, and Psychological and Brain Sciences, Peter Todd, recently appeared in the feature-length German documentary film "Ich Dich Auch" ("Love Me Do"). This movie will be released in 2006 in the United States, and explores the nature of love from multiple perspectives. Professor Todd provides the perspective from mathematical modeling and evolutionary psychology. You can see Professor Todd’s movie segments: clip one and clip two. (Download QuickTime) His own research on mate selection, computational and mathematical modeling of cognition, judgment and decision making, adaptive behavior, and evolution at http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/pmtodd.html . In WIRED Magazine, February 2006… The February 2006 issue of WIRED magazine asks, "What will be the next big concept/phrase now that 'Cyberspace' is dead?" See how luminaries such as William Gibson, Vint Cerf, Neil Gershenfeld, and Indiana University's own Katy Borner, associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science and Cognitive Science Program, answered this question at the newsstand or at the WIRED magazine website. Living with Punishment, and Loving It. Elinor Ostrom, Arthur Bentley Professor of Political Science, Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, and Member of the Cognitive Science Program was interviewed in the New York Times on April 7, 2006. She commented on an article appearing in that week's issue of Science experimentally showing that people prefer to be in groups that allow group members to financially punish one another for not cooperating with the group. When given a choice of interacting in groups that did and did not allow punishment, the experiment participants systematically moved over time to the group that did allow punishment, and the overall profit was higher for members in this group. In the Economist, November 17, 2005... The November 17, 2005 issue of the Economist covered research reported at arxiv by four researchers at Indiana University: Santo Fortunato, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Vespignani (Professors Menczer and Vespignani are faculty members of the IU Cognitive Science program). Their article, "The egalitarian effect of search engines" reports empirical evidence that search engines such as Google, rather than biasing web traffic to already popular sites, in fact results in a more egalitarian pattern of site visitation than would be predicted if web citizens based their visits only on the popularity of a site. See the full paper, and the story in The Economist.