Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 13, part 3 (food preparation)

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 07:08:11 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 13, part 3 (3 of 3).

Recipes and notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/tagliatelle-ai-funghi.html
http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/orecchiette-alla-caprese.html
http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/lezione-numero-tredici-lultima-lezione.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 13, part 1 (opening lecture)

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 07:08:19 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 13, part 1 (1 of 3).

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 12, part 2 (cooking instruction)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 07:03:57 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 12, part 2 (2 of 3).

Recipes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012_05_11_archive.html
http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012_05_12_archive.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 12, part 1 (opening lecture)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 07:03:56 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 12, part 1 (1 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/lezione-numero-dodici-andare-fare-la.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 12, part 3 (closing lecture)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 07:03:56 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 12, part 3 (3 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/lezione-numero-dodici-andare-fare-la.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 11, part 1 (opening lecture)

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:04:02 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 11, part 1 (1 of 3).

Recipe available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/i-cantucci.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 11, part 2 (vocabulary)

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:04:02 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 11, part 2 (2 of 3).

Recipe available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/i-cantucci.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 11, part 3 (closing lecture)

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:04:02 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 11, part 3 (3 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/lezione-numero-undici-fare-una.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 10, part 3 (closing lecture)

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 07:04:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 10, part 3 (3 of 4).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/04/lezione-numero-dieci-ino-one-etto-accio.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 10, part 4 (a game!)

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 07:04:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 10, part 4 (4 of 4).

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 10, part 1 (opening lecture)

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 07:04:06 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 10, part 1 (1 of 4).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/04/lezione-numero-dieci-ino-one-etto-accio.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 10, part 2 (ingredients and cooking instruction)

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 07:04:06 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 10, part 2 (2 of 4).

Recipe available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/05/la-torta-sbrisolona.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 9, part 1 (opening lecture)

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 07:03:49 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 9, part 1 (1 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/04/lezione-numero-nove-un-caffe-per-favore.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 9, part 2 (cooking instruction)

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 07:03:49 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 9, part 2 (2 of 3).

Recipe available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/04/tiramisu.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 9, part 3 (Food preparation)

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 07:03:49 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 9, part 3 (3 of 3).

Recipe available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/04/tiramisu.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 8, part 3 (Ingredients and cooking instruction)

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:03:29 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 8, part 3 (3 of 3).

Recipes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012_04_08_archive.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 8, part 2 (The Mediterranean Diet, part 2)

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:30:15 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 8, part 2 (2 of 3).

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 8, part 1 (The Mediterranean Diet, part 1)

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 07:03:22 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 8, part 1 (1 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/04/lezione-numero-otto-la-dieta.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 6, part 3 (closing lecture)

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 07:03:35 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, lesson 6, part 3 (3 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-sei-part-22-roma.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 6, part 1 (vocabulary & sentences)

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 07:03:34 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 6, part 1 (1 of 3).

Lecture notes available at:

http://www.speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-sei-part-12-in-cucina.html

Engaging Neighborhoods - Berliner sehen

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:29 GMT

The contemporary video core of Berliner sehen consists of 18 hours of natural conversations with Berlin residents from different social backgrounds. Spoken in authentic German, they acquaint students with the many facets of individual lives. Together with the extensive archive of texts, images, historical audio and video, these conversations form an expansive narrative network that engages students in exploring key cultural issues from diverse points of view. The footage for Berliner sehen was filmed during Summer 1995 by the Berlin-based German documentary video artists INTERACT, who worked in close collaboration with project directors Crocker and Fendt to create a video expressly designed for the hypermedia format of this project.

Read more about Berliner sehen: http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/BerlinerSehen.shtml

Consciousness

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:28 GMT

Stress

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:28 GMT

Emotion & Motivation

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:27 GMT

Memory II: Amnesia and Memory Systems

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:27 GMT

Personality

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:27 GMT

Introduction

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:26 GMT

Science & Research

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:26 GMT

Vision II

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:26 GMT

Social Psychology I

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:25 GMT

Social Psychology II

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:25 GMT

Adult Development

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:24 GMT

Child Development

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:24 GMT

Language

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:23 GMT

Memory I

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:23 GMT

Thinking

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:23 GMT

Learning

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:22 GMT

Vision I

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:22 GMT

Conclusions: Evolutionary Psychology, Happiness

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:21 GMT

Psychopathology I

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:21 GMT

Psychopathology II

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:21 GMT

Attention

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:20 GMT

Brain II: Methods of Research

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:20 GMT

Intelligence

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:20 GMT

Brain I: Structure and Functions

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:03:19 GMT

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 5, part 1-a (part 1 of 2)

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:03:47 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 5, part 1a (part 1 of 4).

Lecture notes are available at:

http://www.speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-cinque-la-festa-della.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 5, part 1b (lecture continued)

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:30:08 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 5, part 1b (2 of 4).

Lecture notes available at:

http://www.speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-cinque-part-2-la-mia.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 5, part 3 (cooking instruction)

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:03:00 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 5, part 3 (4 of 4).

Recipe and lecture notes available at:

http://www.speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/le-polpette.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 4, part 3 (cooking instruction)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:03:26 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 4, part 3 (4 of 4).

Recipe available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/gli-gnocchi-di-patate.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 4, part 2 (vocabulary)

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:03:39 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 4, part 2 (3 of 4).

Lecture notes available at:

http://speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-quattro-quante-domande.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 5, part 2 (vocabulary)

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:30:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 5, part 2 of 3

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 4, part 1a (lecture)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:30:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 4, part 1a (1 of 4)

Lecture notes available at:

http://www.speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-quattro-quante-domande.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 4, part 1b (lecture)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:30:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 4, part 1b, (2 of 4)

Lecture notes available at:

http://www.speakcookitalian.blogspot.com/2012/03/lezione-numero-quattro-quante-domande.html

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 3, part 4 (closing lecture)

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:30:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 3, part 4 of 4

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 3, part 3 (cooking instruction)

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:30:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41-Lesson 3, part 3 of 4

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 3, part 2 (ingredients and vocabulary)

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:03:32 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41-Lesson 3, part 2 of 4

ESG Seminar: Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 2, part 1 (lecture)

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:30:07 GMT

Lesson 2, part 1 of 3 of Experimental Study Group Undergraduate Seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41 Speak Italian…with your mouth full

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 2, part 2 (ingredients)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:30:07 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 2, part 2 (of 3)

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 2, part 3 (cooking instruction)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:30:06 GMT

ESG Seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: ES.S41, Lesson 2, part 3 (of 3)

Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Lesson 3, part 1 (opening lecture)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:30:06 GMT

ESG seminar on Italian language, culture, and food: Lesson 3, part 1 of 4

Learn Italian with Your Mouth Full: Lesson 1, Part 1

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:30:07 GMT

Experimental Study Group (ESG) seminar on Italian language, food, and culture: ES.S41, lesson 1, part 1 of 3.

Learn Italian with Your Mouth Full: Lesson 1, Part 2

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:30:07 GMT

Experimental Study Group (ESG) seminar on Italian language, food, and culture: ES.S41, lesson 1, part 2 of 3.

Learn Italian with Your Mouth Full: Lesson 1, Part 3

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:30:07 GMT

Experimental Study Group (ESG) seminar on Italian language, food, and culture: ES.S41, lesson 1, part 3 of 3.

Unique languages, universal patterns

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:30:08 GMT

Under the surface, English and Japanese have deep similarities, as MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa argues in his new book, Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order.

ACT Lecture | Michael Corris: What Do Artists Know?

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 08:03:05 GMT

Michael Corris, Professor/Chair of Studio Art, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, discusses how some contemporary art is profoundly engaged with the world in ways that go beyond interpretation.

Samuel Jay Keyser - Interview No. 3 - Dec. 17, 2010

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:35:31 GMT

Third of three oral history interviews with Samuel Jay Keyser, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, jazz trombonist, poet. Interviewed by Forrest Larson, MIT Lewis Music Library. Topics include: scientific and artistic creativity, historical state of linguistics, phonology, argument structure, poetry analysis, generative grammar, jazz and linguistics, music and language, poetry, free verse poetry, Theory of Evolution and the arts, linguistics at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, writing poetry and short stories, dixieland jazz, Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Hale, Sylvain Bromberger, Morris Halle, Leonard Bernstein, Ray Jackendoff, Ernie Clark (trombone), Bobby MacInnis (trumpet), Dan MacInnis (banjo), Dave Whitney Orchestra, New Liberty Jazz Band, Everett Longstreth (band leader). Professor Keyser reads two of his poems, and plays two tunes on the trombone.

Welcome and Opening Remarks, History

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:00:00 GMT

04/11/2011 9:00 AM David A. Mindell, PhD '96, Frances and David Dibner Associate Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing; ; Dr. Susan Hockfield, President, MIT; Victor Zue, ScD '76, Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Director, CSAIL; F. Thomson Leighton, Ph.D. '81, Co"Founder and Chief Scientist, Akamai; Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT; Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington; Patrick Henry Winston, '65 SM'76, PhD '70, Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science; ; Randall Davis, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering,Description: It's Day 95 in MIT's 150 days of sesquicentennial celebration, and all thoughts turn to the evolution of computer science and MIT's pivotal role in that history. As Victor Zue puts it so succinctly, "Computers sure have changed." They are even invading biology, and President Hockfield (who is also a Professor of Neuroscience) sees this history as another branch in the tradition, initiated by William Barton Rogers, of education bringing the "useful arts" (or as we now say, technology) to bear on the economic development of the United States. Tom Leighton asserts that "To say computers are transforming everything is an understatement." Leighton offers a brief lesson in theoretical computer science, defining an algorithm through the example of searching for the prime factors of a given number N, and identifying the key follow"up questions: Can you prove it works? How long does it take? How good is it? Then the big question: Does theoretical computer science matter? Leighton cites some powerful examples of the field's impact on our lives, from encryption to Google's page"rank algorithm to the content delivery system of Akamai Technologies (which he co"founded in 1998). Ed Lazowska asks a very different question: What four important events happened in 1969? If you guess the landing on the moon, the Woodstock festival, or the Mets winning the World Series, you're right but no cigar: the most important event was the first data transmission over the ARPANet, forerunner of the Internet. Since then, relentless innovation has produced computer systems that make possible digital media, mobility, search _ and set the stage for the next generation of smarts, i.e., computers embodied in our homes, cars, healthcare, and in a sense, ourselves, via crowd"sourcing. In all this, even when viewed from the "left coast," MIT's role continues to be central. But the rock star of this symposium is actually IBM's Jeopardy"winning Watson, whose glowing blue countenance beams in all three talks. Patrick Winston takes off from Watson to look for the beginning of artificial intelligence, and after a few hops backward through the late 20th century, arrives at Aristotle and then Neanderthals and the paintings at Lascaux. The modern progenitors of artificial intelligence, whom Winston honors one"by"one in a digital photo gallery, include Marvin Minsky (for focusing on human cognition), Roger Schank (storytelling), and David Marr (layers of explanation). Where is artificial intelligence headed? Winston is working on a "trinity of strong hypotheses" _ about story, perception, and social interaction _ and he promises to report on the success of this way forward at the MIT bicentennial celebration. About the Speaker(s): Victor Zue is the first holder of the Delta Electronics Chair endowed for senior researchers. His main research interest is in the development of spoken language interfaces to make human/computer interactions easier and more natural, and he has taught many courses and lectured extensively on this subject. Prior to 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group, which has pioneered the development of many systems that enable a user to interact with computers using multiple spoken languages (English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish). Outside of MIT, Zue has consulted for many multinational corporations, and he has served on many planning, advisory, and review committees for the US Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Science and Engineering. In 1990, he became a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. In 1999, he received the DARPA Sustained Excellence Award. In 2002, he received the Speech Technology Magazine's inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. Host(s): Office of the President, MIT150 Inventional Wisdom

20th Killian Award Lecture (1992) - Noam Chomsky, "Language: The Cognitive Revolutions"

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:36:03 GMT

Professor Noam Chomsky delivers the 20th annual James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award and Lecture, titled "Language: the Cognitive Revolutions," on April 8, 1992. The Killian Award was established in 1971 to recognize extraordinary professional accomplishments by full-time members of the MIT faculty. A faculty committee chooses the recipient from candidates nominated by their peers for outstanding contributions to their fields, to MIT and to society. [T1704, T1705]

Nepali Language Classes

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:14:46 GMT

A video of Nepali language classes run by volunteer MIT graduate students. For more information about this initiative, visit: http://colabradio.mit.edu/?cat=522

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

03/09/2010 6:30 PM 32"141Sasa StanisicDescription: From the publisher: "Heralded as a "sorcerer of narrative" (Foreign Policy) with an instinct for "poetic and intoxicating language" (Freie Presse), twenty"nine"year"old Sa_a Stani_i_ bounded onto the international literary scene to great fanfare and acclaim. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone-the tale of a boy who experiences the war in Bosnia and finds the secret to survival in language and stories-was the only debut novel to be short"listed for the top literary prize when it was published in Germany, and indeed every page of this glittering, exuberant tale thrums with the joy of storytelling." Stani_i_ reads a few passages from the book in Saxonian, and then explains the story line in English. At 35:00, Stani_i_ takes questions from Kurt Fendt. At 43:05 he reads three newer pieces in English. At 51:38 Stani_i_ takes audience questions. About the Speaker(s): Sa_a Stani_i_ is the 2010 Max Kade Writer in Residence in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT, Sa_a Stani_i_ was born in Visegrad, a small town in eastern Bosnia in 1978. In 1992, at the age of 14, he witnessed the Bosnia War, as Serb troops laid siege to his hometown. He fled with his family to southern Germany a few weeks after the occupation. Stani_i_ attended the Heidelberg International Comprehensive School. He later studied at the University of Heidelberg and was a teaching assistant at Bucknell University. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, a semiautobiographical work, is his debut novel. co"sponsored by the DAAD and the MIT European Club Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Libraries

Rebuilding Haiti

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

02/23/2010 4:00 PM Bartos theaterCherie Moit Abbanat, Lecture, Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Department of Architecture, MIT; Michel DeGraff, Associate Professor of Linguistics, MIT; Erica James, Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT; Dale Joachim, Visiting Scientist, MIT Media LabDescription: In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake, four panelists with strong personal and professional ties to Haiti share their insights about the different paths to rebuilding and reconstructing the country. Erica James begins with a view of Haiti's history of "ins_curit_", a term used to describe "cycles of political violence, crime, and economic deterioration that have accompanied periods of political and economic upheaval, foreign occupation, dictatorship, and continued environment decline." She believes the transition from emergency to reconstruction must deal with the challenges of repeated cycles of psychosocial trauma. Her concern is that international organizations, in attempting to alleviate the suffering of earthquake survivors, will give rise to practices that undermine the effectiveness of their interventions and create even more victims and victimization-unintended, and unwanted, consequences of their help. For James, the issues of population management-the regulation and distribution of resources, identity, and accountability-are important considerations in reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts. Cheri Miot Abbanat taps into her American and Haitian networks to find out what survivors need and want immediately to help rebuild their lives and their country. While governments and NGOs bring in traditional support-technology, medicine, food, housing-Abbanat suggests first "seeing it with Haitian eyes." She asks that aid organizations respect what is already in place in Haiti: homegrown knowledge, the language, what already works. Although fragile, existing support systems could be bolstered by international aid organizations instead of being replaced by them. Dale Joachim recognizes that "technology doesn't solve everything, but it solves a lot of things." His vision for rebuilding Haiti focuses on energy, the environment, and communications. By addressing Haiti's serious energy imbalance and by "bootstrapping" the public health, education, and rural enterprise systems with a robust communication infrastructure, the path to reversing the breakdown of the environment-in particular, Haiti's massive deforestation-will lead to far greater long"term recovery for the country overall. Using a series of overheads comparing several different countries of similar sizes and densities, he shows how the imbalance in Haiti's energy input/output has a pervasive impact on the Haitian infrastructure. Resolving the energy problem will help resolve issues of education, deforestation, and public health concurrently. Michel DeGraff uses language and linguistics "as a lens on [Haiti's] history." Without recognizing and resolving the complicated socio political stratifications created by language and economics, Haiti will be "rebuilt for the 5% who have always been well off," leaving the other 90%-those who speak Creole-no better off than they were before. DeGraff asserts that Haiti still suffers under brutal class and race inequities brought about, in part, by the power held by those who speak French over those who speak Creole. He believes that by changing the school system, which has been used to maintain these inequities, and by using Creole as the language of all Haitians, the system of language apartheid would be minimized and allow more Haitians access to economic power. A Q&A session follows. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

5. Intelligence Initiative - Language

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:20:38 GMT

Speakers:
P. Winston: Language, the Great Differentiator
D. Roy: New horizons in the study of Language Development
T. Gibson: Cognition of language above the word
R. Barzilay: Reinforcement Learning for Automatic Language Interpretation

Class 14 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:59:28 GMT

In this session: Learning and long term potentiation

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 19 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:29:09 GMT

Language and the brain

Class 16 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:26:20 GMT

In this session: Numbers and math

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 22 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:46:40 GMT

In this session: Alzheimer's disease

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 21 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:34:47 GMT

In this session: Some thoughts about music

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 20 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:21:18 GMT

In this session: Language production

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 18 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 20:03:38 GMT

In this session: Language processing

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 17 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 19:56:29 GMT

In this session: Auditory perception

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 15 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 19:20:25 GMT

In this session: Number processing

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 12 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 17:54:08 GMT

In this session: Working memory II

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 11 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 17:38:28 GMT

In this session: Working memory I

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 10 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 16:29:06 GMT

In this session: Attention II

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 9 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 16:08:50 GMT

In this session: Attention I

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 7 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 16:02:55 GMT

In this session: Visual processing

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 2 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 15:57:59 GMT

In this session: Nervous system

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

Class 1 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Thu, 21 May 2009 15:51:27 GMT

In this session: Overview of cognition

Thought, learning, perception, reasoning, and language are all cognitive abilities powered by the soft squishy gray stuff inside our skulls. After a quick-and-dirty introduction to neurons and the brain, we'll examine several aspects of human cognition and look at the neurophysiology that underlies them. We'll also discuss methods used to study these areas, read some current research, and navigate the wilds of the science library.

MIT Communications Forum: Global Media

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Just as digital technology has expanded the means of producing media, so has it increased the geographic range new media may travel.

An Evening with Video Artist Bill Viola

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:00:00 GMT

03/10/2009 6:30 PM 10"250Bill ViolaDescription: Bill Violadims the lights in MIT's Room 10"250, and begins to talk of life, death and all that lies between, leaving the realm of classroom and entering a place of potential enlightenment. Weaving together his video art, personal anecdotes, poetry and other writings from religious traditions spanning the globe and the ages, Viola illuminates his own spiritual journey and search for meaning. With a light touch, he manages to tap into reservoirs of deep feeling. Viola imparts the vital interplay between his life experience, and the evolution of his vision. After his mother's death, for instance, he 'recovered' her after finding a bowl she'd given him years earlier. Objects outlive us, Viola realized, and contain their own "spark of life." This is true of technologically enabled things including Viola's own video art. He admits that this medium makes him nervous. One of the world's most dangerous weapons is the camera, whose "narrow focus, which is its strength, allows me to see inside a soul." It can also "intentionally obscure an entire class or race." Technology may be used to enrich or to harm, but its goal must be knowledge. Viola recalls Buddha, who told his followers to treat his teachings like a raft, which should just be used "to get to the other side. From that point on, only an idiot would carry a boat around." This is a good time for Buddhist ideas, suggests Viola. The world "seems like it's deconstructing before our eyes." Yet Viola says he's "excited about this age. People who've been making money, doing stuff, must suddenly start living like artists." He tells students they should be "very happy graduating into this emptiness," because collapse brings opportunities for regeneration. Viola recounts various other experiences and insights: a visit to an exhibit of Bodhisattva sculptures, which he regarded merely as ancient art, until an old lady adorned them with scarves, revering them as sacred objects; a Flemish painting of Mary that left him weeping, and made him realize that he "was using art, mourning his mother who was leaving this world." Only after years of training, says Viola, "could I see how my personal and professional life was not at odds, that it holds the whole edifice of the self up." One profound expression of that interdependence is played in this talk: his 1992 Nantes Triptych, whose three 'panels' consist of videos of the live birth of a baby, the last moments of Viola's mother's life, and a clothed man drifting in an underwater pool "in currents between the poles of life." About the Speaker(s): Bill Viola received his B.F.A. in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 and currently lives and works in Long Beach, California with Kira Perov, his wife and long"time collaborator. Viola has exhibited works and established relationships with some of the world's most prestigious museums and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, which in 1997 organized an exhibition entitled Bill Viola: A 25"Year Survey; the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim Museum, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery, London; the Fondacin "La Caixa," Madrid; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Op_ra National de Paris, Bastille; the Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; and the Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York. Viola is the recipient of numerous prestigious national and international awards and honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989 and the first Medienkunstpreis in 1993. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), California Institute of the Arts (2000), Royal College of Art, London (2004) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. Host(s): Office of the Provost, Council for the Arts

Persuasive Communication Workshop: Conveying Content with Voice Tone and Body Language

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:21:09 GMT

Insight from a 2007 Alumni Leadership Conference workshop presented by Stever Robbins '86 that shows how to influence decisions, sway opinion, and get what you want.

Scratch in 30 seconds

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:51:18 GMT

Video by Jay Silver and Karen Brennan

The first 4 months of Scratch

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:58:14 GMT

Children programming user-generated content. Video by Karen A. Brennan and Jay Silver

"Ideal" Language Learning and the Psychological Resource Problem

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 3:50 Wong AuditoriumWilliam Gregory Sakas, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Hunter College; Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science and Linguistics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York Description: Some linguists study what can be learned in principle, but William Gregory Sakas asks "the feasibility question -- how efficient learning takes place." This talk focuses on such research, its historical antecedents, and issues that trouble Sakas and his colleagues. Sakas provides a swift conceptual survey of modeling parameter"setting, from Chomsky, through Yang and Lightfoot. In "the spirit of Pinker," Sakas believes that any computational model of a feasible learner must be compatible with the psychological resources of a human child. So Sakas's lab tries to zero in on "what is needed in the way of psycho"computational resources in a learner to converge on the target grammar on the basis of a limited sample of sentences." The lab has created "a large, artificial but linguistically motivated domain of parameterized languages for evaluating learning models," with more than 1.6 million parsed sentences. Sakas and his colleagues compare the efficiencies of different parameter"setting models, attempt to solve such modeling problems as noise and over"generalization, as well as evaluate richness of the stimulus claims. Underlying this work _ "the whole parameter setting enterprise" -- says Sakas, is the effort "to limit the resources to what can reasonably be attributed to young children," so as to reduce the complexity of innate knowledge -- generally limit the amount and complexity of input and processing of each sentence. The sticky problem remains of finding a "psycho"computationally palatable way" of modeling a process of fitting grammar to multiple sentences. "We feel alone in this endeavor," says Sakas. While there's lots of interesting recent work on modeling syntax acquisition, mathematical, and statistical/probabilistic learning, "we haven't been able to take it into our models, because it doesn't seem to be concerned with resource limits." The ideal learner other linguists discuss "is not a learner concerned with resource issues." Sakas asks if "this work is intended to mirror psychological reality." He notes, "The effective richness of the stimulus for a child language learner depends on the child's non"ideal capacity to extract information from heard utterances." The point is to model what a child really does with the linguistic input available to her. Sakas concludes with a question: "Is there anyone out there trying to solve the psychological resource problem? About the Speaker(s): William Gregory Sakas has been a professor at CUNY/Hunter College since September 2000. He has published a book chapter with J.D. Fodor in Language Acquisition and Learnabilityand co"authored a textbook, The Core Guide to PPL Programming. He received his A.B. from Harvard College in Economics and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the City University of New York.Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child"directed Speech

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 12:50 PM Wong AuditoriumJoshua Tenenbaum, PhD '99, Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MITDescription: How do kids manage to figure out that the word "dog" applies to a whole category of animals, not just one creature? Joshua Tenenbaum wants to understand how children and adults manage to solve such classic problems of induction. Throughout cognition, wherever you look, he says "we see places where we know more than we have a reasonable right to know about the world, places where we come to abstractions, generalizations, models of the world that go beyond our sparse, noisy, limited experience." Tenenbaum's goal is to come up with "general purpose computational tools for understanding how people solve these problems so successfully." He's creating a set of hierarchical, probabilistic models that will help explain how humans make inductive leaps _ how abstract knowledge that "guides and constrains our inferences" helps us acquire language from our earliest days. While his models can apply to many areas of cognition, Tenenbaum focuses on recent work with syntax. From very simple data, children manage to turn a complex declarative like "The girl who is sleeping is happy," to a complex interrogative: "Is the girl who is sleeping happy?" They don't say, "Is the girl who sleeping is happy?" Tenenbaum suggests that humans somehow identify the hierarchical phrase structure of language, and use this as an "inductive constraint to guide acquisition of a particular piece of syntax." Tenenbaum and his colleagues have built representative grammars using data from child"directed speech --2300 sentences that correspond to 20 thousand"plus utterances. He deconstructs these sentences so that each word is replaced by a syntactic category. "The baby bear discovers Goldilocks in his bed" becomes "det adj n v prop pre adj n." He's explored these grammars for their capacity to balance complexity, generalize appropriately, and ability to fit the data. His results indicate that "by having the right kind of inductive bias, the idea of hierarchical phrase structure, you can make generalizations which you have no evidence for" By probing what seem to be "innate domain general capacities," says Tenenbaum, "we're trying to formalize these arguments and use them as a tool to diagnose what has to be innate, or what is more or less plausibly part of Universal Grammar." Tenenbaum sees his use of statistical inference methods as bolstering classical linguistics in its attempt to map out how humans learn from real data, and helping devise machine systems that might approach the capacities of human learners. About the Speaker(s): Joshua Tenenbaum is also a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1999 and after a brief postdoc with the MIT AI Lab, he joined the Stanford University faculty as Assistant Professor of Psychology and (by courtesy) Computer Science. He returned to MIT as a faculty member in 2002. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Science, and he has been active on the program committees of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and Cognitive Science (CogSci) conferences. He held a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Predoctoral Fellowship from 1993"1998, and won the Outstanding Paper Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1997, for "Learning bilinear models for two"factor problems in vision", with William T. Freeman. Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

Have We All Been Right? Looking Backwards at Linguistic Theory, Statistics, and Language Acquisition

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 4:45 PM Wong AuditoriumCharles Yang, SM '97, PhD '01, University of Pennsylvania; Jean"Roger Vergnaud, PhD '74, USC; Anna"Maria di Sciullo , University of Qu_bec; Norbert Hornstein, UMD; Robert Freidin, Princeton University; William Gregory Sakas, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Hunter College; Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science and Linguistics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York Description: It was uncertain by the end of this panel if linguists and computational scientists could find meaningful common ground. As conference organizer Michael Coen initially stated, "The issues we're discussing are as religious to people as the Red Sox." The two disciplines view their shared territory in distinctive ways, leading, in this panel and subsequent discussion, to some friction. Moderator Charles Yang sums up the preceding talks, describing how presenters explored such issues as whether statistical models could adequately capture psychological and linguistic complexity, and whether the learning models fit the developmental data. He cites continued conundrums, such as "How does a child do something that is so apparently in contradiction with what's in the data," which he would like to see addressed in discussions of statistical learning of syntax. Robert Friedin comments, "What I noticed in the presentations of modelers was that syntactic representations put forward were not syntactic representations that I would accept. There is an assumption in linguistics that language has a particular syntactic structure and not another. If you have a theory of grammar that gives you the right set of syntactic representations, you might want to say, let's take that and now let's see what else do we need to add to explain other things on the periphery." Jean"Roger Vergnaud is "puzzled by the approach" of some models that look at the distribution of data for the purpose of inferring grammar. He says, "I think there is a problem with standard treatments that purport to derive phrase structure or consistent structure just from examining strings." Norbert Hornstein says, "I was amused that poverty of stimulus here was considered a problem." Many people in this conference looked at it as a thing to solve, and "in my part of the world, it's an extremely effective tool, not a problem -- a given, we know it exists." He said that computationalists "seem to think we're people who generate phrase structure grammars. Frankly these are peripheral issues." He notes that many syntacticians are interested in the nature of the initial state of the language faculty, and suggests it might be useful to ask how current statistical techniques could study this question. William Sakas repeats his request for "discussion about how statistical models might be scaled down to feasibly be embodied in a child." Anna Maria Di Sciullo says, "Probabilistic models have been said to be the models of language acquisition. If we look at human possession and acquisition of language, whether words, sentences or text, a human tends to have different behavior with respect to different sorts of structures." Also, children don't acquire language instantaneously, and instead go through a set of errors. She seems dubious that a model based on probability would be able to account for the kinds of nuanced patterns found in human language acquisition. The question and answer period includes some energetic exchanges among panelists and conference participants, including Josh Tenenbaum , Lila Gleitman, Chris Manning, Amy Perfors, and Partha Niyogi. About the Speaker(s): Charles Yang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. Before his appointment at Penn, he taught linguistics and psychology at Yale University. His research and teaching interests include, language acquisition and change; morphology and the mental lexicon; computational linguistics; and the evolution of language and cognition, Most recently, he authored the book Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World. Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

Human Simulations of Language Learning

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 9:30 AM Wong AuditoriumLila Gleitman, Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology,University of Pennsylvania; Michael Coen, '91, SM '94, PhD '06, University of Wisconsin"MadisonDescription: This workshop, explains Michael Coen, is an effort to engender temperate, collaborative discussion of a matter that inspires hot dispute: whether machine learning helps explain how humans acquire language. In particular, says Coen, machine learning advocates believe they have evidence against Noam Chomsky's "poverty of stimulus argument," which in essence states that language is built into us, that "children don't receive enough linguistic inputs to explain linguistic outputs." Coen, who doesn't think much of such claims, worries about a deeper problem, that scientists have "begun to discuss engineering at the expense of science." He describes 13"year"old Bobby Fischer's astonishing match with a world chessmaster, where Fischer managed to look 16 moves ahead -- eliminating about 10 to the 30th board positions. We had no way to represent his thinking process then, and we don't today, although scientists have built a machine, Deep Blue, that can topple any human chess champion. It seems there's nothing left to say about chess, yet we know absolutely nothing about how humans play chess, says Coen. "If you're an engineer, this may be fine, but if you're a scientist, that's deeply troubling." One problem with machine models, says Lila Gleitman, is that "they don't try to learn what the human already knows," and we really aren't sure "how big a piece of the pie that is in the first place." Gleitman distinguishes between acquiring language, and acquiring *a* language, like French or German. In her years of researching how children learn language, and specifically children who have been deprived of linguistic input entirely, Gleitman does not find a blank slate: "Children don't just sit there; they start to make gestures." Gleitman reviews various studies that describe a basic sequence in language acquisition that holds true regardless of specific 'inputs.' If researchers make models that are to be "of any interest, they ought to take into account the fact that you may not have to learn some of this." Gleitman has conducted simulations with adults, giving them incomplete scenes on video or paper (dropping words or substituting Lewis Carroll type doggerel) to see how we acquire the meaning of common nouns and verbs through contextual clues and inference. The more sources of evidence people get in these tests, the better they do. But such language acquisition "doesn't scale up" to higher level categories of words," such as "think." Says Gleitman, "It's crazyto suppose there's no biological given in a language learning situation. There's plenty. Some of it is maybe the substance of language and some of that is about the sophisticated learning procedures themselves." So any kind of "informative statistical modeling requires a matrix of conspiring cues, intrinsically ordered in time of appearanceRealistic models of incremental learning will incorporate what the learner brings to the task." About the Speaker(s): Lila Gleitman's research has helped to define current investigations into language learning. She examines the mechanisms that drive the process of language learning. In her work, she looks for the biases children bring to the learning situation and the processes through which children extract meanings from the input they receive. Gleitman has served as president of the Linguistic Society of America and is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the National Academy of Sciences. She co"founded the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. Michael Coen received his S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, where his doctoral work on self"supervised machine learning received the Sprowls Dissertation Award. His primary academic interests are developing biologically inspired approaches to machine learning and reciprocally, to using these approaches to better understand learning in biological systems. Coen is the author of "A Similarity Metric for Spatial Probability Distributions",a CSAIL Technical Report, MIT, 2007, "Multimodal Dynamics: Self"Supervised Learning in Perceptual and Motor Systems," Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT 2006. Coen worked on Wall Street from January 2000 through May 2004.Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

Machine Learning of Language from Distributional Evidence

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 10:45 AM Wong AuditoriumChris Manning, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford UniversityDescription: Christopher Manning thinks linguistics went astray in the 20th century when it searched "for homogeneity in language, under the misguided assumption that only homogeneous systems can be structured." In the face of human creativity with language, rigid categories of linguistic use just don't help explain how people actually talk and what they choose to say. For every hard and fast rule linguists find, other linguists can determine an exception. Categorical constraints rise, then come crashing down. Manning argues for acceptance of variable systems of language, and for searching for structure in these systems using probabilistic methods. Manning applies quantitative techniques to sentence structure, digging for the frequency, probability and likelihood that people will use specific turns of phrase in certain real"world contexts. Looking at distributions in the ways people express ideas in a language "can give a much richer description of how language is used." Indeed, Manning finds that certain typical constraints on sentence structure in one language "show up as softer constraints and preferences in other languages." Manning looks at raw data, like sentences from the Wall Street Journal, and gleans such information as typical word associations that begin to "tell us about the dependencies of verbs and arguments." He looks for dependencies between words, the distance between them, and at a sentence's flow from left to right. Classes of words emerge, and clusters, yielding distributionally learned categories. Certain classes of syntax naturally fall together. Manning builds nested phrase structure trees, and branching structures, and derives simple probabilistic models that help explain "gradual learning and robustness in acquisition, non"homogeneous grammars of individuals, and gradual language change over time." Manning says computational linguistics is also proving useful in such applied fields as information retrieval, machine translation, and text mining. About the Speaker(s): Christopher Manning's research concentrates on probabilistic models of language and statistical natural language processing, information extraction, text understanding and text mining, and other topics in computational linguistics and machine learning. Together with Dan Klein, he received the ACL 2003 best paper award. He received a B.A. in mathematics, computer science and linguistics from the Australian National University in 1989. He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford in Linguistics in 1995. He previously served as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Computational Linguistics Program and as a lecturer in the University of Sydney Department of Linguistics. Manning's "bestseller" is Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Manning and Schôtze,(MIT Press, 1999). Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

Statistical Natural Language Parsing: Reliable Models of Language?

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 3:15 PM Wong AuditoriumSandiway Fong, SM '86, PhD '91, Associate Professor, University of ArizonaDescription: The statistical natural language linguist owes much to the University of Pennsylvania's famous Treebank project. But this giant corpus of one million words _ actually, 49 thousand sentences from the Wall Street Journal all carefully labeled for their syntactic and semantic components -- is actually both a "blessing and a curse," says Sandiway Fong. This "gold standard" list of parsed sentences, the result of more than a decade of work, has become "the only game in town,"according to Fong. Linguists developing natural language algorithms often rely on the complex Penn Treebank to construct and train probabilistic, context"free grammars, and Fong acknowledges the Treebank's revolutionary impact on the field. But he also thinks it' sworthwhile to examine how systems that rely on Penn Treebank actually perform. He has been exploring three basic questions: Do such systems attain cognitively plausible knowledge of language, such as distinguishing between grammatical and ungrammatical components of sentences? How brittle are these systems, so that if you misspell a word or flip one part of the sentence, the system will "give you back some parse? Can these systems learn non"natural languages? Fong has unearthed some interesting issues. For instance, two well"known parsing systems couldn't score more than 50% figuring out the right way to pronounce the word "read" in eight sentences that deployed the past and present tenses (e.g., The girls will read the paper; The girls have read the paper). And the two systems didn't get the same sentences wrong. Fong wonders if "reading the Wall Street Journal is not a good way to learn how to pronounce 'read' or 'red.'" Fong also demonstrated that a parsing system could be turned on the presence (or absence) of a single example involving the phrase "milk with 4% butterfat," calling in question whether such systems are truly robust. While Treebank"based parsing systems demonstrably perform well on Treebank"like sentences, one cannot infer they have necessarily achieved grammatical competence nor linguistic stability. We must understand, says Fong, that 40 thousand training samples do not really provide enough parameters to provide the broad range of linguistic cases for computational systems that ordinary people pick up nearly effortlessly. "We expect statistical systems to be able to deal with noise. But they are extremely fragile, despite their statistical nature and training over a large data set." About the Speaker(s): Sandiway Fong received his B.Sc. in Computing Science, at Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. He received an S.M. in 1986 at MIT, where he worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. After working at IBM's Watson Research Center, he returned to MIT for his Ph.D. In 1991, he joined the NEC Research Institute to work on natural language processing, and machine translation. In 2003, he moved to the University of Arizona, where his research interests are at the intersection of computer science and formal linguistics, with a focus on multilingual parsing, ontolinguistics, computational lexical semantics and computational morphology.Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

Structure Dependence, the Rational Learner, and Putnam's "Sane Person"

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/19/2007 1:20 PM Wong AuditoriumHoward Lasnik, PhD '72, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland; Juan Uriagereka, Professor, University of MarylandDescription: Young children say many surprising and funny things _ funny, often, because how they say it is not quite right in an endearing way. "My friend goed to the playground," and "I ated two desserts" both demonstrate errors that we readily understand, sympathize with, and are confident will go away with further listening and speaking. But there are other kinds of errors that children just don't seem to make. In his pathbreaking work on transformational grammar, Noam Chomsky has written extensively about sentences like "The dog in the corner is hungry." By applying a formal operation Chomsky described in detail, we can form the question "Is the dog in the corner hungry?" But confronted with "The dog that is in the corner is hungry," we do not end up asking "Is the dog that in the corner is hungry?" Instead, we apply the transformational rule in a different, more complex way, to ask "Is the dog that is in the corner hungry?" Chomsky draws two conclusions from close study of many such cases. First, he says, this shows that the transformational grammar rules we follow are "structure"dependent," that is, they apply to phrases, not simply to a string of words in sequence. Second, because a person can go through life without recognizing or even encountering some structure"dependent cases _ and yet make the correct choice when presented with alternatives _ this aspect of grammar has deep implications for human psychology. In fact, Chomsky claims, this is an argument for the existence of invariant principles of language, a universal grammar. Howard Lasnik cites evidence for a different interpretation: Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" scenario may not be relevant. By examining a large collection of speech (drawn from the CHILDES database), and applying a Bayesian model of grammar induction _ making use, in other words, of the speaker's knowledge of prior probabilities _ it is possible to show that a rational learner could in fact learn that transformational linguistic rules depend on phase structure. Lasnik's former student, now colleague, Juan Uriagereka, broadens the argument. Drawing on a startling range of examples _ from animal behavior to protein folding, Uriagereka wonders if the structural properties of grammar are unique to human language, or extend to other forms of human cognition, including music, mathematics, and complex planning. Structure dependence may be true, it may be specific to language or at least to human thought but how did it get there? Where does structure come from? These are the bold questions Lasnik and Uriagereka believe that contemporary linguistic cognitive science has to address. About the Speaker(s): Howard Lasnik is the author of A Course in Minimalist Syntax(2005), with Juan Uriagereka, and of Minimalist Investigations in Linguistic Theory (2003). He previously taught at the University of Connecticut, and has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Lasnik received his M.A. In English at Harvard University in 1969, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics at MIT in 1972. Juan Uriagereka is author of Rhyme and Reason; and co"author of A course in GB Syntax: Lectures on Binding and Empty Categories; and editor of Derivations: Exploring the Dynamics of Syntax. He previously taught as a Visiting Professor at Konstanz University in Germany, and at Wolfson College, Oxford University. He has served as a Visiting Chair, Basque Philology, University of the Basque Country. Uriagereka received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut.Host(s): School of Engineering, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems

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Learn Italian with Your Mouth Full: Lesson 1, Part 1

Learn Italian with Your Mouth Full: Lesson 1, Part 2

Learn Italian with Your Mouth Full: Lesson 1, Part 3

Unique languages, universal patterns

ACT Lecture | Michael Corris: What Do Artists Know?

Samuel Jay Keyser - Interview No. 3 - Dec. 17, 2010

Welcome and Opening Remarks, History

20th Killian Award Lecture (1992) - Noam Chomsky, "Language: The Cognitive Revolutions"

Nepali Language Classes

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Rebuilding Haiti

5. Intelligence Initiative - Language

Class 14 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Class 19 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Class 16 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Class 22 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Class 21 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Class 20 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008

Class 18 | Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Summer 2008