Posted by
Leigh Fanning on
Apr 07, 2010; 1:19am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/invitation-introduction-tp4862386.html
First, the invitation:
On Thusday, the University of New Mexico Computer Science department will
hold it's annual student conference highlighting active research within
the department. Dr. Melanie Mitchell will give the keynote address at
11:00 am.
The conference is open with no admission fees, however we are not able to
provide you with lunch. Proceedings hardcopy can be ordered for $10,
and will be available for free via download from the website shortly.
Details, and the keynote talk abstract, are below.
Next, the introduction:
By way of introduction, I am largely a FRIAM lurker, but have met a few
of you and in particular would like to further encourage Nick's suggestion
of a Robert Rosen reading group. My PhD research area is molecular computing
and I am developing a formal system for reasoning about molecular computing
systems, specifically those composed of heterogeneous mixtures of DNA
oligonucleotides. Milner's pi calculus, and Alur and Dill's timed automata
have been inspirational starting points. Of course it's supremely simple
to find these inspirations, and attempt physics-style reductionist
techniques, in the engineering of synthetic biological systems. However
one quickly determines that building even the simplest systems with a
biological basis must be done with a different approach. The difficulty
in system calibration and readout, and the large number of tunable input
parameters, prevent breaking down molecular computing systems into neat
modules and demand study of how living systems execute their own
engineering and maintenance.
My training, and I use this word with great trepidation following recent
discussion, is Engineering Physics, B.S. from CU-Boulder, Computer Science,
M.S. from UNM, and among other industry jobs, 7+ years doing Guidance,
Navigation and Control engineering for the Space Shuttle program in
the middle years when the fleet was "upgraded" to handle heavier weight
missions to the Space Station -- all old hat now and soon to retire, but
initially a load of interesting problems to work out.
Leigh Fanning
--------
The train between SF and ABQ works well, the bus system has a straight
shot up to the UNM campus from the depot. Otherwise about an hour
of driving time is needed from Santa Fe, followed by some patience to work out
parking on campus. There is a large parking garage by Popejoy hall
just off of Central Ave, or street parking just SW of campus can
work well sometimes. If this works for your schedule, please come
and enjoy!
The schedule of talks is here:
http://cs.unm.edu/~csgsa/conference/The location is the new Centennial Engineering building on the west
end of campus, bordering University Blvd, just north of Central Ave.
---
Melanie Mitchell, Portland State University and Santa Fe Institute
Thursday, 8 April, 2010
11 am - 12:00 pm
Centennial Engineering Center auditorium
Enabling computers to understand images remains one of the hardest
open problems in artificial intelligence. No machine vision system
comes close to matching human ability at identifying the contents of
images or visual scenes or at recognizing similarity between different
scenes, even though such abilities pervade human cognition. In this
talk I will describe research---currently in early stages---on
bridging the gap between low-level perception and higher-level image
understanding by integrating a cognitive model of perceptual
organization and analogy-making with a neural model of the visual
cortex.
Bio: Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland
State University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
She attended Brown University, where she majored in mathematics and
did research in astronomy, and the University of Michigan, where she
received a Ph.D. in computer science, working with her advisor Douglas
Hofstadter on the Copycat project, a computer program that makes
analogies. She is the author or editor of five books and over 70
scholarly papers in in the fields of artificial intelligence,
cognitive science, and complex systems. Her most recent book,
"Complexity: A Guided Tour", published in 2009 by Oxford University
Press, was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of
2009.
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org