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
