LINGUIST List 3.347

Fri 17 Apr 1992

FYI: Summer Institute in Cognitive Science

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1. Len Talmy, FIRST INTERNATIONAL SUMMER INSTITUTE IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

			PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

 The Center for Cognitive Science
 of the State University of New York at Buffalo

 announces the

 FIRST INTERNATIONAL SUMMER INSTITUTE IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

 SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

 July 1994

 The theme will be:

 MULTIDISCIPLINARY FOUNDATIONS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE

 Robert Van Valin & Barry Smith, Institute Co-Directors
 Leonard Talmy, Director of the Center for Cognitive Science

 Honorary Scientific Committee:

	Margaret Boden (University of Sussex, UK)
	Charles Fillmore (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
	Charles Frake (SUNY Buffalo, USA)
	Elmar Holenstein (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
	Philip Johnson-Laird (Princeton University, USA)
	Kevin Mulligan (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
	Dan Slobin (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
	Dan Sperber (CREA, Paris, France)
	David Waltz (Thinking Machines, USA)
	Sandra Witelson (McMaster University, Canada)

The Center for Cognitive Science of the State University of New York at
Buffalo will present a four-week summer institute in July 1994. The
preliminary dates are July 5-30, 1994. This project represents an
important innovation in the Cognitive Science field; no venture of this
type has ever been attempted before.

It will be comprised of introductory and advanced courses in the
constituent disciplines of Cognitive Science, which will be run during
the first three weeks of the institute. Courses will be taught by both
SUNY Buffalo faculty and invited faculty from other institutions. The
fourth week will then be devoted to workshops and special conferences.
There will also be a special lecture series running through the four
weeks, with prominent scholars from the United States, Europe and Asia
brought in to participate.

The model for this institute is the Summer Institute that the
Linguistic Society of America has been sponsoring over the past 70
years, and there is an interesting historical analogy here. The LSA
summer institutes began at a time when there were very few formal
Departments of Linguistics or Linguistics Programs at American
universities, and they served to provide a venue at which students and
faculty at universities without any offerings in Linguistics could get
training in the field.

Cognitive Science is in a similar position today: There are very few
Departments of Cognitive Science or degree-granting Cognitive Science
Programs, and there are many universities and colleges with no
organized offerings in this area at all. This Institute will provide
an opportunity for many faculty and students to get an introduction to
this field and to supplement discipline-based courses at their home
institutions.

A special effort will be made to recruit minority students and
participants from outside the United States, where systematic courses
across the range of Cognitive Science disciplines are very rarely
offered.

With respect to course offerings, two types of courses will be offered,
introductory and advanced. The first and most important would be
systematic introductory courses for advanced undergraduates or
beginning graduate students in each of the major Cognitive Science
disciplines: Anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics,
Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Psychology. These courses will be
designed for students with no background in that discipline but with
expertise in another. Examples would be "Introduction to Cognitive
Psychology", "Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics", "Introduction to
Anthropology for Cognitive Scientists", "Introduction to Philosophy for
Cognitive Scientists" and "Introduction to AI for Non-Computer
Scientists". This would permit a student in, e.g., Psychology, to get an
introduction to, e.g., Cognitive Linguistics and AI.

There will be two types of more advanced courses. The first is courses
in specific disciplines, e.g., "Cognitive Semantics" (Linguistics),
"Knowledge Representation" (Computer Science), "Cognitive
Development" (Psychology). In addition to the six disciplines listed
above, courses will also be offered in Communicative Disorders and
Cognitive Geography.

The second type of course will be interdisciplinary, team-taught
courses that bring together ideas and methods from more than one
Cognitive Science discipline to bear on a particular problem, e.g.,
Narrative, Neuropsychology of Cognitive Development, Vision.

It is anticipated that participants will include undergraduate and
graduate students, faculty associates, and researchers from industry
and government. For students, each course will meet for a total of 15
hours over the three weeks and will carry 1 semester unit of credit.

Detailed information on the Institute will be available in Summer
1992. If you wish to receive more information about exact course
offerings, speaker series, workshops, fees, living accommodations, and
scholarship and travel support (for students), please send your name
and address to:

 COGSCI94UBVMS.BITNET
 cogsci94ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
or

 1994 Cognitive Science Summer Institute
 Center for Cognitive Science
 652 Baldy Hall
 SUNY Buffalo
 Buffalo, NY 14260 USA.
 (716) 636-3794
 (716) 636-3825 (fax)