CCNC/SfN/Epirob/AAAI Conference Blogging

I am currently in San Diego, in the second day of a three-city, four-conference tour during which I'll be attending the CCN Conference, Society for Neuroscience, Epigenetic Robotics, and the AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Approaches to Representation Change during Learning and Development. This is the longest and most complicated conference travel adventure I've ever …

George Lakoff Speaking in Austin

Austin Moving Forward, a progressive political group I've never heard of has cognitive scientist George Lakoff as keynote speaker at what I assume is an organizational meeting at St. Edwards University on Saturday, June 25. I've mentioned Lakoff here before. He is an expert on the cognition of language, and a Rockridge Institute fellow studying …

Lakoff Starts a Progressive Think Tank

I've already mentioned George Lakoff and his applications of the cognitive science of language and metaphor to current political thought. He mentioned that the reason that conservatives were winning the political struggles in this country was that they have better metaphors — they're better a framing the debate. Then hoped that he would give some …

Lakoff: Liberal and conservative moral metaphors

Much has been made in the media and blogs lately of the Democrats' lack of leadership and a central message to compete with the republicans. In this 1995 essay cognitive scientist George Lakoff analyses the central metaphors that describe and inform the moral systems of American conservatives and liberals. He argues: While conservatives understand that …

Forum for AI, Monday April 28

This Monday at 4:00 pm in ACES Auditorium, Robert Hecht-Nielsen will speak at FAI. I haven't met Robert, but I understand he is an entertaining and provocative speaker. His talk certainly seems provocative — basically a unified theory of cognition based on associative memory between vector quantizors. Right up my alley! The info is below. …

Lakoff: Metaphor and War

Linguist and Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff discusses the metaphors used in framing the war in his essay Metaphor and War, Again: One of the most frequent uses of the Nation As Person metaphor comes in the almost daily attempts to justify the war metaphorically as a "just war." The basic idea of a just war …

Forum for AI, Friday April 4

This Friday at 3pm in ACES 2.402, Michael Ryan will be speaking at FAI. This title and abstract are below Using Artificial Neural Networks to Study the Evolution of Animal Communication Animals often attend to only a few of the cues provided by the complex displays of conspecifics. We suggest that these perceptual biases are …

Brain Prosthesis

Slashdot and others have covered this story an artificial hippocampus chip. The hippocampus is an area of the brain that's necessary for the formation of new memories. People with memory disorders like the guy in the movie Memento have damage to their hippocampus. It is also known to be crucial for navigation. Rats have "place …