Season Greetings

[John Anderson]

This is our annual update on the CMU scene between ACT-R meetings.  The
publication of the new book has begun a year of transitions.

Christian Lebiere has successfully defended his thesis.

Kevin Gluck, Lisa Haverty, Frank Lee,  and Dario Salvucci will all be
finishing their degrees by the end of this summer or earlier.

John and Lynne are going for a Abe-shortened sabbatical to Stanford. 
There they have almost no plans or commitments.

A company, Carnegie Learning Inc., was formed to market the high-school
mathematics tutors and other things.  Don't ask me about it because I
don't know.  Al Corbett and Ken Koedinger would.  Steve Ritter has
joined the company.

We have begun fMRI research adding another link to the claim that ACT-R
is a model of the human brain.  Jon Fincham is working on this.

We have officially retired the U in the ACT-R LUV research agenda.  The
U was concerned with making ACT-R usable as a tool and easy to learn. 
We consider this goal now achieved and will be focusing on its use in
research.  However, thanks to Dan Bothell, we will continue to maintain
and update our excellent interfaces and Web-based facilities.

The V in the ACT-R research agenda was concerned with the visual
interface.  We have become more concerned with interaction at the
terminal more generally (eye movements, vision, speech, audition,
keyboard, mouse) and so have decided to rename this agenda item
Interaction.  We needed a vowel anyways.  A number of ongoing research
projects (anti-air warfare coordinator, unmanned air vehicle) have
become concerned with the detail of interaction with dynamic
problem-solving interfaces.  This is research that is occupying Mike
Byrne, Scott Douglass, and Myeong-Ho Sohn.

L, the learning agenda, remains.  One focus here on the issue of how
experimental instructions get turned into the productions that we all
use to model our experiments.  Marsha Lovett has been looking at the
issue of credit assignment in complex strategy learning situations.

We have decided to add language as our third major focus.  There are a
number of interesting projects outside of CMU but within CMU we have
Raluca Budiu working on on-line semantic processing, Mike Matessa on
discourse, and Christian on instruction following.

This leads to the rather weak acronym for the local ACT-R agenda:  LIL. 
But at least it is pronounceable.  Suggested improvements are welcome.

The summer school dates have been set and the workshop will this year be
at George Mason.   See you all there if not sooner.