[ACT-R-users] Season Greetings

[John Anderson]

Again I hope you all have had a profitable year modeling. 

It would seem that my major personal event of the year would be the 
winning of the Rumelhart Award, which made me very happy and which I 
see as really an award for ACT-R and the community.  However, 
personally I seem more dominated by the transitions in my life.  I 
had one son, Abe, go off to college (although CMU) and the other son, 
Jay, come home from college and start working for me.  For one reason 
or another, we have lost our regular contact with a lot a people over 
the last 12 months - Helen Borek, Raluca Budiu, Cam Carter, Monchu 
Chen, Jon Fincham, Adam Goode, Glenn Gunzlemann, Craig Haimson, and 
Eli Silk.  In addition, Scott Douglass has switched to graduate 
student status.  We have had Mark Albert, Wai-Tat Fu, and Niels 
Taatgen come join us.  However, as one can calculate, the net effect 
has been a reduction in contacts, but still I feel more than 
occupied.  Still here meeting with me on whatever basis they were 
last year are Dan Bothell, Dana Byrne, Christian Lebiere, Yulin Qin, 
Phil Pavlik, Myeong-Ho Sohn, and Hedderik van Rijn.

Our two major research fronts continue to be brain imaging and skill 
acquisition, brought together both by their connection to ACT-R and 
issues of instruction.  Some of these threads are brought together in 
our forthcoming Psych Review article (An Integrated Theory of Mind - 
Anderson, Bothell, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin).  Unfortunately, 
the final draft of this has not been updated on the web reflecting 
the fact that our web site is more than 12 months out of date.  This 
is one of the things I need to be attending to in the New Year and 
will be bugging some of you about.

The big upcoming event is ICCM in Pittsburgh (July 30 - Aug 1; 
organized by Marsha Lovett , Christian Schunn , Christian Lebiere, 
and Paul Munro  -- http://simon.lrdc.pitt.edu/~iccm/).  It is 
supplanting the ACT-R workshop for this year.  So, although I expect 
to be seeing you all this summer it will be in a somewhat different 
context.  There has been some discussion about whether we should have 
something of an ACT-R special interest retreat, as we did with the 
PGSS before ICCM in 2001.  However, reflecting the general state of 
things not yet pursued, we have done nothing about that.  Among the 
things to be discussed would be ACT-R 6.0.  Dan Bothell is soon to 
release a draft of the specifications to the community for comment. 
I have read an earlier version and it looks good to me.

Next summer in Pittsburgh,
John Anderson



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==========================================================

John R. Anderson
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: 412-268-2788
Fax:     412-268-2844
email: ja at cmu.edu
URL:  http://act.psy.cmu.edu/
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