From katja.mehlhorn at gmail.com Wed Feb 1 03:34:46 2017 From: katja.mehlhorn at gmail.com (Katja Mehlhorn) Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2017 09:34:46 +0100 Subject: [ACT-R-users] Early Registration Deadline Groningen Spring School on Cognitive Modeling Message-ID: Reminder: register by February 15 to avoid late fee Groningen Spring School on Cognitive Modeling ? ACT-R, Nengo, PRIMs, & Accumulator Models ? Date: April 3-7, 2017 Location: Groningen, the Netherlands Fee: ? 250 (late fee + ?50 after February 15) More information and registration: www.ai.rug.nl/springschool We would like to invite you to the 2017 Groningen Spring School on Cognitive Modeling. As last year, the Spring School will cover four different modeling paradigms: ACT-R, Nengo, PRIMs, and Accumulator models. It thereby offers a unique opportunity to learn the relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. Each day will consist of four theory lectures, one on each paradigm. Each modeling paradigm also includes hands-on assignments. Although students are free to chose the number of lectures they attend, we recommend you to sign up for lectures on two of the modeling paradigms, and complete the tutorial units for one of the paradigms. At the end of each day there will be a plenary research talk, to show how these different approaches to modeling are applied. The Spring School will be concluded with a keynote lecture and a conference dinner. We are excited to announce that Sander Bohte has accepted our invitation and will be the keynote speaker. Admission is limited, so register soon! ACT-R Teachers: Jelmer Borst, Hedderik van Rijn, Katja Mehlhorn (University of Groningen) Website: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu . ACT-R is a high-level cognitive theory and simulation system for developing cognitive models for tasks that vary from simple reaction time experiments to driving a car, learning algebra, and air traffic control. ACT-R can be used to develop process models of a task at a symbolic level. Participants will follow a compressed five-day version of the traditional summer school curriculum. We will also cover the connection between ACT-R and fMRI. Nengo Teacher: Terry Stewart (University of Waterloo) Website: http://www.nengo.ca Nengo is a toolkit for converting high-level cognitive theories into low-level spiking neuron implementations. In this way, aspects of model performance such as response accuracy and reaction times emerge as a consequence of neural parameters such as the neurotransmitter time constants. It has been used to model adaptive motor control, visual attention, serial list memory, reinforcement learning, Tower of Hanoi, and fluid intelligence. Participants will learn to construct these kinds of models, starting with generic tasks like representing values and positions, and ending with full production-like systems. There will also be special emphasis on extracting various forms of data out of a model, such that it can be compared to experimental data. PRIMs Teacher: Niels Taatgen (University of Groningen) Website: http://www.ai.rug.nl/~niels/actransfer.html How do people handle and prioritize multiple tasks? How can we learn something in the context of one task, and partially benefit from it in another task? The goal of PRIMs is to cross the artificial boundary that most cognitive architectures have imposed on themselves by studying single tasks. It has mechanisms to model transfer of cognitive skills, and the competition between multiple goals. In the tutorial we will look at how PRIMs can model phenomena of cognitive transfer and cognitive training, and how multiple goals compete for priority in models of distraction. Accumulator Models Teacher: Marieke van Vugt, Don van Ravenzwaaij (University of Groningen), & Martijn Mulder (University of Amsterdam) Decisions can be described in terms of a process of evidence accumulation, modeled with a drift diffusion mechanism. The advantage of redescribing the behavioral data with an accumulator model is that those can be decomposed into more easily-interpretable cognitive mechanisms such as speed-accuracy trade-off or quality of attention. In this course, you will learn about the basic mechanisms of drift diffusion models and apply it to your own dataset (if you bring one). You will also see some applications of accumulator models in the context of neuroscience and individual differences. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mmw188 at gmail.com Mon Feb 6 10:41:18 2017 From: mmw188 at gmail.com (Matthew Walsh) Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 10:41:18 -0500 Subject: [ACT-R-users] research scientist position at TiER1 Performance Solutions Message-ID: We are looking for a researcher to add to our interdisciplinary research team at TiER1 Performance Solutions. The ideal candidate possesses strong analytical abilities, enjoys working with modern rapid development programming languages (for example, Python, etc), has an experienced, disciplined approach to quantitative research and experimentation, and enjoys making an impact on how people perform at their work. The individual needs to value working in a collaborative environment and be able to work within cross disciplinary team of psychologists, cognitive scientists, quantitative scientists, and others. This position provides the opportunity to make an immediate impact on several current projects in a variety of ways: - Analytical ability: take a fuzzy problem and decompose it into specific and clear pieces (clarity could either be qualitative or quantitative) - Strong writing skills (clear writing == clear thinking) - Programming skill to support our projects (e.g., Python, JAVA, R, MATLAB, Octave, or similar). Experience in more than 1 programming language is highly desired. - Experience in statistics and data analysis. - Exposure to topics in cognitive science including learning and memory, attention, and language processing. - Participate in and/or lead the development of deliverable content that meets the needs of the client and contract - Anticipate client needs and formulate solutions to client issues - Review deliverables for accuracy and quality - Contributes to new business proposals and proposal development - Manages own personal and professional development; seeks opportunities for professional growth and expansion of consulting skills and experiences *QUALIFICATIONS* - Preferred majors include: Computer Science, Software Engineering, Cognitive Psychology or related field. PhD or near PhD is a large plus. - Strong experience software development with multiple programming languages - Ability to communicate with the client, project team and within TiER1 *ABOUT TIER1* Our mission is to improve the performance of organizations through the performance of people. We wake up every morning ready to tackle big challenges, so that more people can do the amazing work they are meant to do. When they contribute more, stretch their talents, and free themselves of workplace limits, a remarkable thing happens?they become happier and more fulfilled. And that means they reduce stress, create healthier relationships, and simply find more joy. Every day we?re in business, we really are building a better world. Our purpose is to help people do their best work?that?s the lens we wear every day. As an employee-owned firm, we apply that to our client organizations, their people, and ourselves. And to do that, we embrace our core values: High Performance, Relationships, Initiative, Accountability, Value, AND Fun *TO APPLY* http://tier1performance.applicantstack.com/x/detail/a2rjxfm0nbcl?preview=1 We are evaluating applications on an ongoing basis. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From christopher.dancy at bucknell.edu Mon Feb 6 13:47:47 2017 From: christopher.dancy at bucknell.edu (Chris Dancy) Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2017 13:47:47 -0500 Subject: [ACT-R-users] SBP-BRiMS 2017 CFP Message-ID: Hello all, The latest CFP for SBP-BRiMS is below. If you have any questions regarding SBP-BRiMS 2017 (or would like to get more involved in the meeting itself, please feel free to contact me. Some of this is cut short for your convenience, the full CFP is -Chris ------ SBP-BRiMS 2017 2017 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS) July 5 (Wed) -- 8 (Sat), 2017, Lehman Auditorium, George Washington University, Washington DC, USA Conference Website: http://sbp-brims.org All papers are qualified for the Best Paper Award. Papers with student first authors will be considered for the Best Student Paper Award. Those receiving these awards will be invited to publish an extended version in a special issue of the journal Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. IMPORTANT DATES: Regular Paper Abstract Submission : February 22 (Wed), 2017 Regular Paper Submission : March 1 (Wed), 2017 Author Notification : March 24 (Fri), 2017 Final Version Submission : April 7 (Fri), 2017 Note, all regular papers will be evaluated for: presentation in plenary, presentation in regular session, presentation as poster, or no presentation. All accepted papers will be published in the physical proceedings ? the Springer LNCS volume. This volume is considered archival. Challenge Problem Submission : May 12 (Fri), 2017 Those submitting a response to the challenge are to submit a poster and a short paper by this date. All accepted papers will be published in the online proceedings only and will not be included in the Springer LNCS volume. The online proceedings is not considered archival. Posters & Demos Short Paper Submission : May 12 (Fri), 2017 This short paper submission is intended for late breaking results, technology demos, and those papers from industry, government or the military where constraints prevent the authors from writing a full paper. All short papers (including those describing demos) will be evaluated for: presentation as a poster, or no presentation. All accepted papers will be published in the online proceedings only and will not be included in the Springer LNCS volume. The online proceedings is not considered archival. Tutorial Proposal Submission : March 10 (Fri), 2017 Conference : July 5(Wed) to 8(Sat), 2017, including the following: Pre-conference Tutorial Sessions : July 10, 2017 (first day conference) Poster Session : At Conference Poster Night Technology Demos : Lunch times & Poster Night Challenge Problem Evaluation : At Conference Poster Night ABOUT SBP-BRiMS: SBP-BRiMS is a multidisciplinary conference with a selective single paper track and poster session. The conference also invites a small number of high quality tutorials and nationally recognized keynote speakers. The conference has grown out of two related meetings: SBP and BRiMS, which were co-located in previous years. Social computing harnesses the power of computational methods to study social behavior, such as during team collaboration. Cultural behavioral modeling refers to representing behavior and culture in the abstract, and is a convenient and powerful way to conduct virtual experiments and scenario analysis. Both social computing and cultural behavioral modeling are techniques designed to achieve a better understanding of complex behaviors, patterns, and associated outcomes of interest. Moreover, these approaches are inherently interdisciplinary; subsystems and system components exist at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., ?cells to societies?) and across multiple disciplines, from engineering and the computational sciences to the social and health sciences. The SBP-BRiMS conference invites modeling and simulation papers from academics, research scientists, technical communities and defense researchers across traditional disciplines to share ideas, discuss research results, identify capability gaps, highlight promising technologies, and showcase the state-of-the-art in applications in the areas of cultural behavioral modeling, prediction, and social computing. Please see the SBP-BRiMS17 website for more details. Keynotes and tutorials delivered in the previous SBP and BRiMS meetings are available through the websites http://sbp-brims.org and http://cc.ist.psu.edu/BRIMS2015/ . CALL FOR PAPERS: Submissions are solicited on research issues, theories, and applications. Topics of interests include the following: Advances in Sociocultural & Behavioral Processes * Group interaction and collaboration * Group formation and evolution * Group representation and profiling * Collective action and governance * Cultural patterns & representation * Social conventions, social contexts and processes * Influence process and recognition * Public opinion representation, identification and modeling * Information diffusion * Psycho-cultural situation awareness Behavior Modeling * Intelligent agents and avatars/adversarial modeling * Cognitive robotics and human-robot interaction * Models of reasoning and decision making * Model validation & comparison * Socio-cultural M&S: team/group/crowd/behavior * Physical models of human movement * Performance assessment & skill monitoring/tracking * Performance prediction/enhancement/optimization * Intelligent tutoring systems * Knowledge acquisition/engineering * Human behavior issues in model federations Methodological Challenges * Mathematical foundations * Verification and validation * Sensitivity analysis * Matching technique or method to research questions * Metrics and evaluation * Methodological innovation * Model federation and integration * Evolutionary computing * Optimization Information, Systems, & Network Science * Data mining on social media platforms * Diffusion and other dynamic processes over networks * Inference of network topologies and changes over time * Analysis of link formations and link types * Detection of communities and other types of structures in networks * Analysis of high-dimensional networks * Analytics for social and human dynamics Military & Intelligence Applications * Evaluation, modeling and simulation * Group formation and evolution in the political context * Technology and flash crowds * Networks and political influence * Group representation and profiling * Reasoning about terrorist group behaviors and policies towards them Applications for Health and Well-being * Social network analysis to understand health behavior * Modeling of health policy and decision making * Modeling of behavioral aspects of infectious disease spread * Intervention design and modeling for behavioral health Other Applications * Economic applications of behavioral and social prediction * Viral marketing * Reasoning about development aid through social modeling * Reasoning about global educational efforts through cognitive simulation FORMAT AND SUBMISSION: The conference solicits three categories of papers: Regular papers (max. 10 pages) All topics and authors (academic, government, industry) welcome Published in a Springer volume and online. Plenary or poster presentation. Short papers and Late-breaking results (max. 6 pages) All topics and authors welcome. Published online. Typically a poster presentation. Demos (2-page abstract, or max. 6 pages) Published online. Typically a poster or demo presentation. Paper Formatting Guideline The papers must be in English and MUST be formatted according to the Springer-Verlag LNCS/LNAI guidelines. Sample LaTeX2e and WORD files are available at http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6- 793341-0. It is not required to submit a cover page. All regular paper submissions should be submitted as a paper with a maximum of 10 pages using the foregoing format. All submissions for posters, demo-presentations, challenge problem entries and late breaking results should be submitted as a paper with a maximum of 6 pages using the same format as the regular papers. All accepted entries will be posted on the SBP-BRiMS 2017 website. A selection of authors will be invited to contribute journal versions of their papers to one of two planned special issues of the Springer journal ?Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory? and another high- profile journal. The submission website will be available at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sbpbrims2017. To register a paper abstract, use the standard Easychair submission website and submit your title and abstract. Until the final paper deadline, you will be able to update your submission. PUBLICATION For any questions and inquiries concerning submissions, please email the program chairs at sbpbrims2017 at gmail.com. PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIAL SESSIONS: Several half-day sessions will be offered on the day before the full conference. Sessions will be designed to meet the needs of one of two distinct groups. One group will consist of attendees who have backgrounds in computational science; computer science, engineering, and other mathematically oriented disciplines. Other tutorial sessions will be designed for behavioral and social scientists and others (e.g. those with medical backgrounds or training in public health) who may have limited formal education in the computational sciences. Attendees will gain an understanding of terminology, theories, and general approaches employed by computationally based fields, especially with respect to modeling approaches. Tutorial proposal submission: Tutorial proposals should be submitted online to sbpbrims at andrew.cmu.edu. At minimum, each proposal must contain the following information: * Title of the tutorial. * Description of the tutorial topic and structure. * Expected audience (including the expected backgrounds of the attendees). * Short bio and contact information of the organizers. More details regarding the pre-conference tutorial sessions, including instructors, course content, and registration information will be posted to the conference website (SBP-BRiMS.org) as soon as this information becomes available. For further information, please contact sbpbrims at andrew.cmu.edu. CHALLENGE: The conference expects to announce a computational challenge as in previous years. Additional details will be posted on the conference website. FUNDING PANEL & CROSS-FERTILIZATION ROUNDTABLES: Previous SBP-BRiMS conferences have included a Cross-fertilization Roundtable session or a Funding Panel. The purpose of the cross- fertilization roundtables is to help participants become better acquainted with people outside of their discipline and with whom they might consider partnering on future SBP-BRiMS-related research collaborations. The Funding Panel provides an opportunity for conference participants to interact with program managers from various federal funding agencies. Participants for the previous funding panels have included representatives from federal agencies, such as the NSF, NIH, DoD, ONR, AFOSR, USDA, etc. BEST PAPER AWARDS: SBP-BRiMS17 will feature a Best Paper Award and a Best Student Paper Award. All papers are qualified for the Best Paper Award. Papers with student first authors will be considered for the Best Student Paper Award. HOTEL AND LOGISTICS: Information on hotel and logistics will be provided at the conference website as it becomes available. TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIPS: It is anticipated that a limited number travel scholarships will be available on a competitive basis. Additional information will be provided on the SBP- BRiMS Conference website as it becomes available. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pblouw at uwaterloo.ca Sat Feb 11 02:30:01 2017 From: pblouw at uwaterloo.ca (Peter Blouw) Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2017 02:30:01 -0500 Subject: [ACT-R-users] Feb. 15 Application Deadline - 2017 Nengo Summer School Message-ID: [All details about this school can be found online at http://www.nengo.ca/summerschool] The Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo is inviting applications for our 4th annual summer school on large-scale brain modeling. This two-week school will teach participants how to use the Nengo software package to build state-of-the-art cognitive and neural models to run in simulation and on neuromorphic hardware. Nengo has been used to build what is currently the world's largest functional brain model, Spaun [1], and provides users with a versatile and powerful environment for designing cognitive and neural systems to run in simulated and real environments. For a look at last year's summer school, check out this short video: https://goo.gl/EkhWCJ We welcome applications from all interested graduate students, research associates, postdocs, professors, and industry professionals. No specific training in the use of modeling software is required, but we encourage applications from active researchers with a relevant background in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, robotics, neuromorphic engineering, computer science, or a related field. [1] Eliasmith, C., Stewart T. C., Choo X., Bekolay T., DeWolf T., Tang Y., Rasmussen, D. (2012). A large-scale model of the functioning brain. Science. Vol. 338 no. 6111 pp. 1202-1205. DOI: 10.1126/science.1225266. [ http://nengo.ca/publications/spaunsciencepaper] ****Application Deadline: February 15, 2017**** *Format*: A combination of tutorials and project-based work. Participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas for projects, which may focus on testing hypotheses, modeling neural or cognitive data, implementing specific behavioural functions with neurons, expanding past models, or providing a proof-of-concept of various neural mechanisms. Hands-on tutorials, work on individual or group projects, and talks from invited faculty members will make up the bulk of day-to-day activities. A project demonstration event will be held on the last day of the school, with prizes for strong projects! *Topics Covered*: Participants will have the opportunity to learn how to: - build perceptual, motor, and sophisticated cognitive models using spiking neurons - model anatomical, electrophysiological, cognitive, and behavioural data - use a variety of single cell models within a large-scale model - integrate machine learning methods into biologically oriented models - interface Nengo with various kinds of neuromorphic hardware (e.g. SpiNNaker) - interface Nengo with cameras and robotic systems - implement modern nonlinear control methods in neural models - and much more? *Date and Location*: June 4th to June 16th, 2017 at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. *Applications*: Please visit http://www.nengo.ca/summerschool, where you can find more information regarding costs, travel, lodging, along with an application form listing required materials. If you have any questions about the school or the application process, please contact Peter Blouw (pblouw at uwaterloo.ca). We look forward to hearing from you! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cl at cmu.edu Fri Feb 17 09:50:46 2017 From: cl at cmu.edu (Christian Lebiere) Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2017 09:50:46 -0500 Subject: [ACT-R-users] 2017 ACT-R Workshop Message-ID: A one-day ACT-R Workshop will take place at University College London on July 26, 2017, immediately after the ICCM conference in Warwick, UK and before the Cognitive Science Society meeting in London. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss issues of interest to the ACT-R community, including but not limited to new architectural modifications and developments, modeling and methodology discussions, scaling and efficiency issues, and ideas for applications and expansion. Inquiries, submissions of presentations, and proposals for session topics can be sent to Christian Lebiere (cl at cmu.edu). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: