Fall 2011
ICS Research Practicum
CSCI 7412/7422 | EDUC 6506/6516 | LING 7415/7425 | PHIL 7415/7425 | PSYC 7415/7425
Milestone 2

I would like you to mull over the ways in which your research is or could be more interdisciplinary in nature.  Supposedly this is a cognitive science course but many of us are working on projects that fall into core areas of psychology or linguistics or hearing sciences or data mining. With a few exceptions (e.g., Keith's effort to develop models to explain his data), it's not clear how your research has benefited by being a part of this class. Of course, I hope that it has been helpful to talk about your research to an intellectually diverse audience and to get feedback from folks who have very different academic backgrounds. But beyond this benefit, I'd like for the course to encourage you to think about ways you can draw ideas from other arenas of cognitive science into your own work.

For our penultimate class on 11/30, I'd like each student to give a brief presentation that includes some (possibly wild) directions you'd like to go that would make your research more interdisciplinary in nature, and that would either broaden its appeal to a larger audience or that would bring ideas from other fields into your own field. You might have been inspired by talks you heard during the semester, or by other students' presentations, or by Mike's constant nagging to be thinking about mechanisms and computational issues.

For our last class on 12/7, I'd like you to report on progress you've made on some aspect of your reseearch. This could be in the form of an interesting paper you read that has inspired you, a literature review, new results you've obtained during the semester and haven't yet reported to us, etc.

As an end-of-semester wrap up, I'd like a written document (Milestone 2) that covers these two presentations.  You needn't hand in this document until the week of finals, but if you run earlier drafts past me, I'll be able to give you feedback and suggestions. The final version of this document will hopefully be informed by class discussions.