The Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Students’ Association is happy to announce the 7th iteration of the University of Toronto Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Mind (UTism), titled ‘Work in Progress: The Cognitive Science of Development’. Several of the talks are available here.
Conference Abstract
How does a system changing its organization over time grant it new capacities for action? This question seems to be at the heart of much of the work on development in psychology, linguistics, computer science, robotics, biology, and philosophy. How generalizable some model of development is, how to model a developing system, how to create systems that we expect to develop in some particular way, and what kind of place developmental explanations have in philosophy of science are all important and open questions with interesting current work being done on them. It is at the intersection of these kinds of questions where some of the most fundamental and important issues arise.
Each of these big issues depends on the particulars of research in many fields on developing motor skills in humans and machines, on language acquisition, on developing reasoning abilities, on epigenetics, on machine learning, among many others. Finding answers to these big questions in ways that will illuminate these particulars in new and interesting ways will involve fulfilling the promise of Cognitive Science: answering big questions about the mind in an interdisciplinary way. This symposium aims to part of doing just such a thing by bringing together researchers from many different fields to facilitate interdisciplinary dialog and in doing so tackle the hard problems in development.
Speakers
Linda Smith (Keynote)
Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University Bloomington
Jill de Villiers (Keynote)
Sophia & Austin Smith Professor of Psychology & Philosophy
Smith College
Josh Bongard
Associate Professor of Computer Science
University of Vermont
David Witherington
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of New Mexico
Ana Pérez-Leroux
Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and Director of the Cognitive Science Program
University of Toronto
John Vervaeke
Lecturer in the Department of Psychology and the Cognitive Science and Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health Programs
University of Toronto
Denis Walsh
Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
University of Toronto
Daphna Buchsbaum
Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Toronto