The Computational Cognitive Science Reading Group at Stanford University is a student-driven initiative to explore recent advancements in computational models of cognition.
Meeting Time: Every other Thursday, 3pm-5pm
Meeting Location: Room 358 in Building 420
Sessions generally begin with snacks for 10 mins and then transition into 1.5 hrs for presentation/discussion.
Our main interests are in works that are motivated by modeling aspects of individual human cognition. We have additional interest in works that make plausible contact with the human brain, which we inclusively define as any connectionist modeling and anything that can be implemented with modern connectionist models. We prefer works that are more cognitively focused, but we are also interested in works with more neural focus as long as they are cognitively related.
We expect most interest to come from Cognitive Psychology, Computational Neuroscience, Computer Science, Linguistics, and Philosophy graduate/research communities, but open to anyone who is interested.
We expect attendees to have read the paper(s) before each meeting. It is okay for attendees to have a poor understanding of the paper after their reading. We require, however, that attendees have at least made a faithful effort to read the paper(s).
Each session will have one or two discussion leaders who have read and understood the paper deeply. The sessions will begin with a presentation from the discussion leader(s) to provide interactive context of the papers (30 min or less). They will then lead a discussion which can take the form of posing questions to the group or soliciting thoughts to the effect of deepening the group’s understanding of ideas surrounding the paper.
Our main form of communication is our stanford email listserv [compcogsci], joinable here. All announcements will be made via the listserv.
We also have a slack channel in the Stanford workspace for additional communication; please contact us if you would like to be added.
We are organized by Adani Abutto, Jerome Han, Satchel Grant and Sean Anderson. Interested in presenting? Contact Jerome Han (sjeromeh@stanford.edu) or Adani Abutto (aabutto@stanford.edu) to schedule a presentation.
We are grateful for Jay McClelland, CSLI, Judy Fan, and Robert Hawkins for funding our meetings.