In the defense, professor Nelson Phillips from Imperial College (UK) served as the opponent.
Our collaboration with Robin Gustafsson began when Nina Janasik and Robin organized a course on Socio-Cognitive Fundamentals.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Robin Gustafsson: Awareness, Institutional Entrepreneurship, and Contradictions in Emerging Technological Fields
Our collaborator Robin Gustafsson defended recently his PhD thesis Awareness, Institutional Entrepreneurship, and Contradictions in Emerging Technological Fields. His thesis studies the emergence of awareness and institutional entrepreneurship in novel technological fields (such as functional foods, well-being technologies, electronic publishing and printing, and modular constructional steel), and the contradictions that result from emergence. The thesis further advances understanding about emergence and socio-cognitive dynamics in novel technological fields.
In the defense, professor Nelson Phillips from Imperial College (UK) served as the opponent.
Our collaboration with Robin Gustafsson began when Nina Janasik and Robin organized a course on Socio-Cognitive Fundamentals.
In the defense, professor Nelson Phillips from Imperial College (UK) served as the opponent.
Our collaboration with Robin Gustafsson began when Nina Janasik and Robin organized a course on Socio-Cognitive Fundamentals.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Analogy and Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter is a well known cognitive scientist. His book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been inspiring people interested in intelligence and cognition since it was published in 1979. The concept of analogy has been central in Hofstadter's work and this was also the main theme when we met at University of Indiana Bloomington on 16th of October.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Timo Honkela and Nina Janasik
Hofstadter wanted to emphasize that when he talks about analogy he does not talk about analogical reasoning which he finds to be much too narrow view on analogy making as a central cognitive operation. According to his view, analogy making is a basis for recognition and categorization. He agreed that analogy and similarity are closely related concepts which also lead to a discussion on Kohonen's self-organizing map as an approach in which detection of similarities is central.
Hofstadter mentioned that sometimes people have viewed his work through the examples or microdomains that he uses. One example is the Copycat model with Melanie Mitchell that produces answers to such problems as "abc is to abd as xyz is to what?". He stressed, however, that his interest is in the general cognitive processes.
We also discussed the work of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner on conceptual blending which Hofstadter found important from the point of view of recognizing the importance of analogy making.
Hofstadter's impressive series of books including "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", "Metamagical Themas", "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" and "I am a Strange Loop" calls for continuation.
Hofstadter wanted to emphasize that when he talks about analogy he does not talk about analogical reasoning which he finds to be much too narrow view on analogy making as a central cognitive operation. According to his view, analogy making is a basis for recognition and categorization. He agreed that analogy and similarity are closely related concepts which also lead to a discussion on Kohonen's self-organizing map as an approach in which detection of similarities is central.
Hofstadter mentioned that sometimes people have viewed his work through the examples or microdomains that he uses. One example is the Copycat model with Melanie Mitchell that produces answers to such problems as "abc is to abd as xyz is to what?". He stressed, however, that his interest is in the general cognitive processes.
We also discussed the work of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner on conceptual blending which Hofstadter found important from the point of view of recognizing the importance of analogy making.
Hofstadter's impressive series of books including "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", "Metamagical Themas", "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" and "I am a Strange Loop" calls for continuation.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Castellani: Sociology and complexity science
Brian Castellani (Kent State University) writes an excellent blog on sociology and complexity science. Among many interesting items I would specifically like to mention the map of complexity science. The map includes links with a lot of additional information. Castellani also discusses what happened to neural networking.In 2003 Castellani published an article in which he showed how qualitative researchers can use the SOM to conduct grounded theoretical investigations of large, complex, numerical databases. It was heart warming to read how positively Castellani writes in his blog about our (Janasik, Honkela and Bruun) recent article "Text Mining in Qualitative Research" in which we continue the same line of research and extend it to text data.
Last but not least, it is worth mentioning that Castellani and Hafferty have recently authored a book called "Sociology and Complexity Science - A New Field of Inquiry". I am eagerly looking forward to reading it.
Towards Aalto University
The joint opening of the 2009–2010 academic year of the Helsinki School of Economics, the University of Art and Design Helsinki, and Helsinki University of Technology took place on Tuesday, 1st of September 2009 in Finland Hall. The rectors of each university were emphasizing the opportunities provided by the merger of these three. Aalto University will begin its operations in January 2010.
Rectors Matti Pursula, Helena Hyvönen and Eero Kasanen
The talks by the rectors as well as the talk by the president of Aalto University, Dr. Tuula Teeri were rather seremonial whereas the student union representatives brought up challenges and new openings in their talks.
Tuula Teeri, Aalto University President
The talks by the rectors as well as the talk by the president of Aalto University, Dr. Tuula Teeri were rather seremonial whereas the student union representatives brought up challenges and new openings in their talks.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Cognitive Information Processing workshop in Santorini
Professors Simon Haykin and Sergios Theodoridis chaired a workshop on Cognitive Information Processing in Santorini, Greece in June 2008. The keynote speakers included Simon Haykin, José Principe, Ali Sayed, Bernhard Schölkopf, Naftali Tishby and Timo Honkela. There were many interesting, mostly methodological presentations, including some presentations on the special theme of cognitive radio. The term "cognitive" was discussed and it was concluded that it has been used in different ways covering the concept at different levels of detail.
Sergios Theodoridis and Simon Haykin in Santorini. Theodoridis is
known for his excellent text book on pattern recognition with Koutroumbas.
Naftali Tishby gave an interesting keynote with a focus on the perception-action cycle. Among other things, he considered the topic from the point of view of information bottleneck. There is a predictive channel between the unknown future (channel output) and partially observed past (channel input). An organism links these so that the sensing costs and action value are taken into account.
Panel discussants at CIP'2008 (from left): José Principe, Ali Sayed, Simon Haykin, Bernhard Schölkopf, Timo Honkela, and Naftali Tishby
known for his excellent text book on pattern recognition with Koutroumbas.
Naftali Tishby gave an interesting keynote with a focus on the perception-action cycle. Among other things, he considered the topic from the point of view of information bottleneck. There is a predictive channel between the unknown future (channel output) and partially observed past (channel input). An organism links these so that the sensing costs and action value are taken into account.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Zhijian Yuan: Advances in independent component analysis and nonnegative matrix factorization
Our colleague, Zhijian Yuan, defended his doctoral dissertation "Advances in independent component analysis and nonnegative matrix factorization" today. The opponent was Prof. Fabian Theis from Helmholz Zentrum München and he provided very interesting and insightful discussion on Zhijian's work.
The thesis is theoretical work and develops and analyzes independent component analysis (ICA) and nonnegative matrix factorilization (NMF). They are both interesting methods from a cognitive point of view as they can find interesting and understandable features in an unsupervised fashion without any labeled training examples.
The thesis is theoretical work and develops and analyzes independent component analysis (ICA) and nonnegative matrix factorilization (NMF). They are both interesting methods from a cognitive point of view as they can find interesting and understandable features in an unsupervised fashion without any labeled training examples.
Monday, March 09, 2009
New journal: Cognitive Computation
Springer has announced a new quarterly journal Cognitive Computation, with Amir Hussain as the Editor in Chief. It covers biologically-inspired computational accounts of all aspects of natural and artificial cognitive systems. The first issue is available.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Dissertation in corpus-based lexicography
MSc Antti Arppe successfully defended his dissertation Univariate, bivariate, and multivariate methods in corpus-based lexicography - a study of synonymy today at the University of Helsinki. The thesis is a methodological study in modeling lexeme selection in context when considering linguistic variation such as synonymy. The work applies polytomous logistic regression to produce odds for lexeme selection using a number of predictors. The odds for each individual predictor allows interpretation as to in which kind of contexts each lexeme is typically present or absent.
The opponent, Prof. R. Harald Baayen from the University of Alberta (Canada), provided an interesting discussion. It started by the notion of movement away Chomskyan intuition-based language analysis towards corpus analysis that studies how language works with statistical methods. It was followed by complex questions: Are grammars probabilistic? If so, how does the brain handle probabilities? Why does language allow synonymy? How to handle inter-dependencies between predictors? Language changes, how about the models?
Prof. Baayen mentioned the recently started Journal of Empirical Linguistics, which accepts only replicatable submissions that have to include all scripts that can be used to re-produce the results reported in the paper.
The opponent, Prof. R. Harald Baayen from the University of Alberta (Canada), provided an interesting discussion. It started by the notion of movement away Chomskyan intuition-based language analysis towards corpus analysis that studies how language works with statistical methods. It was followed by complex questions: Are grammars probabilistic? If so, how does the brain handle probabilities? Why does language allow synonymy? How to handle inter-dependencies between predictors? Language changes, how about the models?Prof. Baayen mentioned the recently started Journal of Empirical Linguistics, which accepts only replicatable submissions that have to include all scripts that can be used to re-produce the results reported in the paper.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Extracting meaning from audio signals
Associate professor Jan Larsen, from the Intelligent Signal Processing Group at IMM, Technical University of Denmark, gave a presentation on extracting meaning from audio signals. He gave several examples on how to process audio signals to extract information of, for instance, used instruments and genre. Other examples showed how several information sources can be combined to create search engines for music.
He highlighted the increasing importance of cognitive systems and machine learning in future research. As current emerging interests he stated sparse unsupervised models, generation of high-level contextual information, semisupervised learning and user modeling. Games with a purpose, such as the ESP game and reCAPTCHAs, were mentioned. There users typically entertain themselves, and at the same time happen to tag images, recognize digitized text or otherwise augment raw data with high-level meta-data. The results can be used as additional training data for machine learning methods for creating better applications.
The next day, he acted as the opponent in Jarkko Salojärvi's dissertation on using wrong models.
He highlighted the increasing importance of cognitive systems and machine learning in future research. As current emerging interests he stated sparse unsupervised models, generation of high-level contextual information, semisupervised learning and user modeling. Games with a purpose, such as the ESP game and reCAPTCHAs, were mentioned. There users typically entertain themselves, and at the same time happen to tag images, recognize digitized text or otherwise augment raw data with high-level meta-data. The results can be used as additional training data for machine learning methods for creating better applications.
The next day, he acted as the opponent in Jarkko Salojärvi's dissertation on using wrong models.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop 11
The eleventh Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW11) was held this year at the Experimental Psychology department of Oxford University in historical Oxford on July 16-18. There have been several exciting presentations in the workshop, of which I summarizing a few I found most interesting.
Dr. L. Andrew Coward (Australian National University), whom I had earlier met at AKRR'05 gave an interesting talk about managing neocortex resources. In his talk, Dr. Coward told us about a his artificial neural network model that uses leaky integrators. The structure of the ANN is based on the findings that the receptive fields of the cortical pyramidal cell columns in the brain seem to overlap as little as possible. According to him, the responses in the cortical columns form the information record which serves as a declarative memory, and the association of the columns in which there was an increase in the receptive field simultaneously is the the episodic memory. The background idea of minimally overlapping (i.e. as independent as possible?) features sound very much like Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to me, except that in ICA you cannot add more features to better discriminate between categories. Further talk with Dr. Coward clarified that the outcome of the model is indeed similar to ICA, but the matemathical foundations of the two approaches are fairly different. The simulations are carried out using random patterns in different categories making sure that the inputs of the same category are statistically similar.
Dr. John Lipinski (Institut für Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum) gave another interesting talk. Test subjects show a so-called spatial drift in behavioral experiments in which they are shown a cross on the computer screen, and then after a short delay, their task is to click the place where the cross was. In the experiments, there is a considerable drift toward more left/right/above prototype depending on the place of the target. According to further experiments, the effect is even stronger when a lexical category label (above, left, right) is shown. Building on these findings, he then introduced a model for simulating the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic spatial systems using dynamic field theory approach to spatial working memory integrated with a competitive spatial semantic network. According to the results shown, the simulation model captures the empirical findings.
Dr. Nicolas Ruh (Oxford Brookes University) presented OXlearn, a new neural networks simulation toolkit. The toolkit contains simple neural network models, a graphical interface in which several parameters can be altered. The toolkit is intended to be an easy-access pedagogical tool, which means no programming is needed to use it (but you can access all the Matlab-based parameters and functions, if you want to). The OXlearn is available at http://psych.brookes.ac.uk/oxlearn for free download both as a toolbox for Matlab, and as a standalone version (only for Windows XP at the moment). Within the field of computer science, one usually wants to teach the students programming as well, but there are several other disciplines in which such a program is probably quite useful.
The invited speaker in this year's workshop was Professor David Plaut from Carnegie-Mellon University (Psychology, Computer Science and the Center of the Neural Basis for Cognition). He gave an insightful presentation about the common cognitive and neural principles of face and word processing in the brain. The research had been carried out together with professor Marlene Behrmann. Distributed presentation of knowledge as a pattern of activation over multiple, hierarchically organized visual areas. According to him, the representations are different in the case of faces and words, but the computation would be same and in both cases the process relies on high visual acuity which enables making fine grained discriminations. In addition, representational coordination and competition and a bias for local connections are important. His conclusions were based by simulations carried out in two simulated systems which on these features, and the results of the simulations seem to produce behavior which is similar to humans in these cases.
The last talk of the three-day workshop was given by Dr. András Lorincz (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary). This talk featured a cognitive model based on factored reinforcement learning and independent component analysis. Like most of the content of the workshop, I will look forward to reading the full paper of this paper the proceedings of the workshop that should be out in December.
The NCPW12 will be probably be held in London in early 2010. I am certainly looking forward to it!
Dr. L. Andrew Coward (Australian National University), whom I had earlier met at AKRR'05 gave an interesting talk about managing neocortex resources. In his talk, Dr. Coward told us about a his artificial neural network model that uses leaky integrators. The structure of the ANN is based on the findings that the receptive fields of the cortical pyramidal cell columns in the brain seem to overlap as little as possible. According to him, the responses in the cortical columns form the information record which serves as a declarative memory, and the association of the columns in which there was an increase in the receptive field simultaneously is the the episodic memory. The background idea of minimally overlapping (i.e. as independent as possible?) features sound very much like Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to me, except that in ICA you cannot add more features to better discriminate between categories. Further talk with Dr. Coward clarified that the outcome of the model is indeed similar to ICA, but the matemathical foundations of the two approaches are fairly different. The simulations are carried out using random patterns in different categories making sure that the inputs of the same category are statistically similar.
Dr. John Lipinski (Institut für Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum) gave another interesting talk. Test subjects show a so-called spatial drift in behavioral experiments in which they are shown a cross on the computer screen, and then after a short delay, their task is to click the place where the cross was. In the experiments, there is a considerable drift toward more left/right/above prototype depending on the place of the target. According to further experiments, the effect is even stronger when a lexical category label (above, left, right) is shown. Building on these findings, he then introduced a model for simulating the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic spatial systems using dynamic field theory approach to spatial working memory integrated with a competitive spatial semantic network. According to the results shown, the simulation model captures the empirical findings.
Dr. Nicolas Ruh (Oxford Brookes University) presented OXlearn, a new neural networks simulation toolkit. The toolkit contains simple neural network models, a graphical interface in which several parameters can be altered. The toolkit is intended to be an easy-access pedagogical tool, which means no programming is needed to use it (but you can access all the Matlab-based parameters and functions, if you want to). The OXlearn is available at http://psych.brookes.ac.uk/oxlearn for free download both as a toolbox for Matlab, and as a standalone version (only for Windows XP at the moment). Within the field of computer science, one usually wants to teach the students programming as well, but there are several other disciplines in which such a program is probably quite useful.
The invited speaker in this year's workshop was Professor David Plaut from Carnegie-Mellon University (Psychology, Computer Science and the Center of the Neural Basis for Cognition). He gave an insightful presentation about the common cognitive and neural principles of face and word processing in the brain. The research had been carried out together with professor Marlene Behrmann. Distributed presentation of knowledge as a pattern of activation over multiple, hierarchically organized visual areas. According to him, the representations are different in the case of faces and words, but the computation would be same and in both cases the process relies on high visual acuity which enables making fine grained discriminations. In addition, representational coordination and competition and a bias for local connections are important. His conclusions were based by simulations carried out in two simulated systems which on these features, and the results of the simulations seem to produce behavior which is similar to humans in these cases.
The last talk of the three-day workshop was given by Dr. András Lorincz (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary). This talk featured a cognitive model based on factored reinforcement learning and independent component analysis. Like most of the content of the workshop, I will look forward to reading the full paper of this paper the proceedings of the workshop that should be out in December.
The NCPW12 will be probably be held in London in early 2010. I am certainly looking forward to it!
Friday, December 14, 2007
Models and simulations of consumers and rhythms of everyday life
Our Kulta project organized a seminar on 13th of December at the Helsinki University of Technology. Mika Pantzar, professor at National Consumer Research Center and researcher at Helsinki School of Economics, showed interesting examples of rhythms of everyday life. The topic is related to his collaboration research with Prof. Elisabeth Shove from Lancaster University. Pantzar presented the idea of considering everyday life through the concepts of melody (sequentiality), harmony (synchronicity) and rhythm. He showed interesting examples of various kinds of time series. For instance, the time used for eating in Spain and France is clearly clustered around lunch and dinner times whereas in Finland people are eating throughout the day rather evenly.
Dr. Amaury Lendasse, the head of the group on Time series prediction and chemoinformatics, gave a tutorial on time series analysis. He presented a number of examples in the areas of economics, physics, industry, astronomy, climatology and hydrology. Lendasse made a distinction between recursive prediction, direct prediction and hybrid prediction in long term time series prediction. He also discussed links between variable selection, scaling selection and distance measures.In the end, we discussed some similarities and differences between various disciplines that consider future. Time series prediction aims at developing methods for predicting the future values of some numerical variables. On the other hand, scenarios are created from a qualitative point of view. Similarly, control aims at manipulating some variable values in such a way that some quantitatively measurable process can be directed into wanted direction. Decision making aims at directing some process into wanted direction through measaures that can be described mainly at qualitative level.
Merja Oja: Methods for Exploring Genomic Data Sets
Merja Oja, a resercher in our laboratory, is defending her thesis "Methods for Exploring Genomic Data Sets: Application to Human Endogenous Retroviruses" for the moment. The opponent is Professor Hiroshi Mamitsuka from University of Kyoto. In Merja Oja's thesis, exploratory data analysis methods have been developed for analyzing genomic data, in particular human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) sequences and gene expression data. HERVs are remains of ancient retrovirus infections and now reside within the human genome. The work has been conducted in Professor Samuel Kaski's group on Statistical machine learning and bioinformatics.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
NICSO 2007: Nature inspired cooperative strategies for optimization
The second international workshop on nature inspired cooperative strategies for optimization (NICSO 2007) was held in the beautiful baroque town of Acireale in Sicily. The topics of the workstop ranged from theoretical considerations of complex network models to hardware implementations of swarm computing.In his plenary speak, Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles) presented his ongoing work on swarm robotics. In a series of videos Dorigo showed, for example, how a group of simple robots emreged a collaborative self-assembly strategy so that a group of robots was able to move past physical obstacles that any single robot could not pass. In another robotics related plenary speak, Paolo Arena (University of Catania) presented their work on emergent adaptive locomotion controllers which enabled a legged robot to lear to walk and plan actions autonomously.
Xiaohui Cui's (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) presentation dealt with clustering of text documents after transferring them into a vector format using word frequence information. An inspiring solution to this computationally intensive task was to use modern graphics processing units (GPUs) which have up to 128 cores on one low cost card. Other interesting work related to hardware implementations of biologically inspired parallel computing included Francesca Palumbos's and Giovanni Busonera's papers on an architecture for self-organization on the hardware level.
Artificial immune systems, a topic of ongoing research at TKK, was referenced in two presentations. The comparison of the neural network paradigm and the immune network paradigm for prototype based clustering was the topic of our own paper while Slavisa Sarafijanovic presented a tool for using negative selection in a collaborative spam filtering environment.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Emergence of early cognition, communication and language
Our research group has been organizing a language technology seminar "Emergence of early cognition, communication and language: from humans to machines", coordinated by Krista Lagus, Oskar Kohonen and Timo Honkela.
Today Don Killian was discussing the book Origins of the Modern Mind by Merlin Donald. According to Killian, Donald's book synthesizes various fields, bringing together theories of cultural origins of human cognition in a cohesive approach. In the book, three major "abrupt" cognitive transformations are brought up by which the human mind developed over millions of years.
First major change in brain structure was the transition period leading to Homo Erectus. Brain enlarged from 600 cc to 1,100 cc in late Homo Erectus. Second major change was related to the arrival of Homo Sapiens, including a further increase in brain size. The period was also characterized by a continual acceleration of cultural change, more frequent innovations, development of language, and vocal apparatus change.
In his book, Donald points out that primates could not, and cannot, reinvent symbols, only recombine already symbols given to them. Then a natural question is: What is missing with primates? One good candidate is that fact that humans possess three types of memory: procedural, episodic and semantic. Semantic memory is a system of representation that forms semantic networks and the final change. Other primates are restricted to episodic memory: a virtual "flashback" of previous performances. Thus, there is a lack of performance ability.
Donald explains that misesis is the missing link. Mimesis includes non-lingustic, self-initiated and representational intentional acts. It incorporates mimicry and imitation to a higher end, voice tones, gestures, facial expressions, and patterned wholy-body movements. According to Donald, mimesis probably did not originate as a means of communication, but the presence of mimetic skill however would have lead to a form of social communication.
Mimetic culture has included, for instance, toolmaking, fire use, and coordinated seasonal hunting etc. A change from a mimetic to a mythic culture was crucial for the emergence of modern language. Approximately 50,000 years ago the biological transition from erectus was complete. It lead to Upper Paleolithic, or stone-age culture. The descent of larynx signified cognitive change and resulted in speech and language. Mythic inventions were conceptual models of the universe.
Ivan Berazhny was giving a presentation with the title "On the trail of social semiotics?". He started by stating that being very specialized is often a kind of self-defence. Society could be presented as a system of meanings.
Berazhny gave three perspectives on meaning-making: a) Ontogenetic: an individual/development; b) Phylogenetic - a semiotic resource/evolution; and Logogenetic - a text/unfolding discourse. He asked how people learn to mean. He summarized that humans learn to representre reality, to enact social relations to organize meaning-making in the flow of time.
Berazhny was also discussing a movement from semiotics to social semiotics, and from systemic functional linguistics to multisemiotic studies. In a multilevel stratified model of language, context includes ideology (a model of social organization), genre (a context of culture, i.e. configurations of meanings as they unfold through stages) and register (a context of situation). On the other hand, content includes semantics (configurations of meaning as in figures and taxonomies) and lexicogrammatical information (configurations of meanings in wordings).
According to Berazhny, metafunctions of language include a) ideational (logical, experiential), b) interpersonal, and textual functions.
The presentation lead into active discussion. In the end of his presentation, Berazhny mentioned the conference "Linguistics and multisemiotic challenges in Europe in the world".
Today Don Killian was discussing the book Origins of the Modern Mind by Merlin Donald. According to Killian, Donald's book synthesizes various fields, bringing together theories of cultural origins of human cognition in a cohesive approach. In the book, three major "abrupt" cognitive transformations are brought up by which the human mind developed over millions of years.
First major change in brain structure was the transition period leading to Homo Erectus. Brain enlarged from 600 cc to 1,100 cc in late Homo Erectus. Second major change was related to the arrival of Homo Sapiens, including a further increase in brain size. The period was also characterized by a continual acceleration of cultural change, more frequent innovations, development of language, and vocal apparatus change.
In his book, Donald points out that primates could not, and cannot, reinvent symbols, only recombine already symbols given to them. Then a natural question is: What is missing with primates? One good candidate is that fact that humans possess three types of memory: procedural, episodic and semantic. Semantic memory is a system of representation that forms semantic networks and the final change. Other primates are restricted to episodic memory: a virtual "flashback" of previous performances. Thus, there is a lack of performance ability.
Donald explains that misesis is the missing link. Mimesis includes non-lingustic, self-initiated and representational intentional acts. It incorporates mimicry and imitation to a higher end, voice tones, gestures, facial expressions, and patterned wholy-body movements. According to Donald, mimesis probably did not originate as a means of communication, but the presence of mimetic skill however would have lead to a form of social communication.
Mimetic culture has included, for instance, toolmaking, fire use, and coordinated seasonal hunting etc. A change from a mimetic to a mythic culture was crucial for the emergence of modern language. Approximately 50,000 years ago the biological transition from erectus was complete. It lead to Upper Paleolithic, or stone-age culture. The descent of larynx signified cognitive change and resulted in speech and language. Mythic inventions were conceptual models of the universe.
Ivan Berazhny was giving a presentation with the title "On the trail of social semiotics?". He started by stating that being very specialized is often a kind of self-defence. Society could be presented as a system of meanings.
Berazhny gave three perspectives on meaning-making: a) Ontogenetic: an individual/development; b) Phylogenetic - a semiotic resource/evolution; and Logogenetic - a text/unfolding discourse. He asked how people learn to mean. He summarized that humans learn to representre reality, to enact social relations to organize meaning-making in the flow of time.
Berazhny was also discussing a movement from semiotics to social semiotics, and from systemic functional linguistics to multisemiotic studies. In a multilevel stratified model of language, context includes ideology (a model of social organization), genre (a context of culture, i.e. configurations of meanings as they unfold through stages) and register (a context of situation). On the other hand, content includes semantics (configurations of meaning as in figures and taxonomies) and lexicogrammatical information (configurations of meanings in wordings).
According to Berazhny, metafunctions of language include a) ideational (logical, experiential), b) interpersonal, and textual functions.
The presentation lead into active discussion. In the end of his presentation, Berazhny mentioned the conference "Linguistics and multisemiotic challenges in Europe in the world".
Thursday, October 25, 2007
KITES symposium on multilingual communication and content management
Kites is a new Finnish organization that coordinates collaboration between companies, universities, educational institutions and public organizations related to multilingual communication and content management. Today took place the first day of a Kites symposium, organized in Kouvola. In the first presentation, Markku Saari and
Arto Leinonen, CEO of Kielikone Ltd., provided an overall view on the mission and objectives of the organization.
Juhani Lönnroth, the director-general of the directorate-general for translation of EU commission, gave a presentation on the EU strategy for multilingualism. He started by describing the historical path from national languages into multilingualism. Lönnroth brought up challenges for the language industry which is one the fastest growing business areas in the world and which provides work for a large number of people. He emphasized the central role of language in political and business processes.
Currently in EU there are 23 official languages and thus 506 language pairs. In the EU markets, messages and products need to be localized, the use of global tilingualism in the EU. He emphasized that the basis is one's own mother tongue. If one is not able to express oneself well in one language, it is not possible to communicate efficiently in any other language. In order to facilitate root level communication among EU citizens, the EU Commission wants that all Europeans would master at least two other languages than their mother tongue. The third dimension consists of the communication between citizens and public organizations. Finally, the EU-level public organizations have to find ways for multilingual communication within themselves. Towards the end of the presentation, Lönnroth was describing areas in which Kites and EU may have collaboration including:
Ma Keqing, Chinese ambassador to Finland, described the relationship between China and Finland in several areas, reminding that these countries have had diplomatic relations for 57 years. Several examples of active business relations were given. The value of the trade is 8 billion dollars, Finnish investments in China reach 5 billion euros, Nokia's market share in China is 35%, and Finnair is the third largest international airline operating in China.
Cultural and educational exchange between China and Finland is becoming more and more active. A Chinese-Finnish general dictionary is under preparation and a Chinese-Finnish bilingual school begins its operation in Helsinki next August. Ma Keqing mentioned that Finland is known rather well among Chinese even though mostly the Chinese only know Nokia's products, Santa Clause and sauna as Finnish phenomena. She described the rapid development of Chinese society during the past decades, emphasizing the increasing openness of the society. She described Chinese cultural aspects including the holistic thinking. She discussed the phenomenon of globalization that provide opportunities for both China and Finland for mutual benefits.
Käthe Sarparanta communication manager for Olkiluoto nuclear power station project, was describing this very large industrial construction project, the budget of which is approximately 3 billion euros. The network involved in the project consists of over 1700 companies and people working for the project are of over 30 nationalities. Sarparanta payed attention to the different cultures within the project that creates various challenges. The current 2350 workers need services in their own languages. For instance, in Rauma there is a French school. The number of documents is currently reaching one million. In the end, the documentation will take about 2.5 kilometers of shelves. To manage the translation task, a terminology is being gathered, currently with 8000 terms. Sarparanta concluded by describing the effects of the large project on the local communities.
Juhani Reiman, CEO of Lingsoft Ltd., was emphasizing the importance of language in the modern society, comparing the potential of language technology with the industries grown based on electricity. His main topic was to describe the commercialization of speech technologies. Reiman pointed out that in Finland there is much more room for services the use of which is based on spoken dialogue with machine. He gave a live demonstration of the Lingsoft speech portal using a mobile phone. The speech synthesis was based on the technology developed by Bitlips Ltd. (http://www.bitlips.com/). Reiman emphasized the idea that speech dialogue systems will be important in the future.
Esko Vario, program manager from Microsoft Finland, was describing Microsoft's activities related to multilingualism. He emphasized the importance of understanding the user, including understanding their culture and values. Relevant information can be obtained using ethnographic studies to support development of understandable and usable products. Localization tools include Trados and Microsoft's own tools. Vario told that terms are collected to a database called TermStudio, currently with 15,000 concepts, 20,000 English terms, and almost 100 languages.
My own presentation discussed how research and development on multilingual communication and content management is and can be affected be research on statistical machine learning and pattern recognition.
Arto Leinonen, CEO of Kielikone Ltd., provided an overall view on the mission and objectives of the organization.
Juhani Lönnroth, the director-general of the directorate-general for translation of EU commission, gave a presentation on the EU strategy for multilingualism. He started by describing the historical path from national languages into multilingualism. Lönnroth brought up challenges for the language industry which is one the fastest growing business areas in the world and which provides work for a large number of people. He emphasized the central role of language in political and business processes.
Currently in EU there are 23 official languages and thus 506 language pairs. In the EU markets, messages and products need to be localized, the use of global tilingualism in the EU. He emphasized that the basis is one's own mother tongue. If one is not able to express oneself well in one language, it is not possible to communicate efficiently in any other language. In order to facilitate root level communication among EU citizens, the EU Commission wants that all Europeans would master at least two other languages than their mother tongue. The third dimension consists of the communication between citizens and public organizations. Finally, the EU-level public organizations have to find ways for multilingual communication within themselves. Towards the end of the presentation, Lönnroth was describing areas in which Kites and EU may have collaboration including:
- life-long learning programme 2007-2013 (ERASMUS, GRUNDTVIG, COMENIUS, LEONARDO DA VINCI, ERASMUS MUNDUS)
- databases and translation memories (IATE, EURAMIS, etc.)
- systems for content management
- internet-based communication (WCMS)
- localization of messages
- research activities
- machine translation (CAT, AI)
- digitized libraries, documentation systems
Ma Keqing, Chinese ambassador to Finland, described the relationship between China and Finland in several areas, reminding that these countries have had diplomatic relations for 57 years. Several examples of active business relations were given. The value of the trade is 8 billion dollars, Finnish investments in China reach 5 billion euros, Nokia's market share in China is 35%, and Finnair is the third largest international airline operating in China.
Cultural and educational exchange between China and Finland is becoming more and more active. A Chinese-Finnish general dictionary is under preparation and a Chinese-Finnish bilingual school begins its operation in Helsinki next August. Ma Keqing mentioned that Finland is known rather well among Chinese even though mostly the Chinese only know Nokia's products, Santa Clause and sauna as Finnish phenomena. She described the rapid development of Chinese society during the past decades, emphasizing the increasing openness of the society. She described Chinese cultural aspects including the holistic thinking. She discussed the phenomenon of globalization that provide opportunities for both China and Finland for mutual benefits.Käthe Sarparanta communication manager for Olkiluoto nuclear power station project, was describing this very large industrial construction project, the budget of which is approximately 3 billion euros. The network involved in the project consists of over 1700 companies and people working for the project are of over 30 nationalities. Sarparanta payed attention to the different cultures within the project that creates various challenges. The current 2350 workers need services in their own languages. For instance, in Rauma there is a French school. The number of documents is currently reaching one million. In the end, the documentation will take about 2.5 kilometers of shelves. To manage the translation task, a terminology is being gathered, currently with 8000 terms. Sarparanta concluded by describing the effects of the large project on the local communities.
Juhani Reiman, CEO of Lingsoft Ltd., was emphasizing the importance of language in the modern society, comparing the potential of language technology with the industries grown based on electricity. His main topic was to describe the commercialization of speech technologies. Reiman pointed out that in Finland there is much more room for services the use of which is based on spoken dialogue with machine. He gave a live demonstration of the Lingsoft speech portal using a mobile phone. The speech synthesis was based on the technology developed by Bitlips Ltd. (http://www.bitlips.com/). Reiman emphasized the idea that speech dialogue systems will be important in the future.
Esko Vario, program manager from Microsoft Finland, was describing Microsoft's activities related to multilingualism. He emphasized the importance of understanding the user, including understanding their culture and values. Relevant information can be obtained using ethnographic studies to support development of understandable and usable products. Localization tools include Trados and Microsoft's own tools. Vario told that terms are collected to a database called TermStudio, currently with 15,000 concepts, 20,000 English terms, and almost 100 languages.
My own presentation discussed how research and development on multilingual communication and content management is and can be affected be research on statistical machine learning and pattern recognition.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Volker Tresp: Infinite Hidden Relational Model
Dr. Volker Tresp from Siemens AG is currently visiting our laboratory. He will act as the opponent for Timo Similä's doctoral defense tomorrow on Friday 19th of October. The title of Similä's thesis is "Advances in variable selection and visualization methods for analysis of multivariate data".
For the moment, Volker Tresp is giving a talk on "The Infinite Hidden Relational Model". The IHRM can be used to realize nonparametric relational Bayes. He suggests that the IHRM might be an interesting model for a number of relational problems. He presented a recommendation system, prediction of gene functions and medical decision support as applications.
For the moment, Volker Tresp is giving a talk on "The Infinite Hidden Relational Model". The IHRM can be used to realize nonparametric relational Bayes. He suggests that the IHRM might be an interesting model for a number of relational problems. He presented a recommendation system, prediction of gene functions and medical decision support as applications.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
MT Summit XI
The 11th Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit XI) is taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, and brings together researchers, developers and even some users. Invited speakers have included, for instance, Stephen Richardson from Microsoft Research and Philipp Koehn from the University of Edinburgh.
Microsoft has recently launched their free online machine translation on Translator Live Beta. It is based on Systran and includes some alternative systems from Microsoft for technical domains. Systran is a rule-based system and is the backbone of most machine translation systems provided online, including Google's translator.
Koehn introduced the EuroMatrix project that tries to facilitate resource and tool sharing between researchers, a framework for evaluation of systems for machine translation between all the official languages in the European Union. His talk and the following discussion pointed out the fact that statistical machine translation research is reliving the past of rule-based machine translation research, as there is more and more demand for implementation of syntactic and semantic analysis in the statistical machine translation framework.
Philipp Koehn giving his talk.
Microsoft has recently launched their free online machine translation on Translator Live Beta. It is based on Systran and includes some alternative systems from Microsoft for technical domains. Systran is a rule-based system and is the backbone of most machine translation systems provided online, including Google's translator.
Koehn introduced the EuroMatrix project that tries to facilitate resource and tool sharing between researchers, a framework for evaluation of systems for machine translation between all the official languages in the European Union. His talk and the following discussion pointed out the fact that statistical machine translation research is reliving the past of rule-based machine translation research, as there is more and more demand for implementation of syntactic and semantic analysis in the statistical machine translation framework.
Philipp Koehn giving his talk.Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Visit and presentation by Prof. Simon Haykin
Professor Simon Haykin was visiting our laboratory last week. Prof. Haykin is the director of the Adaptive Systems Laboratory of McMaster University. Simon is also well known for his books, including "Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation".Prof. Haykin gave a presentation on "Coherent Independent Component Analysis", related to the work by his student Kevin Kan. The basic setting was related to the question how to model processing of speech. The Coherent ICA is based on Infomax, Imax and copulas. Imax algorithms are based on the idea of maximizing the mutual information between the outputs of different network modules, and are capable of extracting higher-order features from data. Copulas are functions used in statistics for modeling dependencies between random variables. Prof. Haykin showed in his presentation that the model can be useful for solving real problems including source separation and auditory coding.
I had the chance to have an inspiring discussing with Simon on issues related to cognitive systems and agreed on various ways of future collaboration.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Reasons for a gap between theory and practice
In the Third Organization Studies Summer Workshop, Alfred Kieser and Lars Leiner had a paper on “Why Collaboration with Practitioners Is often Referred to in Management Science as a
Remedy for the Rigor-Relevance-Gap and Why This Is Not a Promising Idea”. Alfred Kieser is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Mannheim. Alfred mentioned in his presentation several reasons why theory and practice may not meet. There are problems of access: scientific information may not be readily available for a practitioner. It may be that relevant information exists but it presents itself as information overflow. Scientists apply a multitude of different approaches to a particular problem and it is very difficult to assess which point of view is relevant for practice. Scientists also produce contradictory results depending on their theoretical framework and many practical choices. Sometimes the results are simply trivial from the practical point of view, for instance they may just confirm existing practices and intuitions. Last but not least, scientists speak for scientists: the scientific form of presentation is often not suitable for “consumption” in practical contexts. Alfred amused the audience by showing some mathematical formulae out of context.
Alfred Kieser and Sara Rynes discussing
In general, Alfred Kieser painted a quite dark picture about the possibility of being relevant for practice. This view, maybe presented in a provocative manner on purpose, was considered too pessimistic by many. For instance, Alper Alsan and Kathleen Park gave a presentation in which they described their collaboration as a researcher and a practitioner.
In summary, I would say that building a bridge from theory to practice is a challenging task. On the other hand, I would strongly claim that scientists are in a central role in protecting and producing wellbeing in the world. It is sad to see when people do not understand and appreciate the complex paths that the scientific results take to practice. Scientific understanding of evolution, human mind, physiology, materials, complex systems, etc. have fundamentally changed the way how human beings and societies live their lives. This does not mean, however, that scientific innovations only take place in formally organized institutions and projects.
Remedy for the Rigor-Relevance-Gap and Why This Is Not a Promising Idea”. Alfred Kieser is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Mannheim. Alfred mentioned in his presentation several reasons why theory and practice may not meet. There are problems of access: scientific information may not be readily available for a practitioner. It may be that relevant information exists but it presents itself as information overflow. Scientists apply a multitude of different approaches to a particular problem and it is very difficult to assess which point of view is relevant for practice. Scientists also produce contradictory results depending on their theoretical framework and many practical choices. Sometimes the results are simply trivial from the practical point of view, for instance they may just confirm existing practices and intuitions. Last but not least, scientists speak for scientists: the scientific form of presentation is often not suitable for “consumption” in practical contexts. Alfred amused the audience by showing some mathematical formulae out of context.
In general, Alfred Kieser painted a quite dark picture about the possibility of being relevant for practice. This view, maybe presented in a provocative manner on purpose, was considered too pessimistic by many. For instance, Alper Alsan and Kathleen Park gave a presentation in which they described their collaboration as a researcher and a practitioner.
In summary, I would say that building a bridge from theory to practice is a challenging task. On the other hand, I would strongly claim that scientists are in a central role in protecting and producing wellbeing in the world. It is sad to see when people do not understand and appreciate the complex paths that the scientific results take to practice. Scientific understanding of evolution, human mind, physiology, materials, complex systems, etc. have fundamentally changed the way how human beings and societies live their lives. This does not mean, however, that scientific innovations only take place in formally organized institutions and projects.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Organization Studies Workshop: Keynote by S. L. Rynes
The Third Organization Studies Summer Workshop was organized in Crete in early June. The event was well organized and raised many important issues. The gap between theory and practice was one of the recurring theme. The same theme was also phrased as the question how to combine successfully scientific rigor and practical relevance.
The first keynote speaker was Sara L. Rynes, Professor at University of Iowa, who discussed the theme how to make research relevant to practice. She is the editor of Academy of Management Journal. She emphasized the values of pluralism in research and welcomed respect for co-produced research, based on an inductive and social constructive approach. This means that researchers should work in collaboration with practitioners gathering qualitative data in real-world cases. She used her own experience from the 1990s as an example.
She showed how ready-made questionnaires may not succeed in bringing up utterly important factors. Through open interviews the researchers had figured out the importance of recruitment in job choice. Sara also called for broader views of relevance and research that develops insights that helps managers. She referred to Jim March in mentioning the combination of academic and experiential knowledge. Academic research can produce generalizations and frameworks which need to be applied through human intuition and contextual understanding.
Sara Rynes also emphasized the idea that usefulness to practitioners alone is a deficient vision for organization studies. She mentioned the book Freakonomics in which N.N. brings up important findings that may be “inconvenient truths” for many. I also very much agreed with the conclusion that for longer term and for the society as a whole, researchers need to be certain kind of watchdogs. Researchers should be allowed to have the role that is commonly attributed to free press. If this role is not fully appreciated the society does not function as well as it could.
It may, of course, be convenient for the leaders to think that the researchers can support directly their aspirations and policies. This is, however, bound to lead both to bad science as well as into a declining nation. If a decision makers fail to listen to the inconvenient questions that researchers may ask they finally are going to make much less optimal decisions than through taking into account even the critical voices. This does not, of course, mean that the scientists should be made the primary decision makers.
Towards the end of the presentation, Sara Rynes mentioned that researchers within organizational studies ought to be think more about data mining. This was nice to hear for us three, Sari Stenfors, Tanja Kotro and Timo Honkela who participated the workshop as Kulta project researchers. The project develops methods for modeling and simulating changing customer needs. In addition to practice theory and qualitative research, data mining and other adaptive informatics methods are in a central role in the project.
The first keynote speaker was Sara L. Rynes, Professor at University of Iowa, who discussed the theme how to make research relevant to practice. She is the editor of Academy of Management Journal. She emphasized the values of pluralism in research and welcomed respect for co-produced research, based on an inductive and social constructive approach. This means that researchers should work in collaboration with practitioners gathering qualitative data in real-world cases. She used her own experience from the 1990s as an example.
She showed how ready-made questionnaires may not succeed in bringing up utterly important factors. Through open interviews the researchers had figured out the importance of recruitment in job choice. Sara also called for broader views of relevance and research that develops insights that helps managers. She referred to Jim March in mentioning the combination of academic and experiential knowledge. Academic research can produce generalizations and frameworks which need to be applied through human intuition and contextual understanding.Sara Rynes also emphasized the idea that usefulness to practitioners alone is a deficient vision for organization studies. She mentioned the book Freakonomics in which N.N. brings up important findings that may be “inconvenient truths” for many. I also very much agreed with the conclusion that for longer term and for the society as a whole, researchers need to be certain kind of watchdogs. Researchers should be allowed to have the role that is commonly attributed to free press. If this role is not fully appreciated the society does not function as well as it could.
It may, of course, be convenient for the leaders to think that the researchers can support directly their aspirations and policies. This is, however, bound to lead both to bad science as well as into a declining nation. If a decision makers fail to listen to the inconvenient questions that researchers may ask they finally are going to make much less optimal decisions than through taking into account even the critical voices. This does not, of course, mean that the scientists should be made the primary decision makers.
Towards the end of the presentation, Sara Rynes mentioned that researchers within organizational studies ought to be think more about data mining. This was nice to hear for us three, Sari Stenfors, Tanja Kotro and Timo Honkela who participated the workshop as Kulta project researchers. The project develops methods for modeling and simulating changing customer needs. In addition to practice theory and qualitative research, data mining and other adaptive informatics methods are in a central role in the project.
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