[visionlist] TIMELY Training School on the DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL TIMING AND TIMING IN SPEECH PROCESSING: call for participation

Sat Jan 7 19:37:14 GMT 2012

Dear colleagues, my apologies for cross postings - please feel free to distribute to members of your list/organization

this is a second call for participation in the forthcoming TIMELY Training School on the: - 

DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL TIMING AND TIMING IN SPEECH PROCESSING

Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy

May 2nd – 4th 2012

The Organisers are: 

§  Mark A. Elliott,  National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, Ireland and Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan;

§  Anna Esposito, Second University of Naples and IIASS, Italy;

§  Argiro Vatakis, Cognitive Systems Research Institute (CSRI), Greece.

Details of EU COST funding support for participants – and how to apply - is given below

Brief Description: This training school aims to brings together, the advanced research results obtained in the field of Psychological Dynamic Systems combining together models of SYSTEM TIMING with models of TIMING in SPEECH PROCESSING. The school will be held from the 2nd to the 4th of May 2012 in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietri_sul_Mare <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietri_sul_Mare> ) at the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS, www-iiassvietri.it). The School will be supported by the European COST Action TD0904 “Time In MEntaL activitY: theoretical, behavioral, bioimaging and clinical perspectives (TIMELY):  (http://www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/isch/Actions/TD0904). This Training School will include both hands-on lab sessions and theoretical lectures.

The main focus of the school would be on DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL TIMING AND TIMING IN SPEECH PROCESSING and will be focused on the importance of time processing for modelling dynamic systems in general and speech in particular. Details of the meeting content and schedule may be found here http://timely-cost.eu/training-school-4 

Rationale: Complex systems theory of dynamic systems (CSTDS) describes the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems entailing many degrees of freedom. While relevant to phenomena in physics, biology, and ecology, CSTDS also offers a potentially integrative framework for issues relating to mind, brain, and behavior. This integrative potential is due to CSTDS’s ability to address phenomena relevant to cognitive science that reside at nested, yet distinct levels of scale. For example, while CSTDS can address both agent-environment relationships and on-going brain dynamics, it can also address the computations taking place in neural networks and cellular automata. The dynamics at these nested levels of scale are inherently self-organizing, context dependent and synergistically coupled (i.e., they are mutually influential and, thus, mutually constraining). Importantly, they are describable in terms of their temporal characteristics and ultimately refer to the way the system behaves over time. Given CST’s ability to address such multi-scale interaction, it constitutes a method and a perspective that affords cognitive science the ability to address issues such as cause and effect, mind and brain and psychological time, in novel and important ways.

In everyday communication, few people are aware of the fact that a message may assume a different meaning in function of how, at a cognitive level, the timing of speech articulatory gestures and length of speech sounds and words have been planned. Timing plays a significant role in identifying distinctive cues for the recognition of speech at segmental and prosodic level. Phoneme recognition strongly depends either on the intrinsic duration of the speech segment, or the phoneme spectral change’s duration, or the relative timing of two overlapping events.  

Excerpts of fluent speech are not very well perceived by listeners below a given duration threshold, and “phonemic clauses”, at a large extent, are signalled either by a speech pause, or the lengthening of the final word or syllable in the clause, or the pitch contour. 

The prosodic cues useful in disambiguating speech words and sentences use time as primary  distinctive feature. If a sentence should be perceived as temporally fluent, changes made in the timing of one segment should be compensated by durational changes of  adjacent segments.

However, despites of its importance, timing is an underestimated phenomenon and only recently has captured the attention of several scholars.

The Keynote Talks are:

·          Time, noise, and rhythms in cognitive science 

Lawrence Ward, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (http://www.psych.ubc.ca/faculty/profile/index.psy?fullname=Ward,%20Lawrence&area=Cognitive%20Science&designation=core <http://www.psych.ubc.ca/faculty/profile/index.psy?fullname=Ward,%20Lawrence&area=Cognitive%20Science&designation=core>  

·       Intrinsic dynamics of dyadic interaction 

Christopher T. Kello, University of California, Merced, USA http://www.ucmerced.edu/faculty/christopher-t-kello <http://www.ucmerced.edu/faculty/christopher-t-kello>  

·          Metrically produced speech and the Japanese mora 

Robert Port, Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana, USA https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/ <https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/>   

·          Dynamics of reading in the brain 

Lawrence Ward

·       Critical branching neural networks 

Christopher T. Kello 

·          Why a language is a set of social conventions and not a knowledge structure 

Robert Port

·       What is it like for a brain to be a dynamical system? 

Cees van Leeuwen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium http://kuleuven.academia.edu/CeesvanLeeuwen  

The Workshops are:

1.       Analysis of Interpersonal Dynamics in Spoken Interaction 

Instructors:

Anne S. Warlaumont (Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Memphis and Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA) and Rick Dale (Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA)

2.       Methods of Dynamical Brain Activity Analysis During Cognitive and Verbal Tasks

Instructors:

Katarzyna J. Blinowska and Jarek Żygierewicz, (Warsaw University, Poland)

3.       Recurrence Analysis and the EEG

Instructors:

Stefan Schinkel (Department of Physics, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany) and Kitty Moloney (Department of Economics, NUI Galway, Ireland)

4.       Analysis of the Action Dynamics of Choice

Instructors:

Denis O’Hora (School of Psychology, NUI Galway, Ireland), Petri Piiroinen (School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics, NUI Galway, Ireland) and Rick Dale (Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA)

Workshops will make use of a suite of 20 PCs with MATLAB 6.1 installed within the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies. No previous knowledge of Matlab is required although a basic working knowledge would be helpful. Details of the workshops will be posted on a School web site to be published online in the near future.

There will also be a Poster Session and all participants are encouraged to present their work in this way at the school.

Please note that the full programme will be announced in due course alongside publication of the School website.

Participation and Support

The School is free and applications are welcome from far and wide. We intend  a maximum of 40 participants with applications taken on a first come first served basis (on the basis of receipt of the application by email) until the 40th application is received. Applications including a brief statement of purpose and details of current professional affiliation and status should be sent to mark.elliott – at – nuigalway.ie carbon copies to argiro.vatakis – at - gmail.com and iiass.annaesp – at - tin.it with the subject title APPLICATION FOR TIMELY TRAINING SCHOOL SALERNO.

A limited number of 17 participants may be admitted to the Training School with support of 500 euros (travel and accommodation) from TIMELY. This support can only be provided for participants who attend the full training school and present a poster during the poster session. This poster can either focus on already conducted work, or on planned work. 

This support is available to participants at any level although we particularly encourage applications from individuals at advanced Master, PhD or Post-Doc level. Applicants should submit the following documents both to argiro.vatakis – at - gmail.com and mark.elliott – at – nuigalway.ie with the subject title APPLICATION FOR SUPPORT: TIMELY TRAINING SCHOOL SALERNO

·         Curriculum vitae

·         Statement of purpose (max 1 page)

·         Title and Abstract of the poster that will be presented in the student poster session

·         A detailed budget for travel.

For full consideration, applications should be submitted before February 15th. On February 24th we will inform applicants to be funded, while any remaining funding will be assigned on a first-come, first served basis. 

Accommodation and Travel

For accommodation please contact Mr Andrea Senatore (andrea – at - hotellalucertola.it),  manager of the hotel "La Lucertola" using reference "TIMELY school at IIASS" and ccing to iiass.segreteria – at - tin.it and iiass.annaesp – at - tin.it (this allows us to trouble shoot if necessary). Reference to the TIMELY summer school allows you to avail of discounted rates €70 single and €80 double room per night (bed and breakfast). The hotel can provide lunch and dinner on request and is 2 minutes walking distance from the School venue. Alternative options for accommodation will be posted on the School web site. 

For flights, the nearest airport is Naples-Capodichino with several carriers, including Alitalia connecting Naples to other Italian and European cities. Information is available from http://www.portal.gesac.it/portal/page/portal/internet/inVOLO/DestinazioniCompagnie  An alternative to this is Rome Leonardo da Vinci airport http://www.rome-airport.info/ and then by train (http://www.rome-airport.info/). Again full details will be given on the school web site.

General queries on accommodation and travel may be directed Anna Esposito  (iiass.annaesp – at - tin.it) with the subject title TRAVEL/ACCOMMODATION QUERY: TIMELY TRAINING SCHOOL SALERNO

With very best wishes on behalf of the organizers 

Mark A. Elliott, Anna Esposito and Argiro Vatakis

Mark A. Elliott CSci BA, MSc PhD 

Professor: Center for Applied Perceptual Research

Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

Senior Lecturer: School of Psychology 

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland 

Room ENG-3031 New Engineering Building

Tel.: [Direct line] +353 (0)91 495345; [Internal ext.] 5345 

email: mark.elliott at nuigalway.ie 

http://www.nuigalway.ie/psy/m_elliott_page.htm

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