Time:9:00 - 11:00am, Oct 28（Friday）
Venue:F310, ME building A
Speaker:Prof. Shimon Edelman, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, USA
Inviter:Prof. Gao Feng
The uses of similarity in cognitive information processing
 
ABSTRACT:
the concept of similarity has traditionally evoked a mixture of respect,stemming from its ubiquity and intuitive appeal, and concern, due to its dependence on the framing of the problem at hand and on its context. I offer support for similarity as an explanatory  concept in vision and in other  cognitive domains,  By surveying established results and  recent developments in  the theory and  methods of similarity-preserving dimensionality reduction  --- acritical component of many cognitive functions. I focus in particularon improvements in analytically derived bounds on neighborhood-preserving embedding and  immersion, as  well as  on new algorithms that support associative memory by performing hashing thatrespects local similarity. These similarity-based ideas and methods are proving  to be  useful both in  modeling human performance  and in building AI applications.  I  conclude with a  discussion of how the Bayesian framework for  cognition offers a natural remedy  for some of the  concerns  about  similarity  by  quantifying  its dependence  on context.
 
 
About the speaker: 
Prof. Shimon Edelman received the B. S. degree from Technion – Israel Institute of Techological in 1978, and M. S. and Ph. D. degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He had been Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Biological Information Processing. of Cambridge since 1988-1991. As a senior researcher of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in Rehovot, Israel since 1998.He is currently professor of Department of Psychology. Cornell University.  His interest in all aspects of cognition; his main research themes are vision and language. Because cognition is computation, his approach integrates computational theory development and computer modeling with behavioral studies carried out in his lab and with published data from the neurobiology literature.
 
University Service:
Director of computing (1992-1996, Dept. of Applied Math & CS, Weizmann Institute)
Sub-Dean for Graduate Affairs (1998-1999, School of Cognitive and Computin Sciences, University of Sussex)
Co-Director, Cornell Cognitive Studies Program (2000–2001).
Director, Cornell Cognitive Studies Program (2001–2004).
Member, Cornell Computing and Information Science Council (2006–2007).
 
Teaching Experience
Visual perception and computer vision (Spring 1991)
Formal Computational Skills (Autumn 1998)
Issues in Cognitive Psychology (Cornell Psych 214; Fall 1999, Fall 2000)
Modeling of Perception and Cognition (Cornell Psych 416; Spring 2000)
Representation of Structure in Vision and Language (Cornell Psych 530 / Ling 530;
Spring 2000, Spring 2002, Spring 2004)
Topics in High-Level Vision (Cornell Psych 465 / CS 392; Spring 2001, Spring 2003,Spring 2005, Spring 2009, Spring 2011)
Mind and Reality in Science Fiction (Cornell Psych 531; Spring 2003, Spring 2005)
 Cognitive Psychology (Cornell Psych 214 / 614 / 501; Fall 2001, Fall 2002, Fall2003, Fall 2004, Fall 2006, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Spring 2010, Spring 2011)
 Neuroscience as the Quest for Perfect Self-Knowledge (Cornell Psych 531; Spring2004, Spring 2007, Spring 2008)
Language Acquisition in Humans and Computers (Tel Aviv University Computer Science; Fall 2005; Cornell Psych 426; Spring 2007)
Computation in the Brain (Cornell Psych 465, Spring 2008)
Consciousness and Free Will (Cornell Psych 231, Spring 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011)
Computational Principles of Psychology (Korea University BRI 606, Fall 2009)
Embodied Cognition (Cornell Psych 465, Spring 2010)