MTS is the department’s Mind, Technology, and Society speaker series. It is hosted by a different faculty member each semester. Founded by a generous gift from Professors Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, MTS brings researchers and industry professionals from across the globe to present a variety of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. See our UCMerced CogSci youtube channel for videos of past MTS talks!
CIS graduate students, faculty, and staff, and all who are interested are invited! Members of other departments at UC Merced as well as the general public are encouraged to attend. (Note: current CIS Ph.D. students are required to attend MTS each semester in residence, to fulfill their COGS 250 course requirement).
Dr. Josh de Leeuw's talk "An open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments": will be from 2-3:30pm in SSM 104
Abstract: In this talk, I will describe ongoing work to develop an open-source ecosystem of software for conducting behavioral experiments, and the design challenge at its core: how do we construct frameworks that support collaborative and cumulative scientific tool building? A key to this work is aligning the tools with our conceptual framework for experiment design. I'll share recent developments in the ecosystem aimed at producing more robust and transparent scientific practices, and speak about the ways that machine learning and large language models are creating new opportunities for innovating both how we build experiments and the methods we employ.
Bio:Josh de Leeuw is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at Vassar College. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychological and Brain Sciences from Indiana University. Josh's work is focused on the development and application of tools to improve our ability to study human cognition. He also dabbles in research on learning in educational contexts, pedagogy for cognitive science, and metascience.
For more information or to sign up for email announcements, please contact the talk series organizer: cis-mts-lead@lists.ucmerced.edu.
