France and Switzerland, Summer 2008:

With Saul Kripke in CH. A three day conference, three speakers: S. Kripke, J.Y. Béziau, and yours truly. I realy enjoyed every minute of the interaction with Kripke. At least in person, he does not live up to the infamy of his legend and is still as sharp as anyone.

Left to right: Wagner, Darko, Saul, Jean-Yves.

All the speakers at the conference. They had me associated with CU. I hope my bosses at CSU never find out!

During S. Kripke's lecture in the surprise exam paradox.

More on the surpirse exam.

Jean-Yves Béziau's lecture followed.

Jean-Yves talked about the history of possible worlds.

Jean-Yves earier that day.

Jean-Yves with me during a coffee break.

Saul, Jean-Yves, and Darko.

Kripke.

Lunch.

Lunch.

Time to part.

Our eyes are getting moist.

Stanford Spring 2009 :

March 2009, Spatial Relations: An Interdisciplinary Perspective · A Lovely `By Invitation Only' workshop on thinking and tinkering with space and spatial relationships ·
A truly interdisciplinary gathering of cognitive scientists wonderfully set-up by Annie Zaenen and Alistair Isaac. It enabled the participants to converse, interact, and think aloud about the issue of spatial reasoning, language of spatial relations, dynamics of our visual interaction with the environment. Check Spatial Reasoning Workshop for more details.

I never really had much appreciation for any institution, social hierarchy, or structure. Although I wasn't playing the reverence game well when I was there, since I left Stanford, I really started appreciating how dedicated every brick and every neuron of that institution is to discovery, innovation, and in general, research of every kind. From the abstractions of mathematics, anthropology, classics, and humanities, all all the way to the hyper-applied realms of mechanical and electical engineering, it is all there. What is in some sense more amazing is that all those brilliant busy minds are more than willing to help each other along in the path of discovery. The multidisciplinary nature of research is buit into every fiber of the institutional commitment to research and success. I would love to see that emulated at CSU, at least as much as our resources allow.

James Pustejovsky: Spatiotemporal Properties of Motion in Language
The talk was great, full of insight and detail. A rare combo. I became an instant fan of James

Mark Gawron also gave an awesome talk: Verbs and Axes.

In my mind, it is rare to have an interdisciplinary conference like this one, and have all talks be so good and understandable to a varied audience. A way to go organizers!

We had folks from cognitive psych, cognitive and computational linguistics, philosophy, CS and cog sci.

Max J. Egenhofer gave a surprise talk over the lunch break. The talk fit awesomely with the other talks and really made a great transition from the early talks to those in the afternoon.

Egenhofer.

Egenhofer.

Annie Zaenen, one of the two organizers, also gave a great talk on behalf of her research crew: Daniel Bobrow, Cleo Condoravdi, Elizabeth Coppock. Title: Extended Paths.

Annie.

Lunch time. The intense exchange of ideas continues.

Herb Clark was at his usual awesome. He gave talk employing dynamical methods. There can't be too much dynamics. The discussion was very entertaining.

Herbert H. Clark and Leila Takayama: Displaced Places in Communication.

Herbert H. Clark: taking dynamics of language seriously.

Beth Driver gave a great talk titled Observations, Applications, Examples It was an overview of research program in GIS and more particularly in her institute.

Group Think at CSLI

As it is quite common for a conference at CSLI (Center for Study of Language and Information at Stanford), the audience included more academic stars than the Holywood BLVD. Stanley Peters from linguistics was there, so was Ken Taylor from philosophy, logician Grisha Mints, A.I. star Daavid Israel from SRI, Ed Zalta, the director of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and many others. It is hard to tell what is more impressive: the ease with with almost anyone at CSLI engagess in interdisciplinary conversation and research, or how much material they actually know in their nonnative disciplines. If there are other places that emphasize multidisciplinary nature of the academe more tban that one, they must either be rare or else not properly advertised.

Stanford Low Key Logic Workshop, Spring 2009 :

Thankfully, Stanford can be very much low key too. In fact, if pretension is measured, Stanford is almost always low key. The logicians there organized a small one day long forum for idea exchange to "brief" me on the present state logic. I was honored not only by the presence of the established royalty of the field, Sol Feferman and Grisha Mints, but a number of future stars were thre too: Tomohiro Hoshi, Jesse Alama, Alexei Angelides, and newcomers to the scene there, but not any less logicially ferocious for that, Thomas Icard.

Penn Fall 2009 :

Coming Up