RAIL

The fifth North American Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information, NASSLLI 2012, will be hosted at the University of Texas at Austin, on June 18–22, 2012.

Overview

NASSLLI is a one-week summer school aimed at formally-minded graduate students in Philosophy, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, and related fields, especially students whose interests cross over traditional boundaries between these domains. The summer school is loosely modeled on the long-running ESSLLI series in Europe; it consists of a number of courses and workshops which, by default, meet for 90 minutes on each of five days.

Courses

In the main week of the school, students select up to five courses from among twenty that are offered. Of these courses, five are from specially invited lecturers, and the remainder are researchers selected because they are leaders in their fields and also because they have proven ability to communicate with interdisciplinary audiences. These instructors were selected after a public call for course proposals and a peer review process by the program committee, which is drawn from a wide range of specialities including linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. Over 45 course proposals were submitted for NASSLLI 2012. These were high quality proposals by established scholars, mostly tenured or tenure-track at research universities, and many strong proposals had to be rejected. The acceptance rate for course proposals was 30%.

As well as the main five days of courses, there will be events on the weekends before and afterwards. During the weekend afterwards we have two events scheduled, and expect to announce more. First, there will be a symposium celebrating the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. Second, the Texas Linguistic Forum conference is scheduled, an open peer-reviewed Linguistics conference which this year will have sessions on Semantics and American Sign Language. We will soon be announcing special tutorials and bootcamp courses for the weekend prior to the main week of courses.

History

NASSLLI 2012 will be the fifth edition of the school, the previous four having taken place at Stanford University, Indiana University (twice), and UCLA. It follows in the tradition of the very successful series of ESSLLI summer schools in Europe, and both have received sponsorship from a single parent organization, the Foundation for Logic, Language, and Information (FOLLI). NASSLLI is an interdisciplinary event with emphases in applied logic, computational linguistics, and areas of computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and economics. Despite the obvious differences in the goals of these fields, they depend upon many of the same mathematical tools, and are concerned with many parallel philosophical issues. This is reflected in a great deal of crossover work: examples that have created whole new subfields include the application of dynamic logics and feature logics from computer science to problems in linguistics. However, in spite of there being an active community of interdisciplinary scholars, departments in US universities tend to follow traditional disciplinary lines, so that it is often difficult for graduate students to access courses in neighboring fields. NASSLLI’s role is to provide access for graduate students to cutting edge research on logic, language, and information, specifically taught for an interdisciplinary audience.

Sponsorship

NASSLLI 2012 is generously sponsored by the National Science Foundation, The College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin, and the Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology departments at UT.

Further details:

• NASSLLI 2012 be held on the UT Austin campus. UT Austin is a large research university set in what is widely agreed to be one of the most fun cities in the US, the self-styled “Live Music Capital of the World.”
• Dorm accommodation will be available, and we will also provide links to alternative accommodation options.
• Registration details are soon to be announcted. Expected registration cost is $175.
• Scholarships will be available for 50 students, and an application procedure will be announced shortly. These scholarships will include the cost of registration, accommodation in a shared dorm room, and a further travel subsidy of up to $200.

NASSLLI homepage: http://nasslli2012.com/index