The Honors Seminar

The seminar meets each Monday evening from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. in LH 101. It is open to all undergraduate students in informatics and computer science with overall GPAs at least 3.3, whether they do or do not enroll in the course. Juniors and seniors with GPA at least 3.3 may enroll in the seminar for one credit-hour each semester or to only audit the course so that their record will show that they attended the seminar. Sophomores may enroll to take or audit the seminar with permission of the one of the instructors or a CS or INFO academic advisor. Each week a different professor lectures about his/her research during the first hour. The second hour is devoted to an informal discussion of the research topic or any other questions that come up. This in a great way to get to know the faculty members more personally. To earn the grade for this course, the student must select one of the speakers he/she heard in the seminar and write a report of approximately ten pages about the goals of that that speaker's project, what has been accomplished on the project to date, and what their plans are for the future. Attendance and participation in the discussions will also influence the grade.

The speakers change from semester to semester so one my take the seminar several times to get a broader view of the research being done at IU. The speakers are mostly from Computer Science and Informatics, but some have come from such fields as cognitive science, psychology, library science, law, chemistry, biology, and physics. The speakers for the entire Spring Semester 2008 are listed here along with their research interests. About two weeks before their lectures, the title of the lecture and a brief abstract will be added. The speakers for the Fall 2007 academic year can be seen at the link: H498 Syllabus for Fall 2007.

January 7, 2008: Edward Castronova Associate Professor, Dept. of Telecommunications.

Research Interests: Synthetic worlds. In 2005, he wrote the book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. His latest book, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality, explores the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it is changing the way we live.

Title: Fantasy Regnant

Abstract: I study synthetic worlds: online environments where thousands or even millions of users share a persistent, fabricated geographic space at the same time. These places, billed and sold as video games, actually seem to be offering something more than mere entertainment. They act as a fantastical alternative to ordinary life, and as such they pose a significant challenge to business-as-usual in ordinary society: markets, public policy, politics, law, romance. In the area of economics, for example, one pressing issue involves the extent to which people are paying real money to buy items for their game characters, thus blurring the distinction between the game economy and the real one. And this is not the only way in which synthetic worlds threaten the lines we have drawn between fantasy and reality. The objective of my work is to increase our understanding of this technology.

January 14, 2008: Curtis J. Bonk, Educational Psychologist in the Instructional Systems Technology Department of the School of Education and adjunct professor in Informatics.

Research Interests: Technology and E-Learning.

Title: Just a Lot of Bonk: 15 Years of Online Learning Research, Results, and Reflections

Abstract: After a decade of accelerating growth of online learning and associated research, it is imperative to reflect for a moment on the research results and forecast where this field is headed. In this talk, Curt Bonk will summarize more than a decade of his research in the e-learning field with an emphasis on asynchronous and synchronous online conferencing, virtual teaming, and online mentoring and cross cultural collaboration. In addition, he will include his e-learning research on blended learning, scaffolded learning, interactivity, student perceptions, instructor roles, case-based learning, and critical thinking. He will then offer suggestions on the salient gaps in the research and next steps to address them.

January 28, 2008: Alessandro Vespignani, Professor of Informatics, Professor of Cognitive Science (COAS), Adjunct Professor of Physics(COAS), Adjunct Professor of Statistics(COAS), Affiliated Researcher in the Biocomplexity Institute

Research Interests: Complex networks; epidemic modeling; Internet structure; reaction-diffusion systems; non-equilibrium statistical physics; self-organization;phase transitions; critical phenomena.

Title: Mobility networks and the worldwide spread of epidemics

Abstract: Networks which trace the activities and interactions of individuals, transportation fluxes and population movements on the local and global scale have been analyzed and found to exhibit large scale heterogeneity, self-organization and other properties typical of complex systems. Here we analyze the impact of mobility networks on the spreading of emerging infectious diseases. We define a computational model for the large scale spread of infectious diseases that integrates the air transportation network with demographic data. The model is used to study the specific case of the SARS epidemic and to provide scenario forecasts for pandemic influenza. The effect of the airline network structure on the global spreading pattern of diseases will be finally discussed.

February 4, 2008: Santiago Schnell, Assistant Professor of Informatics, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biology (COAS), Adjunct Assistant Professor of Physics (COAS), and Associate Director of the Biocomplexity Institute.

Research Interests: Prof. Schnell is the head of the Systems Biology laboratory and a member of the Complex System group in the School of Informatics. Biology deals with phenomena that are intrinsically more complex and more difficult to investigate than those normally studied in other natural sciences. In recent years, systems biology has led to important insights into many fundamental questions using mathematical and computational modelling as a research tool. Prof. Schnell is interested in applying systems biology techniques to study complex biochemical reactions and embryology. His research focuses in four areas: theoretical enzymology, understanding the structures of biochemical pathways, biochemical theories for the origin of life, and patterning through segmentation in developmental biology.

Title: How do cells form rounded segments?

Abstract: The vertebral column develops during early embryogenesis. It is formed from a periodic pattern of segments along the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo. These segments are rounded structures formed after compaction and separation of cells. There is an intricate pattern of gene activity and protein expression which appears to be involved in the rounding process. However, this process cannot be explained by the existence of a genetic program. To understand embryo developmental we must move away from the genetic obsession. We must look at the interaction of processes at various levels, from the molecular to whole organs and systems. This is the realm of a new field of research, known as systems biology. Current theory is that increased cell-cell adhesion induces minimization of the tissue surface tension, yielding rounded tissue. We investigate this behaviour using a computational viscous liquid model of tissue dynamics and applying a systems biology approach. Given the relatively brief time in which segment formation occurs, and the high bulk viscosities of tissues, the basic model is unconvincing. We propose a simple mechanism to extend the model. This new model successfully produces rounding within the timeframe found in vivo.

February 11, 2008 : Amr Sabry, Professor of Computer Science.

Research Interests: All aspects of programming language research: design, semantic and logic foundations, type theory, compilers, analysis, verification, optimization, program specification and construction, hardware description languages, and software engineering support.

Title: Effects, continuations, monads, and quantum physics

Abstract: Life is full of "side-effects:" a company makes a drug to cure something and it causes something else; you try to do something but something else happens; etc. Perhaps surprisingly this notion of "side-effects" appears in every scientific discipline and perhaps it is at the foundation of Science itself. In this informal presentation, we will discuss side-effects in programming, how they are modeled, where they come from, and then argue that the new paradigm of quantum computing has, at a deep level, something to say about the nature of side-effects.

February 18, 2008: David Hakken, Professor of Informatics, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology (COAS).

Research Interests: For more than 25 years, David Hakken has been preoccupied with the relationship between the deployment of automated information and communication technologies and social change. Most recently, this has meant study of Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Knowledge and Information, the Ethnograpy of Information, Globalization, and the rise of technoscience in Asia.

Title: US/Asia University Partnerships and the transformation of Global Techno-science, Innovation, and Economics

Abstract: Many observers of the contemporary scene argue that current social formation reproduction is going through fundamental transformation at three strategic moments: creativity in techno-science, the innovation system, and economic change. The character of these transformations is the increase in scale pointed at by terms like "globalization" and "internationalization." Each of these moments is extremely complex; how do we assess their combined importance?

At the same time, many University-to-university partnerships are being created between the US and Asia, especially China. These linkages could provide an interesting window on the three transformations identified above, as all of them are involved in university research. However, little information exists regarding these partnerships, especially what makes them successful.

The Partnerships across the Pacific project, of which I am a PI, aims to increase understanding of the role of u-to-u links in contemporary social formation reproduction. It will begin doing this through establishing ethnographically what both Asian techno-scientists at three universities (two in China, one in japan) identify as productive and succesful u-to-u links, finding out what US partners think of in these terms, and establishing the degree of overlap in the perceptions of the two groups of partners. Subsequent stages of the research will identify indicators that correlate highly with the perceived factors of productivity/success, which of these indicators data can be gathered systematically, institutionalizing this data collection, and incorporating these indicators into NSF and OECD compendia of science indicators.

February 25, 2008: Larry Yaeger, Professor of Informatics and Professor of Cognitive Science (COAS).

Research Interests: Artificial Life, Complexity, Information Theory, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Cognition, Computer Graphics, Genetic Algorithms, Ecological Simulation, Evolution, Handwriting Recognition

Title: ARTIFICIAL LIFE AS AN APPROACH TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Abstract: In the natural world, all known examples of even modest intelligence are derived from the evolution of nervous systems in an ecology. In so-called artificial life systems, genetic algorithms can mimic natural selection, neural networks can capture at least some of the information processing characteristics of real nervous systems, and computational ecologies can provide an environment rich in niches, diversity, competition, and cooperation.

I will present the particular combination of computational genetics, physiology, metabolism, neural systems, learning, vision, and behavior that comprise the "Polyworld" artificial life system, and briefly review some of the research that inspired and guided its development. I will also show some of the evolutionary and emergent behaviors seen in Polyworld, including behavioral isolation of species, flocking, and (optimal) foraging.

An information-theoretic measure of complexity of the neural dynamics of Polyworld agents is used to assess the agents' intelligence, which is seen to increase as natural selection takes its course. And a novel method of simulating genetic change with and without natural selection allows us to investigate driven vs. passive trends in the evolution of complexity.

March 3, 2008: Douglas Hofstadter, Distinguished Professor; College Professor of Cognitive Science (COAS) and Computer Science. Director of the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG), at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.

Research Interests: For roughly 25 years, the FARGonauts have been making computational models of our human concepts and categories, the premise being that if and when these mini-concepts achieve the holy grail of “fluidity”, creative analogy-making will be an outcome.

Hofstadter’s interests concerning the human mind are varied, ranging from errors as a window on the mind (see “To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science”) to the mechanisms of creativity to the nature of consciousness (see I Am a Strange Loop and The Mind's I). Currently his most active goal is to reveal how analogy-making lies at the base of all human thought (see “Analogy as the Core of Cognition” and hopefully, in a couple of years, Toward the Roots of Thought).

Hofstadter has a lifelong love for languages, and has written a tome about translation, analogies, constraints, and creativity (Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language), plus translated many poems and two novels into English — one novel in verse (Pushkin's Eugene Onegin) and one in prose (Françoise Sagan’s La Chamade, anagrammatically titled in English That Mad Ache). He has also spent much time doing art and music (see Ambigrammi).

From 1981 to 1983, taking over from Martin Gardner’s incomparable “Mathematical Games” column, Hofstadter wrote the free-ranging “Metamagical Themas” column for Scientific American, from which a book of that title was later created.

Hofstadter received his doctorate in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975, and his thesis project led him to discover that crystal electrons in magnetic fields have a beautiful self-similar energy spectrum, the graph of which has since been dubbed the “Hofstadter butterfly”. A couple of decades after his Ph.D., he started avidly exploring the astonishing role played by irrational analogical leaps in progress in physics, and he plans eventually to write a book on the topic.

In the early 1960’s, Douglas Hofstadter majored in mathematics at Stanford, and it was his passion for number theory and logic that led him eventually to writing the Pulitzer Prize winning book for which he is best known, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Later in life, he discovered a latent love for geometries of many types, and a special delight in the lowly Euclidean triangle. Here, too, a book may one day come out, focused on the discovery process in mathematics. Last but not least is Hofstadter’s passion for making abstract-seeming mathematical ideas, such as group theory and Galois theory, visualizable and very down-to-earth.

Title: Perception, Imagination, Ambiguity, and Ambigrams

Abstract: Seeing the world around us involves breaking up scenes into parts, and assigning those parts to mental categories. We humans are constantly seeing instances of thousands of unexpected categories, ranging from the very tiny and simple (a red dot) to the very large and complicated (a suspension bridge covered with marathon runners), and of course there are many intermediate levels in between these extremes (a colored pencil; a chipped coffee cup; a capital "A"; a knocked-down stop sign; the word "dog" in cursive; a garage whose door is too small for our car; and so forth and so on).

We also can imagine visual things in our heads to some extent without having them before our eyes, of course (in fact, you just did so at my request -- you obediently imagined the chipped coffee cup, the knocked-down stop sign, and the suspension bridge swarming with runners) categories on multiple levels (strokes, letters, words).

Sometimes we combine the act of seeing something before our eyes with the act of imagining things in our heads by imagining "tweaking" the shape before our eyes into something that we have just dreamt up -- such as imagining oneself with a different hairdo, or imagining a room with different furniture, or imagining a house with the walls in different places. Of course such mental tweakings can be far more complicated than these relatively simple examples, and they can involve many things being tweaked simultaneously.

Can you tweak a whole written word -- such as "light", for instance -- in such a way that it looks simultaneously like another whole word -- such as "particle", for instance? In other words, can you find a single shape that reads -- not just for you yourself, but for a random viewer -- as both words at the same time, in the way that certain famous ambiguous figures (such as the Necker cube) can oscillate between two different stable interpretations? To do this would be a subtle and brazen act of imagination on your part, involving imagining (or "seeing") letters as other letters, and imagining (or "seeing") one whole word as another whole word. This turns out to be a very tricky perceptual game, and to succeed well in it requires, on the part of the designer, a deep understanding of how people unconsciously assign shapes to categories on multiple levels (strokes, letters, words).

I'll talk about these kinds of subtle perceptual issues in the context of the art form of ambigrams -- words that can be read as other words, sometimes when seen upside down or reflected. From the phenomena observed in the entertaining realm of ambigrams, I'll try to draw some general lessons about human perception and cognition, as well as about human creativity.

March 17, 2008: Donald F. (Rick) McMullen, Director of the Knowledge Acquisition and Projection Lab in the Pervasive Technology Labs at Indiana University and adjunct faculty in the Computer Science Department.

Research Interests: Sensor networks for scientific research and critical infrastructure monitoring, instrument sharing and remote access to instruments, high performance research networking, knowledge representation for cooperative work by humans and machines, knowledge management (KM) in virtual organizations, and AI applications in KM.

Title: Big instruments, big science: CS challenges in observation and measurement

Abstract: Observation is the core of "doing science". To deal with the challenges of scale at the forefront of science we are building ever larger instruments to help us see phenomena at extremes of the very large and very tiny. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are critical to the design of these observing systems and play a key role in a spectrum of activities ranging from timing and making observations to signal processing, communication, storage, and analysis. Moving from hardware to social organization, increasingly science is a global endeavour with researchers scattered around the world working together to answer the biggest questions. ICT plays an ever more important role as the "glue" binding these international scientific collaborations. In this talk we will explore how computer science is addressing problems posed by instruments at the frontiers of experimental and observational science, and will discuss as well the role of ICT in enabling new social organizations and modes of work in global-scale scientific collaborations.

March 24, 2008: Erik Stolterman, Professor of Informatics, Director of Human-Computer Interaction Design, and Professor of Cognitive Science (COAS).

Research Interests: Stolterman's research focuses on interaction design, information systems design and management, information technology and societal change, Net-Life studies, and the philosophy, theory and methodology of design.

Title: Living with Interactive Artifacts

Abstract: We are all living in an environment that includes a growing number of digital interactive artifacts (laptop, MP3-player, cell phone, desktop computer, PDA, digital camera, etc). Taken together, these artifacts can be seen as a "personal artifact networks". These networks of artifacts are for many users difficult to handle and manage, and people develop different strategies on how to develop their own network. Some try to "harmonize" all their artifacts so they work perfectly together, while others try to keep each artifact separate. This interactive environment creates new challenges for anyone who is trying to design new digital applications and artifacts. I will present a way of describing this kind of networks and how we can understand them, and also discuss how to think about them if we want to design new artifacts that will become part of people's networks.

March 31, 2008: Eden Medina, Assistant Professor of Informatics, Adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.She is the recipient of a Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation (2007-2008) and the 2007 IEEE Life Members' Prize in Electrical History.

Research Interests: History of technology; science and technology studies; information technology in the developing world; modern Latin American history. Medina's research uses technology as a means to understand historical processes. Her most recent work addressed the history of information technologies in Latin America and the role these technologies played in creating new forms of governance and the advancement of state ideological projects.

Title: Histories of the Cutting Edge

Abstract: Those in the field of Informatics often strive to invent the next big technology or killer app. A recent billboard for the School of Informatics read we design the future. So why is there a historian in the School in Informatics? How does historical research enrich our understanding of technology and the way it interacts with the world around us? In this seminar, Prof. Medina presents her work studying the history of technology. Her research looks at the intersection of technology, culture, and politics and asks how technology relates to government policies, organizational cultures, political ideologies, and social change.

April 7, 2008: Gregory Rawlins, Associate Professor of Computer Science.

Research Interests: Data mining, genetic algorithms, spatial interfaces, Java, open-source software, software engineering, and adaptive software. My current passions are object-oriented programming, Java, the open-source movement, data mining, spatial interfaces, and adaptive software, as exemplified by the Java open-source KnownSpace Project. A related project, KnownSpace Symphony, is intended to give infrastructure support for remote peer-to-peer Java development. Symphony will carry a new class of user interfaces, built with yet another project, Fluency (October, 2005, design document) an editable, exportable, and sharable user interface builder intended partly for non-programmers (also called `end-users') as well as programmers.

Title: Fluency—Freeing Programmers and Users

Abstract: While much of computer science education revolves around programming, most programming in the real world today is user-interface development, a chore that many programmers are poorly trained for. Since 1992 the distribution of costs in software development has shifted so that more than half of all development costs go solely to user-interface development. UI design, development, and deployment is a never-ending headache both to companies and users, and, of course, the programmers who have to build them. The central problem is that while user know the problem, programmers know the machine, and neither know much about design. Fluency is an attempt to remove this expensive roadblock to more rapid development and deployment. The idea is to build a new kind of user-interface builder, one that does not produce 'code' but widget relationships, which can be reinterpreted, and edited, by multiple &non-programmers. Three members of the current development team and one graduating senior will help me describe to you the current state of the fluency project.

April 14, 2008: Kay Connelly, Assistant Professor of Computer Science. She leads the Security for Ubiquitous Resources Group (SURG), is the Associate Director of IU's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, and is a member of the Pervasive Technology Labs.

Research Interests: Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing, Health Informatics, Usability Studies and Methodologies, and Security and Privacy.

Title: ETHOS: Ethical Technologies in the Homes of Seniors

Abstract: Pervasive Computing embeds technology into the world around us. Examples of pervasive computing systems are when a sensor detects when someone enters a room and subsequently turns on the light, or a smart refrigerator uses RFID tags and weight sensors to determine when the milk is getting low and adds milk to a grocery list. But Pervasive Computing can go far beyond simple automation. This talk focuses on how technologies can be persuasive; that is, how they can be integrated into our normal routines in such a way that they encourage us to have healthier behaviors. After providing an overview of pervasive technologies, I will discuss the ETHOS project and how we're using technologies to help elders age healthier in their own homes. I will also talk about how undergraduates can get involved in research on the ETHOS project.

April 21, 2008: John Beggs, Assistant Professor of Physics (COAS) and Member of Biocomplexity Institute.

Research Interests: Neural Networks.

Title: Reconfiguration of Information Flow Graphs in Networks of Cortical Neurons

Abstract: How does information flow through the cerebral cortex? Neurons are connected by relatively fixed synapses, so it would be natural to assume that information travels along a fixed underlying network. But when we tracked how signals were sent back and forth within groups of a hundred cortical neurons, we found that patterns of information flow dramatically switched every few minutes. This surprising result suggests that small networks in cortex often reconfigure the way they process information. This work raises the interesting possibility that the same set of "hardware" in the cortex may be used to perform very different computations.