Matthew Darling: Bachelor of Cognitive Science

A year ago, the Cognitive Science department at Carleton took a vote on whether the primary name for our degrees should be changed from Bachelor of Arts: Major in Cognitive Science: Specialization in X to Bachelor of Cognitive Science: Major in X. I voted in favour, and so did most other people apparently, because earlier this year the BCog became an option for us. I’ve finally gotten around to making the change, and I’m pretty happy about it, I think. The requirements for me to graduate didn’t really change from what they were when I first came to Carleton and the current calendar, so it was an easy decision from that point of view.

The important change is from Bachelor of Arts to BCog. My first thought was “well, nobody’s going to know what to think about this weird degree only offered at Carleton”. Then I remembered that you can often get a BA in psychology, or a BS in psychology. They’re probably quite similar degrees, but odds are there’s one or two differences in required credits. Cognitive science gets a free pass on some of the BA staples like “breadth requirements”, so from that perspective it makes sense to make us separate. But the other aspect is that if I’m BCog with a major in Linguistics, it acknowledges that I’m probably only a few credits away from a BA degree in Linguistics. I can’t necessarily say whether my degree is primarily focused on linguistics or on cognitive science, so I can’t speak on whether “majoring in cognitive science” is better than “majoring in linguistics”. But the specialization thing has always been really confusing, and I’m glad to be rid of that.

It’s really weird to think I’m not far away from graduating. Most of my prerequisites in other areas were taken care of last year, but I had to do logic and philosophy of science this year too. This semester, I’ve got one required cognitive science course and three linguistics courses. Next year will be pretty similar, though at some point I’ll be doing an AI course. Over the summer, assuming I’m at Carleton, I’ll be doing an independent study course to learn statistics the hard way via R rather than the typical “stats for psych students who are scared of math”.

I say all of this because it’s equal parts exciting and scary. As it turns out, I’ve learned stuff over the last three years. Still, I haven’t decided on what I’m going to do after I graduate. This summer is going to be important, I think, for deciding what I’ll do when I graduate. Still figuring that out, though. I’ve been told I could potentially travel to work at another university over the summer, but the trouble with that is I don’t know what my options are. Or if my recommendations are good enough to be accepted by professors I’ve never met.

Anyway, I’ve got some meetings to arrange before I start making decisions. Though, of course, I’ll be screwed if I take too long on that. But then homework. And other things that need to be done. Blaaarg.

[please direct any funny jokes about my bachelor-tude to your usual communication channels, or comment so everyone can chuckle]

Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security 20124

It might sound kind of strange, but part of my job at Hotsoft is actually just to get used to academic culture. As part of my ongoing education about what being a graduate student will be like, I went to my first conference two weeks ago in Washington, DC. The conference was the eight annual Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security, and you can read the notes I took at the link I’ve posted! It’s a notebook I put together with Microsoft OneNote and have shared publicly through SkyDrive - in theory, it should look pretty nice. But if you prefer, I’ve put a .pdf version up on UniNotes.

My thoughts on the conference itself: it was what they call “single track,” meaning there’s only ever one thing going on at a time. That was really nice, because it meant I didn’t have to plan what I wanted to attend in advance or run around like a crazy person trying to see everything interesting. I didn’t realize the conference would take pretty much the entire day, each day - I figured I’d have time to check and write e-mail, or do other productive things. Never really found the time, unfortunately. One of the lab’s PhD students told me that’s basically the norm at conferences, so that’s a lesson learned.

One thing that surprised me is the diversity of interests that were brought together under the umbrella of “usable privacy and security.” There were people who are immersed in the world of location-sharing services or looking at ways to use location data. Others were focused on studying Android app stores. And if it weren’t for meeting up at conferences like SOUPS, they probably wouldn’t ever interact a whole lot. As someone who doesn’t have a vested research interest in the area right now, I was actually pretty out of the loop on some of these things - for example, I know nothing about location sharing/tracking. So when I was talking for a while with someone who works in that area, I was a bit at a loss on what to talk about. On the other hand, when I was discussing issues that affect me as an Android user, I had lots to talk about.

I hope I made decent conversation, even when I was completely outclassed. I’ll have to work on getting people to talk about themselves more, so that I can just nod and smile. Practice asking clarification questions, so I can get up to speed without sounding like an idiot.

On Friday, when the conference was done, a group of us went to see the Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian. It was pretty unimpressive, to be honest, because it was primarily a “look, don’t touch” exhibit. Which really defeats the entire purpose of video games. There wasn’t much historical information about the development of different games, so they didn’t have that to fall back on either. The games they picked generated good discussion among our group, but I don’t know if non-gamers would get a whole lot out of the exhibit.

Overall thoughts on the trip: I got to know members of the lab when we went to dinner and chatted over drinks (water for me, because I can’t drink across the border yet). I met some new people, as well, from Carleton and from other universities. I learned what to expect from conferences, and got a bit of a feel for the HCI/privacy+security area. Altogether, I think it was a pretty valuable experience!

Photo by Marika Washchyshyn. Taken 10/19/2011. Cropped and badly compressed by yours truly.

One of the great things about the Cognitive Science department at Carleton is its size. It’s large enough that you don’t lose anything by majoring in cognitive science and specializing in your area of interest, but small enough to host events for the entire department. When I was starting my first year in 2010, the department organized an event for professors to introduce their research to undergraduates (and I believe this is an annual event). Basically, professors sat at various tables (in person and via Skype) as groups of students went from table to table, getting the elevator pitch and asking questions. By the end of the day, I’d decided to contact Professor Masako Hirotani of the Language and Brain Lab, and set up a meeting with Professor Jim Davies of the Science of Imagination Lab.

Initially it was all volunteering, because I didn’t have a whole lot to offer as a first year undergrad except enthusiasm. Getting involved with research so early paid off, though, when I received the I-CUREUS award to fund a part-time research position at the Language and Brain Lab (LBL) for the fall of my second year in 2011. I continued my work with the lab through the winter term, and now for the summer I’m applying the same skills in my work with Carleton’s Hotsoft lab.

The moral of the story is this: investigate the research being done in your department, whatever it may be. Send an e-mail to one of the administrators and ask about what kind of work is being done. Gather your courage and send an e-mail to the people who are doing things you’d like to be a part of. Offer to work for free in your spare time, and you’ll find a lot of doors will open.

You literally have nothing to lose by sending some e-mails, because there’s essentially two outcomes:

the professor is happy to have your help in working on one of their million research ideas
they forget about you five minutes after deleting your e-mail/sending a kind rejection, and go back to working on one of their million research ideas

You don’t need to obsess over finding the perfect place to work. Just do something that sounds cool! You can start out by attending lab meetings, if there are any, to test the waters. You can move on if it turns out you don’t like it as much as you thought you would. Just get out there, get some experience, and connect with your professors and the faculty in your department.

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I’ve learned a number of things from being part of the LBL so far, including:

how to create highly controlled research experiments using Neurobehavioral Systems’ Presentation software (initially just with their “Scenario Description Language,” now working with the more advanced “Presentation Control Language”)
the basics of EEG research within neurolinguistics
programming with Python for processing and organizing data
how to run experimental participants (mostly as an assistant, but being the lead experimenter is similar)

I’m certainly not an expert in any of these things, but it’s all valuable experience for an undergrad to have. Pretty much any experience is valuable as an undergrad, truth be told. Also, working with Python is way more fun than doing assignments in Java/C/C++ ever was.

Oh, and I also have the first two things to put on my CV, because I’m listed as the third author on an upcoming paper! We received the award for best paper at the Institute of Cognitive Science Spring Conference in April. Second, the paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science. though I wasn’t present for the conference. While I was thinking “journal article” when I said I wanted a publication in 2012, that was before I really understood that there are a lot of intermediate steps along the way. Technically, presenting a talk or a poster is also a “publication.” That’s not to say that I’m going to stop being involved, though! It’s hard to give time estimates, but I’d really like to get first authorship on something. So that’s the next (or is it current?) step - taking a lead role on a project of my own. Exciting stuff.

[those of you with particularly good memories may remember not one, but two minor remarks I made promising this post would come “soon”]

Summer job!

I have exciting news! The title probably spoiled it, but the news is this: I applied for a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council summer research grant with Dr. Robert Biddle as my supervisor and we were accepted! That means working full-time at Carleton for four months, starting in May. Also nice is the fact that the award is enough to cover my tuition and books for next year, assuming I keep my entrance scholarship (I will, if this semester goes as well as the last).

Here’s the story: I found out who the eligible supervisors were, looked up their research interests, and contacted a few. I saw “Games and Hypermedia” on the side of the HotSoft webpage and that was pretty much all I needed to hear. Although, I had seen Dr. Biddle’s name before on a pretty neat project involving security and some awesome hardware, which would also be fun to work on too. I wound up walking over to the lab, knocking on the door and asking to speak to Dr. Biddle. After talking for a while and providing a transcript, we did our respective paperwork and found out a week ago that we’d been successful!

I dropped by yesterday after officially accepting the award and got a bit more information on what I might be working on. The initial plan is that I’ll work with Elizabeth Stobert, a PhD candidate working at the lab, on experiments related to security and usability. Later on, I’ll probably take a more active role and possibly start a project of my own. All in all, it should be pretty awesome.

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On an unrelated note, I’ll also be working on a computational linguistics project with a linguist doing his PhD in cognitive science. He’ll bring the linguistics, I’ll bring the computational. This is probably the area I’ll have my eye on in the future, though usability testing is a fascinating field as well. If all goes well, I’ll soon have exciting news about that! If it doesn’t go well, the exciting news will just take longer.

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On the subject of research, I’ll be posting a little blurb soon with details about my work at the Language and Brain Lab during the fall. Plus some snazzy photos of me looking like I actually belong in a research lab. It’s a bit more esoteric than computer security and usability, but I think it’s genuinely awesome. Stay tuned, folks.

MY NAME IN SHINING LIGHTS4

Well, if you consider your monitor a bunch of tiny shining lights (pixels) rapidly flashing in front of your eyes. Honestly even if you don’t know my last name, I’m the only Matt on the page, so scroll down a little and look for it.

This is what I was talking about a few weeks ago! The Language and Brain Laboratory is doing a lot of cool stuff and it seems like I’ll be the one putting together the programs for the experiments. Or helping to, at any rate, when I learn to use the tools. I’m hoping it’s pretty easy, it honestly can’t be that complicated to have a black screen show words with a specific timing and capture a couple keyboard input events. There’s a program for it, and I’m willing to bet it’s designed so you don’t need to be a hardcore programmer to put experiments together, so it ought to be pretty simple.

Famous last words, I know.

At any rate, here’s what I need to do in the next little while. Unfortunately, most of these have no due dates, so it’s hard feeling really motivated about it.

Monday: Linguistics assignment. I have one question left, and I need to print it, so I’m waiting to finish it when I actually have a printer.
Thursday: 200 word story in french written in past tense, using the three main varieties of past tense.
Write funny instructions for the GLaDOS head cake, then submit it to my Computers teacher so he can build a database of recipes for our assignment.
Finish the Oracle of Objects python script for Jim Davies. Need a way to parse the results from that.
Check out Presentation to help Masako Hirotani.
Take notes on chapter 9 for Psychology.
Read chapter 10 for Psychology.
Read a couple chapters for Computers.
Read ahead a bit for Philosophy.

Except for the part with Dr. Hirotani, this is all stuff I’ve known I have to do for at least a week. I, uh, haven’t really done much work in the past week. If I HAD been working all of the time, I would probably be able to rent a game and play that in my spare time. It’s all going to get done, of course, I just used my free time tweaking my computer and reading things on the internet. Ah well. Some day I’ll run out of things to check out.

Exciting research opportunities abound!

I went to a lab fair for Cognitive Science, which means various lab directors from Carleton sat down to chat about their projects and where they needed assistants and things like that. So aside from learning a few names and getting my name out there, I’ve also gotten a position as a volunteer research assistant (i.e. no benefit for me unless we get published), and names of a few people with research grants with which to pay people like me to do things. I’ll go through those in order.

First, the volunteer stuff. Met a man named Jim Davies, who carries five notebooks with him to write down his research ideas. He has also given a TEDx talk at my school. I haven’t watched it yet, though I will, but first I have some stuff to do. But anyway! So he’s doing research on building a computer that can imagine the way humans do. The ultimate goal is to construct a massive database of images, with various parts labelled, and have the computer construct images based on keywords. So, for example, based on its experience of “car” images, if you say “car” to the computer it will make a car and perhaps put it on a road or driveway. If you say “puppy” it might put it near some grass or flowers.

So my help with this is to create a Python program (note: I don’t yet know Python, so that’s step 1) that will submit queries to the Oracle of Objects, and so if I say (on the proximity page) “dog” it tells me there’s a 10% chance a picture of a dog will include a man. So that’s the basic “AI” of the imagination-bot, to go through its database of images and calculate these percentages and use them to generate its images. Now, one caveat is that it will be creating a kind of collage out of the images in its database - it isn’t going to spontaneously create these images like a human being might. So someone else needs to work on its ability to do photo-stitching, i.e. super-powered photoshopping.

So yeah! That’s something to do in my spare time. I have to report back on my progress January 4th.

Also? Jim Davies had two widescreen monitors set up in his office, except one was vertical (portrait orientation) and it was pretty cool seeing him manage them. Still kinda toying with the idea of more monitors. Also the main method of co-ordination with him and his assistants is shared google calendars. Thanks, Google!

Now the paid work, which is… well, much more interesting to my wallet. Carleton has a Language and Brain Lab, as well as a Logic, Language, and Information Lab. Both of these labs have acquired research grants, allowing them to pay undergraduate students to do work as research assistants for them during the summer. So, essentially, summer jobs doing interesting research. This is far better than my planned summer jobs working for the government. I have to send out a few e-mails to the people I spoke to today, but one in particular mentioned that he would be looking for applications soon. Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect.

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In unrelated news, I did a cool thing in Echo Bazaar, but it’s pretty spoilerrific. This is the culmination of a long series of silk hunting/spider extermination expeditions at The Silken Chapel near the Wolfstack Docks. Something that was immensely boring, unrewarding, and unsatisfying. Until this happened! Now it’s kinda cool. Image is here, if you want to see it.