15-17 Jul 2013
College Park MD, U.S.A.
The 2013 world congress of the International Association of Computers and
Philosophy will take place from July 15-17 at University of Maryland
College Park. See the main conference site (
http://www.iacap.org/conferences/iacap2013/) for registration information
and other details.
Computing in Philosophy Track: Final Call for Papers
With symposia on *Technology and the Classroom* and *Statistical Analysis
of Philosophical Texts*
***Extended Deadline***: April 30, 2013 (Symposia deadline May 12, 2013)
We welcome papers on the way that these new approaches are transforming
philosophy in the following areas:
- Computational metaphysics
- Computational epistemology
- Digital archives and reference works
- Cognition and visualization
- Computing and art
- Computing in the philosophy of information
- Digital pedagogy and computer-enhanced instruction
- Formal argument analysis and theories of reasons
- Social computing and distributed philosophy
- Computational metaphilosophy
*This track will also feature two symposia; if you would like to present in
the symposia, please submit your papers to the symposium organizers
directly according to the instructions below.*
*Symposium 1: ?Technology and the Classroom?*
We are inviting proposals for presentations and/or demonstrations related
to teaching and learning philosophy with technology at any educational
level. We especially encourage work on the following topics:
? innovative and successful teaching strategies
? engaging students outside the classroom
? innovative uses of instructional technologies
? methods to improve student learning
Speakers include Mara Harrell (Carnegie-Mellon), Tony Beavers (Evansville),
Wilfried Sieg (Carnegie Mellon), Joyce Lazier (Indiana University-Purdue
University Fort Wayne), and Selmer Bringjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic).
*PROPOSAL GUIDELINES*
Send Submissions, via email, to Mara Harrell: mharrell@cmu.edu. Submissions
should be received by *Sunday, May 12, 2013*.
Each presentation will be 30 minutes (approximately 20 minutes for
presentation or demonstration, and 10 minutes for questions).
Please attach your proposal in Word (.doc or .docx), PDF (.pdf), Open
Office (.odt) or Pages (.pages) format.
The Proposal should include:
? the presentation title
? a 100-200 word abstract for use in the printed conference program
? each presenter?s name, institutional affiliation (if any), and contact
information
? a one-to-three page description of what the presentation will cover and
what it seeks to achieve
? a list of equipment needed
Visit http://www.iacap.org/conferences/iacap2013 for additional information
about IACAP or the conference.
*Symposium 2: "Statistical Analysis of Philosophical Texts*"
This symposium will introduce participants to several tools for the
statistical analysis of texts, including the computational
psycholinguistics package word2word and subcorpus topic modeling.
*Session 1: Demystifying the "black art" of semantic modeling (Brent
Kievit-Kylar, Indiana University)*
Algorithmic learning models have allowed computational systems to
automatically accumulate vast quantities of relational data that are
proxies for the semantics of words. Philosophical corpora that would be too
vast for single human consumption can be reduced and relations queried in
seconds. This compressed and condensed information can lead to insights
that would have been impossible for a human to discover from the full data
set. However, with compression comes noise and possible inaccuracies. As
with all models, parameters must be set and assumptions must be made. But
how much do these choices affect the resulting output and therefore the
conclusions of the modeler? Even worse, while most modelers know what they
are optimizing against (human similarity judgments, previously established
benchmarks etc) in the field of philosophical relations, we have nothing
resembling a golden standard to compare our results to. In this paper, we
explore how the ?black art? of parameter setting in these semantic models
effects the outcomes in a comparative study of differences in the outcome
spaces generated. We focus on how single words or small neighborhoods can
be affected by parameters such as dimensionality, windowing, stemming, and
other cleaning procedures, using the BEAGLE semantic space model as a
guide. We use visual paradigms for exploring these relations as well as
novel, between words similarity plots. We conclude with a discussion of
variables that least significantly control variation (e.g. dimensionality
and window) and those that have the most control (e.g. stemming) as well as
providing thresholds for parameters under which change is effectively
irrelevant.
*Session 2: Simulating expertise through subcorpus modeling (Jaimie
Murdock, Lead Developer, InPhO Project)*
As the number of digital philosophy resources expands, the distance between
computational models and human expertise grows. However, when working on
domain-specific problems, this is not always a good thing. For example, the
most relevant documents about free will differ by subject area: a
philosopher of mind will examine a different discourse than the
metaphysician or ethicist. Through subcorpus topic modeling, we can
simulate the discrimination of an expert and provide more focused search
tools - moving from query-based search to topic-based search. In this demo,
we will show how several different subcorpus topic models respond to
documents in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. What does the
logician see? What does the virtue ethicist see? The consequentialist? The
P101 student? The theologian? We will also hint at how these tools can be
used to guide discovery in a large-scale corpus, such as the HathiTrust
Collection of over 10 million volumes.
We also welcome proposals for presentations on any aspect of statistical or
linguistic analysis of philosophical texts.
*PROPOSAL GUIDELINES*
Send Submissions, via email, to Cameron Buckner (cjbuckner@uh.edu).
Submissions should be received by *Sunday, May 12, 2013*.
Each submitted presentation will be 30 minutes (approximately 20 minutes
for presentation or demonstration, and 10 minutes for questions).
Please attach your proposal in Word (.doc or .docx), PDF (.pdf), Open
Office (.odt) or Pages (.pages) format.
The Proposal should include:
? the presentation title
? a 100-200 word abstract for use in the printed conference program
? each presenter?s name, institutional affiliation (if any), and contact
information
? a one-to-three page description of what the presentation will cover and
what it seeks to achieve
? a list of equipment needed
Please see the submission page for formatting details.
http://cameronbuckner.net/IACAP2013/cfp.html
--
Cameron Buckner
University of Houston
Department of Philosophy
713.743.2255
Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow
Institut für Philosophie II*
*Ruhr-Universität, Bochum