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1、ILLC October 2007 A patent achievement for the ILLC In this issue amongst others: 9 Inspiring research: Henk Zeevat and Jouko Vnnen We interview Frank Tip and Barbara Terhal at IBM research ILLC Magazine Contents TA B L EO FC O N T E N T S Foreword Announcements Inspiring research A patent achieveme
2、nt for the ILLC Irresistible amnesia Alumni: Interview with Barbara Terhal and Frank Tip New PhD students 2 2 4 6 8 10 13 Projects awarded in the period July 2006 - August 2007 VICI award to Rens Bod The VICI research proposal “Integrating Cognition” of Rens Bod has been selected by NWO Geestesweten
3、schappen. Rens is awarded the sum of 1.25 million which creates jobs for 2 PhD students (3 years) and 2 postdocs (3 years). VIDI grants 2006 to Khalil Simaan and Jaap Kamps Both Khalil Simaan and Jaap Kamps have been awarded VIDI subsidies for their respective projects, Priors for the Estimation of
4、Probabilistic Grammars from Incomplete Natural Language Data and Retrieving encoded archieval descriptons more effectively (README). The Priors project has a total budget of 767 k of which 406 k is contributed by NWO, and 65 k by the CvB- UvA. Besides Khalil himself, a postdoc (3 years) and a PhD st
5、udent (4 years) will be attracted to work on the project. The README project has a budget of 600 k of which 405 k comes from NWO, and creates jobs for two PhD students, one postdoc and one parttime scientific programmer. This means 2 out of 8 approved VIDI project proposals within NWO Exact Sciences
6、 went to the ILLC (and to the LaCo programme)! VIDI grants 2007 to Ulle Endriss and Maria Aloni Within the Division of Humanities: Maria Aloni for her project Indefinites and beyond: evolutionary pragmatics and typological semantics, and within the Division of Exact Sciences: Ulle Endriss for his pr
7、oject Collective Decision Making in Combinatorial Domains. Both will receive the sum of 600 k (2/3 NWO; 1/3 UvA matching) with which they can start their own research group (one postdoc and one PhD student each). VENI grants 2007 to Jelle Zuidema and Catarina Dutilh-Novaes Jelle Zuidema (now a postd
8、oc at the ILLC), for his project proposal “Discovering grammar: statistical models of sequence learning in humans, animals and machines” and Catarina Dutilh-Novaes (Master of Logic alumna), for her project: “Philosophical Foundations of Formal Languages in Logic: Formal Languages as Language Games”.
9、 Both receive funds for a three year appointment as postdoctoral researcher at the ILLC. Rubicon award 2007 to Emar Maier An NWO Rubicon grant is awarded to Emar Maier from Nijmegen University (http:/www.ru.nl/ncs/emar/). The grant allows him to work for one year as a researcher at ILLC, together wi
10、th Jeroen Groenendijk. The planned starting date is January 2008. NWO Mosaic grant 2007 awarded to Yurii Khomskii Master of Logic alumnus Yurii Khomskii has been awarded a NWO Mosaic grant. The Mosaic programme is developed to boost the participation of ethnic Announcements I L L C MAGAZINE Dear fri
11、end of the ILLC, The ILLC is growing. In 2006 the Master of Logic programme had its first evaluation for accreditation; it was described as “unique and excellent” and “something very special”. Some ex-MoL students have continued to PhD positions, along with a large number of appointments from outsid
12、e the ILLC. (Those who started before July introduce themselves on page 13.) This huge influx has led to expansion across the canal from the Euclides building (into the oddly disjunctive J/K building) and rotating desk schedules in the philosophy building, as well as a new internal seminar series an
13、d a great deal of lively discussion. The year also marks the first patent earned by the ILLC, discussed on page 6. Following this theme, on page 10 we interview two employees of IBM Research who made the transition to industry from academia in Amsterdam. Another theme of this issue (albeit present o
14、nly implicitly) is procrastination. We have beaten all previous records for lateness of the magazine, for which we (the editors) most humbly apologise. In keeping with this theme we asked the new PhD students how they planned to procrastinate; while not all of them have gotten around to replying, so
15、me of the answers might surprise you. In closing, we should express our thanks to all those who have written articles for this issue or let us interview them, to the photographers whose work we have included (particularly Yanjing Wang), and to the ILLC management for their support and patience. Its
16、been fun, we hope you enjoy the result. The editors, Tikitu de Jager, Jonathan Zvesper 2 O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 Foreword CO L O P H O N ILLC Magazine is published by: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation Universiteit van Amsterdam Plantage Muidergracht 24 1018 TV Amsterdam The Netherlands Te
17、l: +31 (20) 525 6051 Fax: +31 (20) 525 5206 E-mail: illcscience.uva.nl Internet: www.illc.uva.nl EDITORIAL TEAM: Tikitu de Jager, Jonathan Zvesper PHOTOGRAPHS: Yanjing Wang DESIGN: Crasborn Grafisch Ontwerpers bno, Valkenburg a.d. Geul | 07527 PRINTING: Drukkerij Hub. Tonnaer, Kelpen MANY THANKS TO:
18、 Ingrid van Loon and Frank Veltman I L L C MAGAZINE 3 O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 minorities in academic research and provides funds for a 4 year period of doctoral research. Yurii starts his PhD research at September 1st, 2007 under the supervision of Benedikt Loewe, on the project called “Making Guesswo
19、rk Precise: Developing a mathematical theory of rules-of-thumb in Set Theory of the Real Line” Scientific Network PhiMSAMP The DFG (Deutsche Forschungs- gemeinschaft, the German Research Foundation) decided to fund the Scientific Network PhiMSAMP (Philosophy of Mathematics: Sociological Aspects and
20、Mathematical Practice) coordinated by Thomas Mller (Bonn) and Benedikt Lwe. The Network consists of six nodes, Amsterdam, Bonn, Brussels, Darmstadt, Dortmund, and Fort Wayne IN, and will fund workshops and meetings on applying sociological and empirical methods to questions of philosophy of mathemat
21、ics. For more information, see http:/www.lib. uni-bonn.de/PhiMSAMP/ Prizes and Awards 3 out of 6 ESSLLI06 prizes to ILLC students! ILLC PhD and MoL students were very succesful in the 2006 ESSLLI Summer School. In the oral session Reut Tsarfaty won the first prize for her talk “The Interplay of Synt
22、ax and Morphology in Building Parsing Models for Modern Hebrew”. Michael Franke and Scott Grimm both received third places; Michael in the oral session for his talk “Teological Necessity and Only” and Scott in the poster session for his poster “Subject Marking in Hindi/Urdu: A Study in Case and Agen
23、cy” (based on his Master of Logic thesis). The winner from both the poster and the oral session may choose 500 worth of Springer books. ILLC team wins “Nieuwe Ideen Prijs” 2006 A team consisting of Leen Torenvliet, Sybren Stvel (student) and Peter Blok (Head of FNWI Buildings) has won the prestigiou
24、s Science Park Nieuwe Ideen Prijs 2006 for their Digital Location System. From the announcement on the ILLC mailing list: This location system can serve many purposes. For one thing, it can and will be used as a security system in buildings like Euclides. It is based on an idea of Leen which as the
25、jury said is “as simple as it is brilliant”, but about which we cannot say too much until the patent application is completed. Suffice it to say that there is a lot of interest from outside to develop this system further and to bring it on the market. The patent application has now been completed, a
26、nd an interview with Leen appears on page 6. Also see http:/www. scienceparkamsterdam.org/ for more information. Ackermann Award 2006 to Balder ten Cate The Jury of the Ackermann Award 2006 has decided to award to Balder ten Cate one of the two Ackermann Awards 2006 for his ILLC dissertation “Model
27、theory for extended modal languages”. This EACSL Outstanding Dissertation Award for Logic in Computer Science will be presented to the recipients at the annual conference of the EACSL (CSL06). The award consists of (i) a diploma, (ii) an invitation to present the thesis at the CSL conference, (iii)
28、the publication of the abstract of the thesis and the laudatio in the CSL proceedings, (iv) travel support to attend the conference. For more information about the award, see http:/www.dimi.uniud.it/ eacsl/award.html Martin Stokhof elected as KNAW member Martin Stokhof, professor in Philosophy of La
29、nguage at ILLC, is elected as member of the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). He is the fourth ILLC professor to become a KNAW member, after Renate Bartsch, Anne Troelstra and Johan van Benthem. For more information, see http:/www.knaw.nl/. Prof. Krzysztof Apt: member of Academi
30、a Europaea ILLC and CWI professor Krzysztof Apt has been chosen as “member of Academia Europaea” in Informatics Section. In total there are 66 members of which 7 are from the Netherlands. For more information, see http:/www.acadeuro.org/ Teaching Prize 2007 of FGW to the course “Logica en de Linguis
31、tic Turn” The Teaching Prize 2007 of the Faculty of Humanities has been granted to the course “Logica en de Linguistic Turn”, which is part of the Bachelor of Philosophy. Almost every ILLC member working in the Philosophy Department has taught this course - some more than fifteen times. We congratul
32、ate them all. It was the first time this prize was granted to a course (instead of a teacher). ESSLLI07 best student paper award to Thomas Icard III Master of Logic student Thomas Icard III won the award of the Best Student Paper in the Oral Session at the ESSLLI summer school of 2007 with his paper
33、 “Towards An Alternative Proof of Solovays Arithmetical Completeness Theorem” based on a project advised by Joost Joosten. Personnel arrived Jouko Vnnen, professor of Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Mathematics. Alessandra Palmigiano, postdoc. Sujata Ghosh, postdoc (since departed). Karin Gige
34、ngack, administrator. Personnel left As of September 1, 2006: Wolfram Hinzen; now at University of Durham, UK. As of October 1, 2006: Detlef Prescher; now at University of Heidelberg. As of September 1, 2007: Eric Pacuit, now at Stanford University. PhD defenses 7 September 2006, Robert Spalek: Quan
35、tum Algorithms, Lower Bounds, and Time- Space Tradeoffs. 14 September 2006, Master of Logic defense, Martin Mller 4 October 2006, Merlijn Sevenster: Branches of imperfect information: logic, games, and computation. 12 October 2006, Marie Nilsenova: Rises and Falls. Studies in the semantics and pragm
36、atics of intonation. 20 October 2006, Aline Honingh: The Origin and Well-Formedness of Tonal Pitch Structures. 7 February 2007, Neta Spiro: Musical Structure: Expectation generation, disruption and resolution. 23 February 2007, Rudi Cilibrasi: Statistical Inference through Data Compression. 28 Febru
37、ary 2007, Darrin Hindsill: Its a Process and an Event. I do not think there are papers of other people I would have liked to have written. Fortunately, my field has not developed to the point where the author has completely disappeared behind his subject as seems to be the case in branches of psycho
38、logy or engineering. To write somebody elses paper would therefore mean that one would have to become that somebody else. But there are a great number of people who have influenced me very considerably, as teachers or as colleagues. Here I will only mention the papers that have really changed the wa
39、y my life was going. Long ago I was a student in Bologna and making my first acquaintance with logic. At one point, I asked my professor Marco Santambrogio if logic had been applied to the analysis of natural language meaning, a subject that had been treated in the vaguest possible terms in the ling
40、uistics courses I had been following. He pointed me to the work of Montague, which was very new then, though Montague had already died. I cannot have understood that much at that time, but I was quite taken with it. This was not just an application of logic to natural language semantics, but it offe
41、red a method for developing an account of meaning and a quite clear and precise answer to the question what such a theory would be like, in addition to many ideas about particular phenomena. It made me decide to study logic, to work on natural language semantics and to go back to Amsterdam. It was p
42、robably the most decisive moment in my life. It has determined who I got to know, the jobs I have had, the work I did and even my love life. I still admire Montagues radical vision and his optimism about the tools with which he set out the task and the methods, even though the rest of my life seems
43、to have been spent in getting away from the picture that Montague developed. But I admire radical attacks on a broad front and Montague seems to have been the sort of personality that could have drawn everything together in the way he did, without being too much disturbed by doubts. Herbert Clark wa
44、s the first to shake my optimism about Montagues programme. In the footsteps of Russell, Montague analysed referring expressions as generalised quantifiers. This makes a psychological prediction: it should be enough to recognise the words they are made up of and to access their meanings for a full u
45、nderstanding of their role in the sentence. Clark showed that this was not the case. After the use of a referring expression, speakers normally check whether their audience has got the referent and if there are signs that this is not so, they produce new attempts to get the hearer to figure out who
46、they were talking about. My interest in discourse representation theory and computational models of dialogue I L L C MAGAZINE 4 O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 Inspiring research Henk Zeevat and Jouko Vnnen span between them the entire official history of the ILLC. In 1991, when we became a university Researc
47、h Institute, Henk Zeevat was working in computational linguistics. Last year Jouko Vnnen was welcomed as the new professor of Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Mathematics (the position previously held by Dick de Jongh). We asked them both about research that has inspired them, and the influence
48、 this has had on their own work. “All processes in language use can be seen as a competition between candidate solutions for the input situation.” You must just think for yourself Henk Zeevat developed later, but would not have been possible without Clark shaking me up from my dogmatic slumbers. Ulr
49、ike Haas-Spohns analysis of subjective meanings has been another shake-up of this kind. It showed that far more was possible within possible worlds analyses than I had assumed. Here I am to blame myself: I had been content at an earlier point in my life to show to my own satisfaction that analyses of epistemic contexts could not be carried out with possible worlds, because of the inevitability of certain problems, coming from logical omniscience, rigid designators and the li