HLP Lab is grinking 2014

Posted on August 15, 2014 Updated on June 19, 2014

And it’s that time of the year again. Time to take stock. This last year has seen an unusual amount of coming and going. It’s been great to have so many interesting folks visit or spend time in the lab.

Grads

• Masha Fedzechkina defended her thesis, investigation what artificial language learning can tell us about the source of (some) language universals. She started her post-doc at UPenn, where she’s working with John Trueswell and Leila Gleitman. See this earlier post.
• Ting Qian successfully defended his thesis on learning in a (subjectively) non-stationary world (primarily advised by Dick Aslin and including some work joint with me). His thesis contained such delicious and ingenious contraptions as the Hibachi Grill Process, a generalization of the Chinese Restaurant Process, based on the insight that the order of stimuli often contains information about the structure of the world so that a rational observer should take this information into account (unlike basically all standard Bayesian models of learning). Check out his site for links to papers under review. Ting’s off to start his post-doc with Joe Austerweil at Brown University.

Post-docs Read the rest of this entry »