The University of Arizona

Events & News

Colloquium

CategoryLecture
DateFriday, November 14, 2008
Time10:00 am
Concludes11:00 am
LocationSU 411-A
DetailsCareer Services, Room 411-A [4th Floor Student Union, Above Bookstore]
SpeakerProf. Paul Cohen
TitleProfessor, Head
AffiliationComputer Science Department

Segmentation and Chunking of Sequences

Humans detect chunks or episodic structure in continuous sequences.
Sometimes the boundaries of chunks are marked (e.g., promoter regions
in DNA, punctuation in text, prosody in speech). Sometimes the chunks
are recognized (e.g., the words in "thequickbrownfoxjumped"). And
sometimes the chunks are inferred because of their statistical attributes.
This talk is about two algorithms for finding chunks in univariate and
multivariate sequences, respectively. Both algorithms are extremely
simple and perform better than I would expect, and for one of them,
at least, the only requirement for success is that some patterns are
more frequent than others. I speculate that the cognitive process we
call chunking is a simple, statistical consequence of non-uniform
distributions of patterns.

Biography

Paul Cohen works in several areas of AI and cognitive science.
Paul's academic postings include five years at USC's Information
Sciences Institute and twenty years at the University of Massachusetts.
Throughout, Paul has been interested in simple, general mechanisms of
cognition, especially mechanisms of cognitive development. Paul
attended UCSD as an undergraduate, UCLA for a MA in Psychology,
and Stanford University for a PhD in Computer Science and Psychology.
He graduated from Stanford in 1983 and became an assistant professor
in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. In 2003, he
moved to USC's Information Sciences Institute where he served as the
Deputy Director of the Intelligent Systems Division and Director of
the Center for Research on Unexpected Events. In 2008, he joined
the University of Arizona as the Head of the Computer Science
Department.