Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized
Workshop
April 23-24, 2010
Location: Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg,
Institute for Advanced Study (HWK)
Goals:
The workshop will start on Friday (April 23, 2010) at 09:30 with the first of four sessions, and end on Saturday (April 24, 2010) after lunch. Each session will give up to five invited speakers the opportunity to relate their work to the workshop topic, putting their own contribution in perspective with respect to the neighboring areas. The intention of the talks will be to inspire and raise questions to discuss; altogether this will add up to a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field. The invited experts will in part bridge interdisciplinary boundaries (combining behavior and language and/or representation formats for space and language), while others centrally represent one of the core areas. Talks will be followed by open discussions, with the last session extended to allow for final wrapup. Participants who are not giving a talk are encouraged to present a poster. The poster session will take place on Friday evening. The overall number of participants is limited. Those who are interested in attending this workshop should contact Thora Tenbrink as soon as possible. Edited collection Call for Contributions Program A pdf file with the detailed program can be accessed here. Photographs Here is a zip file (56 MB) with some sunny photos of the event. Session Topics (with links to abstracts): Spatial behavior and cognitive strategies Speakers: Jan Wiener, Christoph Hölscher, Stefan Münzer, Tobias Meilinger Language as a representation of spatial thought Speakers: Thora Tenbrink, Emile van der Zee, Matthijs L. Noordzij Position paper: Karl Rehrl Representation and modelling frameworks Speakers: Christophe Claramunt, Gérard Ligozat, Sabine Timpf, Kai-Florian Richter Position paper: Andrew U. Frank Interrelations and combinations Speakers: John Bateman, Marios Avraamides, Hanspeter A. Mallot, Rainer Malaka Funding: This workshop concludes the Tandem project on "Wayfinding strategies in behavior and language", funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Also, this workshop follows up on excited debates at the Conference of Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) 2009 and is supported by the organizers. The host will be the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study (HWK), including generous additional funding. Organisation: Thora Tenbrink (University of Bremen, Germany) Jan Wiener (Bournemouth University, UK) Christophe Claramunt (Naval Academy Research Institute, France) Workshop description: Research in the areas of spatial cognition and geographic information science has undergone a rapid development within the past decades, as reflected by steadily growing numbers of researchers addressing spatial topics, national as well as trans-regional conferences and meetings, and major research projects spanning a wide variety of related issues, transcending disciplinary boundaries. Recent developments have now highlighted a widespread substantial interest in establishing a reliable basis for combining insights and representation models from various sources. In particular, the existing manifold approaches to interpreting spatial representations in language deserve to be systematically combined with behavioral navigation data, associated cognitive processes and strategies, and formal representation systems capturing cognitively relevant categories and features of space. Substantial steps towards this goal have been brought forward both within the recently concluded tandem project on wayfinding strategies in behavior and language (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation from 2007 to 2009), and by a number of contributions to, and discussions at, the recent COSIT conference in Aber Wrac'h (France, September 21-25, 2009), reflecting not only the considerable progress already emerging in this regard, but also the necessity to substantiate interdisciplinary approaches systematically, and clarify open issues. In this workshop, we will bring together experts and discussants working in the areas of spatial behavior and linguistic representation and the relationship between them, pushing further towards the shared goal of a systematic interdisciplinary basis for understanding spatial cognition. |