“How to write a successful collaborative H2020 proposal, with specific focus on Impact” by Sean McCarthy of Hyperion, the top training agency for EU programmes.

Registration is free of charge and includes participation as well as course material. However, there is a limited amount of spots available for each faculty. Register if you have (concrete) plans for proposals and/or are looking for partners from other faculties, e.g. with Social Science and Humanities backgrounds.

“How to write a successful collaborative H2020 proposal, with specific focus on Impact” by Sean McCarthy of Hyperion, the top training agency for EU programmes.

Registration is free of charge and includes participation as well as course material. However, there is a limited amount of spots available for each faculty. Register if you have (concrete) plans for proposals and/or are looking for partners from other faculties, e.g. with Social Science and Humanities backgrounds.

The atomic coverage (Grothendieck topology) is defined on any category that satisfies the property that every cospan completes to a commuting square. This property is sometimes called the right Ore condition. It is trivially satisfied by any category with pullbacks. More generally, even in the absence of pullbacks, there is often a "universal" way of completing cospans to commuting squares. In the talk I shall present examples of this situation, and I shall discuss special properties of atomic toposes that arise from sites of this nature.

When listening to music, humans spontaneously synchronize their movements with different aspects of the sound. We propose that such movements are a direct result of specific acoustic features that activate motor responses in the peripheral nervous system. To test this hypothesis, participants (N = 42) remained still and listened to 12 musical excerpts while electromyography (EMG) was recorded on the hand and arm...

Abstract:

This is an invitation to reflect on the successes and failures of collective rationality, particularly as embodied in modern mechanisms for mass information-aggregation-and-exchange (media, markets, voting, social networks, crowdsourcing). What are the nature, sources and dynamics of “collective knowledge”? Do the benefits provided by ''the wisdom of the crowds" outweigh the dangers posed by the stupidity or even ''madness" of the crowds? Do the above-mentioned aggregation mechanisms fulfill their epistemic promises (helping us acquire relevant information and take better collective decisions), or do they end up creating their own pseudo-reality (as exemplified by echo-chambers, ''fake news" and ''alternative facts"), leading in the end only to catastrophic mass delusions and self-defeating protest votes?

Can Logic and Philosophy help us understand this dilemma? Can Computer science help us verify and ''debug" our social software, diagnose its weaknesses and provide tools for social-informational ''mechanism design", that could be used to prevent the worst forms of ''groupthink"? Can ''epistemic democracy" actually work and endure? Will the ''facts" (the actual facts) eventually emerge from the noisy networks of irrelevant data, self-confirming rumors and self-congratulatory 'likes'? Or, to put it more bluntly: will 'truth' (the real truth) survive the ''information age"?

What are the classics of humanistic scholarship? Most historians of science or historians of philosophy would be able to produce a list of classical texts within their field in a short time. Such texts are well known, often reproduced, and recommended in syllabi and readers around the world. Nothing similar exists for the history of the humanities. Even if much debate in recent decades has criticized the idea of canons, there may be good reasons why we need one. An established list of classics would not only make the history of humanities a more teachable topic, but also to promote new research in the field. On the one hand, such a list could inspire scholars to reinvestigate the classics. On the other hand, it could provoke others to question what should and should not be considered classics, as it has happened in recent decades in other historical fields.

As in the previous editions, the purpose of this meeting is to inform you about various issues that are currently of importance in the ILLC and / or the Master of Logic programme. All ILLC staff, PhD students and guests are invited to attend.

Cool Logic is a logic seminar by and for Master and PhD Students of the ILLC.



Hana's talk this week proposes an account of concealed questions (e.g. 'I know your age') that extends Aloni & Roelofesn (2011). The talk features one of the most trivial card games ever invented, and the best division of semantic and pragmatic labour in the history of the United States (period). Come see for yourselves!

This is joint work with Julien Narboux and Freek Wiedijk. We used computer proof-checking methods to verify the correctness of our proofs of the propositions in Euclid Book I. We used axioms as close as possible to those of Euclid, in a language closely related to that used in Tarski's formal geometry. We used proofs as close as possible to those given by Euclid, but filling Euclid's gaps and correcting errors. Then we checked those proofs in the well-known and trusted proof checkers HOL Light and Coq. The talk will contain many geometrical diagrams and discuss both the geometry and the proof-checking.

The notion of representation is crucial for understanding Western tonal harmony. We investigate the explanatory power of different harmony representations in a series of computational studies, analyzing large datasets of classical, popular, and jazz music. The results demonstrate the structural importance of many representations from music psychology and music theory, with structural importance varying as a function of musical genre. Combining these representations into one statistical model allows considerably more accurate characterizations of harmonic structure. The results have implications for music theory, music information retrieval, and music psychology.

Abstract:

In 2015 I argued that full mathematical cognition was the result of a process of enculturation. Given that symbolic mathematics is a very recent acquisition—mathematical symbol systems are only thousands of years old and some mathematical practices are only hundreds of years old—it could not be the result of a genetically inherited and specialised module. How then do we acquire the capacity for symbolic mathematics in ontogeny? I return to the argument I presented there, that we should pay close attention to the social and cultural pressures that gave rise to the need for arithmetic and mathematics and to the cultural practices that were developed for thinking abstractly about quantity. Mathematical practices recruit a number of existing capacities including the capacity for numerosity (which appears to be an ancient endowment), the capacity for sensorimotor manipulation of tools and the ability to perform sequences of operations according to norms (or rules).