The fifth North American Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information, NASSLLI 2012, will be hosted at the University of Texas at Austin, on June 18–22, 2012.
NASSLLI is a one-week summer school aimed at formally-minded graduate students in Philosophy, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, and related fields, especially students whose interests cross traditional boundaries between these domains. The summer school is loosely modeled on the long-running ESSLLI series in Europe; it consists of a number of courses and workshops which, by default, meet for 90 minutes on each of five days.
In the main week of the school, students select up to five courses from among twenty that are offered. Of these courses, five are from specially invited lecturers, and the remainder are from researchers selected because they are leaders in their fields and also because they have proven ability to communicate with interdisciplinary audiences. These instructors were selected after a public call for course proposals and a peer review process by the program committee, which was drawn from a wide range of specialities including linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. Over 45 course proposals were submitted for NASSLLI 2012. These were high quality proposals by established scholars, mostly tenured or tenure-track at research universities, and many strong proposals had to be rejected. The acceptance rate for course proposals was 30%.
Intensive "bootcamp" courses the preceding weekend will refresh participants' knowledge of material that will be presupposed in the main courses.
A related conference, Reasoning and Interaction at NASSLLI (RAIN), will occur the weekend following the summer school, along with the Turing Centenary Symposium, celebrating the 100th anniversary of mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing's birth, and TLS 13, a conference organized by the Texas Linguistics Society, which this year will feature sessions on Semantics and Sign Languages.
NASSLLI 2002 (Stanford University), NASSLLI 2003 (Indiana University), NASSLLI 2004 (UCLA), NASSLLI 2010 (Indiana University) and now NASSLLI 2012 follow the tradition of the very successful series of ESSLLI summer schools in Europe, and both have received sponsorship from a single parent organization, the Foundation for Logic, Language, and Information (FOLLI). NASSLLI is an interdisciplinary event with emphases in applied logic, computational linguistics, and areas of computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and economics. Despite the obvious differences in the goals of these fields, they depend upon many of the same mathematical tools, and are concerned with many parallel philosophical issues. This is reflected in a great deal of crossover work: examples that have created whole new subfields include the application of dynamic logics and feature logics from computer science to problems in linguistics. However, in spite of there being an active community of interdisciplinary scholars, departments in US universities tend to follow traditional disciplinary lines, so that it is often difficult for graduate students to access courses in neighboring fields. NASSLLI's role is to provide access for graduate students to cutting edge research on logic, language, and information, taught specifically for an interdisciplinary audience.
The NASSLLI organizing committee gratefully acknowledges support for NASSLLI 2012 and associated conferences from the following organizations:
