Dear members of the ILCB community,

I was really happy to see so many of you at the lunch talk of our IMERA ILCB chair Kate Watkins who gave a wonderful lecture on Stimulating speech: auditory-motor interactions in perception and production.
 
As part of Kate’s stay here in Marseille, which will end at the end of March, there will be a small, informal one-day workshop at IMERA on “Timing, action and language”. The goal is to gather local researchers interested in the interaction between at least 2 of these 3 topics: timing and action; time and language; action and language. Details will follow; for now you can save the date: Friday March 24th!  

This year again, IMERA has attracted very strong applications in connection with language, communication, and the brain. There will be two ILCB IMERA chairs starting in September 2023: Prof. Sonja Kotz from the University of Maastricht and Asst. Prof. Fenna Poletiek from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen and the University of Leiden. Their portraits will be presented in the upcoming newsletters.

This makes me think to remind you that we are always happy to welcome international visitors who want to do a research visit at the ILCB. There is, of course, the prestigious IMERA ILCB chair for research visits of 5 or 10 months, but we can also finance much shorter visits if there is an interest for the ILCB and/or a close collaboration with members of the ILCB.  

In more immediate news, AMPIRIC and ILCB will jointly host a lecture by Carmen Fonseca Mora on March, 2nd (full details below). Carmen works at the Affective Language Learning Lab at the University of Huelva (Spain); she is collaborating with Mireille Besson (LNC). Carmen Fonseca-Mora’s lecture will be on Affective factors and emotions in second language education.

Best wishes

Johannes

"[A]n inability to keep track of knowledge of instances independently of kinds [,] seems to underlie the rampant hallucinations that allow large language models to say things like “Elon Musk died in a car crash in 2018”, even when nothing in the corpus says so, and massive amounts of data contradict the claim, because they blend together information about kinds with information about specific individuals, in haphazard ways. [...]

Deep learning has undeniably made amazing progress, on other dimensions, but the fact is it hasn’t solved the core problems that many of us thought were essential 30 years ago."

Gary Marcus in his blog-post Happy Groundhog Day, The AI Edition

Join local researchers to discuss the interactions between at least 2 of these 3 topics: timing and action; time and language; action and language. Details will follow.

For now you can save the date: Friday March 24th @ IMERA

Please always check the events page on the ILCB website for the latest update.