Avigad and Danks will direct a three-week summer school in Logic and Formal Epistemology at Carnegie Mellon University during the summers of 2009 and 2010. The three-week program will draw approximately 30 talented undergraduates from across the United States and abroad, in fields such as mathematics, computer science, and philosophy, and expose them to topics in logic, causal and statistical inference, formal veri fication, and decision theory.
The summer school will thus introduce students to important areas of research at the interface between philosophy and the sciences, forge substantial connections between a number of disciplines, and support the use of formal methods in technology and the sciences. The program has been offered since the summer of 2006, and has been highly successful.
"Logic" is the study of the principles and methods of reasoning. "Formal epistemology" involves representing and working with knowledge in precise mathematical and computational terms. The Carnegie Mellon Summer School in Logic and Formal Epistemology is an intensive three-week workshop for undergraduates from mathematics, computer science, philosophy, and the sciences, which is designed to introduce students to methods and topics of contemporary research in these areas, and encourage them to consider careers in academic research and the sciences. The three-week summer school ran from June 8 - June 26 in 2009. There were 94 applicants, from top institutions in the US (including Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, University of Chicago, and so on) and abroad. We accepted 34 students, and, in the end, 28 attended. (That year, there were an unusually high number of last-minute emergencies, including one case of the swine flu.) The three sessions taught were: Categories and Structures, Monday, June 8 to Friday, June 12, Instructor: Steve Awodey Decisions and Games, Monday, June 15 to Friday, June 19, Instructor: Teddy Seidenfeld Logic and Formal Verification, Monday, June 22 to Friday, June 26, Instructor: Jeremy Avigad Students were also able to participate in the Formal Epistemology Workshop, an interdisciplinary conference of statisticians, computer scientists, philosophers, and others, which was held on the Carnegie Mellon campus during that time period. Student evaluations of the program were uniformly extremely positive. In 2010, the program ran from June 7 to June 25. The program had 105 applicants, again from top schools in the US and abroad. We accepted 31 students, all of whom participated (but one had to leave early due to a family illness.) The sessions taught were as follows: Logic and Scientific Inquiry, Monday, June 7 to Friday, June 11, Instructor: Clark Glymour Computability and Foundations, Monday, June 14 to Friday, June 18, Instructor: Wilfried Sieg Philosophical Logic and Formal Epistemology, Monday, June 21 to Friday, June 25, Instructor: Horacio Arló-Costa Students were also invited to attend a workshop at the Carnegie Mellon Center for Formal Epistemology immediately after the summer school, and most students did. Once again, the session was a great success. The summer school will run again in 2012, now entirely funded by Carnegie Mellon. Details about the summer schools are available online: www.phil.cmu.edu/summerschool
