The North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) will be held June 21-26, 2010 at Indiana University, Bloomington. NASSLLI is a week-long event including thirteen five-hour graduate-level courses given in parallel sessions, two associated workshops, and a session for student papers. The school has run several times in the past and aims to establish itself as a biannual event. The general areas of emphasis for the school are at the intersection of linguistics, philosophy, and computer science, specifically applied logic, computational linguistics, as well as broader themes from cognitive science.
NASSLLI is an interdisciplinary event, designed to foster interactions and provide instruction in ways that would be difficult in traditional academic departments. Most of its topics are not standardly taught at many colleges and universities in the USA and smaller institutions frequently do not have faculty with multi-disciplinary research experience. The summer school will give post-doctoral students, graduate students, and even advanced undergraduates the chance to interact with faculty who are active researchers and leaders in their fields. The school aims to expose the next generation of researchers in linguistics, philosophy, and computer science to a vibrant interdisciplinary research atmosphere, at the same time as it gives them the tools to advance their learning.
This award supported two installments of the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information. The schools were held at Indiana University, Bloomington in 2010 and at the University of Texas, Austin in 2012. Although the schools are aimed at graduate students, they also attracted established academics, professionals, undergraduates, and even high school students. The 2012 school was held in Austin, with 214 particpants: 21 undergraduates, 135 graduate students, 8 post-docs, 39 faculty, and 11 others. The attendance in 2010 was around 150, with similar distibution. The schools cover a variety of topics in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Information Science, Linguistics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology, Statistics. The advanced topics were at the research level. The basic ones covered topics that are important but not always available to graduate students. Each school ran for one week, and it involved about eighteen classes given in parallel session. Each class met for five sessions of about 90 minutes each. In addition, there were many extra activities associated with each school. For brevity, we list here only the activities in 2012. There was a bootcamp of introductory lectures held the weekend before; evening lectures during the school; a symposium on the life of Alan Turing, with several speakers invited especially for this; a mini-conference held after NASSLLI on topics related to several of the courses, and a meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society. 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%. The support of the NSF enabled many graduate students to attend. Specifically, it allowed the schools to run with very low registration fees for students. There were also scholarships for deserving students. NASSLLI is not associated with any larger institution or organization. The school did not produce results as such. Some of the lectures were recorded and later entered on YouTube; they are thus available to the public. The schools surveyed the participants afterwards. We received 110 responses in 2012; in 2010 the response rate was even higher. Ratings were given on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 as "Failed to meet my expectations" and 5 as "Exceeded my expectations." The mean overall rating was 4.30 out of 5. Each course was rated, and the mean for the courses overall was 3.91. One of the comments: "I had an amazing time. It was very interdisciplinary and I got to meet people from a bunch of fields. The classes were very stimulating. It was great to be with so many people who are interested in and passionate about logic and language."
