Event Description
This lecture will be recorded and available on the College of Computing & Informatics YouTube page.
About the Talk:
The World Wide Web is increasingly a venue in which we conduct commerce, build relationships, and live out our lives. Underneath the everyday activity of the Web lurks another layer: computers manipulating symbols and bits to create the infrastructure within which we act. How do actions on the Web, undertaken by individuals or by automated agents, come to have meaning and force in the physical world outside the Web? This talk examines that question, challenging some existing theories of "Web semantics," providing an alternate explanation building on linguistic and social constructions of meaning and exploring the implications of this explanation in both philosophical and practical contexts.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Andrea Stein is Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and a founding faculty member at Olin College of Engineering. Stein's research, at Olin since 2000 and over the prior decade on the MIT faculty, spans the fields of artificial intelligence, programming languages, and human-computer interaction. She is co-author of foundational documents of the semantic Web and the "mother" of a humanoid robot and an intelligent room. Stein has been innovating in computing and engineering curricula for more than three decades, with an emphasis on hands-on pedagogies, interactive technologies, and student engagement. Stein runs workshops to stimulate curricular creativity, empower student-motivating pedagogic experimentation, and catalyze departmental and institutional change. She consults with a wide range of US and international institutions, serves on curricular advisory boards, speaks frequently at educational conferences, and embeds in sites to cause trouble and create constructive change.
This lecture is held to honor former Drexel Computer Science Professor Pragnesh Jay Modi (1975-2007) and his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Learn more at
bit.ly/jaymodi
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