The IRIS Center will be opening in its new space, Peck Hall 0226, at the start of the spring 2011 semester. Check back for details about an open house and other events.
Also, visit the IRIS Center Blog for additional information about faculty projects and current issues in the digital humanities and social sciences.
| 10:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Kristine Hildebrandt, English Language & Literature; Larry LaFond, College of Arts & Sciences; Laura Wehmer, English Language & Literature "Dialectal Variation in America and Illinois" |
| 1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Jessica DeSpain, English Language & Literature; Kelly Walsh, Wendy Simpson, English Language & Literature Students "Representations of Americanness in Book Designs for Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World" |
| 3:45 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Gypsy Murphy, Anthropology "Red Power-Red Pedagogy" |
Ceara Horsley, English Language & Literature "NAGPRA Quantified: What Empirical Analyses of Artifact Repatriations Can Tell Us" |
Cory Willmott, Anthropology "Collaborative Research and Digital Circulation: The GRASAC Database of Great Lakes Aboriginal Culture" |
Greg Fields, Philosophy "Songs in Epic Stories of the Pacific Northwest and Prospects for Recovery of the Samish Language" |
| 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. Bill Smart, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University in Saint Louis "Answering Questions in Physical Anthropology with Machine Learning" |
 | Anthropologists are often interested in questions such as “What do chimpanzees optimize for when they walk, and when they climb?”, “What would Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) look like when she walked?”, and “How did the modern human musculoskeletal system evolve from its evolutionary ancestors?”. These questions can be framed as designing a controller for the simulation of a complex biomechanical system that optimizes some criteria. Armed with a way to ask the question computationally, a realistic physical simulation, and a robust optimization method, anthropologists can start to address a number of interesting "what if" questions that have remained unanswered for decades. In this talk, Dr. Bill Smart will describe problems that lie in the way of using computational techniques to answer interesting questions in anthropology, and suggest some possible solutions to them. In particular, he will describe an approach using techniques from the field of machine learning, and show how researchers can overcome the problems of learning in a high-dimensional, non-linear system with continuous states and actions that are inherent in simulations of complex biomechanical systems. |
| 9:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Jessica DeSpain, English Language & Literature "A Not-So Virtual Materiality: Using Student-Created Digital and Physical Exhibits to Teach Book History" |
Steve Kerber, University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian "The Future of Archives and Special Collections" |
Gillian Acheson, Geography "Library Resources and Collaboration in the Context of Teaching about Cultural Landscapes" |
