Today:
This afternoon Fridays@4 is in the Dept of Statistics for their Florence Nightingale Lecture:
Professor Marloes Matthuis (ETH Zurich) - Causal learning from observational data
10th February:
Departmental Colloquium, Lecture Theatre 1
Dani Smith Bassett - University of Pennsylvania
What is curiosity? Is it an emotion? A behavior? A cognitive process? Curiosity seems to be an abstract concept—like love, perhaps, or justice—far from the realm of those bits of nature that mathematics can possibly address. However, contrary to intuition, it turns out that the leading theories of curiosity are surprisingly amenable to formalization in the mathematics of network science. In this talk, I will unpack some of those theories, and show how they can be formalized in the mathematics of networks. Then, I will describe relevant data from human behavior and linguistic corpora, and ask which theories that data supports. Throughout, I will make a case for the position that individual and collective curiosity are both network building processes, providing a connective counterpoint to the common acquisitional account of curiosity in humans.
Dani Bassett (pictured) is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
