9:30 am

Ben Feeser Salience and the formation of memories Humans are presented with incalculable amounts of sensory input in everyday life: visual, touch, sound, smell, and taste. How are we able to pull out the salient information from these vast inputs to form memories? If we are to understand the formation of memories, then we need to understand what makes information salient. Research proposal. Annika Heuser The Best Way to Learn a Language If we wish to acquire another language in the most efficient way possible, we must devise a strategy based on the research conducted by linguists and computer scientists who have created language-understanding models. Research Proposal Nava Haghighi Self-Interfaces: A Window into the Human Body and Brain Imagine what it would be like to know why you react to events the way you do, or what you base your decisions on. We have evolved to mostly notice low-level perceptual inputs and are often unaware of the higher-level processes that take place in our bodies and brains. We often attribute our decisions to tangible external stimulus, but the external stimulus are processed and turned into higher-level concepts once received. What if there was a way to peek into the brain and experience the higher-level translations of the low-level perceptual information? Can a live window into our brains change how we perceive the external world or the decisions we make? Proposal for a pilot experiment. Kritkorn Karntikoon The Effect of Visualization on Problem-Solving Skills If we are to understand the role of visualization in problem-solving skills, we need to understand how visualization helps our problem-solving performances and the limits of this effect. Pilot experiment. Luke Luneau Improve Genesis for Business Case Studies If Genesis is to be a proof of concept for story understanding, it should be able to understand a wide variety of stories, including business case studies. Pilot experiment. Molly Mason AI as a Collaborator in Architectural Design Meetings and Design Space Problem: Sharing knowledge is hard because each party involved has to recreate the idea in their own mind and hope that it matches how everyone else recreated it. This is especially challenging in the design of architecture because these ideas must be shared through multiple mediums and between multiple disciplines who possess different vocabulary and visualization styles. If we are to use AI to assist design meetings then we must identify the most common mistakes within design collaboration, analyze the transferability of a similar concept between multiple mediums and fields, and strategize procedures of clarification. Such an AI would be able to assist with clarification, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration during design meetings. If this information is collected in the right structure it would have the possibility of being better integrated into existing CAD and BIM tools. Research Proposal Jessica Quaye Augmenting Genesis' story understanding using image processing If we are to fully understand stories, then we need to leverage visual information to complement analysis of the written script. Research project with implementation. Links to speeches Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc Winfrey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMWFieBGR7c Jim Peraino Recipe following and question asking in architectural design If we want to design buildings that make us happier and healthier, then we need a design process that combines human imagination with computational simulation. Hand Simulation Sameena Shaffeeullah Counting Tobacco Hornworm Caterpillars In order to create a robotic assembly line that dynamically puts food in trays, we must know how much food each tray needs by counting the number of caterpillars in each tray. Pilot experiment. Suchan Vivatsethachai Understanding Internal Representation and its Conversion to the External World If internal representations exist, there must also exist mechanisms that convert between the internal representations and the external representations. Therefore, if we are to truly understand the internal representations, we have to also understand the conversion mechanisms and their properties. Pilot Experiment Rose E. Wang, rewang@mit.edu How Humans Use Their Story Understanding for Multi-Player Game Coordination If we want to understand human intelligence, we must study how humans are capable of quickly coordinating with one another. Previous AI milestones include DeepMind's successful AlphaGo project which demonstrated a single AI system can learn by playing from experience. However, an important milestone yet to be reached is enabling multiple systems to effectively cooperate together, such as for self-driving vehicles or household robots. With this project I hope to investigate how humans use their story understanding skills for dynamically coordinating together across different multiplayer game levels. This project pursues this topic in the context of Overcooked, a cooperative multiplayer game where players play as chefs and must prepare meals to specific orders under a time limit. Pilot study and research proposal Erica Yuen Representations in Color Perception If we were to understand how we recall the perception of color, we need to understand if multimodal associations have an effect on our ability to remember and differentiate color. Pilot Study

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Sabrina Drammis Theories of Neural Computation (A Review) If we wish to understand how the brain works, we must start by understanding how information in the brain gets transmitted. Paper review. Alex Cabral Understanding Self-Models across Different Demographics If we are to understand human intelligence, then we must understand how people model themselves in their own minds. I plan to conduct an online study to learn about people's self models and how those models differ between different demographic groups. Pilot study Nichole Clarke The Effect of a Reader's Bias on Story Modulation If we are to understand the role of bias in modulating stories, then we need to understand how our own biases influence our ability to discern the bias in a story. Pilot experiment. Erick Friis Leadership and Collaboration in the Genesis Story Understanding System If we are ever to build a collaborative artificial intelligence based on story understanding, we must first understand how models of leadership, hierarchy, and cooperation can be stored as stories and used to influence interactions. Research Project with Implementation Henrik Giske Fosse Language's Role in Virtual Spatial Cognition My vision is to understand human cognition, and to do so I need to better understand spatial cognition. A part of understanding spatial cognition is figuring out which parts of the brain are active in the process. Hermer-Vazquez, Spelke and Katsnelson proposed in 1999 that language plays an important part in spatial cognition and I will therefore investigate this further. However, Fedorenko and Varley have disputed the results from Spelke's experiments. I share their skepticism, but because the results are of such importance in understanding human spatial cognition, I will reproduce their experiment in a virtual environment. Reproduce experiment.  Abhinandan Jain The Effects of Thermal feedback on Aesthetic Chills and Cognition Aestheic chills or Frissons are universal markers of openness to experience in the Five Factor(OCEAN) Model of personality traits. We aim to use thermal feedback to elicit Aesthetic chills and investigate the downstream effects in cogntion towards a stimulus. Pilot experiment. Ronit Langer An Ethical Framework for a Human Intelligence Model If we are to create a model of human intelligence, then we must equip the model with an ethical framework for moral reasoning. Humans communicate about ethics using moral language. Drawing on tools from philosophy and computer science, this project proposes a method to give machines a way to interface with moral language. Assuming computers are given ethical capabilities, this project explores how and to what extent we would want computers involved in deciding our moral dilemmas. A research proposal Jennifer Madiedo Predicting Story Outcomes Through Story Alignment using Genesis If we want to understand how we predict outcomes of an event, then we need to understand how we generalialize prior knowledge from past events. Research Proposal Ole Morten Olsen The role of creativity in problem solving If we are to understand the human mind, we need to understand how we solve challenging new problems by a combination of acquired knowledge and creativity. What is this creativity and can it be replicated in a machine? A research proposal. Ellen Shea, Temitope “Tosin” Olabinjo Can the Human Language System Multi-Task? Because language plays a crucial role in human intelligence, if we are to understand human intelligence, then we must understand the limits of the human language processing system. Pilot experiment. Tristan Thrush Implementing the Intuitive Motion Planner If we are to understand how humans plan motions in the real world, then we need to understand how we are able to account for and predict the effects of newtonian physics. Project proposal. Sunny Tian The Effect of Directed Questions on Image Memory If we are to understand human intelligence in the context of forming memories about images, then we need to understand how noticing specific aspects of a complex image increases our ability to recall the image contents later. Pilot experiment. Justin Xiang and Nikhil Bhatia The Effect of Auditory Jamming on Reading Comprehension If we want to understand the role of external and internal language in performing cognitive tasks, then we need to understand how different types of auditory jamming affect our ability to utilize our inner language faculty while performing reading comprehension tasks. Pilot experiment. Jessica Zhu Training a Machine to Play Cards In order to understand how machines can work with humans in solving a problem, a first step is to teach a machine to play a team-based card game based on a set list of rules and a varying list of strategies. Research Proposal.