Purdue expert in robotics and human cognition to speak at next Science on Tap
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A leading international researcher at Purdue University in the field of robotics and mental functions is the featured speaker at the next Science on Tap event Thursday (July 21) in downtown Lafayette.
Psychological sciences professor Zygmunt Pizlo, director of the Visual Perception Laboratory at Purdue, will speak at 6 p.m. in the upstairs of the Lafayette Brewing Company, 622 Main St., Lafayette. His talk is titled, "Minds and Robots."
The Science on Tap event is free and open to the public to those ages 21 or older.
"All mental events, like perception, thinking and memory are private in the sense that we do not have direct access to mental events of other people," Pizlo said. "So before cognitive psychology can become a natural science, we must develop an experimental methodology that allows 'measuring' characteristics of mental events and producing 'public' data."
In his talk, Pizlo will review the primary experimental methods in perception and cognition and illustrate their effectiveness through examples. He also will discuss the role of mathematics, physics and engineering as "models" for scientific psychology and describe robotic systems as tools in explaining mental functions, on the one hand, and as useful additions to our lives, on the other.
Sponsors for Pizlo's talk are Discovery Park and Purdue's College of Science, along with the Department of Psychological Sciences, which is providing funding for food at the event.
Pizlo, who joined the Purdue psychological sciences faculty in 1991, received a doctorate in electronic engineering from the Institute of Electron Technology and the Center for Microelectronics in Warsaw, Poland, and a second doctorate in psychology from the University of Maryland at College Park.
He gained his master's degree in electronic engineering from the Warsaw University of Technology in 1978. He also has served as a research fellow during his career with the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology at the Polish Academy of Science and the Central Institute of Occupational Hazards, both in Warsaw.
Pizlo also is part of the university's team of researchers that was awarded $25 million to create the first National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center in Indiana. The new Science of Information Center will extend classical information theory, which paved the way for the Internet, DVDs and iPods of today, to meet new challenges posed by rapid advances in networking, biology and quantum information processing.
Science on Tap, led by Purdue graduate student Patrick Dolan and postdoctoral students John Paderi and Kate Stuart, provides Purdue faculty an opportunity to share their research activities in an informal setting, touching on subjects and providing presentations that are designed to appeal to a more general audience.
Attendance at the monthly event has averaged 80 during the program's first year.
Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu
Sources: Zygmunt Pizlo, 765-494 6930, zpizlo@purdue.edu
Patrick Dolan, 765-496-9336, pdolan@purdue.edu