Overview of the Dubrovnik Conference Series in Cognitive Science

Cognitive science, as the interdisciplinary study of cognition, has become one of the central integrating disciplines both in Europe and in the U.S. during the last two decades. Generally, it promises to provide an overall view of cognition and offer foundations for its application. It has additional potential, as well. By combining the notions and methods of psychology, as well as neuroscience and biology, philosophy, mathematics, computer science and social sciences including linguistics, anthropology, and economics, it keeps alive the vision that the infamous two cultures divide can be overcome. Some of us in Europe might still be hoping for an integrated if not unified vision of knowledge.
This integrative message is much alive and much needed in Central Europe. The tradition of the Vienna Circle and multidisciplinary scholars like Ernst Mach, Georg von Békésy, Konrad Lorenz or Béla Julesz is still with us. To keep these traditions alive and to facilitate dialogue between "old" EU member countries, new EU members, and candidate countries is one of the aims of the conference series, and the creation of CECOG, the Central European Cognitive Science Association

General outline

The annual conferences shall be open international events. Students and tutors are encouraged to come from all over the world. Invited tutors will all be fully supported. For graduate student participants, however, financial support will depend upon the decision of the organizing comittee. We hope that in a few years time the conference series will attract 150-200 participants. The relatively small conference will allow for open discussion and a real scientific socialization experience for the young participants, our primary target audience.

Each year the conference will be open to students doing research on any aspect of cognitive science. However, tutorials always shall be concentrated around one hot topic of cognitive science.

Poster sessions

The core of the conference will consist of student research reports in the form of peer-reviewed posters. The posters shall be organized around discussion groups chaired by senior scholars, including the invited tutors.

Each poster session shall consist of two parts: a five minute presentation by each participant of his/her own poster and a discussion period of approximately two hours, in which interested audience members can discuss the posters with the students.

Tutorials

The tutorials shall be given by internationally well know scholars, concentrating on a specific area. We intend to ask for real tutorials, i.e., not merely a presentation of some specific new research, but a survey of the tutors' own research, or of the research in the field, providing a general framework and message.

The conferences shall be organized by the CECOG. The calls for each conference will be made in November of the previous year by the organizing committee, under the authority of a general organizer, appointed by CECOG leadership. Announcements shall be circulated through the internet, and our network of sister organizations. The call shall already specify the lead topic, and the invited tutors. It will be emphasized that abstracts from all fields of cognitive science are welcome. The call will be circulated in the widest possible way, calling specifically for graduate student submissions.

Publication aspects

Preceding each conference, the abstracts will be published, and participants will receive the abstract volume at the beginning of the conference. Abstracts will be in a citable, reviewed format as a supplement to the new journal Learning and Perception, published by Akadémiai, a Budapest based Walters Kluwer journal starting in 2009. Talks by the tutors, and a student presentation selected as the best will published in a later issue. The editor in chief Mihály Racsmány will be responsible for the publications. Registered participants will have a one year membership to the CECOG. This would allow them access to the members-only content of the CECOG website, a one year subscription to Learning and Perception and notification about any CECOG related events.

Site and time

The conferences are scheduled to take place each year in Dubrovnik. In the long run, however, this does not exclude the possibility of moving the conference to other sites 2012. One example is the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference that was launched by the City University of New York Graduate Center, and was held there for many years. After being established, however, it began to move around other sites in the world, while keeping its original name, CUNY.

Venue
Centre for Advanced Academic Studies Dubrovnik, University of Zagreb
Don Frana Bulića 4
20000 Dubrovnik
CROATIA
Tel: +385 20326300