This is the homepage of the Meaning and Computation Lab seminar series.
Spring 2004 meetings will focus on general algebra and its applications to computer science. These applications include abstract data types, programming language module systems, behavioral types and inheritance, hardware specification, database schema and schema mapping semantics, mechanical theorem proving, ontologies, user interface design, knowledge representation, metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics, and more.
Participants will be expected to present material to the group and/or write a short paper surveying some application area; there will also be some exercises using the BOBJ system, to which a detailed gradual introduction is given in the online book that we will be reading. Parts of several meetings will be enlivened by research that members of the Meaning and Computation Lab are doing, on topics that include databases, new media, computational narratology, and user interface design. Warning: These discussions can range very widely, including, for example, applications of ideas from French post-structuralism to the design of new media, applications of algebra to musicology, and almost anything else you can imagine.
Please read the Integrity of Scholarship Agreement, by Scott Baden, and UCSD's official policies on Plagiarism; see also the most recent amended policy (sorry, it's in MS Word). You are expected to abide by these rules; failure to do so can have very serious consequences.
Prerequesites: Some mathematical sophistication will be necessary for understanding this material.