This newsletter, prepared monthly, provides highlights of H&SS faculty and graduate student recent accomplishments including: grant awards, program and curricular initiatives, appointments, publications, performances, conference papers, and the like.

Awards

Ron Eglash, Assoc. Prof. in STS, received an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates grant for $12,000. This will supplement his NSF-BPC project "Collaborative Research: BPC-DP: Improving Minority Student Participation in the Computing Career Pipeline with Culturally Situated Design Tools."

Sara Tack '01, Adjunct Lecturer in LL&C, and principle artist at the Troy design firm of Smith & Jones, has won a 2008 award for Art Direction and Design for the Complete Corporate Identity Program initiative for Windham Mountain ski resort. Tack's work will be featured in the 23rd annual volume, American Corporate Identity 2008, to be published by Collins Design, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in November 2007. more

Appointments

Ron Sun, Prof. in Cognitive Science, is a member of the program committee, the Workshop on Extending Computational Cognitive Modeling to Issues of Multi-Agent Interaction, at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI 2007), Las Vegas, Nevada, June 25-28, 2007; and a member of the program committee, The 8th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM 2007), Ann Arbor, Michigan. July 27-29, 2007.

PUBLICATIONS, PERFORMANCE, & EXHIBITIONS

Sharon Anderson-Gold, Prof. in STS, published “Terrorism and the Politics of Identity” in Filozofski Godisnjak: Terrorism Moral, Legal and Political Issues, volume 19/ 2006 edited by Jovan Babic.

Caren Canier, Prof. in Arts, exhibited recent work in "Urbanities", a five person exhibition at Martinez Gallery in Troy.

Linnda Caporael, Prof. in STS, authored the first chapter, "Evolutionary Theory for Social and Cultural Psychology," in Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles, 2nd Edition, published by The Guilford Press. more

John Gowdy, Prof. in Economics, published Frontiers in Ecological Economic Theory and Application, volume edited with Jon Erickson. Edward Elgar press. This book was chosen as Edward Elgar's Book of the Month. more

Shawn Lawson, Asst. Prof. in Arts, exhibited "Surface Traversal" in Collision 11 at the Stata Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. He also exhibited "A Bar at the Folies Bergère;" and "Mona Lisa" in Art Chicago at the Merchandise Mart with the Dean Jensen Gallery , Chicago, IL.; and exhibited "One Chair" in the curated exhibition "To Fear or Not to Fear" at the Highland Park Art Center, Highland Park, IL.

Pauline Oliveros, Distinguished Prof. in Arts, organized “Convergence,” a three day series of performances by 45 composers and instrumentalists who hold certificates from her Deep Listening Institute at venues in Troy, Hudson, and High Falls, NY on June 8, 9, & 10.

Kathleen Ruiz, Assoc. Prof. in Arts, Co-curated an international on-line exhibition of short study flash projects by RPI Intermediate Digital Imaging students and students at the University of Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, China. Each group created original personal autobiographical stories using flash animation, taking less than two weeks to learn and create these works. The stories range from friendships, to wars, to travel logs, to lost loves, to skydiving, and to universal human struggle. URL's for China participants more, and for U.S. participants more.

Ron Sun, Prof. in Cognitive Science, just published "The interaction of implicit learning, ex-plicit hypothesis testing learning, and implicit-to-explicit knowledge extraction" with X. Zhang, P. Slusarz, and R. Mathews in Neural Networks, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 34-47, 2007; and also "Computational models of consciousness: A taxonomy and some examples" with S. Franklin in P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, and E. Thompson (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, pp.151-174. Cambridge University Press, New York. 2007.

LECTURES & PANELS

Jim Fahey, Clinical Asst. Prof in Cognitive Science, presented his paper, “Critical Wisdom:  What it is, How We Can Measure It; Why We Should Teach It” at the April National meeting  of the American Educational Research Association.

David Hess, Prof. in STS, gave an invited lecture titled "Rethinking the Sustainable City: Exploring the Potential of Local Social Enterprises" at the Institute for Social Sciences and Enterprises in Lisbon.

Shawn Lawson, Asst. Prof. in Arts, lectured on his "Raytracings of the In Between" series at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also presented his paper "A Look at Crudeoils" on the “Towards a Culture of Collaboration” panel at the Media in Transition 5 conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Bill Puka, Prof in Cognitive Science, gave a talk at the Cornell University Department of Education on “Education for Dissent.”  April 2007.

Kathleen Ruiz, Assoc. Prof. in Arts, presented “Simulation and Empathy” at the "Games-Simulation-Conflict, Tech/Action Conference" at Bard College on May 18; participated in Buckminster Fuller’s “The World Game”, a co-operative alternative to the "war game;" participated in international seminar with noted philosopher of technology and political theorist Paul Virilio in La Rochelle, France, moderated by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Wolfgang Schirmacher on March 30–31; and presented “Physically Interactive Gaming: What Appeals to Adolescent and Undergraduate Women?” with Julie G. McIntyre , Sybillyn Jennings at "Interacting with Immersive Worlds: An International Conference," Interactive Arts and Science Program, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, June 4-5, 2007 more.

Kenneth Simons, Asst. Prof. in Economics, presented his work "Product Market Characteristics and the Industry Life Cycle" on May 8 in Washington, D.C., to the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice; and also presented a seminar on "Data Compilation and Display" on May 12 at the FIVE Project Conference on Firm and Industry Evolution and Entrepreneurship, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.

Ron Sun, Prof. in Cognitive Science, was a colloquium speaker, College of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao. January, 2007; and also at the WICI International Workshop on “Web Intelligence Meets Brain In-formatics”, Beijing, China.  December 15-16, 2006.