Special Events
Blackwell Lectures
The Blackwell-Maryland lectures present contemporary research and debate on language and its ties with cognitive science. These lectures, sponsored by Blackwell Publishing, are delivered every year at the University of Maryland, College Park. The first lectures took place in 1998 and past speakers included Noam Chomsky, Lila Gleitman, Jerry Fodor and others. The 2008-2009 Blackwell Lectures will feature Janet Werker.
Mayfest
Mayfest is an annual workshop organized by the graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. The aim of the meeting is to present the current state of debate in a particular domain of interest to a variety of language researchers. Planning is currently underway for the 11th Mayfest, which will take place in the Spring of 2009. View old Mayfest web sites.
Winter Storm
Winter Storm is an
annual training session for students and faculty. It occurs in January and runs morning to late-night for approximately two weeks, focusing on
hands-on skill building, interdisciplinary communication, and collaborative team-building. The Winter Storm is inspired by a successful 'Boot
Camp' initiative in a computer vision IGERT at UCSD. Winter Storm includes intensive workshops for developing key foundational skills, e.g.,
computing with MATLAB, statistical analysis with R, speech analysis with Praat, simple linguistic problem solving, or electrophysiological data
acquisition. Students and faculty alike share their expertise in their specific areas, and act as learners outside of their own specialty. Hands
first learning enables students to step outside of their comfort zones to build an appreciation for diverse methods and data-types.
All info about the 2009 Winter storm can be found on the student-created and maintained Winter Wiki site.
A second activity of the Winter Storm is a set of presentations of current work by research groups, with a focus on relating specific projects to the
big-picture challenges. These provide models of interdisciplinary communication. These are not progress reports, however - presenters also
identify manageable problems of their research agenda for others to work on collaboratively. These exercises help to build student relationships
across disciplines. Winter Storm also includes social activities for decompression and team-building.