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Special Projects
Besides supporting the work of individual scholars, the Center has a
long and distinguished history of organizing year-long special projects
for work on cutting-edge topics. Some of the most influential work to
come out of the Center has been produced by these groups. Special
projects are generally multidisciplinary groups of three to five
residential Fellows formed to pursue innovative research focused on
issues of importance to contemporary society or consequential to the
study of human behavior.
These groups benefit greatly from both the integrative and expansive nature of the
collaborative project itself as well as its intellectual embedding in
the Center environment. In addition to the core residential Fellows,
special project groups often host visiting scholars and conferences at
the Center, open to interested members of the intellectual community.
Other Fellows often attend special project meetings and affiliate with
the group during its residence year.
Among the earliest Center special projects was Mathematics and Social
Science (1956), an ambitious multidisciplinary group bringing together
views from economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and
statistics. Group members were Martin J. Beckmann, James S. Coleman,
William K. Estes, Leonid Hurwicz, Jacob Marschak, Roy Radner, Howard
Raiffa, Frank Restle, Martin Shubik, Patrick Suppes, and L. Benjamin
Wyckoff.
Another early group, Primate Behavior (1963), engaged Fellows from
anthropology, biology and psychology in producing a seminal volume of
that title edited by Irven DeVore. Other group members were Phyllis C.
Dolhinow, K. Ronald Hall, Hiroki Mizuhara, Vernon Reynolds, George B.
Schaller, and Sherwood L. Washburn. The DeVore volume had introduced
members of the 1984 Primate Behavior special project to the subject,
and their goal was to produce a volume that would serve the same
purpose for a new generation of students in the behavioral sciences.
The volume, Primate Societies, edited by group members Dorothy L.
Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Barbara Boardman Smuts, Thomas T.
Struhsaker, and Richard W. Wrangham, became an authoritative review and
synthesis of field research on nonhuman primates, focusing on social
behavior and its interpretation.
The Center has hosted several groups working on cutting-edge topics at
the intersection of computer science and behavioral sciences. In 1980,
the Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy special project brought
together eminent researchers from the fields of artificial intelligence
(Patrick Hayes, Robert Moore and John McCarthy), philosophy (Daniel
Dennett and John Haugeland) and psychology (Zenon Pylyshyn).
Two years
later, the 1982 Meaning and Cognition special project engaged
linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy Fellows, and a host of
multidisciplinary visiting scholars, in research within the emerging
science of information, computing, and cognition. The group sponsored a
series of open lectures (approximately every other week) as a service
to the Center community and the scholarly community of the Bay Area.
Core group members were K. Jon Barwise, Manfred Bierwisch, Robin
Cooper, Johan A. W. Kamp, Lauri Karttunen, and Stanley Peters, the
organizer. In 1983, several of the participants helped found an
independent, interdisciplinary laboratory at Stanford University, the
Center for Study of Language and Information (CSLI), with Barwise
serving as its first director. The Systems Development Foundation,
which helped fund the special project group, provided a generous
start-up grant to CSLI. Besides its interdisciplinary focus, one
special feature of CSLI, as well as this project, is a collaboration
between industrial laboratories (especially SRI and Xerox PARC) and
academic departments.
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