AMPC 09 and a renovated research page

As mentioned in a previous entry, I recently spend some time in Newcastle. The reason for this was to attend the 2009 Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference - my first conference since beginning my PhD! I had a really good time there. A lot of the material that people spoke about was somewhat opaque to me with my complete lack of background in psychology, but at the same time it was quite encouraging to get a sense for the extent to which people in Australia are doing good quantitative work on psychology. I came back with a lot of techniques and buzzwords underlined in my notes that I need to get up to speed with! I gave a talk myself which went relatively well. In hindsight I probably tried to pack more material into 20 minutes than is readily manageable, but it was hardly a disaster and at least now a lot more people know that I and my work exist.

It's really been a very long time since I blogged anything regarding my research. In fact, this is the first I've written about it that is anything more than preliminary mental wanderings that I had before I had actually accumulated any sort of knowledge about the field. This has not been because due to a lack of work or ideas worth writing about. Far from it! It has been mostly because I have wanted to avoid alienating non-specialist readers by talking about concepts which I have not properly introduced, but at the same time have struggled to find the time and motivation to write a good series of grounding posts introducing the relevant concepts and paradigms.

Upon getting back from AMPC09 I reasoned that for the next week or two there would be a slight increase above the baseline probability of fellow academics working in language acquisition (or computational cognitive science in general) visiting my website, and so I made some quick effort to tidy up my research page somewhat. As a consequence of this, I can now point interested readers to my informal research overview] to get a rough idea of just what kind of work I do. You'll also find on my research page copies of a paper I currently have under review for the 31st annual meeting of the cognitive science society (which is happening in Amsterdam in July) and of the presentation slides I used for my talk at AMPC09.

For better or worse, I am going to consider the availability of all of this new material sufficient for me to start blogging about my work again. Hopefully I can manage to keep my entries non-technical enough to be accessible but still interesting!