Overview and Background

CSLI is an independent laboratory at Stanford University devoted to research in the emerging science of information, computing, and cognition. This new science had its origins in the late 1970s as computer scientists, linguists, logicians, philosophers, psychologists, and artificial intelligence researchers, seeking solutions to problems in their own disciplines, turned to one another for help.

Hoover Tower The problems that brought them together were rooted in issues that crossed the traditional boundaries among the disciplines. A shared interest in how agents, whether biological or artificial, acquire, process, and convey information forced researchers in these different fields to confront many of the same issues concerning communication, perception, action, reasoning, and representation. Many researchers saw that problems targeted by their own discipline were linked to solutions in the others, and, as interaction developed, began to view the common issues as defining a science in its own right.

CSLI's foremost goal is to provide an interdisciplinary setting for research in this new science. All of the research projects currently under way benefit from significant interaction across disciplines. Many are collaborative projects involving senior researchers from different fields. The interaction has born fruit in both expected and unexpected ways.

Besides being interdisciplinary, CSLI is an interinstitutional laboratory. Founded in 1983 by researchers from Stanford, SRI International, and Xerox PARC, CSLI has since its inception promoted collaboration between industrial laboratories and academic departments. In recent years, this collaboration has expanded to include researchers from additional universities, laboratories, and companies, both within the immediate geographical vicinity and around the world. CSLI's Industrial Affiliates Program currently includes twenty corporate members, many of which send researchers to participate in research projects on site.

This interinstitutional collaboration has had an equally important effect on the nature and progress of many CSLI projects. It has informed the more theoretical projects with an awareness of current technology and potential applications, while providing the more applied projects with access to the latest theoretical advances.

CSLI Topics

* Robotics design
* Planning and reasoning
* Speech recognition
* Machine-aided translation
* Language acquisition
* computer languages
* Text understanding
* Software design strategies

Each project focuses on one or more aspects of the use of information by natural and artificial agents. Roughly half deal with languages, vehicles by which information is communicated between agents. These in turn divide into those concerned with natural (human) languages, and those concerned with computer languages. The other half deal with a variety of questions involving the acquisition and manipulation of information: how agents acquire and use information to guide action; what information-processing architectures are best suited to various tasks; how representational format affects information processing and human comprehension; and so forth.

The information here is intended as a record of the researchers and projects associated with CSLI during 1999-2000. The purpose is to catalog the projects currently under way, and to give a brief status report on each of them. The individual project descriptions are provided voluntarily by project leaders, and no effort is made to guarantee uniformity in the scope or detail of the descriptions. In particular, we do not try to give detailed descriptions of project results, though we do point the interested reader to publications in which those details appear.

In presenting the project reports, we divide them into the following rough groupings, according to the project's principal concerns:

* Interface Laboratory
* Cognitive Science

Readers who would like more detailed information about specific research projects should consult the list of publications and references for that project, or contact the publications department at CSLI.
References

Report of Workshop on Information and Representation, ed. Barbara H. Partee, Stanley Peters, and Richmond Thomason. Stanford, CA: CSLI, 1985.