NERD NITE 82Doors at 7pm, talks begin at 8pm, $1.00 cover at Maceli’s 1031 New Hampshire

Grab a drink at the bar and enjoy $2.50 slices of pizza as you get your nerd on!

The Presentations:

“Being the doctor of our Earth – how do I diagnose?” – Chi Zhang
What do you know about what is going on underground? How do you know? And how do scientists know? Chi will tell you how geophysicists use different tools to figure out the structure, the components, and the movement of Earth’s interior, especially when things go wrong in the shallow underground zone that is critical to all life on Earth.

“Jurassic Park and the Ethics of Adaptation” – Clara Cobb
I’m going to be talking about the Ethics of Adaptation; the main questions I want to ask and answer is “why do we make what we love, why do we make what we don’t, and what gets lost in translation along the way?”
Jurassic Park is an apex point because of how it both does and doesn’t fit into the “adaptation” descriptor. I’ll be examining correlations between literature and film versions of stories, and discussing the reasons those stories change.

“Artificial Intelligence” – David Menager
Many intelligent agents available today are not able to remember their past interactions with users and cannot explain their decision-making processes. As a remedy to these issues, we propose a novel theory of event memory that can provide an infrastructure for such capacities. The psychologically plausible theory enables the agent to store both individual instances and probabilistic schemas of personal events. Using the contents of this memory, intelligent agents can interact with their users in a contextually relevant manner and provide explanations and justifications for their decisions. In this talk, we describe representation and processes of this framework and discuss its implications to intelligent agency.

Our Esteemed Presenters:
Chi Zhang – Chi is an Assistant Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas. Growing up in the Gobi desert, Chi is now studying the water-rock interactions using geophysical tools. Chi is interested in sharing the beauty and facts of our Earth with others. Chi travels the world to talk about geophysics and to do research, sometimes with her outdoor enthusiast husband and their strong-minded young child.

Clara Cobb – Clara Cobb is an expert on nothing at all, but she once considered getting an English degree. She loves dinosaurs, sketch comedy, her family and Jurassic Park. All that compounded love has turned into a passion for researching connections, big and small, between the things she cares for. A Lawrence native, she was thrilled at the chance to speak at Nerd Nite, and although she could, never stopped to think if she should.

David Menager – David Menager is a PhD student at the University of Kansas. His research uses computational models of event memory as a core technology for answering research questions about artificial intelligence. His current interest is to understand the role of event memory for explainable AI in single-agent and multi-agent domains. David spent last summer as an intern at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works researching machine learning. In his free time, David likes to produce music and go running.