Symbolic and Sub-Symbolic Systems in People and Machines

The curriculum includes humanistic approaches to questions about language and intelligence, as well as training in science and engineering. The undergraduate program in Symbolic Systems is an interdisciplinary program focusing on the relationships between natural and artificial systems that use symbols to communicate and to represent information. The mission of the program is to prepare majors with the vocabulary, theoretical background, and technical skills necessary to research questions about language, information, and intelligence, both human and machine. The curriculum offers a combination of traditional humanistic approaches to these questions as well as a training and familiarity with contemporary developments in the science and technology of computation.

• ” When I answer, most people have never heard of Symbolic Systems.
• How can we ensure that these systems respect our ethical principles when they make decisions at speeds and for rationales that exceed our ability to comprehend?
• A basic introduction to SQL will be given in the course.
• Degree are discussed in the “Graduate Degrees” section of this bulletin.
• Independent work under the supervision of a faculty member.
• A systematic overview of the important and recent developments of research on NeSy AI, including neural-symbolic interrelation, neural architecture, knowledge representation, and functionality, is provided.

Either an additional research project course (e.g., the second course of an Honors Project) or a Concentration-Specific Integrative Course, which must be completed no earlier than the Junior Year. 3-5Optional, but recommended, and may be used as contingent electives in a concentration. One or more of the following courses, which may be needed as preparation for some Core options and other advanced courses in the major. Declare the major in Axess, and have the declaration approved by the program student services officer.

Media and Communication Concentration

All structured data from the main, Property, Lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The PROTOtypical Logic Tensor Networks (PROTO-LTN) extend the current formulation by grounding abstract concepts as parametrized class prototypes in a high-dimensional embedding space, while reducing the number of parameters required to ground the knowledge base. DynamicalSystem constructor, used to create systems from symbolic expressions. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.

These courses prepare students with the vocabulary, theoretical background, and technical skills needed for study and research at the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels. Most of the courses in SSP are drawn from affiliated departments. Courses designed specifically for the program are aimed at integrating and supplementing topics covered by the department-based offerings.

How to Declare the Major

You will familiarise yourself with the central concepts of formal reasoning, including syntax and semantics, truth and interpretation, validity and soundness, and the concept of logical consequence. Although formal and technical, the course is accessible to all students, and all may benefit. Studying logic will improve your analytic and critical thinking skills and help you develop a more rigorous and precise writing style.

To what extent is symbolic processing required for intelligent behaviour? Advances in both sub-symbolic deep learning systems and explicitly symbolic probabilistic program induction approaches have recently reinvigorated this long standing question about cognition. While sub-symbolic approaches have shown impressive results, they still lag far behind human cognition, e.g., in the compositional re-use of learned concepts or generalizing to new contexts.

symbolic systems module¶

This course will explore possibilities for student research projects based on presentations of faculty research. We will cover a broad range of topics within the general area of collective behavior, both natural and artificial. Students will build on faculty presentations to develop proposals for future projects. If all dogs bark and Fido is a dog, it follows that Fido barks. If Clark Kent owns a car, it follows that Superman owns a car, since Clark Kent is Superman.

I also felt like I didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity because SymSys is only offered at Stanford, and I truly wanted to make the most out of my major based on my interests. We are the student group for Stanford Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary program. Practical details make it somewhat difficult to do systematic experiments on such programs. But the experiments I have carried out do suggest that, just as with simple register machines, searching through many millions of short programs typically yields at least a few that exhibit complex and seemingly random behavior. This subject is appropriate for undergraduates who have the prerequisite experience.

Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming

All of which we will touch upon in this survey course and is intended to give students a sampler of each discipline. This introductory class will expose students to some of the major methodologies, experimental design, neuroscientific fundamentals, and different cognitive disorders. More importantly, it will help students refine their interest to a specific field within cognitive science for future studies at their respective institutions. This 6-week summer course will require a sizable amount of required reading, not all of the readings is covered in the lectures.

Like To and Sugarman, Davies said, Symbolic Systems students typically draw upon a wide variety of disciplines. Symbolic Systems major Makiko Fujimoto, ’14, won the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. When the New York Times faced a technical challenge in getting photos from big events onto the newspaper’s website as quickly as possible, Haner applied his “sym sys” thinking to solve the problem. He built what’s called a “remote streaming backpack” that allowed photos to be published to the Times’ homepage within a minute of being taken. With hands-on technical training and a deep understanding of how people think and communicate, your SymSys degree will help you stand out.

Student spotlight: Elise Sugarman

Applications for Coterminal admission of active Stanford undergraduates are reviewed in the Winter and Spring Quarters. For more details, see the Coterm admissions information on the Symbolic Systems Program website. The GRE is not required for coterminal applicants to the Symbolic Systems M.S. The Symbolic Systems M.S. Program admits a handful of coterminal students each year. Coterminal students usually complete the program in one academic year.

Under the supervision of their faculty honors adviser, students work on their senior honors project. Lecture/studio course exploring arts and humanities scholarship and practice engaging with, and generated by, emerging emerging and exponential technologies. Our course will explore intersections of art and artificial intelligence with an emphasis on social impact and racial justice. Program, the Department of Philosophy offers a Special Program in Symbolic Systems track for interdisciplinary graduate level work leading to the Master of Arts in Philosophy.

Students in the major take courses in cognitive science, computer programming, logic and computational theory, probability, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The program prepares students for a variety of careers in the private and public sectors, especially those involving the human-facing sides of information systems/technology, as well as for further study and research in the cognitive and/or information sciences. A master’s degree involves an in-depth study on a particular topic. Cognitive Science explores one of sciences final frontiers; the scientific study of the human mind. It is a broad interdisciplinary field that encompasses research from areas in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science and covers topics such as the nature of knowledge, thinking, remembering, vision, imagery, language, and consciousness.

This joint survey reviews the personal ideas and views of several researchers on neural-symbolic learning and reasoning and presents the challenges facing the area and avenues for further research. A systematic overview of the important and recent developments of research on NeSy AI, including neural-symbolic interrelation, neural architecture, knowledge representation, and functionality, is provided. When I talked to some Stanford alumni who majored in Computer Science, many talked about how some of their most impactful classes at Stanford were philosophy classes because it taught them how to critically and ethically think about problems and solutions in the real world. And although I’ve yet to take a philosophy class, I’m really looking forward to this aspect of my major.

In an increasingly technology-reliant society, it’s important to think about technology’s impact on the way people interact and the way they think. For example, we know from social media that while it was a revolutionary concept that changed the world as we know it, for all the upsides, there symbolic systems are dangerous consequences that have now come to life in regards to mental and physical health as well as overall happiness. This sort of critical examination of the consequences of technology to humans is an important part of continually maintaining moral value and integrity in society.

• We will also practice the use of machine learning based on text data for psychological assessment, and the further statistical analysis of language variables in R.
• I’ve always been fascinated by the human side of things , so it was a huge pro that these sorts of classes would count toward my major.
• In one article, Hoffman explains how the SymSys major contributed greatly to his success because it taught him how to bring both creativity and discipline into his problem-solving approaches.
• More importantly, it will help students refine their interest to a specific field within cognitive science for future studies at their respective institutions.
• Applications for Coterminal admission of active Stanford undergraduates are reviewed in the Winter and Spring Quarters.
• A participatory course focused on the online representation of oral and archival history research.