Kenny Coventry

JANUARY 2013 – New 4 million Euro Marie Curie ITN grant commences

admin — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:45:05 +0000

The EU has invested more than €4 million (Euro) in LanPercept, a new Marie Curie Initial Training Network that will develop cutting-edge techniques to study human abilities to map visual information and language. The four-year collaboration starts in January 2013.

Prof Kenny Coventry, will lead two research projects examining how language and perception change during ageing, and how language plays a role in visually attending to everyday events and remembering those events.

Prof Coventry said: “Language and perception are two fundamental human brain systems that furnish us with an understanding of where we are in the world and an ability to communicate about our location. We currently know very little about how these brain systems work together across the lifespan. Early evidence suggests that an ability to express location may be a possible marker of abnormal ageing. This is something we will be exploring in more depth.”

UEA is one of eight European universities, and only two UK institutions, involved in the project. Aston University is the other UK institution involved. The programme will support basic and clinical research and bring together professionals from psychology, neuroscience and linguistics.

The network is to identify key behavioural and brain mechanisms explaining how actions in everyday situations shape language understanding and how language conditions the way the visual environment is perceived.

Knowledge gained will be used to develop testing and training tools and software for clinical work with elderly people suffering from dementia and people with autism spectrum disorders, deafness and reading disabilities.

Funded through the Seventh EU Framework Programme, LanPercept will also train 11 PhD researchers – two of them at UEA – and four postdoctoral researchers across the eight leading academic and seven industrial and private sector partners in Europe. The researchers will do internships with the participating eye-tracking and brain research companies that offer technical tools for vision-language research, and receive training on identifying applications for research outputs, as well as preparation for a professional career outside academia.

AUGUST 2012 – Embodied and Situated Language Processing Conference (ESLP 2012) comes to Newcastle.

admin — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:32:20 +0000

AUGUST 2012 – Kenny is chairing the Embodied and Situated Language Processing Conference ESLP 2012) to be held in Newcastle Upon Tyne, August 28th-30th, 2012.

This event, previously hosted in San Diego in 2010 and Bielefeld in 2011, brings together leading experts from all over the world interested in the role non-linguistic systems, such as the vision and action systems, play in language processing.

The confirmed keynote speakers for the event are Jesse Snedeker (Harvard University, USA), Gerry Altmann (York University, UK) and Bernard Hommel (University of Leiden, the Netherlands).

More information about this event can be found by visiting the conference website here.

JUNE 2012 – On the move…Kenny accepts new post at University of East Anglia

admin — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:07:01 +0000

Kenny accepts a new post at the University of East Anglia (http://www.uea.ac.uk/). He will start his new role as Chair in Psychology/Head of the (new) School of Psychology commencing 1st October.

APRIL 2012 – Moscow visit to Russian State University for the Humanities.

admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:30:50 +0000

APRIL 2012 – Kenny will be visiting Moscow as a keynote speaker at the Conference on Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science Research, to be held at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He will talk about the mapping between spatial language and spatial cognition, featuring research funded by the Economic and Social Research council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

MARCH 2012 – Kenny invited to European Parliament in Brussels

admin — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 21:52:57 +0000

MARCH 2012 – Kenny goes to Brussels to the European Parliament to attend a European Research Leadership in Robotics working lunch debate. The debate, organised by Professor Ioannis A. Tsoukalas (MEP) and Professor Angelo Cangelosi (Plymouth University), brings together European and US scientists, industry experts, and representatives of the European Institutions to explore the state of the art in robotics research and discuss future R&D challenges and plans to sustain European leadership in this field.

MARCH 2012 – Kenny gives talk with Alastair Campbell on decision making.

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:27:09 +0000

MARCH 2012 – Kenny gives a talk with Alastair Campbell (former advisor to PM Tony Blair), on the science of decision making. The event was organised by Newcastle Science City, and staged in association with the Newcastle Scienve Festival. Kenny talked about the science of decision making, and Alastair discussed the realities of decision making in government. The individual talks were followed by a joint question and answer session from the audience.

Laura Lord, Newcastle Science City: “Both Kenny and Alastair went down a storm and I have heard nothing but positive comments about both presentations.”

Head of Newcastle City Library, where the talks took place, said “It was a real pleasure to see a full house at the Library enthralled by two very different, but wonderfully entertaining speakers.”

DECEMBER 2011 – New film showcases work on mapping between language and perception.

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:16:05 +0000

Have you ever wondered whether the language you speak affects the way you think? Have you ever thought about the relationship between language and your perceptual systems?

A new film, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, showcases some of the research in the mapping between language and perception undertaken by Kenny and his colleagues in the Cognition and Communication Research Centre.

The film can be viewed here.