Dear fellow students,
we are happy to announce that we will host the first “Cognitive Science Conference for Students” or CoSCoS for short, this year in Darmstadt. It will take place from 04. – 07. June 2020 and will feature “Cognitive Science in Society” as the main topic.
The conference is partly inspired by other student conferences like the KIF (Konferenz der Informatikfachschaften) and the PsyFaKo (Psychologie Fachschaften Konferenz), but is not supposed to focus solely on university matters and student politics. As the main topic suggests, we want to highlight the relevance of Cognitive Science in our society.
For this purpose, we are inviting different speakers who do not only have a background in classical science but also come from the industry. As for now, we have confirmed talks/workshops by members of the Centre of Cognitive Science in Darmstadt: Frank Jäkel, Constantin Rothkopf and Kristian Kersting.
Another part of the conference will be organized in free time slots. We plan to fill some of those slots with predefined workshops on different topics ranging from data analysis techniques to discussions on the ethics of AI. However, the idea behind the free slots is mainly that you as a participant can define some of the program points yourself. This is done so you can tailor some of the conference experience specifically to your own interests and ideas. The potential topics can range from cool research done at your university, to how one can effectively organize orientation events for freshman students in Cognitive Science programs.
One main goal for the conference is to keep it financially affordable, so we will only have a low attendance fee which might already include catering. Apart from that, we will also try to organize a hosting program with as many spots as possible so that you don’t have to book any accommodation and can stay with local students for free. In about one or two months’ time, we will open the inscription for the conference where we will give you the exact details. For regular updates, you can follow us on Twitter (@coscos_tuda) or check our website at coscos.fspsy.de.
Best wishes
The CoSCoS team from Darmstadt
P.S. We are very open to suggestions, help, and tips of any kind. So please don’t hesitate to contact us!
Note: Unifying all our different study programs under one name is quite difficult. So when we say Cognitive Science, we actually want to address people from other study programs as well who think that the topics are relevant for them!
Note on inclusion: We want to be as inclusive as possible in this conference. This is the reason why we decided on English to be the conference’s main language in order to include international students. Of course, you can also contact us in German if you find it easier to do so. Furthermore, if you have any other handicap (or special needs) as for example visual or auditory disabilities, please contact us and we will try to make it possible for you to attend our conference as we aim to make the conference as barrier-free as possible.