2002 Complex Systems Summer School
Budapest Students
Christophe Labiouse
I have a Master’s degree in Psychological Sciences from the University of Liege (Belgium). I am currently a Ph.D. student in psychology at the University of Liege. Funded by the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research, I am working in the Cognitive Science Unit managed by Prof. Robert M. French. I am involved in research focusing on mathematical modeling and neural network implementations of social cognitive processes. More specifically, I am trying to see whether simple neural networks are sufficient and plausible candidates to simulate social cognitive processes such as the emergence of stereotypes, some effects due to social categorization. Until now, I have demonstrated that many phenomena in the social psychological literature usually described as the result of higher-level and complex processes could be simulated by very simple artificial neural networks such as auto-encoders and MLP’s. Besides the core of my Ph.D. research, I am also interested in mathematical and computational properties of recurrent neural networks and I am trying to devise new learning algorithms in order to optimize the basins of attraction of auto-associative memories. I also worked on very diverse topics such as evolutionary psychology, the Turing Test, the statistical modeling of human semantics and the statistical underpinnings of unsupervised category learning. Finally, I study the dynamics and the structure of scientific collaborations in the social psychology research community with the help of graph theory tools.