EFR Archive
To access past GSG Event Funding Requests, go to the Forum. If you have any questions, contact the GSG Chief of Staff at gsg-efr [at] umd [dot] edu.
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EFR's for 2009-2010 (Session 29)
EFR 29.06: Graduation Conference
Organization: AMSC Student Council
Status: Accepted
The Graduation Conference celebrates the research efforts of graduating members (B.S., M.S., Ph.D.) from the MATH, STAT, and AMSC programs in the form of a one-day conference. The event includes invited 20 minute talks from graduating students, and a poster session presenting the current research of any student who would like to participate. The talks and posters are presented at the level of incoming graduate students, to encourage discussion between an interdisciplinary audience including all technical fields (in the past topics have spanned Computer Science, Genetics, Computational Linguistics, Business Optimization, Applications of Theoretical Mathematics, and more). Panel discussions and workshops from previous graduates and professionals will supplement the research talks. This event has been held for several years. Last year the event was very successful, welcoming noticeably more than the predicted number of participants, which was fantastic, but our food budget was stretched very thin. We expect to hold an equally successful conference this coming year.
We welcome all University students, faculty, staff, and visitors to attend the Graduation Conference, and make special effort to invite graduate students in all technical fields to attend, with the goal of encouraging interdisciplinary research and dialogue.
EFR 29.07: Mayfest
Organization: Linguistics Graduate Student Association
Status: Review
The graduate students in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland are organizing the Twelfth Annual MayFest, our workshop that brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss fundamental issues in linguistics. This year's title is: "Bridging Typology and Acquisition." Talks at this year's workshop will center around issues raised by cross-linguistic variation for theories of language acquisition and vice versa. In particular we are interested in fostering discussion about defining the space of possible languages and how learners use constraints on this space to acquire a particular grammar. We hope the talks will address the strengths and weakness of theories of "principles and parameters" and linguistic universals in accounting for the range and limits of grammatical variation, in addition to the degree to which conclusions from this work converge with those from the study of language acquisition and change. We hope that this year's MayFest will provide a lively interdisciplinary exchange that offers new angles for approaching the relation between learnability and typology. We have correspondingly invited 11 speakers who represent a broad variety of backgrounds and viewpoints, who would each be able to address the issues surrounding typology and acquisition from their own perspective, and to constructively relate and reflect on the concerns of other viewpoints. The workshop presentations and discussions will be extremely beneficial for the graduate students working on language research at various programs and departments at the University of Maryland, such as Linguistics, Biology, Psychology, Speech and Hearing, Second Language Acquisition and Application, English, Philosophy, Computer Science, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, not to mention researchers and students from other universities in the DC area. In order to encourage academic interactions, we are not charging any registration fee for participation in the workshop. We are planning to advertise our workshop by asking relevant department chairs to forward our announcement to their department email lists, so that interested graduate students can access our website for more detailed information.