Humans of SymSys: Sonia Targ

"SymSys and other interdisciplinary programs teach you to become comfortable analyzing phenomena at many different levels, which overall enriches your understanding of any field."

Sonia Targ did her B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science, with a secondary major in Symbolic Systems. She's currently finishing up her coterminal M.S. in Bioengineering, and then she’ll be off to med school at UCSF! 

What drew you to the SymSys major, and what is your concentration? 

I was initially drawn to the SymSys major because it aligned with my interests in linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience. I thought it was super cool that there was a single major that touched on so many of my favorite topics. I decided to do my concentration in the neurosciences since I find the neurobiological mechanisms that give rise to behavior and experience incredibly fascinating. 

What’s your favorite SymSys-related class that you’ve taken?

I really liked LINGUIST 130A: Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. It was fun to apply set theory and logic in a context outside of mathematics or computer science. I enjoyed learning how language works from theoretical and practical perspectives. I also liked that many of the ideas tied in with topics I had learned in philosophy (like “possible worlds”), making those concepts seem more applicable.

What is one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

I’d encourage younger students to plan out their degree more than I did! Have some goals in mind about what types of knowledge and skills you’d like to come away with, and try to build your academic plan around that. Sometimes students in Symbolic Systems say they feel like they did 5 minors, rather than a major, so if that seems like a problem to you, maybe choose a specific topic in your SymSys concentration in which to develop your expertise. 

What's something cool you recently worked on? 

I recently took the class BIOE 273: Biodesign for Mobile Health, a project-based course at the intersection of technology, healthcare, and entrepreneurship. My team decided to tackle the issue of post-surgical wound infections by developing a wearable wound sensor linked to a mobile app that alerts patients and doctors to problems with wound healing. While I had done plenty of laboratory research and engineering before this class, this course exposed me to aspects of product design and marketing, which form a large part of bringing impactful products to the public. My team won funding from the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign to continue our project, and Nokia Bell Labs has expressed interest in partnering with us!

What underlying questions and issues do you hope to tackle/learn more about?

As I finish my M.S. in BioE and begin medical school, I hope to continue learning about the intersection of STEM and the lived human experience. To this end, during undergrad, I studied Medical Anthropology at Oxford University through BOSP, which complemented my SymSys and BioE background well. I got to think deeply about topics ranging from the medical definition of death, the ethics of organ transplantation, and how culture wildly affects the experience and pathology of disease. I think that my diverse academic background will help me to tackle the various problems I will face as a physician, some technical and some distinctly human.  

As a diverse program with a lot of flexibility, many students struggle to find continuity across their coursework. (How) do you address this?

I never really found continuity across my coursework in the way you would in a more traditional major. However, I noticed the themes of reductionism (explaining complex phenomena by breaking them down to their fundamental units) and emergentism (understanding how parts of a whole interact to give rise to new properties) appeared over and over again throughout my coursework. SymSys and other interdisciplinary programs teach you to become comfortable analyzing phenomena at many different levels, which overall enriches your understanding of any field. For example, I learned to analyze the brain from the perspectives of anthropology, philosophy, neurobiology, engineering, and computing. 

What else are you involved in at Stanford? 

At Stanford, I have been involved with various organizations, including Stanford Students in Biodesign, Stanford Sympony Orchestra, and Taiwanese Cultural Society. I also write poetry in my spare time and have been published in Leland Quarterly and Z Publishing House’s anthology California’s Best Emerging Poets. I enjoyed promoting wellness on campus as a Peer Health Educator during my junior year. I started Stanford Music + Mentorship, a club that does music education outreach in East Palo Alto. As for research, I’ve done work on projects related to regenerative medicine and cognitive neuroscience in the Helms and Parvizi labs, respectively. I also feel lucky that I’ve gotten a chance to pursue my passion for teaching by being a TA for classes in Chemistry, Symbolic Systems, and Neurobiology.  

California Cognitive Science Conference 2018

On Saturday April 28, 10 Stanford students rolled out to Berkeley to attend the 10th Annual California Cognitive Science Conference. Hosted every year by UC Berkeley’s Cognitive Science Student Association, this conference invites undergraduates in the Bay Area to hear talks from researchers in the field and to present their own research during the poster session. This year’s two keynote speakers were the renowned neuroscientist, VS Ramachandran, who talked about the phantom limb, synesthesia, and xenomelia, and the author of Theoretical Neuroscience, Peter Dayan, who presented his view on model-based versus model-free decision making. We also had Hyo Gweon, Professor of Psychology and PI of the Social Learning Lab at Stanford as one of the focus talk speakers as well as other influencing researchers such as Lera Boroditsky. The topics of the focus talks ranged from brain machine interfaces to cognitive development to word embeddings.

However, it was not just the talks that we found inspiring. The CalCogSci Conference is a wonderful place to meet new people who share your own interests. We met with Professor Paul Li who teaches Berkeley’s introductory cognitive science class and had dinner with Professor Zachary Pardos who works at the intersection of informational science and education. He uses vector space to predict what course a student should take next based on their past enrollment sequence. We talked about AI, art, and education while eating spicy Indian food. Last but not least, congrats to Steve Rathje, a senior in psychology who presented his research in the Stanford Mind and Body Lab and was presented the People’s Choice Award given to the best poster of the year!

Written by Megumi Sano

Coffee Chat with Jure Leskovec

Jure Leskovec, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Chief Scientist at Pinterest, spoke with us on Thursday, April 19 about his research in applying machine learning to network data, his advice on how to do meaningful, high-quality work efficiently, and the two questions that one should always ask before undertaking a new project. 

Professor Leskovec’s current research investigates questions of how we can leverage information and social networks in order to build machine learning models that can solve different and more difficult problems compared to traditional models trained on matrix data. Dr. Leskovec's work in this area ranges from modeling disease and properly functioning tissues as networks of proteins and their interactions to taking advantage of the vast amount of driving data collected by companies like Volkswagen. He also teaches at the graduate level about network analysis and mining massive datasets. 

Before becoming a member of the Stanford InfoLab and AI Lab, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. While there, he also worked on problems surrounding analysis of networks, and spoke to us about how the most important two questions to ask before taking on new work are the following: "Why should I work on this problem?" and "Why should I work on this problem now?"  

In addition to talking about his work, Jure told us about his journey as a curious, driven student in Slovenia to the United States and some of the earliest projects that he completed at that time. We really enjoyed hearing about the research questions he investigated as a secondary and university student in Slovenia, as well as his experiences as an intern at HP Labs here in Palo Alto and elsewhere. When asked about his tips for success, he stressed the importance of sleep, not "spinning constantly," and making time for leisure activities as a way of recharging. He also encouraged us to actively seek out our needs, whether that is experience, mentorship, or community. 

To learn more about Jure Leskovec, visit his website at www.stanford.edu/people/jure/index.html.

Written by Pratyusha Javangula

Coffee chat with Dr. Carla Shatz

On Wednesday March 7th, members of SymSys Society sat down to chat over coffee with Dr. Carla Shatz, Professor of Neurobiology and David Starr Jordan Director of Stanford Bio-X. The conversation dived into the intersection of computational and biological methods in approaching some of the most pertinent pressing issues of our time such as neuro-degenerative disorders and other neurological pathologies. Carla shared a great deal of intriguing insights into the exciting work that is being done at the very moment at the forefront of neurobiology, both by her lab and that of a few other research labs applying cutting-edge technologies at Stanford.

Written by Kaylie Zhu.

Humans of SymSys: Hope Schroeder

"I wanted a major that would address [these] questions, teach me to think in new ways, and also push me in terms of my technical skills. Bam!"

Hope is a junior majoring in Symbolic Systems with an Individually Designed Concentration.

Introduce yourself: I’m Hope! I like travel, skiing, ice skating, yoga, lakes, art, and VR.

What drew you to the SymSys major? Why did you pick SymSys as opposed to other (especially, related) majors?

Symbolic Systems was on my radar coming into Stanford, but as someone with eclectic interests, I tried a lot of things before deciding on SymSys. Along the way, I was continually drawn to the questions that SymSys forces us to consider. I wanted a major that would address these questions, teach me to think in new ways, and also push me in terms of my technical skills. Bam!

What’s your favorite SymSys-related class that you’ve taken so far?

Bio150 with Robert Sapolsky, to give an unoriginal answer. I recommend this class to SymSysters and non-SymSysters alike. It will make you think deeply about our bodies and minds as biological agents, and the degree to which biology affects how we interact with each other and our earth. It makes our philosophical discussions in SymSys seem even more pressing.

Fun fact-- Dr. Sapolsky played piano for the musicals I was in during elementary school because his kids went to my school. It was funny to get to Stanford and be utterly blown away by his deep expertise, command of the classroom, and skill at giving an engaging lecture. “Incredible individual” does not even begin to cover it.

Are you involved in research? If so, tell us about a project you are working on:

Yep, I’ve been working for the Clayman Institute for Gender Research since before I came to Stanford! Gender equality might not seem like a topic that meshes easily with SymSys, but over time, the overlap has emerged. I’ve done linguistic analysis of performance evaluations in tech companies to see how the language differs in describing the performance of men and women for a few years now. This year, Chris Potts is advising me in developing a computational tool to do a quantitative analysis of these evaluations to complement the qualitative work we usually do. It’s a perfect marriage of my interests, and SymSys allowed me to see a new way of studying this societal problem.

What is one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

When choosing how to spend your time at Stanford in the summer, think about what excites you. Are you applying for things because they’re what you’re supposed to want, or are they what you actually want? The world is huge and exciting, and Stanford has the resources to help you pursue your wildest dreams. Consider making those a reality! Get a grant for research (some even let you travel!), start something, or even take time off from Stanford if you need it, either on your own or in a study abroad program.

What underlying questions and issues do you hope to tackle/learn more about through SymSys?

One topic I’ve been thinking about is the general idea of abstraction versus instantiation. The models we make in SymSys are abstractions-- we abstract things that are experienced at the individual level into patterns. Minds, both virtual and real, are instantiations of abstractions. When we abstract experiences at scale, what is lost? How good of an abstracted model of experience can we hope to get? Where is the limit to what we can understand about human experience through patterns?

As a diverse major with a lot of flexibility, many students struggle to find continuity across their coursework. (How) do you address this?

Personally, I’ve  never felt more continuity than I do now. I’m concurrently enrolled in Ling130A, CS124, and CS103. It’s exciting to feel like learning logic has paid off in every one of those classes. They’re all speaking the same language in different ways.

During some of my earlier quarters with class combinations like Math51 + Bio150 or CS106A + Psych50, it was harder to feel that continuity. Maybe if I had gotten involved in SymSys society earlier, I’d have felt more overlap in the conversations I’d have been able to have with my peers.

What’s the coolest (loosely) SymSys-related topic that you’re excited about right now?

I’ve been interested in virtual reality for a couple years now. We should be talking about it more in SymSys, because it’s changing how we talk about and integrate models of reality into our conception of what reality is.

Last year, David Chalmers gave a fascinating talk about the philosophy of VR, and it inspired me to think about VR and AI in a similar continuity as we think about minds systematically interacting with worlds in Symbolic Systems. Shouldn’t we be studying how virtual minds interact with virtual worlds as part of how we investigate how real and mechanical minds interact with real worlds?

Shameless plug: join Rabbit Hole VR if you’d like to learn more or get involved in VR and mixed reality at Stanford!

Hope is one of many profiles featuring selected alumni, undergraduates and graduates who are involved in the Symbolic Systems community.