Enhancing a tradition of cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration, the NSF has recently renewed funding for the 11-year old Science and Technology Centers (STC) program. While the 24 Centers nationwide range in focus from astrophysics to biotechnology, notable among them is the Center for Research in Cognitive Science, sited at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, or IRCS, located at the University of Pennsylvania. As in all STCs, the research endeavors are multidisciplinary, in this case uniting several dozen UPenn faculty members from the departments of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science, mathematics and neuroscience.

Founded in 1990, IRCS's research goals are to understand the processes and mechanisms by which human beings acquire knowledge about their environment; how they store and retrieve that knowledge; how they communicate it to others; and how they apply knowledge to carry out actions and manipulate their environment. Much IRCS's research is organized into four interrelated themes:

1) language learning focuses on how children develop the abstract representations of language based on perceptions of sight and sound, plus related inquiries on the development of machines with language learning abilities;
2) language processing combines studies of both human and machine language processing models in a wide range of human languages, impacting the creation of natural language interfaces for human-machine interaction;
3) logic and computation research focuses on resource-bounded logics and computation, representation and processing of partial information, and semantic models for knowledge representation and reasoning;
4) perception and action studies cover the gamut from an individual's evolving perceptual capacities and how these are used in goal-oriented actions, to advanced neural computational modeling; this work is already having applications to artificial intelligence technology.

Helping guide the bustling activity at IRCS are co-directors Dr. Aravind K. Joshi, specializing in mathematical and processing models of language in the Department of Computer and Information Science, and Dr. Lila R. Gleitman, specializing in psycholinguistics and language acquisition in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Joshi was recently honored with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Award for Research Excellence. Dr. Gleitman was recently elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The distinguished co-directors are joined in their research efforts at IRCS by myriad faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and visiting expert scientists from other universities and from private industry.

IRCS interactions with industry continue to prove fruitful. IRCS research has been instrumental in defining industry standards in natural language technology. New technologies developed within the IRCS research consortium have been distributed to AT&T;, Boeing, Intel, Lucent Technologies, Silicon Graphics and others. Also of note are collaborative research projects with companies such as IBM; joint IRCS-industry research projects; and IRCS advisory board members from leading industries. Additionally, the Linguistic Data Consortium, which is closely associated with IRCS, serves as a repository of linguistics resources shared by universities, industrial laboratories, and government agencies for research in linguistic technologies.

The pre-college educational outreach arm of IRCS is PENNlincs, which promotes the application of findings from cognitive science to education practice in settings ranging from schools to museums. Among other endeavors, PENNlincs has developed two mentoring programs, one in Math and the other in Robotics and Computer Science, which link Penn undergraduate and graduate students in science, engineering, and mathematics with small groups of students from local middle and high schools. They have also developed a new science curriculum for the early grades called "Science for Developing Minds" and related professional development programs for teachers.