Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture

Lal Zimman (Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara)
2023-05-17

CLIC Workshop on Managing Competing Demands in Interaction: Identity, Cognition, and Affiliation
2023-04-27 - 2023-04-28
Organized by Giovanni Rossi (Department of Sociology, UCLA) and Tanya Stivers (Department of Sociology, UCLA)
When we interact with others, we juggle many competing pressures. We must both comprehend and produce language in a normatively tight timeframe. We need to work to try to understand and be understood by others, both semantically and pragmatically. Our self-presentations are continually adjusted for the addressee, the activity context, and the actions in which we are engaged. And, we must manage all of these factors while also working to manage our degree of affiliation with our addressees. In this workshop, we bring together speakers from a range of disciplines and methods in order to collectively explore how we balance these competing demands in real time and to what end.
Registration is now open! You can sign up for this event by completing this form.

Alexandra Paxton (Psychological Sciences - U. Connecticut)
2023-04-12
Dynamical, situated, wild: Attempts to capture the glorious mess of social interaction
Alexandra Paxton, University of Connecticut
April 12, 5pm
Social interaction is a glorious mess of multimodal communication embedded within an equally multifaceted cultural, temporal, and interpersonal context. Most people effortlessly manage that mess to connect, work, and even fight with others every day, but it poses a host of problems for the scholars interested in studying it, especially for those in traditional empirical approaches. In this talk, I present a brief overview of some ways to quantify the interconnectedness of social interaction, including both naturally occurring and experimentally derived data. In doing so, I argue that taking a complex systems approach provides methodological, analytical, and theoretical advantages to understanding social phenomena as they truly are—messiness and all.
RSPV: http://bit.ly/clic-paxton

Steven R. Quartz (Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Caltech)
2023-03-08

Natasha Shrikant (Department of Communication, University of Colorado - Boulder)
2023-01-11

Marisa Casillas, PhD (Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago)
2022-11-09

Waverly Duck, PhD (Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara)
2022-10-12

CLIC Annual Reception
2022-10-07

The Unexpected: A Dialogic Symposium in Honor of Alessandro Duranti
2022-05-19 - 2022-05-20
FAQ
Is the symposium open to the public?
Absolutely! Just register here.

When will the program be posted?
When you register, you’ll receive a tentative program.

Do I have to attend the entire event?
No, and on registration you can tell us what events you’ll be there for.

Will there be meals?
Yes, appetizers will be served on Thursday evening, and on Friday there will be breakfast and dinner. Lunch will be on your own but there are places to eat across from the venue.

Where will the event be?
We’ll give you directions once you register!

Do I have to register?
Yes, please. We want to be sure we have the right number of seats, spaced out best for everyone and the right amount of food so please register! If you can’t come, you can let us know and we’ll take you off the list.

CLIC workshop with Joanne Golann (Vanderbilt University)
2022-05-04 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Click here to RSVP

CLIC Presents: Federico Rossano (University of California, San Diego)
2022-03-09 17:00

CLIC Presents: Rick Dale (University of California, Los Angeles)
2022-02-23 17:00

CLIC Presents: Hansun Zhang Waring (Teachers College, Columbia University)
2022-02-09 17:00

CLIC Presents: Ananda M. Marin (University of California, Los Angeles)
2021-12-01 17:00

CLIC Presents: Matthias R. Mehl (University of Arizona)
2021-10-27 17:00 | Haines 279, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095
RSVP: https://forms.gle/d8Xwtc64dFmoVYDq7
The Sounds of Social Life Project: Observing Language and Interactions IRL

Matthias R. Mehl
Professor of Psychology,
Director of the Naturalistic Observation of Social Interaction Laboratory
University of Arizona
https://psychology.arizona.edu/users/matthias-mehl

How much time do we spend talking? Or laughing? Or sighing? Or arguing with others? And what do these behaviors tell us about how we live our lives? These seemingly trivial questions are important because they illustrate how little is known about our everyday social interactions. Over the last 20 years, I have developed and validated the Electronically Activated Recorder or EAR, an ecological momentary assessment tool that can track people’s naturally occurring (acoustic) social lives. Technically, the EAR is a digital audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their normal lives. Conceptually, it is a naturalistic observation sampling method that produces an acoustic log of a person’s day as it unfolds. With the EAR, we can begin to study how subtle yet objective (in the sense of observable) aspects of people’s daily social interactions and language use are related to important psychological processes such as personality, well-being, and health. In this talk I will give an overview of the EAR method and the research we have done with it.

CLIC Presents: Shrikanth Narayanan (University of Southern California)
2021-10-13 17:00 | Haines 279, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095
RSVP: https://forms.gle/RmfF7ExGNeRDR1y27
Human-centered Multimodal Machine Intelligence
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory
https://sail.usc.edu/people/shri.html

Converging developments across the machine intelligence ecosystem, from multimodal sensing and signal processing to machine learning and data sciences, offer exciting possibilities for helping us understand human communication, behavior and interaction across a variety of contexts, and for creating technologies to support and enrich human experiences. Multimodal engineering methods can help analyze human trait (e.g., age), state (e.g., emotion), and behavior dynamics (e.g., interaction synchrony) objectively, and at scale. Machine intelligence could also help detect and analyze deviation in patterns from what is deemed typical. These techniques in turn can assist, facilitate or enhance decision making by humans, and by autonomous systems.
This talk will highlight some of these possibilities and opportunities through examples drawn from two specific domains. The first relates to machine intelligence for behavioral and mental health. For example, in determining whether a child is on the Autism spectrum, a clinician would engage and observe a child in a series of interactive activities, targeting relevant cognitive, communicative and socio- emotional aspects, and codify specific patterns of interest e.g., typicality of vocal intonation, facial expressions, joint attention behavior. Machine intelligence driven processing of speech, language, visual and physiological data, and combining them with other forms of clinical data, enable novel and objective ways of supporting and scaling up these diagnostics. Likewise, multimodal systems can automate the analysis of a psychotherapy session, including computing treatment quality-assurance measures e.g., rating a therapist’s expressed empathy. These technology possibilities can go beyond the traditional realm of clinics, to directly to a person’s natural settings. For example, remote multimodal sensing of biobehavioral cues can enable new ways for screening and tracking behaviors (e.g., stress in workplace) and progress to treatment (e.g., for depression), and offer just in time support.
The second example is drawn from the world of media. Machine intelligence tools can help analyze media such as about who is interacting with whom, about what, how and where. This includes offering objective insights into media representations and portrayals, along relevant dimensions of diversity and inclusion such as gender, race, age, and ability.

Biography of the Speaker:
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery, Director of the Ming Hsieh Institute and Research Director of the Information Sciences Institute. Prior to USC he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. His research focuses on human-centered information processing and communication technologies. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, ISCA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is a recipient of several honors including the 2015 Engineers Council’s Distinguished Educator Award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, the 2005 and 2009 Best Journal Paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and serving as its Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-11, a 2018 ISCA CSL Best Journal Paper award, and serving as an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16, Willard R. Zemlin Memorial Lecturer for ASHA in 2017, and the Ten Year Technical Impact Award in 2014 and the Sustained Accomplishment Award in 2020 from ACM ICMI. He has published over 900 papers and has been granted eighteen U.S. patents. His research and inventions have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded: Behavioral Signals Technologies focused on the telecommunication services and AI based conversational assistance industry and Lyssn focused on mental health care delivery, treatment and quality assurance.

2021 CLIC Annual Reception
2021-10-08 17:00 - 20:00 | Fowler Museum Terrace, 308 Charles E Young Dr N, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
RSVP: https://forms.gle/YjbSuiPG8ie1fCWG7

Summer Workshops in Language, Culture, and Interaction
2021-07-20 | **POSTPONED UNTIL 2021**, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
***Due to COVID-19, this summer event has been delayed until July 2021. Please check back at a later time for details.***

Please click this link to read more information about the Workshops: https://clic.ss.ucla.edu/2020-summer-workshop-series/

CLIC Presents: Douglas Maynard and Jason Turowetz — "On Autistic Intelligence and Autism Diagnosis"
2021-04-28 17:00 - 18:30 | **Details to be posted soon

CLIC Presents Kaoru Hayano — Reporting for and about a child: Addressing a child in talk between nursery teachers and parents
2021-03-10 17:00 - 18:30 | **Details to be posted soon

CLIC Presents: Dan Jurafsky (Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, Stanford University)
2021-01-20 17:00 - 19:00 | **Details to be posted soon

CLIC Annual Reception
2020-12-02 17:00 - 19:00 | Discord CLIC Community Server: https://discord.gg/U5wsEvz, Discord, CLIC Community Server

Steven Clayman — Asking About Bias: Addressing the Sensitivities of Voir Dire Questioning
2020-11-18 17:00 - 19:00 | **Details to be posted soon
Professor Steven Clayman
Department of Sociology, UCLA

Norma Mendoza-Denton — Teaching Language and Politics in the Trump Era*
2020-10-28 17:00 - 19:00 | Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92243509897?pwd=[REDACTED] Password: [REDACTED]
This CLIC presentation is a collaboration between members of the class “Language and Politics,” and is meant as a pedagogical meditation on the way in which we are collaboratively learning to talk and write about politics across the faculty, graduate and undergraduate levels while engaging the present political moment. All of us, professors and students, are political actors and we are committed to engaging each other’s perspectives through the analysis of political interactions around us. We will present how we as a class are approaching learning about language and politics through class discussion and data workshopping, posting on twitter, media engagement, transcription, and analysis. We welcome discussion and ideas from our audience.

*Research produced in collaboration with Tyanna Slobe, Hailey Cavanaugh, Cheryl Lee, Stephanie Lopez, Faatimah Mahadi, and Alexander Ward.

Colloquium: Lynn Hou, 5/13/2020
2020-05-13 00:00 | **POSTPONED**
(University of California, Santa Barbara, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics)

This event has been postponed until further notice.

26th Annual Student Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture
2020-04-23 - 2020-04-25 | **CANCELLED**
*****Given the high number of participants traveling both internationally and domestically, and the warnings issued against non-essential travel in light of the outbreak of COVID-19, the 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction and Culture scheduled for April 23-25, 2020 at UCLA has been cancelled. We truly regret the inconvenience that this has caused. CLIC-GSA looks forward to seeing you at future conferences.******

Colloquium: Dan Jurafsky, 4/22/2020
2020-03-26 16:26 | **RESCHEDULED. Details to be posted soon.
(Stanford University, Professor in Humanities, Professor and Chair of Linguistics, Professor of Computer Science)

Colloquium: Shannon Ward
2020-03-11 17:30 - 20:00 | Haines 352, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
(University of British Columbia, Assistant Professor, Anthropology)

Efrén Pérez (Professor of Political Science and Psychology, UCLA)
2020-02-27 13:30 - 15:00
The UCLA Dept of Sociology’s Gender & Sexuality Working Group and CLIC will be co-sponsoring a talk by Efrén Pérez (Professor of Political Science and Psychology, UCLA) titled, “Words That Matter: How Language Shapes Public Attitudes Toward Gender and LGBT Equality.” The event will be held on Thursday, February 27, from 1:30-3:00pm in Haines 279.

Symposium on Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in Interaction
2020-02-21 08:00 - 20:00 | Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Inclusion is a topic that permeates discussions as diverse as those surrounding education and health policies, political participation, and language choice. However, much of this discussion is ideological and involves normative language about inclusion. This symposium proposes to center our discussion around the more micro-level phenomenon of how processes of inclusion and exclusion play out in real time. What is the actual work that gets done on a playground, at a family gathering, in a business meeting, or during a healthcare consultation, that fosters inclusion? In keeping with CLIC’s mission, we aim to bring together participants representing anthropological, sociological, and linguistic disciplines relying on ethnographic, conversation analytic and other language-based approaches.

Registration is now open! Please register at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc4EL9clsVLk5RqVL5997BoyExeT9Pqb_mX5nXInM_YpGFi2A/viewform?usp=sf_link
