Appearing in the media can be a good way to share scientific knowledge and insights with the general public. But how do you get into the media and how do you ensure you get your message across clearly once you do?

In this basic introduction, UvA press officers share various tips and points of attention for media appearances (print media and radio & television). Do's and don'ts for contacts with journalists and/or during an interview are discussed. You will also discover how best to approach the media yourself and how the UvA can help increase your visibility.

The workshop is also available in Dutch on 30 September (more info online).

Communication, human and otherwise, strives to build some shared understanding; nonetheless, misunderstandings are more the norm than the exception. What happens when misunderstandings involve artificial agents? And is understanding even a precondition of communication? In this seminar, we will explore the complex relations between understanding and misunderstanding, drawing on examples spanning humans, computational agents, social robots, and cats alike.

The event is followed by drinks!

The first reading of this year will be chapters 1 and 2 of Shapiro’s Thinking about Mathematics, titled respectively “What is so interesting about mathematics (for a philosopher)?” and “A potpourri of questions and attempted answers”. We chose this as a first reading for the first session as it’s a nice, broad overview of what the philosophy of mathematics is all about, which hopefully makes for an interesting and accessible reading even for those who are new to this area of inquiry.

On October 13, Anita Slonimska from the Max Planck Institute will present during the bi-weekly SignLab Seminar. Here is the abstract of her talk:

Communicative efficiency, defined as the optimization of the cost–benefit trade-off in communication, has been central to understanding language structure and use (Levshina, 2022). Yet prevailing accounts have largely treated language as a unimodal and static system, focusing almost exclusively on written corpora or speech. Such approaches overlook an ongoing paradigmatic shift in our understanding of language, driven by insights into how language is actually used in interaction: multimodally and adaptively (Hagoort & Ozyurek, 2025; Holler & Bavelas, 2017). Drawing particularly on recent and ongoing work on sign languages, as well as on co-speech and silent gesture, I propose a theoretical framework that reconceptualizes communicative efficiency as an adaptive property of language use, one that flexibly exploits the expressive affordances of communicative systems, including time and space, sequentiality and simultaneity, arbitrary and iconic form–meaning mappings, and acoustic and visual modalities. I argue that communicative efficiency cannot be understood without accounting for the multimodal and adaptive nature of language. Building on these insights, I outline a multimodal communicative efficiency framework and discuss how it opens up new directions for future research, which I look forward to exploring with the audience.

The Nordic Online Logic Seminar (NOL Seminar) is organised monthly over Zoom, with expository talks on topics of interest for the broader logic community. The seminar is open for professional or aspiring logicians and logic aficionados worldwide.

See the announcement for the next talk in the link below. If you wish to receive the Zoom ID and password for it, as well as further announcements, please subscribe here: https://listserv.gu.se/sympa/subscribe/nordiclogic.

To mark Daniil's PhD defence, we are organising a workshop dedicated to the study of group agency, broadly understood, via mathematical methods, broadly understood. The themes include, but are not limited to, modal logics of strategic and cooperative reasoning and philosophical aspects of mathematical and computational models of social interactions. Invited speakers are Davide Grossi, Olivier Roy, and Valentin Goranko.