Moreno I. Coco

Moreno I. Coco
3.43 Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK Email: mcoco at staffmail.ed.ac.uk

I am a Research Associate (i.e., Post-Doc) at the Institute of Language, Cognition and Computation of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I am currently working on an ERC grant (Synchronous Processing) held by Dr. Frank Keller, where we investigate the mechanisms and factors underlying the cross-modal interaction between visual attention and sentence processing. To this aim, we combine experimental eye-tracking research with statistical modeling.

Research Topic

Cognition is an integrated system built up via interactions occuring across different modalities.
I investigate how visual and linguistic information of scenes and sentences is integrated, the factors that are involved, and the cross-modal mechanisms utilized for processing and representation.
Through eye-tracking experiments on linguistic tasks situated in naturalistic scenes, I investigate how visual attention is guided by linguistic information, what is the role played by high- (e.g., context) and low-level (e.g., saliency) information, and how is the semantics of individual objects involved.
Experimental evidence has to be understood also through computational modeling. Thus, I am interested in quantifying the similarity between different streams of information, such as eye-movement and speech, and design computational models able to exploit this similarity to perform cross-modal predictions.

Publications

M.I. Coco and F. Keller. Scan Pattern predicts Sentence Production in the Cross-modal Processing of Visual Scenes. Cognitive Science , doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01246x, 2012 [link]
Results from this paper have received the attention of the media [New Scientist]

M.I. Coco, M. Garraffa and H.P. Branigan. Subject Relative Production in SLI Children during Syntactic Priming and Sentence Repetition. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012), Sapporo, Japan, August, 2012 [pdf]
B. Allison, F. Keller and M.I. Coco. A Bayesian Model of the Effect of Object Context on Visual Attention. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012), Sapporo, Japan, August, 2012 [pdf]
M.I. Coco and F. Keller. Temporal Dynamics of Scan Pattern in Comprehension and Production. In Proceedings of the 33th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2011), 2302-2307, Boston, USA, August, 2011 [pdf]
M. Dziemianko, F. Keller and M.I.Coco. Incremental Learning of Target Locations in Visual Search. In Proceedings of the 33th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2011), 1729-1734, Boston, USA, August, 2011 [pdf]
M.I. Coco and F. Keller. Scan Pattern in Visual Scenes predict Sentence Production. In Proceedings of the 32th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010), 1934-1939, Portland, USA, August, 2010 [pdf]
M.I.Coco and F.Keller. Sentence Production in Naturalistic Scenes with Referential Ambiguity. In Proceedings of the 32th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010), 1070-1075, Portland, USA, August, 2010 [pdf]
M.I.Coco and F.Keller. The Impact of Visual Information on Reference Assignment in Sentence Production. In Proceedings of the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009), 274-279, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July, 2009 [pdf]
M.I.Coco. The statistical challenge of scan-path analysis. In 2nd conference of Human System Interactions, (HSI 2009) Catania, Italy, May, 2009 [pdf] [slides]
M.I. Coco and F. Keller. Cross-Modal Mechanisms of Visual Guidance in Naturalistic Scenes during Situated Language Production (under review).
M.I. Coco, G.L. Malcolm and F. Keller. The Interplay of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Mechanisms in Visual Guidance during Object Naming (under review).
M.I. Coco and F. Keller. The Interaction of Visual Saliency and Intonational Breaks during Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution (under review).

Conference Presentations

Coco, M.I., Dale R. and Keller F. Cognitive Dynamics of Alignment in Cooperative Dialogue Games. AMLAP, 2012, Riva Del Garda, Italy, September, 2012 . (Talk)
Coco M.I.: Cross-Modal Mechanisms in Situated Language Processing. Presented at:Champalimaud Center of Unknown (Zach Mainen), UCSD (Roger Levy), UCM (Rick Dale), UC Berkeley (Jack Gallant), Stanford (Michael C. Frank), Lisbon (Portugal), San Diego, Merced, Berkeley, Palo Alto (USA); March/April, 2012 (Invited Talk)
Garraffa,M. Coco M.I., Branigan,P.H.: Processing of Subject Relatives in SLI Children during Structural Priming and Sentence Repetition CUNY, 2012, New-York, USA, March, 2012 (Poster)
Coco M.I., Malcolm,L.G. and Keller F.: Anticipation in Real-world Scenes: The Role of Visual Context and Visual Memory. CUNY, 2012, New-York, USA, March, 2012 (Poster)
Coco M.I., Clarke, A.D. and Keller F.: Modeling the Visual and Linguistic Importance of Objects. Christmas meeting of the Applied Vision Association (AVA), York, UK, December, 2011, (Poster)
Coco M.I., Malcolm G.L. and Keller F.: The Interplay of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Mechanisms in Visual Guidance during Object Naming. V&L Net Workshop on Vision and Language. Endorsed by EACL (the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) and BMVA (the British Machine Vision Association) , Brighton, UK, September, 2011 (Talk)
Coco M.I., and Keller F.: Scan Pattern Dynamics in Comprehension and Production at Symposium on Scanpath Representation and Comparison. 16th European Conference on Eye Movement (ECEM 2011), Marseille, France, August, 2011 (Invited Talk)
Coco M.I., Malcolm G.L. and Keller F.: The Influence of Task Complexity on Visual Attention. 16th European Conference on Eye Movement (ECEM 2011), Marseille, France, August, 2011 (Poster)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: Scan Pattern in Visual Scenes predict Sentence Production. 32th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010), Oregon, USA, August, 2010 (Poster)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: Sentence Production in Naturalistic Scenes with Referential Ambiguity. 32th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010), Oregon, USA, August, 2010 (Talk)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: Scan-Path in Visual Scenes predict Sentence Production. CUNY 2010, New York, USA, March, 2010 (Poster)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: Visual Search during cued Language Production AMLAP 2009, Barcelona, Spain, September, 2009 (Poster)
Coco M.I. and F.Keller. The Impact of Visual Information on Reference Assignment in Sentence Production. 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July, 2009 (Talk)
Coco M.I. : The statistical challenge of scan-path analysis HSI 2009, Catania, Italy, May, 2009 (Talk)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: The competition of linguistic and visual cues on ambiguity resolution. CUNY 2009, Davis, USA, March, 2009 (Poster)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: Competition between visual and linguistic resources AMLAP 2008, Cambridge, UK, September, 2009 (Poster)
Coco M.I. and Keller F.: Effects of intonational breaks on disambiguation of syntactically ambiguous structure SVG, Pitlochry, UK, March, 2008 (Talk)

Teaching Experience

2010/2011:
- INF1D: Data Analysis (Tutor)
  Dr. Ian Stark
- INF2A: Formal and Natural Language Processing (Tutor)
  Dr. Stuart Anderson and Dr. John Longley
2009/2010
- CSFC1: Computational Foundation of Cognitive Science (Tutor)
  Dr. Frank Keller and Dr. Miles Osborne
- HC1: Human Communication (Tutor)
  Dr. Helen Pain and prof. Joanna Moore
- Cognitive Science (TA)
  prof. Mark Steedman
2008/2009
- INF1D: Data Analysis ( Tutor , Marker )
  prof. Alex Simspon
- Cognitive Science (TA)
  prof. Mark Steedman

R code

R is a statistical programming language, open source, supported by a marvellous community of friendly, active and helpful people, whom have coded thousand of fantastic libraries spanning the whole spectrum of statistical analysis, and beyond.
Below, you can download my little contribution (instructions inside the files):

LCS: Longest Common Subsequence
OSS: Ordered Sequence Similarity
NW: Needleman-Wunsch
Model Selection: Forward-Model Selection, written in collaboration with John K. Pate

I am also developing in collaboration with dr. Rick Dale (UC Merced) and dr. James A. Dixon (University of Connecticut) a library to perform Cross-Recurrence Quantification analysis on categorical and continuous time-series data. If you are interest get in touch.

Organization and Revision

I have been in the committee to organize the Language at Edinburgh Lunch (2008/2009) and student volunteer for the Cognitive Science Society .
Ad-hoc reviewer for Applied Psycholinguistics, Cognition, AMLAP and Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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Last updated: June 2012