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CSLI Calendar, 20 October 1994, vol.10:4




        C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
______________________________________________________________________________

20 October 1994                   Stanford                      Vol. 10, No. 4
______________________________________________________________________________

      A weekly publication of the Center for the Study of Language and
Information (CSLI), Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
                               ____________
                                    
               CSLI ACTIVITIES DURING 20 -- 28 OCTOBER 1994

  THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER
        10:00 - STASS Seminar
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                An Introduction to Situation Theory
                Keith Devlin, Saint Mary's College Mathematics
                Abstract below

        12:00 - Sociolinguistics Conference (NWAV23)
                Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS)
                23rd Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation
                Thursday 20 October thru Sunday 23 October
                Partial schedule below

         2:15 - CSLI Seminar
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Cognitive Development and Infinity's Missing Link:
                Searching Beyond Smallness 
                Rafael Nunez, University of Fribourg
                Abstract below

         4:15 - SSP Forum
                Building 60, Room 61-F
                Symbolic Systems Program Summer Interns Presentations

         7:30 - Phonology Workshop
                *** POSTPONED TO A LATER DATE, DUE TO NWAV23 ***
                Anchors Away: A Unified Treatment of Ghost Segments
                and Floating Features
                Cheryl Zoll, UC Berkeley Linguistics

  FRIDAY, 21 OCTOBER
         9:00 - Sociolinguistics Conference (NWAV23)
                Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS)
                23rd Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation
                Thursday 20 October thru Sunday 23 October
                Partial schedule below

        12:00 - Logic Lunch
                Building 380, Room 383-N
                Real Properties, Relevant Predication, and Relevant Identity
                Philip Kremer, Stanford Philosophy
                Abstract below

        12:30 - HCI Seminar
                McCullough Building, Room 134
                High Resolution Virtual Reality
                Michael Deering, SUN Microsystems
                Abstract below

         2:15 - Logic Seminar
                Building 460, Room 301
                Higher-Order Concurrent Linear Logic Programming
                Noaki Kobayashi, University of Tokyo
                Abstract below

  WEDNESDAY, 26 OCTOBER
         4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                A Rapid Graph-based Method for Arbitrary Transformation-
                Invariant Pattern Classification 
                David G. Stork, Ricoh California Research Center
                Abstract below

  THURSDAY, 27 OCTOBER
        10:00 - STASS Seminar
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Indexicality and Reflexivity
                John Perry, Stanford Philosophy

         4:15 - Symbolic Systems Forum
                Building 60, Room 61-F
                Title to be announced
                Bob Horn, CSLI 

  FRIDAY, 28 OCTOBER
        12:30 - HCI Seminar
                McCullough Building, Room 134
                Audio System for Technical Readings
                T. V. Raman, DEC Cambridge Research Labs
                Abstract below

         3:15 - Philosophy Colloquium
                Building 90, Room 91-A
                Title and speaker to be announced

                               ____________

The CSLI Calendar appears on Thursday of each week throughout the academic
year.  Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in the
Calendar on a given Thursday should be submitted by e-mail to
incalendar@csli.stanford.edu by 5:00 p.m. on the previous Tuesday.

Past issues of the CSLI Calendar, a quarterly schedule of upcoming CSLI
events, and other information about CSLI are available on the World Wide Web:
<http://csli-www.stanford.edu/>.  The Calendar, with available abstracts, is
also posted each week to the csli.bboard newsgroup.

                               ____________

                              STASS SEMINAR
                          on Thursday, 20 October
                    10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
                   An Introduction to Situation Theory
                               Keith Devlin
                     Saint Mary's College Mathematics
                         <devlin@stmarys-ca.edu>

This is the third in a series of introductory lectures on situation theory,
concentrating on applications rather than the underlying mathematics.  The
lectures will cover material included in my book _Logic and Information_
(Cambridge University Press, 1991), so people will be able to join the course
after it gets underway.  However, the order of presentation will not be
exactly as in the book, and I plan to provide alternative motivations and
insights gained since the book was published.  Later lectures will cover
material not in the book.  Motivational applications will include situation
semantics, the analysis of problems in sociolinguistics, and the design of
information systems.

                               ____________

                               CSLI SEMINAR
                           on Thursday, 20 October
                    2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
                   Cognitive Development and Infinity's
                Missing Link: Searching Beyond Smallness 
                               Rafael Nunez
                          University of Fribourg
                        <nunez@csli.stanford.edu>

Since the dawn of civilizations the idea of infinity has played an important
role in the development of almost every branch of human knowledge.  In spite
of this fact, the study of this idea has always been very controversial.  In
mathematics, infinity has presented countless difficulties and disputes
throughout its history, suggesting that infinity might offer a good arena from
where to challenge the dogma which presents mathematics as an objective body
of knowledge.  A controversial, elusive, and important concept of human mental
activity, such as infinity, should represent an interesting subject matter for
cognitive science.  Paradoxically, very little effort has been made by the
various disciplines and theoretical schools in cognitive science to study this
fascinating aspect of human mental activity.  Some issues related to the idea
of subdivision, as well as paradoxes related to it (e.g., Zeno's) will be
presented in order to address the question of how the idea of infinity in the
small emerge in our minds.  Research data obtained in a developmental study
performed in Switzerland, as well as preliminary results obtained in Ivory
Coast, will be discussed.

RAFAEL NUNEZ is currently a visiting scholar at CSLI under a fellowship
awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He studied mathematics in
Chile and received his M.A. in Psychology from Universidad Catolica. He worked
as a consultant on Human Resources for Coopers & Lybrand International in
Santiago. Afterwards he studied in Japan and later obtained his Ph.D. in
Cognitive Science from University of Fribourg in Switzerland. After have done
research on mental health in early adolescence at the University of Lausanne,
he joined research teams in Geneva and Fribourg working on induction and
mathematical thinking. As a researcher, his interest is centered on looking
for evidence to support non-representational explanations of mathematical
thinking by means of developmental and cross-cultural studies.  He is also
working on foundations of cognitive science, from the perspective of
embodied/enactive cognition, and is currently studying the relation between
the different disciplines of cognitive science in so far as non-objectivist
oriented approaches are concerned. Before coming to Stanford, he spent one
year as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

                               ____________

                          SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
                         on Thursday, 20 October
                    4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
                  SSP/CSLI Summer Interns Presentations

The Symbolic Systems Program's summer interns will discuss the research
projects they worked on this past summer.  Summer interns include Erica Don,
Clay Kunk, Jon Lindsay, Brian Walter, Kevin Henry, Kulin Tantod, and Jonas
Celebiler.

                               ____________

                               LOGIC LUNCH
                          on Friday, 21 October
                   12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
       Real Properties, Relevant Predication, and Relevant Identity
                              Philip Kremer
                           Stanford Philosophy
                        <kremer@csli.stanford.edu>

There is an intuition, notoriously difficult to formalise, that some
predicates pick out genuine properties, while others only pick out hokey
properties.  Consider, for example, the predicate (Fx & p), where Fx stands
for "x is tall", and p stands for "it is raining in Paris".  A person could
lose the property expressed by (Fx & p) without, in any intuitive sense,
having undergone a genuine change.

Mike Dunn has suggested that this distinction can be formalised in the context
of first order relevance logic.  In this talk, I will consider Dunn's notion
of "relevant predication", and I will use it to begin a project that relevance
logicians have ye satisfactorily to pursue: the project of giving a clear
analysis of identity in relevance logic.  Though different sets of identity
axioms have been considered in the context of R, there is no agreement about
which axioms are the right ones, or even about what would count for a
particular axiomatization.  In this talk, I will argue for a particular
axiomatization, which, interestingly enough, excludes the axiom of
substitution, ((x=y & Ax) -> Ay).

                               ____________

                  SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
                          on Friday, 21 October
                12:30 p.m., McCullough Building, Room 134
                     High Resolution Virtual Reality
                             Michael Deering
                             SUN Microsystems
                      <Michael.Deering@eng.sun.com>

I define the lower layers of Virtual Reality to be: the highly-accurate,
real-time simulation by computer of the interaction of the physical world with
human senses.  My focus is on the visual system, the talk will desceribe the
techniques used to perform this simulation in several running systems at Sun
microsystems.  These include: correct perspective viewing equations,
correcting for the optics of both human eyeballs and glass CRT's, predictive
head trackers and other hardware nasties.  This talk is an expansion of my
SIGGRAPH '92 talk to include details of the Virtual Portal, a 1K x 2K walk-in
virtual display device.

MICHAEL DEERING recieved his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from
UC Berkeley.  During the eighties he worked at Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Labatories in the areas of AI Computer Vision, VLSI design, 3D graphics
hardware/software and Virtual Reality. In the ninties he's be hanging out at
Sun Microsystems, building 3D computer graphics hardware and Virtual Reality
software and systems.  Due to advanced in computerized spelling correctors, he
has still avoided ever learning how to spel.

                               ____________

                              LOGIC SEMINAR
                          on Friday, 21 October
                    2:15 p.m., Building 460, Room 301
             Higher-Order Concurrent Linear Logic Programming
                             Noaki Kobayashi
                           University of Tokyo

We propose a typed, higher-order, concurrent linear logic programming called
Higher-order ACL, which uniformly integrates a variety of mechanisms for
concurrent computation based on asynchronous message passing.  Higher-order
ACL is based on a proof search paradigm according to the principle, "proofs as
computations," "formulas as processes" in linear logic.  In higher-order ACL,
processes as well as functions, and other values can be communicated via
messages, which provides high modularity of concurrent programs.  Higher-order
ACL can be viewed as an asynchronous counterpart of Milner's higher-order,
polyadic (pi)-calculus.  Moreover, higher-order ACL is equipped with an
elegant ML-style type system.  We demonstrate a power of Higher-order ACL by
showing several examples of "higher-order concurrent programming."  We also
show that a statically-typed concurrent object-oriented programming language
can be constructed on top of HACL extended with records.  (This is joint work
with Akinori Yonezawa.)

                               ____________

                       SOCIOLINGUISTICS CONFERENCE
              Thursday 20 October through Sunday 23 October
           Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS)
                    23rd Annual Conference on New Ways
                          of Analyzing Variation
                       <nwav23@csli.stanford.edu>

The 23rd Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in language
(NWAV23) will take place at Stanford University, 20--23 October 1994.  A
partial schedule of workshops and talks is given below:

------------------------------
THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER

Mainframe VARBRUL: 12:00 to 1:20 PM

This workshop will review the mechanics of using the variable rule program on
a mainframe computer.  The advantages, relative to VARBRUL on a personal
computer, include faster processing time, and increased editing, searching and
data-handling capabilities. By the end of the workshop, participants should be
able to use VARBRUL on the mainframe and interpret its results. They will also
receive a partial annotated bibliography.

Code-Switching: 1:30 to 2:50 PM

This workshop will survey current approaches to both the socio-pragmatic
functions of code switching (CS) and the nature of structural constraints on
intrasentential code switching. These approaches will include Myers-Scotton's
own "markedness model" (applying to social motivations for CS) and her "matrix
language frame model" (providing a production model for intrasentential CS).
Participants will examine CS data from several corpora to see how they are
analyzed/explained under various approaches.

Statistical Analysis with Mystat: 3:00 tp 4:20 PM

This workshop will demonstrate how to perform basic statistical tests,
(including chi square and t-tests) on published data which should have had
such tests done but didn't.  There will also be some discussion of the
rationale for significance testing.  Mystat is a simplified version of Systat.

Grammaticalization: 4:30 to 5:50 PM

This workshop will survey some of the main issues in the field of
grammaticalization. We will relate grammaticalization to some of the current
issues in sociolinguistics/variation theory, with special reference to
gradience, variation, and social networks. Possibilities for integrating the
two fields will be explored.  Workshop participants will analyze both
diachronic and synchronic data that will illustrate the semantic-pragmatic and
formal changes that occur during the grammaticalization process, with
particular reference to evidence for unidirectionality and subjectification.

Evening Panel Discussion: 8:00 PM.
Analyzing Variation above the Level of Phonology

------------------------------
FRIDAY, 21 OCTOBER

Talks will be held in three parallel sessions in the same building, the Center
for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS). The sessions are labeled
session A, B, and C.  Each paper will be twenty minutes long with a ten minute
discussion period.  There will be three or four talks per session, depending
on the time allotted.

Morning Sessions: 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM

Session A: Optimality Theory and Connectionist Approaches to Variation
Session B: Discourse Markers
Session C: Languages and Dialects in Contact

Mid-morning Sessions: 11:15 AM to 12:45 PM

Session A: Optimality Theory Approaches to Variation
Session B: Syntactic Variation in AAVE.
Session C: Register and Interaction Constraints

Early Afternoon Sessions: 2:15 PM to 4:15 PM

Session A: North American Vowels
Session B: Code-Switching 1
Session C: Discourse and Identity.

Late Afternoon Sessions: 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM

Session A: Pidgins and Creoles
Session B: Syntactic Variation 1
Session C: General Discourse

Keynote Address: 8:00 PM.
Gender, Speaker Agency, and Context in Sociolinguistic Analysis.
Marciliena Morgan, UCLA

------------------------------
SATURDAY, 22 OCTOBER

Morning Sessions: 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM

Session A: Morphological Variation and Change
Session B: Phonological Variation
Session C: Attitudes and Ideology

Mid-morning Sessions: 11:15 AM to 12:45 PM

Session A: Social Constraints 1
Session B: Attitudes and Perception
Session C: Syntactic Variation 2 

Early Afternoon Sessions: 2:15 PM to 4:15 PM

Session A: Social Constraints 2 
Session B: Discourse Strategy
Session C: Issues in Collecting Visual Data: Links between Signed and
           Spoken Languages

Poster Session: 4:30 to 6:00 PM.

Evening Panel Discussion: 8:00 PM.
What Can Sociolinguistics Offer the Schools?

------------------------------
SUNDAY, 23 OCTOBER

Morning Sessions: 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM

Session A: Change in Real and Apparent Time
Session B: Preadolescent and Child Language
Session C: Methodology 

Mid-morning Sessions: 11:15 AM  to 12:15 PM

Session A: Instrumental Phonetics
Session B: Phonemic Change
Session C: Code-Switching 2

                               ____________

             SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
                         on Wednesday, 26 October
                    4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
                 A Rapid Graph-based Method for Arbitrary
             Transformation-Invariant Pattern Classification 
                              David G. Stork
         Ricoh California Research Center and Stanford University

We present a graph-based method for rapid, accurate search through prototypes
for transformation-invariant pattern classification.  Our method has in theory
the same recognition accuracy as other recent methods based on "tangent
distance", since it uses the same categorization rule.  Nevertheless, our
approach is significantly faster during classification because far fewer
tangent distances need be computed.  Crucial to the success of our system are
a novel graph architecture, in which transformation constraints and geometric
relationships among prototypes are encoded during learning, and an improved
graph search criterion, used during classification.  These architectural
insights are applicable to a wide range of problem domains.  Here we
demonstrate that, on a handwriting recognition task, a basic implementation of
our system requires less than half the computation of the leading alternate
method.

This talk describes work done jointly with Alessandro Sperduti.

The goal of this seminar is to increase communication among local researchers
with interests in computational approaches to learning and adaptation.  If you
would like to be added to (or removed from) the mailing list, or if you are
interested in giving a talk in the seminar, please send email to
<langley@cs.stanford.edu>.

                               ____________

                              STASS SEMINAR
                         on Thursday, 27 October
                    10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
                       Indexicality and Reflexivity
                                John Perry
                           Stanford Philosophy
                         <john@csli.stanford.edu>

                               ____________

                          SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
                         on Thursday, 27 October
                    4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
                          Title to be announced
                                 Bob Horn
                                   CSLI

                               ____________

                  SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
                          on Friday, 28 October
                12:30 p.m., McCullough Building, Room 134
                   Audio System for Technical Readings
                               T. V. Raman
                       DEC Cambridge Research Labs
                           <raman@crl.dec.com>

The advent of electronic documents makes information available in more than
its visual form -- electronic information can now be display-independent.  We
describe a computing system, AsTeR, that audio formats electronic documents to
produce audio documents.  AsTeR can speak both literary texts and highly
technical documents (presently in La)TeX) that contain complex mathematics.

Visual communication is characterized by the eye's ability to actively access
parts of a two-dimensional display.  The reader is active, while the display is
passive.  This active-passive role is reversed by the temporal nature of oral
communication: information flows actively past a passive listener.  This
prohibits multiple views -- it is impossible to first obtain a high-level view
and then "look" at details.  These shortcomings become severe when presenting
complex mathematics orally.

Audio formatting, which renders information structure in a manner attuned to
an auditory display, overcomes these problems.  AsTeR is interactive, and the
ability to browse information structure and obtain multiple views enables
active listening.

T. V. RAMAN was born and raised in Pune, India.  He was partially sighted
(sufficient to be able to read and write) until he was 14.  Raman received his
B.A. in Mathematics at Nowrosjee Wadia College in Pune and his Masters in Math
and Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.  For his
final-year project, he developed CONGRATS, a program that allowed the user to
visualize curves by listening to them.

Many of the ideas on audio formatting mathematics come from his experiences in
having math read to him, in dictating math exams and having them written by a
writer, and in listening to RFB (Recordings for the Blind) books on tape.

Raman was introduced to computing in 1987 with an introductory course on
programming in Fortran77.  He did his computing with someone behind him to read
the display.  He joined the PhD program in Applied Math at Cornell in Fall
1989, and did his PhD Research on the topic of this talk.  He is now doing
research at DEC CRL on speech-based interfaces.

                               ____________

                          PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
                          on Friday, 28 October
                    3:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 91-A
                    Title and speaker to be announced

                               ____________