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CSLI Calendar, 6 April 1995, vol.10:22
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To: friends
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 6 April 1995, vol.10:22
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From: Tom Burke <burke>
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Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 15:51:24 -0700
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
______________________________________________________________________________
6 April 1995 Stanford Vol. 10, No. 22
______________________________________________________________________________
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 6 -- 14 APRIL 1995
THURSDAY, 6 APRIL
12:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Intelligent Agents
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Small Mobile Robots: Experiments with ERRATIC
Kurt Konolige, SRI International
Abstract below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Visual Programming
Cordura Hall, Room 100
IC-By-Example: Delivering Programming Capabilities
to the Uninitiated
Moshe Zloof, Hewlett-Packard
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 200, Room 34 (NOTE THE ROOM CHANGE)
Making a Mind vs. Modeling the Brain: AI Back at a Branchpoint
Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley Philosophy
Abstract below
7:30 - Phonology Workshop
Building 460, Room 146
The Phonological Analysis of Greek Pitch Accent
Gary Lutes, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 7 APRIL
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium (New location!)
Interactively Skimming Recorded Speech
Barry Arons, MIT Media Lab
Abstract below
7:00 - Linguistics Conference
Building 420, Lower Level Auditorium
27th Annual Child Language Research Forum
Partial schedule below
WEDNESDAY, 12 APRIL
4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Flexible Discriminant and Mixture Models
Trevor Hastie, Stanford Statistics
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 13 APRIL
12:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Intelligent Agents
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Meaning and Mechanism: Methodological Issues in Agent Design
Stan Rosenschein, Teleos and Stanford
Abstract below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Visual Programming
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Rendering By Example
Ravi Krishnamurthy, Hewlett-Packard
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
The Verbmobil Project: Machine Translation
in the Late 20th Century
Dan Flickinger, CSLI
FRIDAY, 14 APRIL
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
A Social Science Theory is a Practical Thing:
Social Responses to Communication Technology
and Microsoft's Bob
Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves, Stanford Communication
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 91-A
Laws of Nature and Natural History in the
Description of the World
James McAllister, Leiden Philosophy (Netherlands)
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium (rescheduled from 7 April)
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Title to be announced
Martin Kay, Xerox PARC and Stanford Linguistics
____________
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 Web, URL
<http://www-csli.stanford.edu/>. The Calendar, with available abstracts, is
also posted each week to the csli.bboard newsgroup.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS
on Thursday, 6 April
12:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Small Mobile Robots: Experiments with ERRATIC
Kurt Konolige
SRI International
<konolige@ai.sri.com>
For the past two years I have taught a course at Stanford in building and
using small mobile robot platforms, aptly named ERRATIC. The robots are
home-grown, built using sheet metal, model airplane parts, Polaroid camera
sonars sensors, and a small microprocessor. They are capable of supporting
experiments in sensor interpretation, motion control, planning and
exploration. In the course of writing robot control programs, we worked on
the basic problems of agents acting in real-world environments: how to move
without bumping into things, how to achieve goals, and how to map the
environment and keep track of position within the map. This talk focuses on
some of the experiments that succeeded, and more importantly, those that were
only partly successful. I will bring one of the robots to the talk.
NOTE: A complete schedule for the CSLI seminar series on intelligent agents is
available, via your web browser, at <http://www-csli.stanford.edu/>. The aim
of this series of talks is to examine some different conceptions of
"intelligent agents" as developed and exploited in robotics and software
design. A variety of perspectives will be presented throughout the quarter --
from open agent architectures, adaptive Web browsers, resource-constrained
rational agents, and net-based information brokers, to intelligent pilot
agents for virtual combat environments, teleo-reactive planners and learners,
behavior-based robotics, and a real though perhaps erratic physical robot or
two.
These talks are scheduled for 12:15 (noonish) on Thursdays throughout the
Spring quarter at Stanford, in Cordura Hall, Room 100. CSLI will provide a
sandwich and beverage (for $4.50, paid at the door; quarters and small bills
preferred) if you order beforehand. Send sandwich orders (turkey, ham,
roastbeef, or vegetarian) to <bocata@csli.stanford.edu> some time on or
before Tuesday of the week of the given talk.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON VISUAL PROGRAMMING
on Thursday, 6 April
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
IC-By-Example: Delivering Programming
Capabilities to the Uninitiated
Moshe M. Zloof
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
<zloof@hpl.hp.com>
In an effort to make computers more pervasive, we propose to empower ordinary
people with the ability to program their own applications. Through a
graphical language called _Interoperation-&-Customization-By-Example_ (ICBE),
the user can express a "program" in a "what you want" fashion while leveraging
on existing applications. Just as Relational Technology brought the "what you
want" paradigm to database query, we are trying to deliver similar promise in
the larger context of building applications.
Subtopics of the talk:
* High-level declarative based on domain calculus (By-Example).
* Programming is accomplished by stating "what you want" in a
picture-like fashion.
* Leveraging on existing application (in particular Databases).
* End-user customization by interactive programming.
* Enables small clientele applications otherwise not economically
feasible at today's programming costs.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 6 April
4:15 p.m., Building 200, Room 34
(NOTE THE ROOM CHANGE)
Making a Mind vs. Modeling the Brain:
AI Back at a Branchpoint
Hubert Dreyfus
UC Berkeley Philosophy
In the nineteen fifties two opposed research programs emerged, each seeking to
use computers to produce intelligence. One saw computers as a system for
manipulating mental symbols; the other, as a medium for modeling the brain.
One sought to use computers to instantiate a formal representation of the
world; the other, to simulate the interactions of neurons. One took problem
solving as its paradigm of intelligence; the other, learning. One utilized
logic, the other statistics. One school was the heir to the rationalist,
reductionist tradition in philosophy; the other viewed itself as idealized,
holistic neuro-science. By the late sixties, however, the neural net approach
had been almost completely eliminated and the symbolic approach remained,
until recently, the only game in town.
My talk examines the philosophical assumptions underlying the atomistic,
symbolic research program which led to the temporary defeat of the holistic,
neural network approach. It then reviews the unexpected and unresolved
problems facing the symbolic approach, and suggests that the underlying
assumption that there must be a theory of every domain has been disconfirmed.
It is thus time for neural network modeling, which is not committed to the
rationalistic assumptions of the symbolic approach, to have its day. However,
given the likely importance of the particular architecture of the human neural
network, as well as the role of emotions, culture, and bodies in the way human
beings come to embody an understanding of the world, neural network modeling,
while correct in principle, may well fail as a program for giving computers
general intelligence.
____________
PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 6 April
7:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
The Phonological Analysis of Greek Pitch Accent
Gary Lutes
Stanford Linguistics
<lutes@csli.stanford.edu>
The word accent of Classical Greek has submitted to detailed description since
the ancient grammarians, yet continues to defy linguistic explanation. The
fundamental facts to be accounted for include the Law of Limitiation, which
restricts the accent to the last three syllables when the ultima is light, and
to the last two syllables when the ultima is heavy. Also, the Law of Penult
Intonation requires that penultimate accent be expressed as circumflex when
the ultima is light, and as acute when the ultima is heavy. Only the ultima
can express morphologically significant variation between the circumflex and
acute intonations, and this too must be accounted for. The most complex set
of facts involves the accentuation of enclitics. In this workshop I would
like to continue the elusive search for an elegant yet comprehensive
phonological analysis of Greek accent.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 7 April
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
Interactively Skimming Recorded Speech
Barry Arons
MIT Media Laboratory
<barons@media.mit.edu>
Listening to a speech recording is much more difficult than visually scanning
a document because of the transient and temporal nature of audio. Audio
recordings capture the richness of speech, yet it is difficult to directly
browse the stored information. This work investigates techniques for
structuring, filtering, and presenting recorded speech, allowing a user to
navigate and interactively find information in the audio domain. This
research makes it easier and more efficient to listen to recorded speech by
using the SpeechSkimmer system.
This talk will briefly review Hyperspeech, a speech-only hypermedia system
that explores issues of speech user interfaces, browsing, and the use of
speech as data in an environment without a visual display. The system uses
speech recognition input and synthetic speech feedback to aid in navigating
through a database of digitally recorded speech. This system illustrates that
managing and moving in time are crucial in speech interfaces. Hyperspeech
uses manually segmented and structured speech recordings-a technique that is
practical only in limited domains.
This talk will focus on SpeechSkimmer, a user interface for interactively
skimming speech recordings. SpeechSkimmer uses simple speech processing
techniques to overcome the limitations of Hyperspeech while allowing a user to
hear recorded sounds quickly, and at several levels of detail. This work
exploits properties of spontaneous speech to automatically select and present
salient audio segments in a time-efficient manner. User interaction, through
a manual input device, provides continuous real-time control of the speed and
detail level of the audio presentation. SpeechSkimmer incorporates
time-compressed speech, pause removal, automatic emphasis detection, and
non-speech audio feedback to reduce the time needed to listen. This research
presents a multi-level structural approach to auditory skimming, and user
interface techniques for interacting with recorded speech.
BARRY ARONS developed "Phone Slave" and the "Conversational Desktop",
explorations of highly interactive conversational answering machines and
office environments, at the MIT Architecture Machine Group and Media
Laboratory. He integrated speech and natural language processing technologies
while a member of the technical staff at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, and
developed a workstation-based audio server and applications while a research
scientist and project leader at Olivetti Research California.
____________
LINGUISTICS CONFERENCE
Building 420, Lower Level Auditorium
27th Annual Child Language Research Forum
April 7-8-9, 1995
<http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/clrf27.html>
FRIDAY, 7 APRIL
7.00-7.30 pm Registration.
7.30 pm Introductory Remarks: Eve V. Clark.
7.40 pm Panel: "Current approaches to phonological development"
Organizer: Katherine Demuth.
9.45 pm Reception, Rm 146 Margaret Jacks Hall.
SATURDAY, 8 APRIL
8.30 am Registration.
9.00-10.30 am Paper Session: Shanley E. M. Allen; Clifton Pye, Diane Loeb,
and Yin-Yin Pao; Charlotte Koster and Sjoukje van der Wal.
10.30-11.00 am Break
11.00-12.30 pm Paper Session: Elena V. M. Lieven; Evelien Krikhaar and Frank
Wijnen; Katharina Boser.
12.30-2.00 pm Lunch
1.30-3.00 pm Poster Session
2.30-3.30 pm Paper Session: Sharon Armon-Lotem; Xiangdong Jia, Patricia J.
Brooks, and Martin D. S. Braine.
3.30-4.00 pm Break
4.00-6.00 pm Workshop: "Evaluative Elements in Children's Narratives"
Organizers: Ruth Berman and Judith Reilly.
SUNDAY, 9 APRIL
9.00-10.30 am Paper Session: Hilke Elsen; Catalina M. Johnson; Melissa
Bowerman, Lourdes de Leon, & Soonja Choi
10.30-11.00 am Break
11.00-12.00 pm Paper Session: Marie E. Helt and Susan H. Foster-Cohen; Elaine
S. Andersen, Beatrice DuPuy, and Maquela Brizuela.
All the meeting sessions will be held in the Lower Level Auditorium, Jordan
Hall (Psychology Department), Stanford University. This building is located
at the head of the Oval, to the right along the front of the Quad.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 12 April
4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Flexible Discriminant and Mixture Models
Trevor Hastie
Stanford Statistics
<trevor@playfair.stanford.edu>
Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a useful and graphical tool for
multi-group classification. With a large number of predictors, one can find a
reduced number of discriminant coordinate functions that are ``optimal'' for
separating the groups. With two such functions one can produce a
classification map that partitions the reduced space into regions that are
identified with group membership, and the decision boundaries are linear.
However, often this formulation is inadequate because:
* the linear decision boundaries can be too restrictive to capture
the class separation;
* if there are too many (correlated) predictors (e.g., grey-scale
pixel values from a digitized image), LDA tends to overfit the
training data, and the discriminant functions are too noisy to
be interpretable.
These deficiencies occupy opposite sides of the spectrum: in one case LDA is
too restrictive, in the other it is too flexible.
In this talk we represent LDA as an optimal scaling problem in multiple
regression, which we generalize to forms of nonparametric regression suitable
for the two scenarios outlined above. A natural extension of LDA is to model
each class by a mixture of Gaussians. Our approach adapts seamlessly, and it
can fit a mixture model, confined to an optimal lower dimensional subspace, by
regression methods.
This talk describes joint work with Rob Tibshirani and Andreas Buja.
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>.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS
on Thursday, 13 April
12:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Meaning and Mechanism: Methodological Issues in Agent Design
Stan Rosenschein
Teleos and Stanford Computer Science
<stan@teleos.com>
In the early days of AI, before symbolic computing, cybernetic models of
information and control reigned supreme. During that era, robot experimenters
built small devices, with sensors and effectors, that wandered around,
avoiding obstacles and moving from place to place. Beginning in the late
1950s, when symbolic computing began to displace cybernetic models as an
intellectual framework, experimentalists discovered the power of symbolic
tools for simulating reasoning and planning, and theoreticians discovered the
power of the *idea* of symbolic computing in explaining how the gap between
mental content and physical process might be bridged. Yet, when it comes to
building physical agents closely coupled to rich environments, even after
forty years of work, researchers are still building simple feedback-controlled
wandering robots. What explains the difficulty in applying symbolic models of
intelligence to physical robots? Does symbolic AI offer anything of value to
robot designers? If not, what other conceptual frameworks might be explored?
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON VISUAL PROGRAMMING
on Thursday, 13 April
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Rendering By Example
Ravi Krishnamurthy
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
<krishnamurthy@hpl.hp.com>
User friendly interfaces for databases have been widely considered an
important topic of research but has lacked its due attention from database
researchers for lack of meta understanding of the problem. Here we present a
linguistic abstraction, namely a visual language, for an important facet of
the problem.
Typical database application can be broadly partitioned into three repeatable
phases: (1) user input phase; (2) query computation phase; and (3)
post-interaction with the computed data. This post interaction phase is
typically so application specific that it requires significant programming as
evidenced in PC applications. These applications not only present the data in
an appropriate visual form but also allow for subsequent interaction with the
data by the user, in order to communicate/update the computed answer
effectively to/by the user. Such a presentation of data with subsequent
interaction secmantics is termed "rendering" of data.
The traditional individualistic applications did not lend to meta
understanding of the problem of rendering in an application independent
manner. Further, the statement of what to render and how-to-do-it (i.e., the
associated efficiency/implementation issues) were inextricably fused together
in these applications, analogous to the traditional problems observed in the
context of file management applications a few decades ago. As before, we
propose a declarative language for describing a chosen rendering of a computed
answer.
Rendering By Example is a declarative domain calculus language, quite similar
to the Query-By-Example, that can be used even by naive users with no
programming background. The declarative (i.e., what-you-want) aspect of the
language enables ease of statement, modification and reuse as well as
providing the separation of system (i.e., optimization, compilation, error
recovery etc.) issues from the functionality issues, all of which were proven
useful in the development of DB technology.
This work was done jointly with Moshe Zloof in the context of Picture
Programming project at HP Labs.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 13 April
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
The Verbmobil Project: Machine Translation
in the Late 20th Century
Dan Flickinger
CSLI
<danf@csli.stanford.edu>
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 14 April
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
A Social Science Theory is a Practical Thing:
Social Responses to Communication Technology
and Microsoft's Bob
Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves
Stanford Communication
<nass@leland.stanford.edu>
For the past five years, we have been collaborating on a new paradigm in
human-computer interaction called "Social Responses to Communication
Technology" or "SRCT." Essentially, SRCT is a theory and methods that argues
that human's interactions with computers and other technologies is
fundamentally social and natural. Via a series of experiments, we have
demonstrated that one can directly apply theories and methods taken from the
social sciences to inform how people will respond to computers. The theory,
results, and methods of this research program were used in the development of
Microsoft's Bob. In the first part of our talk, we will discuss SRCT. In the
second part of our talk, we will demonstrate how SRCT was used to inform the
design of Bob.
PROFESSOR CLIFFORD NASS is an associate professor of Communication at Stanford
University, with appointments in Science, Technology, and Society, Sociology,
and Symbolic Systems. He received his B.A. cum laude In Mathematics and his
Ph.D. in Sociology, both from Princeton University. He has worked as a
computer scientist for the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights and Intel
Corp. He has been a principal investigator on grants sponsored by US West
Advanced Technologies, National Science Foundation, the Center for Integrated
Facilities Engineering, the Center for the Study of Language and Information,
and Stanford University. He has consulted for such organizations as American
Electronics Association, Amoco, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft,
Northern Telecomm, and the Smithsonian Institute. He has published over
twenty journal articles and book chapters concerning technology and
statistical methodology.
PROFESSOR BYRON REEVES is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication, and
Director of the Institute for Communication Research at Stanford University.
He is a nationally recognized expert on the psychological processing of media
in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses.
He has been a consultant to Capital Cities-ABC, The Disney Channel, The
Advanced Television Test Center, The Federal Communication Commission, Apple,
Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM, US West, Northern Telecomm, and Congress. He
has published extensively in communication, psychology, and neuroscience. His
academic background is in graphic design and music (B.F.A., Southern Methodist
University) and communication (Ph.D., Michigan State University).
____________
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 14 April
3:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 91-A
Laws of Nature and Natural History
in the Description of the World
James McAllister
University of Leiden Philosophy
(Netherlands)
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 14 April
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Martin Kay
Xerox PARC and Stanford Linguistics
<kay.parc@xerox.com>
____________
COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT
Spring Quarter 1995
Philosophy 382, Philosophy of Language
Thursdays, 3:15--5:05 p.m.
Cordura Hall, Room 104
Instructor: Julius Moravcsik
<julius@csli.stanford.edu>
This seminar will be concerned with Chomsky's latest proposals concerning:
(a) Why we should not include matters of reference and denotation in everyday
use as part of linguistic competence (and hence in a semantic theory of
natural languages in non-scientific use).
(b) Chomsky's sketches of arguments that would show the limitations of humans
understanding their own faculty of knowledge and understanding.
We will see that these claims open up problems concerning:
i) Syntax in logic versus syntax in natural languages.
ii) The relationship between everyday use of natural languages and "the
language of science."
iii) Arguments purporting to show that a natural language like English cannot
be a formal language in Tarski's sense.
iv) Proposals for a "generative conception" of the lexicon.
We will consider mimeographed material from Chomsky, Putnam, Pustejovsky, and
Moravcsik.
I have to know roughly how many will attend fairly regularly so that (a) I can
be sure the room is adequate and (b) I can guess how many copies of the
unpublished materials need to be produced. So please reply to this
announcement (<julius@csli>) if you intend to come fairly regularly.
We will start by surveying the conceptions of syntax in twentieth century
philosophy of language, then move on to consider arguments showing that, e.g.,
English is not a "formal language." We will then see how these arguments
affect the scientific/non-scientific distinction, and how the presence of
functionality in natural language is related to the purported unknowability
arguments. If a volunteer knows the Penrose argument, we will consider that
also, provided that the volunteer can make it intelligible to all of us.
____________