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CSLI Calendar, 20 April 1995, vol.10:24
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To: friends
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 20 April 1995, vol.10:24
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From: Tom Burke <burke>
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Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 06:03:55 -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
______________________________________________________________________________
20 April 1995 Stanford Vol. 10, No. 24
______________________________________________________________________________
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 19 -- 28 APRIL 1995
WEDNESDAY, 19 APRIL
4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Feature Construction in Decision-Tree Induction
Cesar Montes Gracia, Technical University of Madrid
Abstract below
7:00 - Philosophy Talk
Building 90, Tanner Library
Philosophical Art of the Twentieth Century
Yair Guttmann, Stanford Philosophy
THURSDAY, 20 APRIL
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Situation Theory and the Liar Paradox
John Etchemendy, Stanford Philosophy and Symbolic Systems
Abstract below
12:30 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Intelligent Agents
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Reacting, Planning, and Learning in an Autonomous Agent
Nils Nilsson, Stanford Computer Science
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Combining Analyses of Cognitive Processes and Social
Participation: Understanding Symbolic Representations
James G. Greeno and Randi A. Engle, Stanford Education
Abstract below
7:30 - Phonology Workshop
Building 460, Room 146
Rule Ordering and Constraint Interaction in OT
Young-Yee Yu Cho, Stanford Asian Languages
Abstract below
8:00 - 1995 Immanuel Kant Lecture II
Building 420, Room 041
The Manifest Image
Bas van Fraassen, Princeton Philosophy
FRIDAY, 21 APRIL
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
Amazing Animation
Shannon Halgren, Claris
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 91-A
Kant Lectures Discussion Seminar
Bas van Fraassen, Princeton Philosophy
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Building 460, Room 146 (NOTE THE NEW LOCATION)
Is Indo-European Alone in the World?
Joseph Greenberg, Stanford Linguistics and Anthropology
Abstract below
MONDAY, 24 APRIL
12:15 - CSLI Lecture/Tutorial
Turing Auditorium
Walking the Fine Line to Becoming a Webmaster
Christine Quinn, Stanford Networking and Communications
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 26 APRIL
4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Cellular Encoding in Learning and Automatic
Parallel Compilation
Frederic Gruau, Stanford Psychology
THURSDAY, 27 APRIL
12:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Intelligent Agents
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Agent-based Interoperation
Adam Cheyer, SRI International
Abstract below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Formal Properties of Natural Language and
Linguistic Theories
Christopher Culy, U Iowa Linguistics
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
A Model of Human Sentence Processing: Able to
Tell the Difference?
Charles Lee, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 28 APRIL
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
Bounded Fragments of Predicate Logic
Johan van Benthem, Amsterdam and Stanford Philosophy
Abstract below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
TabWorks: Articulating a Metaphor through
User-Centered Design
Hector Moll-Carrillo and Matthew Marsh, IDEO
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 91-A
Movers and Elemental Motions in Aristotle
Istvan Bodnar, Ctr Hellenistic Studies, Washington D.C.
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Shaped by Some Common Contingency: Historically but Not
Genetically Related
Johanna Nichols, Berkeley 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.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 19 April
4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Feature Construction in Decision-Tree Induction
Cesar Montes Gracia
Technical University of Madrid
(visiting CSLI and ISLE)
The performance of induction algorithms in real-world domains usually depends
less upon the algorithm itself than upon the quality of the features chosen to
describe the domain. This is even more important with techniques that deal
well with discrete attribute values, but that require some form of
discretization to manage continuous features. The MITO (Metodo de Induccion
Total) framework offers a constructive induction approach to improving the
effectiveness of machine learning algorithms. The system identifies
significant relations between the original descriptors, then uses them to
create new higher-order attributes for use during learning and performance.
In particular, MITO first defines new Boolean features as logical or
arithmetic combinations of primitive ones or in terms of membership in some
cluster. The system then augments the training data by adding the new features
and carries out induction over this revised data set. We report results in
both artificial domains and in medical diagnosis, where this approach greatly
improves the accuracy of methods for decision-tree induction.
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>.
____________
PHILOSOPHY TALK
on Wednesday, 19 April
7:00 p.m., Building 90, Tanner Library
Philosophical Art of the Twentieth Century
Yair Guttmann
Stanford Philosophy
<guttmann@csli.stanford.edu>
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 20 April
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Situation Theory and the Liar Paradox
John Etchemendy
Stanford Philosophy and Symbolic Systems
<etch@csli.stanford.edu>
I will present an overview of the solution to the liar paradox presented in
Jon Barwise's and my book, _The Liar: An Essay and Truth and Circularity_.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS
on Thursday, 20 April
12:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Reacting, Planning, and Learning in an Autonomous Agent
Nils Nilsson
Stanford Computer Science
<nilsson@cs.stanford.edu>
We present an autonomous agent architecture and its component subsystems that
integrate important abilities needed for robust, flexible performance in
dynamic environments. These abilities involve appropriate reaction to
environmental situations given the agent's goals; selective attention to
multiple, competing goals; planning new action routines when innovation beyond
designer-provided routines is necessary; and learning the effects of actions
so that the planner can use them to build ever more reliable plans. The
teleo-reactive format allows actions to be closely coupled to continuous
environmental feedback and is also especially compatible with conventional AI
planning and learning mechanisms. The workings of the architecture and its
subsystems are illustrated in a simulated robot domain.
This is joint work with Scott Benson <sbenson@cs.stanford.edu; http://
robotics.stanford.edu/users/sbenson/bio.html>. Papers describing this work
can be downloaded from Benson's www home page and from mine.
NOTE: A complete schedule for the CSLI seminar series on intelligent agents is
available at <http://www-csli.stanford.edu/>. These talks are scheduled for
12:15 (usually) on Thursdays throughout the Spring quarter. If you order
beforehand, we will provide a sandwich and beverage (for $4.50, paid at the
door; quarters and small bills preferred). 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.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 20 April
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Combining Analyses of Cognitive Processes and Social
Participation: Understanding Symbolic Representations
James G. Greeno and Randi A. Engle
Stanford Education
<{greeno,randi}@csli.stanford.edu>
Understanding and reasoning often occur as social processes in conversational
interactions. Cognitive scientists have theories of the contents of
understanding and reasoning by individuals, and social scientists have
theories of the processes of conversational interactions. We want to
integrate these theoretical perspectives.
We propose three analytical representations of collaborative cognitive
activity, which we have adapted from existing sources: the AI theory of
planning, situation theory, and H. Clark's theory of conversations. We
develop generalized versions of these representations so that they can be used
to analyze functional, semiotic, and interactional aspects of the same
activity.
We illustrate this with an analysis of how pairs of middle-school students
constructed tables to represent quantitative properties of a simple device
that models linear functions. We account for their performance with
hypotheses about attunements to constraints and to affordances and abilities
of several schemata: a pattern of turn-taking in collaborative work on a task,
how to accomplish school assignments, forms and meanings of numerical
representations and tables, causal and quantitative properties of the physical
device, and the conceptual domain of numbers and arithmetic.
____________
PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 20 April
7:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
Rule Ordering and Constraint Interaction in OT
Young-Yee Yu Cho
Stanford Asian Languages
<yucho@csli.stanford.edu>
Rule ordering was one of the most powerful tools for phonological analysis
prior to the introduction of OT. In particular, numerous cases have been
reported of dialects or historical stages of a language that contain the same
underlying representations and the same rules, but differ simply by virtue of
the ordering of the rules. I argue that when equipped with two further
assumptions involving markedness and association of structure, OT has not only
the same kind of descriptive coverage in dealing with dialectal variation as
derivational theories but it also handles cases where the latter make
incorrect predictions. Two cases of where the constraint interaction of OT
diverges from the rule ordering of operational theories (Korean and Klamath)
will be discussed in depth.
____________
1995 IMMANUEL KANT LECTURE II
on Thursday, 20 April
8:00 p.m., Building 420, Room 041
The Manifest Image
Bas van Fraassen
Princeton Philosophy
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 21 April
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
Amazing Animation
Shannon Halgren
Claris
<shannon_halgren@claris.com>
Last year Claris Corporation produced their first software product for
children. Amazing Animation allows children to create movies, video games and
interactive school projects using pre-drawn stamps and backgrounds as well as
sounds. The development of the interface for Amazing Animation was a
challenging, unique, and a rewarding experience for the Interface Design Group
at Claris. Given the constraints of a very tight timeframe and working with a
user population we were unfamiliar with, our group was able to make numerous
improvements which had a tremendous impact on the product's usability. This
having been our first time designing for and testing children, we learned
volumes about this unique user population. Design assumptions and testing
methodologies used in adult products must all be reworked for kids. Our talk
will describe the progression of Amazing Animation's interface and will point
out the lessons learned about testing and designing for kids along the way.
SHANNON L. HALGREN is a Usability Engineer in the Interface Design Group at
Claris Corporation. Her job is to manage usability testing at Claris. She
earned her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Human-Computer Interaction Psychology
at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Shannon designed and helped conduct the
usability tests associated with this project and participated in many of the
interface design decisions.
TONY FERNANDES is manager of the Interface Design Group at Claris. The group
is responsible for the UI design of Claris' Windows and Mac products. He
participated in the field testing of this product as well as in the
development of design solutions to the problems encountered.
DEANNA THOMAS is a Visual Designer in the Interface Design group at Claris
Corporation. Her job is to create visual information be way of icons,
navigation in dialogs and product identities for Claris. She received her
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio at the San Francisco Art Institute and her
Master of Fine Arts at University of North Texas. A six year veteran of the
Apple community, her involvements with visual interface also include (of late)
PowerTalk & AppleSearch. Deanna provided the visual interpretation of our
design brainstorming sessions and gave Amazing Animation much of its look and
feel.
____________
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 21 April
3:15 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
Kant Lectures Discussion Seminar
Bas van Fraassen
Princeton Philosophy
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 21 April
3:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
(Note the room change)
Is Indo-European Alone in the World?
Joseph Greenberg
Stanford Linguistics and Anthropology
<josephg@csli.stanford.edu>
Some of the grammatical evidence for the validity of a widespread Eurasiatic
family which contains Indo-European as a member and extends eastward as far as
Eskimo-Aleut is presented. The relation between the approaches and results of
the Russian Nostratic school and that presented here is explained.
A number of Eurasiatic grammatical features are then discussed. These include
a kw- interrogative, -n(a) indefinitizer, first and second person singular
pronouns including the eg'(h)om/me suppletion in the first person singular,
locatives and instrumentals in -m and -bh, the final syllabic -m of the
Indo-European numeral for `seven' and `ten', and the existence in Korean of
old Eurasiatic first and second person pronouns beneath the heavy overlay of
forms indicating politeness levels.
_____________
CSLI LECTURE / TUTORIAL
on Monday, 24 April
12:15 p.m., Polya Hall, Turing Auditorium
Walking the Fine Line to Becoming a Webmaster
Christine Quinn
Stanford Networking and Communications
<quinn@tied-house.stanford.edu>
This will be a general introduction to the World Wide Web, including an
introduction to various Web browsers, illustrations of how the Web works, an
introduction to HTML (the language you use to design Web pages), principles
for designing Web pages, and information about specific Web resources at
Stanford.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 26 April
4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Cellular Encoding in Learning and Automatic Parallel Compilation
Frederic Gruau
Stanford Psychology
<gruau@psych.stanford.edu>
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, 27 April
12:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Agent-based Interoperation
Adam Cheyer
SRI International
<cheyer@ai.sri.com>
A number of software methodologies have evolved with the goal of encouraging
modularity and reuse of code:
- Parameterized subroutines provide code reuse within an application.
- Libraries of subroutines encourage code sharing across applications.
- Object-oriented techniques allow tailoring of library routines through
inheritance and polymorphism.
- Client/Server paradigms (e.g SQL databases) permit sharing
of data across platforms.
- Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) enables code to be shared across platforms.
- Distributed object technologies (e.g. CORBA, COM) allow sharing of
tailorable code across platforms.
Agent-based interoperation can be seen as a new paradigm for software
integration, distinguished from the above approaches in that: input requests
may be specified in terms of "what", not "how"; agents can take an active
role, monitoring real-world conditions and reacting accordingly; and agents
may be seen as holding beliefs about events in the world.
At SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center, the Open Agent
Architecture (OAA) is being developed as a means of integrating AI and classic
systems. The architecture provides a framework in which a distributed
community of software agents work together to access systems on behalf of the
user. In order to facilitate the user's delegating tasks to agents, the
architecture is served by a multimodal interface, combining pen, voice and
direct manipulation.
For this talk, I will describe the Open Agent Architecture, illustrate its
features through two demonstration applications, and then speak about current
and pending work.
NOTE: A complete schedule for the CSLI seminar series on intelligent agents is
available at <http://www-csli.stanford.edu/>. These talks are scheduled for
12:15 (usually) on Thursdays throughout the Spring quarter. If you order
beforehand, we will provide a sandwich and beverage (for $4.50, paid at the
door; quarters and small bills preferred). 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
on Thursday, 27 April
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Formal Properties of Natural Language and Linguistic Theories
Christopher Culy
University of Iowa Linguistics
<culy@csli.stanford.edu>
Over the past 40 years, various formal properties of natural language and
linguistic theories have been studied, most notably weak generative capacity
and time complexity. However, the standard closure properties (union,
intersection, concatenation, concatenation closure, homomorphism, inverse
homomorphism, and intersection with a regular set) of natural language have
not been studied. In this paper I will show that natural language is not
closed under any of these operations (and is hence an anti-AFL). I will
further show that these non-closure facts generally follow from very simple
substantive constraints common to all linguistic theories.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 27 April
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
A Model of Human Sentence Processing: Able to Tell the Difference?
Charles Lee
Stanford Linguistics
<clee@csli.stanford.edu>
There have been numerous models proposed to model human sentence parsing
(Frazier & Fodor 1978, Church 1982, Marcus 1980, Abney 1989, Jurafsky 1993).
A brief discussion of these models and their limitations and undesirable
qualities will be presented.
This talk will introduce a model for human sentence parsing (i.e., performance
rather than competence parsing) which does not have these same limitations or
undesirable qualities. The proposed model has the basic properties of a stack
machine with non-deterministic control. This model is capable of making fine
distinctions between various types of sentences, which are difficult for
humans to parse, which past models fail to distinguish. For example:
(1) a. I gave the boy who you wanted to give the books to three books.
b. Without her donations failed to appear.
(2) a. I crashed the car which you thought Bill gave to you up.
b. I gave the girl who you thought Bill liked a book.
(3) a. After the man drank the water proved to be poisoned.
b. Without her donations to the charity failed to appear.
(4) a. The man gave the girl a ring impressed a watch.
b. The horse raced past the barn fell.
(5) a. The mouse the cat the dog barked at chased is mine.
b. men women children dogs bark at adore love are rare.
The proposed human parsing model was implemented as a computer program and
will be demonstrated at this talk, illustrating how this model is able to make
the distinctions between the above sentences.
After graduating from Stanford with a BS ME '83, and MS ME '84, CHARLES LEE
worked at the Trace R&D Center in Madison, Wisconsin, where he designed
electronic devices and computer programs to help provide access to computers
for people who have severe physical impairment. One of his notable
accomplishments was working with Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, to provide
features such as Sticky-Keys, Mouse-Keys, and Slow-Keys for their operating
systems (e.g., Easy Access for the Mac). Charles returned to Stanford to
pursue a PhD degree in linguistics in 1989. His specific interests are in
natural language processing, machine translation, and sign languages.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 28 April
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
Bounded Fragments of Predicate Logic
Johan van Benthem
Amsterdam and Stanford Philosophy
<johan@csli.stanford.edu>
This talk will be a presentation of some recent results obtained with
Andr=E9ka and N=E9meti, on decidability and other properties of
"quantifier-bounded fragments" of predicate logic. The methods are reduction
arguments using bisimulation-based model constructions. Via translation, our
results also imply decidability for various logics of "generalized assignment
models" for predicate logic.
Reference: "Back and Forth Between Classical and Modal Logic", to appear in
_Bulletin of the Interest Group for Pure and Applied Logics_, London and
Saarbruecken.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 28 April
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
TabWorks: Articulating a Metaphor through User-Centered Design
Hector Moll-Carrillo and Matthew Marsh
IDEO
<hector@ideo.com>
TabWorks book metaphor enhances the standard Windows user interface, providing
an alternative way to organize applications and documents in a familiar, easy
to use environment. The TabWorks interface was designed collaboratively by
IDEO and XSoft and was based on a concept developed at Xerox PARC. This
briefing describes how a user-centered approach affected the design of the
TabWorks user interface: how the metaphor's visualization evolved and how
interaction mechanisms were selected and designed.
HECTOR J. MOLL-CARRILLO has been designing user interfaces for the past seven
years including interactive training applications, information kiosks and
games, electronic documentation and testing applications, and interactive
corporate/educational presentations. He has worked on interaction design for
Macintosh and Windows environments, for products like Xerox TabWorks, as well
as custom user interfaces for medical products, visual languages for future
operating systems and consumer products like the Smith Corona LS40/42 Personal
Labeler.
Before joining IDEO, Hector designed information visuals as Senior Artist for
Computer Imaging and Graphics, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and
later as a Multimedia Designer and Producer for Image Associates, in Raleigh,
North Carolina. He has also been a freelance computer graphics consultant and
an art teacher for children from kindergarten through the ninth grade.
MATTHEW MARSH has worked as a human factors consultant for the last seven
years, providing ergonomics expertise to multi-disciplinary teams. Recently
he has contributed towards development of medical, computer and
telecommunications products. He is presently working on an interactive
leisure device, an insulin delivery device, and a text telephone for the
hearing impaired.
Before joining IDEO, Matt was a senior designer at Davis Associates, an
ergonomics design company in England. While there, he had responsibility for
business development and was their principle consultant dealing with new
legislation on working with Visual Display Units. He has also worked
extensively in transportation; trains, light rail systems and cars. Other
work included systems design and analysis, control room design, computer
interface design and product design.
____________
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 28 April
3:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 91-A
Movers and Elemental Motions in Aristotle
Istvan Bodnar
Center for Hellenistic Studies, Washington D.C.
and University of Budapest
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 28 April
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Shaped by Some Common Contingency:
Historically but Not Genetically Related
Johanna Nichols
UC Berkeley Linguistics
____________