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CSLI Calendar, 22 Feb 1996, vol.11:17
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To: friends@Arch.Stanford.EDU
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 22 Feb 1996, vol.11:17
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From: Tom Burke <burke@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
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Date: Wed, 21 Feb 1996 13:47:40 -0800 (PST)
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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
______________________________________________________________________________
22 February 1996 Stanford Vol. 11, No. 17
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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 22 FEBRUARY -- 1 MARCH 1996
THURSDAY, 22 FEBRUARY
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Barwise--Seligman Reading Group (cont'd)
Keith Devlin, CSLI & St.Mary's
Abstract below
12:00 - CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
A Biological View of Consciousness and Intentionality
Walter Freeman, UC Berkeley Neurobiology
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Perception and Robot Navigation
Illah Nourbakhsh, Stanford Computer Science
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 23 FEBRUARY
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
The Classical Decision Problem and Turing's Reduction Method
Egon Boerger, Universita di Pisa and Siemens R&D
Abstract below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
Space Craft: Perceptual Aids for Cognitive Activity
Kevin Mullet, Macromedia
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy Department Colloquium
Building 60, Room 61-G
A Discussion of Self-Deception
Donald Davidson (UC Berkeley Philosophy), Jean-Pierre Dupuy
(Stanford French & Italian), Ariela Lazar (Stanford Philosophy)
Abstract below
3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
Cordura Hall, Room 100 (Different Location)
Optimizing Lexical Choice: Expletives and Opaque Clitics as
Cases of Minimal Violation
Jane Grimshaw, Rutgers Linguistics
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 27 FEBRUARY
7:00 - SSP Film Series
Cubberley Education Building, Room 133
Wittgenstein [feature film] (1993)
Abstract below
7:15 - Philosophy of Computation Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Readings in Computation: The Origin of Objects
Brian Cantwell Smith, Xerox PARC
THURSDAY, 29 FEBRUARY
12:00 - CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
On the Search for a Neural Correlate of Consciousness
David Chalmers, UC Santa Cruz Philosophy
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Being Understood in a Disfluent World: A Psycholinguistic
Analysis of Oral Fluency and Nativeness
Timothy Seung Yoon Paek, Stanford Psychology
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 1 MARCH
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
Using Nonstandard Analysis to Ensure the Correctness of
Symbolic Computations
Michael Beeson, UC Santa Clara Mathematics
Abstract below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
Designing for Interactivity: From Diagrams to Virtual Reality
Yvonne Rogers, University of Sussex
3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
Building 460, Room 146
Gesture Spaces and Mental Maps
John Haviland, Reed College
Abstract below
____________
The CSLI Calendar appears on Wednesdays weekly throughout the academic year.
Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in the Calendar can
be submitted by e-mail to [incalendar@csli.stanford.edu].
Further information about CSLI and past issues of the CSLI Calendar
are available on the Internet at URL [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/].
The Calendar is also posted each week to the [csli.bboard] newsgroup.
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 22 February
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Barwise--Seligman Reading Group (cont'd)
Keith Devlin
CSLI & St.Mary's College
[devlin@csli.stanford.edu]
Having identified Chapter 5 as the key chapter, the group will meet for one
last time to discuss this book manuscript, in particular Chapter 5. Chapters
1 and 7 provide motivation for the theoretical development in Chapter 5, so we
will probably talk about those chapters as well. For new attendants, copies
of the manuscript are available from Eric Hammer at CSLI.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 22 February
12:00 noon, Cordura Hall, Room 100
A Biological View of Consciousness and Intentionality
Walter Freeman
UC Berkeley Neurobiology
Experimental observations of the brain activity that follows sensory
stimulation of animals show that sensory cortices engage in construction of
activity patterns in response to stimuli. The operation is not that of
filter, retrieval, or correlation mechanisms. It is a state transition by
which a cortex switches abruptly from one basin of attraction to another,
thereby to change one spatial pattern to another like frames in a cinema. The
transitions in the primary sensory cortices are shaped by interactions with
the limbic system, which express the intentional nature of percepts. They
result from goal-directed actions in time and space. Each transition involves
learning, so that cumulatively a trajectory is formed by each brain over its
lifetime. Each spatial pattern as it occurs reflects the entire content of
individual experience. It is a meaning and not the representation of a
meaning. It is the basis for consciousness.
It follows that each brain creates its own frames of reference, which are not
directly accessible by any other brain. How, then, can two or more brains be
shaped by learning, so as to form cooperative pairs for reproduction and
groups for survival? Evolution has provided a biological mechanism that first
came under scientific scrutiny in the form of Pavlovian 'brain washing'.
Under now well known conditions of stress in the internal and external
environments, a global transition takes place, following which brains sustain
a remarkable period of malleability. I believe that Pavlov manipulated a
mammalian mechanism of pair bonding, for the nurture of altricial young
through sexual orgasm and lactation, mediated by oxytocin, and that our remote
ancestors evolved to adapt this mechanism for tribal bonding through dance,
chanting, rituals, and evangelical conversions (Sargant 1957, _Battle of the
Mind_). These dimensions of human experience can be encompassed by a theory
of neurodynamics, but not by theories of representation.
COGLUNCH WINTER SCHEDULE
Theme: Consciousness
1/18: JOHN FLAVELL (Psychology, Stanford U.) "The Development of Children's
Knowledge About Thinking and Consciousness"
1/25: GUVEN GUZELDERE (Philosophy & CSLI, Stanford U.) "The Nature of
Phenomenal Consciousness"
2/01: DAVID SPIEGEL (Psychiatry, Stanford U.) "Disintegrated Experience:
Dissociation, Hypnosis and Trauma"
2/08: PAT SUPPES (Philosophy, Stanford U.) "The Scientific Study of
Consciousness: Problems and Prospects"
2/15: BRIAN WANDELL (Psychology, Stanford U.) "Imaging Human Brain Activity"
2/22: WALTER FREEMAN (Neurobiology, UC Berkeley) "A Biological View of
Consciousness and Intentionality"
2/29: DAVID CHALMERS (Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz) "On the Search for a Neural
Correlate of Consciousness"
3/07: ALAN WALLACE (Religious Studies, Stanford U.) "Attentional Training,
Introspection, and the Investigation of Consciousness in Tibetan
Buddhism"
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 22 February
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Perception and Robot Navigation
Illah Nourbakhsh
Stanford Computer Science
[illah@xenon.stanford.edu]
This talk will address various approaches to using robot perception to guide a
robot through the world. I will demonstrate some of the methods on a live
robot during the talk. The problem of robot control based on limited and
error-prone sensor inputs is a classic one, with such proposed solutions as
reactive control, universal plans, state-tracking finite automata, and so
forth.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 23 February
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
The Classical Decision Problem and Turing's Reduction Method
Egon Boerger
Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita di Pisa (Italy)
and Siemens R&D, Munich (Germany)
In this talk a refinement of the Turing-Buechi method is presented which is
used extensively in the forthcoming Perspectives book "The Classical Decision
Problem" by Erich Graedel, Yuri Gurevich, and myself. The method allows us to
give uniform proofs for completeness phenomena at various levels of
complexity: r.e. completeness (reduction class property), E_n-completeness,
PSPACE-completeness, NP-completeness, etc., for decision problems, for the
model complexity of satisfiable formulae or of consistent theories, for
(generalized) spectra of formulae of type theory etc.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 23 February
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
Space Craft: Perceptual Aids for Cognitive Activity
Kevin Mullet
Macromedia
[mullet@macromedia.com]
The effective use of space and spatial metaphors is a critical success factor
in graphical user interface (GUI) design. Sadly, this is also an area that
has been largely neglected by toolkit, framework, and application developers.
Effective use of space is prohibitively difficult in modern GUI's because the
foundation layers of common software platforms provide little or no support
for complex, expressive layouts (OSF/Motif with its Form and Frame widgets is
one notable exception). Even worse, several familiar UI conventions such as
the use of "group boxes" linking labels to controls or non-modular button
widths that automatically match the length of their labels present severe
problems for spatial parsing but have nevertheless become common by virtue of
their availability in popular toolkits.
A coherent visual organization enhances not only the aesthetics of an
interface design, but its usability as well. Because spatial information is
available at the earliest stages of perceptual processing, displays with
spatial structure that is both obvious and relevant can be used to enhance
higher-level cognitive functions. Making the important contextualizing or
relational information apparent "at a glance" helps users orient themselves,
locate the information they need, and target or navigate efficiently. Spatial
relationships, moreover, can make information displays easier to understand by
revealing internal relationships more concretely and explicitly: the visual
structure of a carefully crafted display will both reflect and reinforce the
semantic structure of the underlying information.
Print designers have been acutely aware of the importance of space craft since
the Futurist, Constructivist, and De Stijl movements of the early 20th
century. Their pioneering experiments with active layouts, asymmetric
typography, and other spatial interactions showed how parts of a composition
exert forces on one another that can be controlled by the designer and used to
influence perception of the resulting display. These influential movements
form the foundation of modern graphic design, but their influence on user
interface design has thus far been minimal, at least in the area of software
tools and standard GUI environments (content-oriented multimedia has been
somewhat more successful).
The focus of this talk is on layout issues in 2-dimensional spaces. We will
briefly survey the growing popularity of 3d representations, but our emphasis
will be on the application of effective spatial design in four key areas:
* Visual Coding
* Visual Structure
* Visual Representation
* System Design
We will see how spatial articulation can be used, in each of these areas, to
simplify learning, enhance memory, and streamline problem solving. Numerous
examples will show how coherent visual structure makes a menu easier to scan,
a dialog easier to interpret, or a window easier to operate. We will also see
how careful space craft can reduce the need for explicit labeling and make the
interface more approachable for beginning users without sacrificing
operational efficiency for advanced users. Finally, we will describe one very
simple technique -- alignment of adjacent elements -- that can be applied
fairly mechanistically to virtually any problem in GUI design. With just a
little practice, this technique can be used to produce noticeable improvements
in the visual structure and aesthetic quality of practically any product.
KEVIN MULLET is the Product Designer for Macromedia's industry leading
multimedia authoring and graphics production tools (Director, Authorware,
SoundEdit, FreeHand, xRes, Extreme 3D) for the Macintosh and Windows
environments. He is also the lead designer for the Macromedia User Interface
-- a set of presentation and interaction design standards created to unify
suites of diverse applications in a series of task-focused, tightly-integrated
"digital design studios".
Previously Mr. Mullet was a Human Interface Engineer at Sun Microsystems,
Inc., where he worked on advanced UNIX development environments in SunPro and
on object-oriented desktop environments and productivity applications in
SunSoft. He has extensive application design experience and is a leading
expert on the OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface. Prior to joining Sun, he
was Senior Designer at Aaron Marcus and Associates -- a Berkeley, CA based
consulting firm specializing in systematic, information-oriented design for
graphical user interfaces.
Mr. Mullet holds a BS and MA in Industrial Design -- with specializations in
Visual Communication and Design Development, respectively -- from The Ohio
State University. He has conducted graduate-level research in experimental
psychology and is the holder of several patents for his user interface design
work. He has delivered lectures, papers, and tutorials on user interface
design at the ACM/SIGCHI, IDSA, MacWorld, and X Technical Conferences, and
presented courses and invited talks at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Ohio State, as well
as to numerous industry groups and professional societies.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 23 February
3:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-G
A Discussion of Self-Deception:
Donald Davidson (UC Berkeley Philosophy),
with Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Stanford French & Italian),
and Ariela Lazar (Stanford Philosophy)
(Sponsored by the Philosophy Club, Stanford University)
Donald Davidson of UC Berkeley will present his views on the phenomenon of
self-deception, as exemplified in his "Deception and Division" and "Paradoxes
of Irrationality," for instance. Following Davidson's talk there will be a
panel discussion led by Jean-Pierre Dupuy of the Stanford French and Italian
Department and Ariela Lazar of the Stanford Philosophy Department, with time
for questions toward the end of the talks. All are invited to attend.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 23 February
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100 (DIFFERENT LOCATION)
Optimizing Lexical Choice: Expletives and Opaque Clitics
as Cases of Minimal Violation
Jane Grimshaw
Rutgers Linguistics
The core of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) resides in the
hypothesis that constraints are universal, potentially conflicting, and
ranked. Constraints can be violated in well-formed sentences. Where two
constraints conflict on a given input it is the ranking of the constraints
that determines which of the available options is grammatical. Grammars are
nothing more than a ranking of the set of universal constraints. Within this
general theoretical framework, this talk offers an analysis of several cases
of apparently odd lexical choices. Why does English "choose" to have an
auxiliary "do" and an expletive "it"? Why do the Romance clitic combinations
show unexpected forms?
First, I will show that the distribution of the English auxiliary "do" can be
understood quite precisely in terms of constraint conflict. The occurrence of
"do" violates a constraint of Full-Interpretation, because "do" has no
semantic analysis. The verb thus occurs only when a higher ranked constraint,
such as Obligatory-Heads, is satisfied by its presence and violated in its
absence. "do" is thus possible only when necessary. From this perspective it
is not a lexical accident that English "has" a semantically empty auxiliary.
Rather it is a consequence of the grammar of the language, i.e. the ranking of
the constraints of UG, which forces the regular verb "do" to appear, but
without its meaning. The hypothesis is that "do" minimally violates
Full-Interpretation: any other verb would violate it more, having a more
highly specified semantics which is unparsed, or unanalyzed, when the verb is
meaningless. Every language with the (relevant) constraint rankings must have
"do", no language with crucially different rankings can have it. The
appearance of empty "do" is far from being a language particular lexical fact.
A similar point holds for other expletive elements. Based on joint work with
Vieri Samek-Lodovici, I will argue that the appearance of the expletive "it"
in English has the same analysis, fundamentally. English ranks
Full-Interpretation below the constraint(s) requiring a filled subject
position. Hence the grammar of English prefers using a nominal without its
meaning to leaving the subject position unfilled. Italian, with a different
constraint ranking, makes the opposite choice. But this is not a fact about
the lexicons of English and Italian, it is a fact about their grammars. Here
again, the hypothesis is that "it" rather than some other nominal element
occurs because it represents minimal violation: stripping the meaningful
pronoun "it" of its semantics is a lesser violation than stripping any other
nominal of the language.
In order to explore this idea further, and achieve a more principled view of
the way optimization affects lexical choice, I will extend the basic idea to
the "opaque" clitics in Romance (Bonet, NLLT 1995). These are cases where the
clitic pronoun occurring in a sequence of clitics is not the one to be
expected on the basis of the clitic pronouns as they occur in isolation. I
will argue that an optimality theoretic account can explain some of the
fundamental properties of this system. The basic idea is that there is a
constraint against adjacent occurrences of identical forms (*XX). Whether the
identity at issue is phonological, morphological, or both, is an issue to be
discussed. This constraint conflicts with faithfulness constraints, which
require the clitic which best analyzes (is most faithful to) the input to be
selected. When *XX dominates, an opaque clitic must occur.
An example can be found in Italian, where the impersonal subject clitic
pronoun is "si", but this is also the 3rd person reflexive. When both occur
in a single sentence, instead of "si si" we find "ci si", where the impersonal
subject is not realized as it would be in isolation. The hypothesis is, then,
that the perfect clitic, namely "si", is not available in this situation,
because of the effects of *XX. The clitic which does occur represents the
best the language can do in the situation. The chosen clitic involves minimal
violation of the morphological faithfulness constraints. Constraint
re-ranking explains the existence of considerable cross-dialectal and
cross-linguistic variation in this system.
In all of these cases, if the argument is correct, the actual choice of a
lexical item is determined by the grammar of the language. In all of these
cases, the lexical item that occurs is the one that minimally violates the
regulating constraints: Full-Interpretation for "do" and "it" and the
faithfulness constraints in the case of the opaque clitics. This proposal, in
which lexical choice is systematically optimized, cannot be instantiated
without a well-defined theory of optimality.
____________
SSP FILM SERIES
on Tuesday, 27 February
7:00 p.m., Cubberley Education Bldg, Room 133
Wittgenstein [feature film] (1993)
This 75 minute video is director Derek Jarman's surreal and fanciful biography
of the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who strove to define and
teach insights on communication and the powers and limits of language. The
film was co-written by Jarman, Terry Eagleton, and Ken Butler.
The Symbolic Systems Film Series showcases films and tapes of general
cognitive science interest. Attendance at film series events can substitute
for attendance at the Symbolic Systems Forum for students enrolled in SSP10
for one unit. All are welcome at these events. The showing of the videos is
followed by a discussion, and researchers who are knowledgeable about the
program's topic are urged to join us in evaluating it.
____________
PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTATION SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 27 February
7:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Readings in Computation: The Origin of Objects
Brian Cantwell Smith
Xerox PARC and Stanford Philosophy
[bcsmith@parc.xerox.com]
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 29 February
12:00 noon, Cordura Hall, Room 100
On the Search for a Neural Correlate of Consciousness
David Chalmers
UC Santa Cruz Philosophy
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 29 February
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Being Understood in a Disfluent World: A Psycholinguistic
Analysis of Oral Fluency and Nativeness
Timothy Seung Yoon Paek
Stanford Psychology
[paek@psych.stanford.edu]
When people beginning to learn a second language attempt to informally
communicate to a speaker of that language, they usually start off by producing
whole utterances, which they formulate first in their native language, then
translate accordingly. Since producing whole utterances is cognitively
taxing, native speakers produce parts of utterances, separating these parts by
hesitation phases or disfluencies. These phases allow native speakers to
formulate what they want to say next in a continuous synchronization of
production and formulation, which consequently facilitates a more fluid and
interactive conversation. The following talk endeavors to define what makes a
speaker of a language "native," and how second language learners develop into
native speakers. This talk is motivated by both theoretical and applied
concerns.
TIMOTHY SEUNG YOON PAEK is a second year graduate student in cognitive
psychology working with Prof. Herbert Clark.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 1 March
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
Using Nonstandard Analysis to Ensure the
Correctness of Symbolic Computations
Michael Beeson
UC Santa Clara Mathematics
[beeson@cats.ucsc.edu]
Nonstandard analysis has been put to use in a theorem-prover, where it assists
in the analysis of formulae involving limits. The theorem-prover in question
is used in the computer program MATHPERT to ensure the correctness of
calculations in calculus. This is of interest because well known symbolic
computation programs are logically unsound (e.g., divide both sides of the
equation x=0 by x and get 1=0 in Macsyma, Derive, and Mathematica). The
general problem of keeping symbolic calculations correct requires a
considerable logical apparatus, and limit calculations are particularly
treacherous, but nonstandard analysis greatly simplifies the treatment. We
will describe a procedure for the "elimination of infinitesimals" (implemented
in MATHPERT) and prove its correctness.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 1 March
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
Designing for Interactivity: From Diagrams to Virtual Reality
Yvonne Rogers
University of Sussex
[yvonne@cs.stanford.edu]
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 1 March
3:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
Gesture Spaces and Mental Maps
John Haviland
Reed College
Starting with three exemplary utterances which include apparent "pointing
gestures," I consider the relationship between spatial information encoded in
spoken language and that apparently conveyed by conversational gesture. A
previous study of a Guugu Yimithirr (Paman) narrative showed how semiotically
complex representations of local geography were incorporated into both verbal
formulations and gestural performance in recounting events -- in this case, a
shipwreck in the waters off northern Queensland. Here I explore some
indexical properties of referential devices, both spoken and gestured: how
they link their referents to context, physical and conceptual, and how in the
examples presented this link crucially depends on an insistent orientation by
cardinal directions. I extend the empirical reach to Tzotzil (Mayan), spoken
in highland Chiapas, Mexico, which unlike Guugu Yimithirr has little explicit
linguistic (or at least spoken) support for such directional acuity. Here,
too, the indexical spaces or projected contexts of utterances, including
gestures, seem to show the same range of semiotic properties as those evident
in the Australian case. Finally I consider some apparent conceptual operations
-- "transpositions" and "laminations" -- which interlocutors must necessarily
apply to their representations of space if the utterances -- and especially
the gestures -- they produce are to be successfully interpreted.
____________