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CSLI Calendar, 29 Feb 1996, vol.11:18
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To: friends@Arch.Stanford.EDU
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 29 Feb 1996, vol.11:18
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From: Tom Burke <burke@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
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Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 09:40:42 -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
______________________________________________________________________________
29 February 1996 Stanford Vol. 11, No. 18
______________________________________________________________________________
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 29 FEBRUARY -- 8 MARCH 1996
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
Abstract below
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
12:05 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Chemistry Gazebo
Theory Refinement for Probabilistic Knowledge Bases
Raymond J. Mooney, UT Austin Computer Sciences
Abstract below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
Designing for Interactivity: From Diagrams to Virtual Reality
Yvonne Rogers, University of Sussex
Abstract below
3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
Building 460, Room 146
Gesture Spaces and Mental Maps
John Haviland, Reed College
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 5 MARCH
7:00 - SSP Film Series
Cubberley Education Building, Room 133
The Strange New Science of Chaos (1989)
Abstract below
7:15 - Philosophy of Computation Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Readings in Computation: The Origin of Objects
Brian Cantwell Smith, Xerox PARC
WEDNESDAY, 6 MARCH
3:15 - Semantics Workshop
Cordura Hall, Room 104
Association with Focus and Association with Focus Phrase
Manfred Krifka, UT Austin and CASBS
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 7 MARCH
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
What Is It Like To Be Situated?
Tom Burke, CSLI
Abstract below
12:00 - CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Attentional Training, Introspection, and the Investigation
of Consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism
Alan Wallace, Stanford Religious Studies
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Stepping Out of the Box: Interfaces as Human Environments
Larry Friedlander, Stanford English
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 8 MARCH
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
EmacSpeak
T. V. Raman, Adobe Systems
3:15 - Philosophy Department Colloquium
Encina Hall, Room 423
Heidegger's Critique of Husserl's (& Searle's)
Account of Intentionality
Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley Philosophy
3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
Building 460, Room 146
Chomsky's Minimalist Program: Philosophical Reflections
on Logical Form
Stephen Neale, UC Berkeley Philosophy
____________
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.
____________
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
The search for the "neural correlate" of consciousness has exploded in recent
years, with a plethora of seemingly incompatible proposals. Given that we do
not have a "consciousness meter" for detecting conscious experience directly,
any such research requires some pre-experimental background principles to get
off the ground (for example, in formulating criteria for the presence of
consciousness). These principles are usually left implicit, but an explicit
analysis of their nature has strong consequences in the search for a neural
correlate of consciousness. In this talk I will draw out some of these
consequences and sketch a theoretical synthesis of current empirical work in
the area.
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, 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 COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Friday, 1 March
12:05 p.m., Chemistry Gazebo
Theory Refinement for Probabilistic Knowledge Bases
Raymond J. Mooney
UT Austin Computer Science
Revising existing knowledge bases to fit empirical data is a machine learning
problem with important applications to the development of expert systems.
Over the past seven years, we have developed a series of systems for revising
various kinds of knowledge bases ranging from logical (propositional and first
order) to probabilistic (certainty-factor rules and Bayesian networks). This
talk will review our history of work on theory refinement and focus on our
recent methods for combining neural-network and symbolic learning methods to
refine probabilistic knowledge. In these methods, a variation of
back-propagation is used to refine numeric parameters and symbolic methods are
used to make structural changes. Results will be presented on several
knowledge bases in the areas of diagnosis and molecular biology.
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.
NOTE: This week the learning seminar will be combined with the SigLunch, which
occurs on FRIDAY at 12:05 PM rather than Wednesday at 4:15 PM. Also, it will
be held in the Chemistry Gazebo, the small octagonal building between Gates
and the parking structure off Campus Drive.
____________
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]
Advances in graphical technology have now made it possible for us to interact
with information in innovative ways, most notably by exploring multimedia
environments and by manipulating 3-D virtual worlds. Many benefits have been
claimed for this new kind of interactivity. Within education, there is much
excitement about how learning can be enhanced. For example, the ability to
travel through virtual bodies and move around in a simulated world of
dinosaurs, made possible by the new technologies, is thought to provide
enriched ways of discovering knowledge and understanding the world.
Such optimism about the capabilities of the new graphical technologies begs
the question of what is actually gained through interacting with explicit,
dynamic 3-D worlds as opposed to good-old fashioned, single media, e.g.,
books, films and audio? Why, for example, should a 3-D virtual model of a
heart that changes in response to user interaction be more effective at
teaching how the heart works compared with a schematic diagram representing
it? What is the added learning value of these new ways of visualizing and
manipulating information?
In my talk I will begin by pointing out how little we know about how
interacting with multimedia and virtual environments can enhance learning.
Furthermore, despite the hype, designers have had little guidance as to how to
create effective commercial interactive educational material. Instead, there
has been a tendency to follow a general principle of "more is more" and
develop CD-ROMs consisting of a mish-mash of images, video, text, animations
and audio combined with overly complex and poorly "stitched" together
interfaces.
What is needed is a better understanding of interactivity. In the second part
of my talk I will describe our research project called ECO-i, in which we are
developing a theoretical and methodological framework with the goal of
"designing for interactivity." Our approach has been to conceptualize
interactivity in relation to how we "read" and integrate multiple
representations of information and the kinds of externalizing activities
(e.g., annotating, making notes) that we use in this process. From this
analysis, we show how the key to designing interactive graphical
representations -- that can enhance learning -- is to know how to combine and
convey different abstractions of information. As an example, I will show how
concepts in ecology have been represented in commercial CD-ROMs and compare
these with our own design solutions.
YVONNE ROGERS is on sabbatical from the School of Cognitive and Computing
Sciences at Sussex University (UK) and is currently a visiting professor in
the Computer Science Dept at Stanford University, where she is teaching a
course in CSCW and groupware CS377C. Her research interests are in graphical
representations, external cognition, HCI and CSCW. The research project
reported on is funded by the UK's ESRC Cognitive Engineering Initiative.
____________
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.
____________
SSP FILM SERIES
on Tuesday, 5 March
7:00 p.m., Cubberley Education Bldg, Room 133
The Strange New Science of Chaos (1989)
This is a 60 minute video from the NOVA series. Some scientists believe that
turbulent processes like weather, waterfalls, irregular heartbeats, and even
brain waves actually have a hidden and highly-ordered structure, a reversal of
Isaac Newton's long-accepted vision of a clockwork universe unfolding with
perfect precision. This program explores an interesting new science that
exploring how to analyze, and derive benefit from, a universe of chaos.
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, 5 March
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]
____________
SEMANTICS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 March
3:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 104
Association with Focus and Association with Focus Phrase
Manfred Krifka
UT Austin and CASBS
[krifka@casbs.stanford.edu]
Association with focus has been recognized as a syntactically unbounded
phenomenon (cf. Anderson 1972, Jackendoff 1972). In the following example,
the association of the focus-sensitive operator "only" violates the complex
noun phrase constraint:
(1) Sue only_1 talked to [the man who raved about [MARY's]F1 book].
Examples like that have been seen as evidence against a movement analysis of
focus (e.g., Rooth 1985). But Drubig (1994) argues that association with
focus is, in fact, bounded; for him, the "only" in (1) associates with the NP
[the man ... book], which he calls the "focus phrase". Drubig adduces
evidence from overt focus movement and correlative phrases; I will present
additional evidence from semantic interpretation. However, I will also show
that the relation between a focus phrase and the focus contained in it is
syntactically unbounded. This naturally leads to a hybrid theory of focus
association: Association with focus phrases can be modeled by syntactic
movement or an equivalent process, such as operator storage. Association of a
focus phrase with its focus can be modeled by a process like Alternative
Semantics that disregards syntactic boundedness. I will present additional
evidence for this division of labor from cases involving two focus-sensitive
operators within the same sentence, and cases in which one operator is
associated with two focus phrases. In particular, I will argue that
coindexing of operators and their focus phrases is necessary, whereas
coindexing between focus phrases and their foci can be dispensed with.
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 7 March
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
What Is It Like To Be Situated?
Tom Burke
CSLI
[burke@csli.stanford.edu]
My target in this talk will be to propose and explain an "ability-based"
conception of situations. I will refer to some material on ability-based
logic which I am writing up in a paper about the GUI problem, "What Is It Like
To Be a Blind Person?" [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/users/burke/ability.ps],
which you are encouraged to look at beforehand, though that is not absolutely
necessary. In that paper I demonstrate how to construct just about all the
logical machinery you would ever want, on the basis of the simple notion of
agents' "abilities" to reliably produce specific "events". What I want to do
in this talk is to present a conception of situations and situation-types as
classes of models arising naturally as part of this logical machinery.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 7 March
12:00 noon, Cordura Hall, Room 100
Attentional Training, Introspection, and the Investigation
of Consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism
Alan Wallace
Stanford Religious Studies
Since the eighth century, when Buddhism was introduced into Tibet from India,
the exploration of phenomenal consciousness has been of central importance to
the Tibetan intelligentsia. First-hand investigation of one's own mind has
been seen as the primary means of knowing the nature of all mental phenomena,
including consciousness itself. Recognizing that the untrained mind is an
unreliable tool for probing its own nature, the Tibetans adopted and developed
numerous means of enhancing attentional stability and clarity. The nature of
such training and its implications for the study of consciousness will be the
topic of this lecture.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 7 March
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Stepping Out of the Box: Interfaces as Human Environments
Larry Friedlander
Stanford English
[larryf@leland.stanford.edu]
Computers of the future will no longer be in that now-familiar box, but will
be hidden in the world around us, embedded in floors and walls, and tucked
away in everyday objects. They will be controlled by voice, by movement,
perhaps even by brain waves and body temperature, It will be a world of
virtual and real presences, strangely intermingled. How will we design for
such technology?
Theater and performance traditions offer one paradigm that will be more and
more useful in these radically new situations. I will discuss some early
attempts I and others have made to explore these new kinds of interface and
speculate on some further strategies.
LARRY FRIEDLANDER, a professor of English Literature and Theater at Stanford
University, began working in multimedia design and applications in 1983 with
the prize-winning Shakespeare Project. In 1990 Friedlander formed the
Interactive Shakespeare Group with Professors Donaldson and Murray from MIT to
further explore this area. He has developed many applications in theater and
education. Professor Friedlander has worked in major research laboratories:
At the Apple Multimedia Lab, the MIT Media Lab, and the Mitsubishi Electronic
Research Laboratory among others. He is also heavily involved in museum
design and planning, and is now advising the Museum of Scotland, a new
national museum due to open in Edinburgh in 1999. He has done work with
numerous other institutions such as the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and is
currently Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Friedlander is now
chair of the committee that is planning a new Center for Innovation in
Technology and Education at Stanford.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 8 March
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
EmacSpeak
T. V. Raman
Adobe Systems
[raman@mv.us.adobe.com]
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 8 March
3:15 p.m., Encina Hall, Room 423
Heidegger's Critique of Husserl's (and Searle's)
Account of Intentionality
Hubert Dreyfus
UC Berkeley Philosophy
(Co-sponsored by the Hume Society)
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 8 March
3:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
Chomsky's Minimalist Program: Philosophical Reflections
on Logical Form
Stephen Neale
UC Berkeley Philosophy
[neale@garnet.berkeley.edu]
____________