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CSLI Calendar, 07 Mar 1996, vol.11:19
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To: friends@Arch.Stanford.EDU
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 07 Mar 1996, vol.11:19
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From: Tom Burke <burke@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
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Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 12:29:37 -0800 (PST)
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Flags: 000000000000
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
______________________________________________________________________________
7 March 1996 Stanford Vol. 11, No. 19
______________________________________________________________________________
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 7 -- 15 MARCH 1996
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
Abstract below
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
Abstract below
MONDAY, 11 MARCH
12:00 - Semantics Workshop
Cordura Hall, Room 100
On the Semantics of Locatives
Vivienne Fong, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 12 MARCH
TBA - Stanford Phonology Workshop
Room to be announced
A Constraint-Based Analysis of Gilbertese Prosody
Juliette Blevins, Stanford / Berkeley / Western Australia
Abstract below
7:00 - SSP Film Series
Cubberley Education Building, Room 133
Complexity [Radio debate featuring Stuart Kauffman, John
Holland, Peter Coveney, and John Horgan] (1995)
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, 13 MARCH
4:15 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Gates Hall, Room 104
Modeling the Reduction of Classification Errors Obtained
by Combining Classifiers
Kamal Mahmood Ali, IBM Almaden Research Center
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 14 MARCH
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Title to be announced
Penelope Eckert, Stanford Linguistics
FRIDAY, 15 MARCH
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
Magic Cap Human Interface: Adventures in Design
Kevin Lynch, General Magic
Abstract below
3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
Building 460, Room 146
The Human Sentence Processor Memory Structure and
Accessibility: Can You Tell the Difference?
Charles Lee, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
____________
The CSLI Calendar appears weekly on Wednesdays throughout the academic year.
Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in the Calendar can
be submitted to [mailto:incalendar@csli.stanford.edu].
Information about CSLI's research program and past issues of the CSLI Calendar
are available at [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/]. The CSLI Calendar is
also posted each week to [news://nntp-csli.stanford.edu/csli.bboard].
____________
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,
comments welcome), 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 situation-types
as families 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.
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, 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]
Screen-readers -- computer software that enables a visually impaired user to
read the contents of a visual display -- have been available for more than a
decade. Screen-readers are separate from the user application. Consequently,
they have little or no contextual information about the contents of the
display. The author has used traditional screen-reading applications for the
last five years. The design of the speech-enabling approach described here
has been implemented in Emacspeak to overcome many of the shortcomings he has
encountered with traditional screen-readers.
The approach used by Emacspeak is very different from that of traditional
screen-readers. Screen-readers allow the user to listen to the contents
appearing in different parts of the display; but the user is entirely
responsible for building a mental model of the visual display in order to
interpret what an application is trying to convey. Emacspeak, on the other
hand, does not speak the screen. Instead, applications provide both visual
and speech feedback, and the speech feedback is designed to be sufficient by
itself.
This approach reduces cognitive load on the user and is relevant to providing
general spoken access to information. Producing spoken output from within the
application, rather than speaking the visually displayed information, vastly
improves the quality of the spoken feedback. Thus, an application can display
its results in a visually pleasing manner; the speech-enabling component
renders the same in an aurally pleasing way.
T. V. RAMAN received his PhD in Computer Science and Applied Math from Cornell
in May 1994. His thesis work on AsTeR -- Audio System For Technical Readings
was awarded the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for 1994. He worked at
Digital Equipment Corp.'s Cambridge Research Lab from Feb 1994 to Sep 1995,
and and now works at Adobe Systems in Mountain View. His research interests
include electronic publishing and multimedia user interfaces.
____________
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]
Over the last few years, Chomsky has argued for what he calls a "minimalist"
program in linguistics. In this talk, I shall attempt to show that
reflections on what seems be required in order to provide a philosophically
useful theory of "logical form" lead naturally to a conception of syntax that
is very close to the conception Chomsky appears to have in mind. To put
things another way, I shall outline a research program in syntax and semantics
that seems to explain (i) why formal languages have tended to look the way
they do, (ii) the empirical and philosophical demands placed on a theories of
variable-binding and logical form, (iii) what was right -- and what was very
wrong -- about talk of "LF", (iv) what was right about generative semantics
(before it went nuts), and (v) what is right about the idea that syntax is
just a projection of lexical properties.
____________
SEMANTICS SEMINAR
on Monday, 11 March
12:00, Cordura Hall, Room 100
On the Semantics of Locatives
Vivienne Fong
Stanford Linguistics
[fong@csli.stanford.edu]
A construction like `I left/forgot the keys INTO the car' is ungrammatical in
English, but is perfect in Finnish:
Unohd-i-n kirja-n auto-on/ *auto-ssa
forget-PAST-1P book-GEN car-ILLATIVE/ car-INESSIVE
I forgot a/the book in (lit. `into'/*`in') a/the car.
I show that the semantics of directional locatives in Finnish and English are
different. The Finnish directional locative cases (e.g., Illative Case) have
a temporal interpretation, introducing anterior/posterior time intervals in
relation to the time of the event denoted by the veb. In contrast, English
directional prepositions encode meanings of transition/change (cf. Dowty 1979,
Jackendoff 1990, Wunderlich 1991), which are incompatible with verbs that do
not denote path/change of state (e.g., `leave').
____________
STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 12 March
Time and place to be announced
A Constraint-Based Analysis of Gilbertese Prosody
Juliette Blevins
Stanford / Berkeley / Western Australia
[juliette@csli.stanford.edu]
In this talk I present evidence for ternary metrical constituents in
Gilbertese, a Micronesian language spoken in Kiribati by approximately 55,000
people, and demonstrate how these constituents can be generated by well
motivated constraints on metrical systems. The terminal elements of stress
feet in Gilbertese are moras, not syllables. Further, the optimal foot in
Gilbertese contains three moras. These trimoraic constituents are typical
units of stress, and also define prosodic word size and shape. Ternary feet
are quite rare cross-linguistically, and Gilbertese appears to be the only
language in the world with a ternary constraint on prosodic word size. The
occurrence of trimoraic feet where possible in Gilbertese, but bimoraic feet
elsewhere is taken as strong evidence that ternarity is the consequence of a
grammar of ranked and violable constraints.
____________
SSP FILM SERIES
on Tuesday, 12 March
7:00 p.m., Cubberley Education Bldg, Room 133
Complexity (1995)
This 55 minute radio debate from NPR's _Talk of the Nation: Science Friday_
program features John Horgan, a writer for _Scientific American_ and a critic
of the "science of complexity" in conversation with three authors of recent
books on the subject: Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute (author of _At
Home In The Universe_ and _The Origins of Order_), John Holland of the
University of Michigan (author of _Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds
Complexity_), and Peter Coveney of Schlumberger, Cambridge (co-author of
_Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World_). They
discuss whether computer modeling of nonlinear systems is, as is sometimes
claimed, leading to general and useful principles for the study of life, the
mind, and human interactions.
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, 12 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]
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 13 March
4:15 p.m., Gates Hall, Room 104
Modeling the Reduction of Classification Errors
Obtained by Combining Classifiers
Kamal Mahmood Ali
IBM Almaden Research Center
This talk presents two empirical results and an observation about the learning
of multiple models -- also referred to as "decision committees" or
"ensembles." The most important result is the first empirical confirmation of
the widely held belief that multiple models can reduce error rates (as
compared to the error rate of the single model learned on the same data) when
the models make errors in an uncorrelated manner. Specifically, we show that
one can model the amount of error reduction by the degree to which the
individual models make errors in an uncorrelated manner. However, this is
only a post-hoc method for explaining the amount of error reduction. It would
be useful to estimate the amount of potential error reduction during the
learning process itself. Towards this end, the second result shows that
models make less correlated errors in domains in which there are many ties in
the model evaluation metric during learning. The observation that follows
>From these results is that one should learn models that make errors in a
negatively- correlated manner rather than ones that make errors in an
uncorrelated manner. This strategy runs counter to "common wisdom" in the
multiple models community.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 14 March
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Title to be announced
Penelope Eckert
Stanford Linguistics
[eckert@csli.stanford.edu]
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 15 March
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
Magic Cap Human Interface: Adventures in Design
Kevin Lynch
General Magic
[kevin_lynch@genmagic.com]
Our goal in designing Magic Cap was to create a personal communicator that
people would welcome into their lives, rather than be a source of stress. In
order to achieve this, we worked to come up with designs that people could not
only use successfully but also enjoy doing so.
This mission resulted in a several year design adventure, including living
through our first rather interesting usability tests, struggling with
touchscreens, coming up with solutions, relentlessly iterating, and gradually
zeroing in on a successful design.
This fast-paced presentation will use video clips from usability tests as well
as early design sketches to review some of these adventures.
At the conclusion, the speaker will accept challenges to remember why any
aspect of Magic Cap is the way it is and will either tell the story behind it
or be forced to make up something convincing.
KEVIN LYNCH has been designing human interfaces for over a decade and is
currently Director of the Magic Cap development team at General Magic. He
pioneered the development of Magic Cap's navigation metaphor and has been
responsible for unleashing several features in Magic Cap including Sniffy the
searching dog. The Magic Cap human interface can be seen in the Sony Magic
Link and Motorola Envoy personal communicators.
Kevin studied computer graphics at the University of Illinois at Chicago ,
where he focused on interactive graphics, working with artists and engineers
in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory. While in school, Kevin helped
start Challenger Software to create Macintosh applications in 1984, including
Legacy, a graphic adventure game, and Mac 3D, a three-dimensional modeling
package. He served as the company's Vice President of Product Development.
Kevin later joined Frame Technology , where he designed the human interface
for the first Macintosh version of FrameMaker in 1989, then managed Frame's
Core Technology Group, directing the creation of FrameMaker 4. Kevin came to
General Magic in 1992 and has helped lead the design of the Magic Cap human
interface, doing his best to create interfaces that succeed at being both
functional and enjoyable.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 15 March
3:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
The Human Sentence Processor Memory Structure and
Accessibility: Can You Tell the Difference?
Charles Lee
Stanford Linguistics
[clee@csli.stanford.edu]
There have been numerous models proposed to model human sentence parsing
performance (Frazier & Fodor 1978, Marcus 1980, Church 1982, Abney 1989,
Gibson 1991, Jurafsky 1993, Stevenson 1994). A brief discussion of these
models and their limitations will be presented. This talk will introduce a
model which accounts for parsing preferences, the ease of processing sentences
with certain types of local ambiguity, as well as accounts for the gradedness
and multi-dimensionality in the difficulty of processing center-embedded, high
attachment, and strong and weak garden path sentences. Examples of sentences
which the processor can account for are shown below:
(1) a. Mary watched the Olympic trials on TV.
b. Mary watched the Olympic trials on TV on his new color TV.
c. Tom believed Bill thought Mary took out the cat on Monday.
(2) a. John believes Bill.
b. John believes Bill died.
c. Susan put the book on the shelf into her backpack.
(3) a. The mouse the cat the dog barked at chased is mine.
b. men women children dogs bark at adore love are rare.
(4) a. John gave the claim that Bill thought Mary died no credibility.
b. I gave the girl whom you thought Bill liked a book.
c. I gave the boy who you wanted to give the books to three books.
(5) a. Without her donations to the charity that won failed to appear.
b. Without her donations failed to appear.
b. After the man drank the water proved to be poisoned.
(6) a. The man gave the girl a ring impressed a watch.
b. The horse raced past the barn fell.
The proposed model has a memory architecture which consists of a workspace of
3D-tree fragments for which the accessibility and immediate accessibility of
its nodes are limited. An accessible node requires a unit of short-term
memory, and the total number of short-term memory units is bounded. The
parsing algorithm uses an ordered non-deterministic depth-first search
algorithm, constructing tree-fragments using a modified head-corner parsing
algorithm. Because of the unique memory architecture, the model requires, for
a whole parse, only constant time per transition.
The proposed human parsing model was implemented as a computer program and
will be demonstrated at this talk, illustrating how this model processes the
above types of sentences.
____________