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CSLI Calendar, 24 September 1997, vol. 13:2
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
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24 September 1997 Stanford Vol. 13, No. 2
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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
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ACTIVITIES DURING 24 SEPTEMBER -- 3 OCTOBER 1997
WEDNESDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Internet Archive the Web or Something
Brewster Kahle
Alexa
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
Copyright and the Future of the Information Society
Pamela Samuelson,
School of Law and SIMS, U.C. Berkeley
Abstract below
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Gates 100
Machine Learning for Adaptive User Interfaces
Pat Langley
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER
Noon Logic Lunch
Room 380:383N
`Naturalizing' Platonistic Mathematics
Eckehart Koehler,
University of Vienna
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
to be announced
THURSDAY, 2 OCTOBER
Noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Art Shimamura
Berkeley
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
The Nitride-based Revolution in Light-emitting Devices
Fernando Ponce and David Bour, PARC
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EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
4:15PM, Wednesday, 24 September 1997
NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
[http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html]
Datamining the Web to create a Navigation service: Alexa
Brewster Kahle
President Alexa Internet and Internet Archive
[http://www.alexa.com/]
Named for the Library of Alexandria, Alexa is a free Internet
navigation service that learns from people. To do this, we use a full
archive of the public web and aggregated usage paths of many people.
For any web page, Alexa suggests other pages that one might want to
see. Going beyond keyword search, we use the paths that other users
have taken to find "the good stuff". If we develop a system that can
leverage what millions have thought, then we will have built something
new and useful.
Keyword searching is being stretched: using 2 words to find the right
10 documents out of 100 million is a very difficult task. Another
approach is to manually catalog web documents to create a directory.
The largest directory only points to much less than 1% of the current
web. The problem is getting worse: the number of websites is doubling
every 6 months (we have found this because we are crawling and
archiving the whole public web). Alexa's goal is to be knowledgeable on
every subject to suggest where the quality web resources are. Alexa is
not an "artificial intelligence", rather aggregates and organizes what
it learns from people. We do this by looking for patterns in the usage
patterns, hypertext link structures, and content of the web.
7 terabytes of web content, usage trails of 10's of thousands, tape
robots are all combined to build this service. We welcome ideas on how
to do this better. [http://www.alexa.com/]
About the speaker: Cofounded Alexa Internet in 1996. In 1989 invented
Wide Area Information Servers, an early Internet publishing system,
founded WAIS Inc, which worked with Dow Jones, NYTimes, Government
Printing Office, Encyclopaedia Britannica to put them on the net. Sold
WAIS Inc to America Online in 1995.
Before that went to MIT, and helped start Thinking Machines a
massively parallel computer company. There he architected a Connection
Machine and started using them for mining large text collections.
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XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 25 September 1997, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
[http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum]
Copyright and the Future of the Information Society
Pamela Samuelson
School of Law
and School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS),
U. C. Berkeley
Copyright has, and will likely continue to have, an important role in
the information economy and in what is often termed "the information
society". Copyright's role in the future economy and in the larger
society is far from clear just now. Debates on this issue can be heard
in academe, in Silicon Valley, and in Congress. This talk will
contrast two views of copyright for the information society: one that
regards it as strictly limited to promoting commodity interests and
another which regards it as a construct that should be configured to
promote a broader set of social interests.
Biography: Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of
California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of
Information Management & Systems and in the School of Law. Her
principal area of expertise is intellectual property law. She has
written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new
information technologies pose for the traditional legal regimes. She
is a Contributing Editor of the Communications of the ACM, for which
she writes a regular "Legally Speaking" column. In June of 1997 she
was named a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation. She is also a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.
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SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Wednesday, 25 September 1997, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates 100
[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html]
Machine Learning for Adaptive User Interfaces
Pat Langley
Intelligent Systems Laboratory
Daimler-Benz Research & Technology Center
and
Computational Learning Laboratory
CSLI/Stanford University
In this talk I examine the growing interest in adaptive user
interfaces and explore the role that machine learning plays in them. I
begin by reviewing the issues that arise in developing systems that
learn from experience, then draw a strong analogy with interfaces that
adapt to their users. After this, I consider two broad classes of such
adaptive interfaces -- informative and generative -- and present some
fielded examples of each type. Next I describe two new systems -- the
Adaptive Place Advisor and the Adaptive Route Advisor -- that we are
developing at Daimler-Benz and that address some issues normally
ignored in work on this topic. Finally, I consider some
characteristics of adaptive user interfaces that distinguish them from
others applications of machine learning, including the relation
between the user models they construct and cognitive simulations of
human behavior.
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LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 26 September 1997, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
`Naturalizing' Platonistic Mathematics
Eckehart Koehler, University. of Vienna
My goal is, first, understanding Goedel's Platonistic philosophy of
mathematics, second, trying to make it compatible with
naturalism. Both Platonism and naturalism turn out to be faulty as
they are usually characterized, and after necessary revision they turn
out to be -- compatible! (Of course one might argue about retiring
the brand identifiers, if this is true.) Issues dealt with include
i. distinguishing between "weak" and "strong" Platonism in Goedel's
senses, based on the sizes of their domains;
ii. defining a useful distinction between the real and the ideal world
based on a modal distinction between 2 different types of knowledge
claims (factual vs. normative);
iii. identifying the cognitive bases for the two types
of knowledge in empirical observation and in rational intuition,
showing them to be extraordinarily analogous, just as Goedel
claimed;
iv. showing conventionalism (noncognitivist foundations for
mathematics) to be not only compatible with Platonism [my own
argument] but even requires it [Goedel's argument against Carnap].
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