[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

CSLI Calendar, 1 October 1997, vol. 13:3



                 
   
     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
______________________________________________________________________

1 October 1997                 Stanford                 Vol. 13, No. 3
______________________________________________________________________

                     A weekly publication of the
       Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
      Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
                             ____________

            ACTIVITIES DURING 1 OCTOBER -- 11 OCTOBER 1997

WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER
         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                The ATLAS I Single-Chip ATM Switch:
                Toward Universal Networking with Advanced Flow Control
                Architectures 
                Manolis Katevenis
                FORTH and University of Crete, Greece
                Abstract below

THURSDAY, 2 OCTOBER
        12 Noon CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                The Mystery Spot Revealed: 
                A Unified Account of Geometric Illusions
                Art Shimamura
                Berkeley
                Abstract below

         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                The Nitride-based Revolution in Light-emitting Devices
                Fernando Ponce and David Bour, PARC
                Abstract below

         4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
                Gates 100
                eMotif: Inferring Characterizations of Protein Families
                Craig Nevill-Manning
                Biochemistry Department, Stanford University.
                Abstract below

FRIDAY, 3 OCTOBER
        Noon    Logic Lunch
                Room 380:381T (note room change)
                On the decision problem for logics with two variables
                Martin Otto 
                Aachen, visiting Stanford
                Abstract below

        12:30am Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
                Finding Objects in Large Collections of Images
                Jitendra Malik, UC Berkeley
                Abstract below

MONDAY, 6 OCTOBER
         4:15pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
                Gates 104
                Gene Golovchinsky (PARC)

WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER
         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                DEC Preservation of Historical Computer Systems
                Bob Supnik
                Abstract below

THURSDAY, 9 OCTOBER
        12 noon CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Creating Context in Interaction Design: 
                What can we Learn from Cognitive Science?
                Terry Winograd
                Stanford CS

         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                Ebonics: A Closer Look
                John Rickford, Stanford University 

         4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
                Gates 100
                To be announced

FRIDAY, 10 OCTOBER
        12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
                The Digital Michelangelo Project
                Marc Levoy, Stanford Computer Science

         3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
                Bldg. 90:92Q
                "From Russell's Paradox to Higher Set Theory"
                Harvey Friedman, Ohio State University

SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER
       10am-3pm Symposia: Are Computers Approaching Human-Level
                Creativity?
                Law School, room 290
                Symposium I: Chess and Go
                Information below
                             ____________

                       UPCOMING EVENTS OF NOTE

Three things are of particular interest.  

1. The Symposia on "Are Computers Approaching Human-Level Creativity?"
organized by Douglas Hofstadter.  See

http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/CCARH/events/courses/symp97f.html 

for full information.

2. On 16 October 1997, CSLI will be holding a series of talks on
"Using Action and Technology to Build Community".   This is organized
by Keith Devlin and full information can be found at 

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/special-971016.shtml

3. On November 12-14, 1997, CSLI will be holding its semi-annual
Interface Lab Workshop Tutorials.  Full information can be found at. 

http://www-csli/csli/Tutorials/iapschedule.nov97.html

                             ____________

            EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
                  4:15PM, Wednesday, 1 October 1997
         NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
      [http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html]

                 The ATLAS I Single-Chip ATM Switch:
 Toward Universal Networking with Advanced Flow Control Architectures
                          Manolis Katevenis
                FORTH and University of Crete, Greece
   
ATLAS I is a single-chip ATM switch with optional credit-based
(backpressure) flow control. This 4-million-transistor 0.35-micron
CMOS chip, which is about to be taped out for fabrication, offers 20
Gbit/s aggregate I/O throughput, 16 serial gigabaud I/O links with
link bundling, sub-microsecond cut-through latency, 256-cell shared
buffer containing multiple logical output queues, priorities,
multicasting, and load monitoring. ATLAS I is a general-purpose
building block for high-speed communication in wide (WAN), local
(LAN), and system (SAN) area networking, supporting a mixture of
services from real-time, guaranteed quality-of-service to best-effort,
bursty and flooding traffic, in a range of applications from telecom
to multimedia and multiprocessor NOW.

This talk will describe the architecture of ATLAS I and how to use it
in systems. We will show how its multilane backpressure can be used
inside large switch boxes to offer the high performance of output
queuing at the low cost of input queuing, how this internal
backpressure is interfaced to the external (rate or credit based) flow
control, and how the ATLAS backpressure protocol compares favorably to
the wormhole protocol.

We will argue that cell-based switching, per-connection queuing, and
hop-by-hop flow control are essential features for universal
networking with high quality of service. Modern VLSI technology is
ripe for implementing them at gigabit speeds.

Biography: Manolis Katevenis is a professor of Computer Science at the
University of Crete; he heads the Computer Architecture and VLSI
Systems Division of the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for
Research & Technology -- Hellas (FORTH), in Heraklion, Crete,
Greece. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford
University in 1984-85. In 1980-83, his research was on RISC
architectures. Since 1984, his research focuses on architectures and
hardware implementation for high-speed networking with fairness and
QoS.

Manolis Katevenis is spending his Fall'97 semester of Sabbatical leave
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
                             ____________

                            CSLI COGLUNCH
                 on Thursday, 2 October 1997, 12 noon
                        Cordura Hall, Room 100
            [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/]

                      The Mystery Spot Revealed:
               A Unified Account of Geometric Illusions
                            Art Shimamura
                               Berkeley

Geometric illusions can distort the perceived length (Ponzo),
orientation (Rod-Frame), spatial displacement (Poggendorf), or
curvature (Wundt-Herring) of stimuli. I introduce a new
view--Orientation Framing Theory--to account for these geometric
illusions. Two other new illusions, the Mystery Spot and Elevation
illusions, are described that bolster the theory. In several
experiments, the Orientation Framing Theory compares favorably in
relation to other competing views (e.g., perceived depth,
assimilation, spatial frequency blurring). As such, this new, unified
account of geometric illusions may help to explain some very old and
still mysterious perceptual illusions.


                             ____________

                           XEROX PARC FORUM
            on Thursday,  2 October 1997, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
                    George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
            [http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum]

        The Nitride-based Revolution in Light-emitting Devices
                     Fernando Ponce and Dave Bour
                              Xerox PARC
                               
A new family of materials has become available for the production of
light emitting devices operating in the green to ultraviolet range of
the visible spectrum. These semiconductors are based on GaN, and their
properties are strikingly different from other semiconductors used in
optoelectronics. Recent developments in the fabrication of these
materials have quickly led to the commercial availability of green and
blue emitters. Light-emitting diodes based on these materials are
finding applications in full-color flat-panel displays, and blue and
ultraviolet laser diodes promise high density data storage and
high-resolution printing. Their use in every day lighting promise
great savings in energy and maintenance costs. In this forum, Fernando
Ponce will review the historical development of these materials, their
properties, and their use in light emitting diodes. Dave Bour will
describe the requirements for making blue semiconductors lasers and
PARC's research towards these devices.

Biographies: Fernando Ponce works at the Electronic Materials
Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His main emphasis
is in the determination of the atomic arrangement in solids using
transmission electron microscopy. He was raised in Cuzco, Peru, and
studied at the University of Engineering in Lima, and at Stanford
University. He has worked on the study of defects and interfaces in
crystalline semiconductors, and in the last three years has studied
the properties of the nitride semiconductors. He has co-authored over
150 publications, and has edited 4 books.

David Bour grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. He received a B.S. degree in
Physics from MIT in 1983, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering
from Cornell University in 1987, where he worked on red semiconductor
lasers. From 1987-1991 he developed infrared laser diode materials as
a member of research staff at the David Sarnoff Research Center
(formerly RCA Laboratories, Princeton, NJ). Since 1991 he has been
with the Electronic Materials Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, working first on red laser diodes, and more recently
establishing an epitaxial growth capability for blue semiconductor
lasers.
                             ____________
   
       SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
            on Wednesday, 2 October 1997, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
                              Gates 100
             [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html]

       eMotif: Inferring Characterizations of Protein Families
                         Craig Nevill-Manning
                       Biochemistry Department
                         Stanford University
                 [http://www.stanford.edu/~cnevill/]
                  [http://dna.stanford.edu/emotif/]

Bioinformatics is a fascinating and rapidly growing field that applies
computational techniques to biochemical data. A central problem is
dealing with the deluge of DNA and protein sequence data flowing out
of the Human Genome Project and similar sequencing efforts. eMotif
infers sequence motifs that are characteristic of certain protein
families by studying conserved regions from several different
organisms. These characterizations are used to identify newly
sequenced proteins, and have been applied to entire genomes of several
organisms. eMotif leverages biochemical domain knowledge to constrain
the description space, and can thereby perform an enumeration of this
space, allowing interactive evaluation of different objective
functions. The talk will begin with a brief introduction to the
biochemistry of proteins.
                             ____________
                                   
                             LOGIC LUNCH
                  on Friday, 3 October 1997, 12 noon
                         Math Corner 380:381T

        On the Decision Problem for Logics with Two Variables
                             Martin Otto
               University of Aachen, visiting Stanford

The classical approach to the decision problem for fragments of
first-order logic has essentially been completed with a full
classification of fragments determined by their prenex quantifier
structure (prefix classes).

Some applications, however, also suggest to consider other fragments,
e.g. those determined by the number of variables.  Two-variable
first-order logic is that fragment of first-order that admits the use
of only two distinct variables.  This fragment, which subsumes
propositional modal logic, has the finite model property and is
decidable (Mortimer'75).

I want to focus in this talk on a recent decidability result (from
joint work with E.Graedel and E.Rosen) concerning a stronger
two-variable fragment obtained by admitting counting quantifiers.
This interesting decidable fragment of first-order logic does not have
the finite model property.  Extensions of two-variable first-order
logic in several other directions outside first-order logic have been
shown to be highly undecidable.
                             ____________

               SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
                on Friday, 3 October 1997, 12:30-2:00pm
                      Gates B01 (HP Classroom)
            [http://hci.stanford.edu/html/pcd_cs547.html]
                          (SITN Channel E2)

            Finding Objects in Large Collections of Images
                            Jitendra Malik
               Computer Science Division,  UC Berkeley
                     mailto:malik@cs.berkeley.edu
   
Retrieving images from very large collections using image content as a
key is becoming an important problem. The UC Berkeley digital library
group has adopted a particular perspective on the problem--namely,
that users are primarily interested in scenes containing particular
objects or configurations of objects. To make this possible, we
believe the key aspects are (a) grouping image data into regions
corresponding to objects, or parts of objects (b) recognizing
particular configurations of regions as objects based on color,
texture, shape or spatial arrangement (c) use learning techniques to
assist in the acquisition of common characteristics of visual
categories.

We have defined a blob world representation which provides a
transition from raw pixel data to a small set of localized coherent
regions in color and texture space. Users can construct queries using
the blob-world representation; automatic machine learning techniques
can use it to acquire visual categories such as tigers, eagles and
airplanes based on a set of examples. We have also demonstrated the
use of spatial arrangements of regions (a ``body plan'') to learn and
recognize instances of humans and horses from a very large collection
of images.  Picture

Biography: Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He
received the B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian
Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1980 and the PhD degree in Computer
Science from Stanford University in 1986. In January 1986, he joined
the faculty of the Computer Science Division, Department of EECS,
University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently Professor
and Vice-Chair of Graduate Matters. He is a member of the Cognitive
Science and Vision Science groups at UC Berkeley.  His research
interests are in computer vision and computational modeling of human
vision. His previous work has spanned a range of topics in early and
intermediate vision including image segmentation, texture, stereopsis,
motion analysis, and line drawing interpretation.  Currently, he is
also interested in the application of computer vision to intelligent
vehicle highway systems.  He received the gold medal for the best
graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980,
a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, and the Rosenbaum
fellowship for the Computer Vision Programme at the Newton Institute
of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge in 1993.  Picture
                             ____________

            EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
                  4:15PM, Wednesday, 8 October 1997
         NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
      [http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html]

   Retro Computing: Researching the Receding Frontiers of Computers
                           Robert M. Supnik
                            Vice President
             Corporate Research and Advanced Development
   
Digital Equipment Corporation's research labs in Palo Alto and
Cambridge are the cutting edge of the company's work in advanced
computer technology. Responsible for such diverse developments as
AltaVista, Millicent, Gigaswitch/ATM, and the Palo Alto Internet
Exchange, the labs focus on pushing the frontiers of computers in
scalable systems, Internet infrastructure and services, and
human-computer interaction.

While the researchers chase computing's future, the research manager
(in his copious spare time) chases computing's past. Computing's
history is of significant educational, historical, and economic value,
and it is rapidly being lost. Computing's past is mostly represented
by narrative texts and preserved non-functional artifacts; access to
working examples is limited to a handful of scattered hobbyists
worldwide.

This talk will cover (briefly) the work of Digital's research labs but
will mostly be devoted to retrocomputing: the art and science of
recovering usable examples of computing's past. The talk with cover
"computer archaeology" -- the recovery of lost information and data;
the role of folklore; the varied merits of restoration and simulation
as strategies for preserving the past; and SIMH, the speaker's
historical systems simulator, which currently includes eight
significant systems with supporting software.

Biography: Robert M. Supnik is vice president of Corporate Research
and Advanced Development (RAD) in Digital's Corporate Strategy and
Technology group. RAD provides Digital with strategic new
technologies, competencies and products. In this position, Supnik is
responsible for identifying and understanding new technological
opportunities and helping Digital apply them for business success.

Supnik currently manages Digital's Cambridge Research Laboratory,
Network Systems Laboratory, Systems Research Center, and Western
Research Laboratory, where he focuses on applications technology,
innovative inter-networking systems, systems research, and mainstream,
high-performance computer systems.

Supnik has been on the vanguard of technology throughout his 20 years
at Digital. A Senior Corporate Consultant Engineer, Supnik started the
Alpha program, and managed it until first product ship. He also
started the MicroVAX chip project, for which he was both project
manager and microprogrammer. Supnik was technical director for the
Alpha and VAX Systems Group, and group manager for the Semiconductor
Engineering Group Microprocessor Development. He also served as
product strategist in the CSD/LSI Microprocessor Group, and project
manager for the J-11 chip. In 1994, he was promoted to vice president
of Technology and Architecture in the Computer Systems Division.

Supnik joined Digital in 1977 as a supervisor, then manager, in the
Storage Subsystems Group. He holds BS degrees in mathematics and
history from MIT, and an MA in history from Brandeis University. 

In addition to his work at Digital, Supnik is the author of a series
of emulators for historically significant minicomputers.
                             ____________
   
                      ARE COMPUTERS APPROACHING
                       HUMAN-LEVEL CREATIVITY?
                         A Series of Symposia
                   Prompted by Some Striking Recent
               Developments in Artificial Intelligence
  [http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/CCARH/events/courses/symp97f.html]
                    Stanford University, Fall 1997
                
These symposia are sponsored by the Center for Computer-Assisted
Research in the Humanities (CCARH) with the participation of the
Office of the Associate Dean for Humanities and organized and
moderated by Douglas Hofstadter.
        
Each symposium will bring together world experts in a particular field
in which human creativity shines; all will deliver short talks
expressing their view about the degree to which computers have become
genuinely creative in that field, after which there will be a panel
discussion with audience participation. The organizer will moderate
the panels, as well as participating as a panelist himself.

                      Symposium I: Chess and Go

Eliot Hearst, Psychology, Columbia University U.S. Senior
   and Life Master and former captain of U.S. Chess Olympic team;
   author on computer chess

Monroe Newborn, Computer Science, McGill University
   Developer of the chess program Ostrich; author of Kasparov vs. Deep
   Blue

Tim Klinger, Computer Science, New York University
   Researcher on Go and developer of a sophisticated Go-playing
   program
                             ____________

                             END MATERIAL

The CSLI Calendar appears weekly on Wednesdays throughout the academic
year.  Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in
the Calendar should be submitted to the editor, who reserves the right
to decide what does or does not go in the calendar
[mailto:incalendar@csli.stanford.edu].

Requests to be added to the mailing list should be sent to
[mailto:csli-request@csli.stanford.edu].  Note that the CSLI Calendar
no longer has a paper version.

The full current issue is at
[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Archive/calendar/1997-98/current.html]
and the archives at
[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Archive/calendar/].  

People on most of the CSLI computers can type 'help csli-calendar' to
see the current issue.  They can also type 'help quip' to see the
Linguistics Department newsletter, the Sesquipedalian,
[http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/].

The CSLI Calendar is also posted each week to
[news://nntp-csli.stanford.edu/csli.bboard].  

Information about CSLI's research program is available at
[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/].

For maps to the Stanford University campus see
[http://www.stanford.edu/home/visitors/maps.html].
                             ____________