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CSLI Calendar, 29 October 1997, vol. 13:7



   
     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 October 1997                Stanford                 Vol. 13, No. 7
______________________________________________________________________

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

            ACTIVITIES DURING 29 OCTOBER - 9 NOVEMBER 1997

WEDNESDAY, 29 OCTOBER
        12:15pm Developmental Brownbag
                Jordan Hall 420:286
                Infant Speech Processing
                John Pinto
                Stanford University

         4:15pm Computer Musings
                Gates B01
                35 Years of (Linear) Probing 
                Donald Knuth  
                Computer Science
                Abstract below

         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                BDTI Processors for DSP-intensive Applications
                Jeff Bier
                Berkeley Design Technology Inc.
                [http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html]
                
THURSDAY, 30 OCTOBER
        12 noon CSLI CogLunch    
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Two Models of Dialogue: What's the Score?
                Phillip Staines
                University of New South Wales
                Abstract below

         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                Failing and Succeeding at Real-World Artificial
                Intelligence: Experiences in Three Decades
                Peter Hart
                Ricoh Silicon Valley, Inc.
                Abstract below

FRIDAY, 31 OCTOBER
        12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B01 (HP classroom)
                Video Rewrite and the Magic Morphin' Mirror.
                Trevor Darrell, Chris Bregler, Michele Covell 
                and Malcolm Slaney
                Interval Research

         3:15pm Cognitive Seminar
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                Decision Making in the N-Person Prisoners' Dilemma
                Paul Whitmore

         3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
                Bldg. 90:92Q
                "Physician-Assisted Suicide and Public Policy"
                Gerald Dworkin
                UC Davis

MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER
         3:30pm Psychology Social Lab
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                To be announced
                Emily Pronin
                Stanford Social Psychology Program (SSPP)
                and
                "Kids Negotiating"
                Jared Curhan
                SSPP

         4:30pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
                Gates B08
                Nancy Van House
                UC Berkeley

TUESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER
         4:15pm Logic Seminar
                Math Corner 380:381T
                Buchholz: Takeuti's reductions via Omega-rule
                (Review of the sections 4-5 of the paper
                "Explaining the Gentzen-Takeuti reduction steps" by
                W. Buchholz) 
                Sergei Tupailo
                Stanford

WEDNESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER
        12:15pm Developmental Brownbag
                Jordan Hall 420:286
                Neighborhoods & Student Changes during Middle School
                Tom Cook 
                Northwestern University

         3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
                Jordan Hall (420:050)
                Dissociating automatic and controlled processes:
                Age-related differences in memory
                Larry Jacoby
                New York University
                
         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                Animated Programs Programming As A Video Game
                Ken Kahn
                Animated Programs
                Abstract below
        
         8:00pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
                Bldg. 90:92Q
                Thoughts from "Image and Logic: A Material Culture of
                Microphysics"
                Peter Galison, Harvard University

THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER
        12 noon CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Linking Human Brain Activity with Psychophysical
                Performance using fMRI
                David Heeger
                Psychology, Stanford
              
         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                How the Internet Will Determine the Future of Publishing!
                Giordano Beretta
                Hewlett-Packard Labs

FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER
        12 noon Logic Lunch
                Math corner 380:383N
                Some critical remarks on Tait's paper on finitism
                Karl-Georg Niebergall
                visiting Stanford

        12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B01 (HP classroom)
                Educational Technology and Distributed Cognition
                Bernard Gifford
                UC Berkeley and Academic Systems

         3:15pm Cognitive Seminar
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                To be announced
                John Pinto

SATURDAY, 8 NOVEMBER
       11am-5pm Symposia: Are Computers Approaching Human-Level 
                Creativity? 
                Campbell Recital Hall, Braun Music Building
                Symposium IIIa: Musical Composition
                with concerts of music by EMI and human composers
                Information below

SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER
       10am-4pm Symposia: Are Computers Approaching Human-Level
                Creativity?
                Campbell Recital Hall, Braun Music Building
                Symposium IIIb: Musical Composition
                with concerts of music by EMI and human composers
                Information below
                             ____________

                           COMPUTER MUSINGS
                on Wednesday, 29 October 1997, 4:15pm
                       Gates B01 (HP Classroom)
       [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html]

                     35 Years of (Linear) Probing
                             Donald Knuth

Many computer programs access large tables of data by using a
classical variant of hashing called "linear probing," also known to
children as the game of "musical chairs." When the author first
studied the characteristics of this simple method in 1962, he came to
understand that the mathematical analysis of algorithms was a rich
subject suitable for a lifetime of study.  This talk surveys the
mathematical analysis of algorithms by focusing on advances that have
been made in the analysis of linear probing from 1962 to 1997, and by
noting surprising relations between this algorithm and other important
algorithms and combinatorial problems, including the study of random
graphs.
                             ____________

                            CSLI COGLUNCH
                on Thursday, 30 October 1997, 12 noon
                        Cordura Hall, Room 100
            [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/]

              Two Models of Dialogue: What's the Score?
                           Phillip Staines
                    University of New South Wales
        [http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/philosophy/pstaines.htm]

In a recent important work, "Making it Explicit", Robert Brandom sets
up a model of dialogue within a deontic pragmatics. As he says "A
crucial measure according to which a theory of speech acts ought to be
assessed is its treatment of what one is doing in producing an
assertion."  In this book he takes the effect of assertion to be
changing the conversational score by altering participants'
commitments and entitlements. This paper compares Brandom's approach
with work in (Formal) Dialectic which also takes commitment as its
central notion, but has no explicit role for entitlement.
                             ____________

                           XEROX PARC FORUM
            on Thursday, 30 October 1997, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
                    George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
           [http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/]

    Failing and Succeeding at Real-World Artificial Intelligence:
                     Experiences in Three Decades
                            Peter E. Hart
                      Ricoh Silicon Valley, Inc.
                                  
The intellectual, research funding, and commercial history of
artificial intelligence includes both boom and bust periods in the
decades since its inception. During much of its history, AI as a whole
has been widely-- though inaccurately-- identified with expert
systems, no doubt because expert systems have been the most
widely-commercialized AI technology.
           
I will describe the life and times of three expert systems for which I
bear some responsibility: Prospector in the 1970's, Syntel in the
1980's, and Fixit in the 1990's. These systems, which to some extent
can be regarded as surrogates for the AI activities of their day,
experienced very different fates. Respectively, they were a resounding
technical success, a large-scale commercial failure, and a modest
technical and commercial success.

Truth in Abstracts disclaimer: The emphasis will not be on the
technical details of these systems, nor will it be on a broad
scholarly review of the history and current state of AI. Rather, this
will be a purely personal view of the conditions surrounding the
failure and success of AI in the real world, and the lessons that
might be drawn from them.
     
Biography: Peter E. Hart, the Chairman and President of Ricoh Silicon
Valley, Inc., has done AI research and has managed corporate R & D
organizations since completing his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1966. His AI
research outside of expert systems has contributed to a theoretical
understanding of the nearest-neighbor classifier, to the development
and analysis of the A* graph-searching algorithm, and to the invention
of the modern form of the Hough transform for image analysis. He has
co-founded two companies, directed three research centers, and also is
the co-author of what might be the oldest AI-related textbook still in
print (Duda & Hart, 1973).

Suggested reading:

P. E. Hart, R. O. Duda and M. T. Einaudi, "PROSPECTOR-- A
Computer-Based Consultation System for Mineral Exploration,"
International Association for Mathematical Geology, Vol. 10, No. 5,
October 1978.

T. Risch, R. Reboh, P. E. Hart and R. O. Duda, "A Functional Approach
to Integrating Database and Expert Systems," Comm. ACM, Vol. 31.
No. 12, pp 1424 - 1437, December 1988.

P. E. Hart and J. Graham, "Query-Free Information Retrieval," IEEE
Expert, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp 32 - 37, Sept/Oct 1997.
			     ____________
				   
			    LOGIC SEMINAR
		 on Tuesday, 4 November 1997, 4:15pm
                         Math Corner 380:381T

            Buchholz: Takeuti's reductions via Omega-rule
               (Review of the sections 4-5 of the paper
   "Explaining the Gentzen-Takeuti reduction steps" by W. Buchholz)
                       Sergei Tupailo, Stanford
 
We will present Takeuti's normalization steps for finite derivations,
which he first used in 1968 for proving consistency of \Pi^1_1-CA, as
images of normalization steps for infinitary derivations with
\Omega-rule of Buchholz. The same will be done for ordinal bounds.
 
A general idea of W. Buchholz is that this investigation perhaps will
be helpful for the understanding and unification of two of the most
advanced achievments in contemporary proof theory, namely the be
helpful for the understanding and unification of two of the most
advanced achievments in contemporary proof theory, namely the
methodologically quite different work of T. Arai and M. Rathjen on the
ordinal analysis of very strong subsystems of 2nd order arithmetic and
set theory.
                             ____________
                                   
                  EE380 COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
           on Wednesday, 5 November 1997, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
        NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
            [http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/]

                     Programming as a Video Game
                                  or
            ToonTalk -- A Video Game for Creating Programs
                               Ken Kahn
                          Animated Programs
                      [http://www.toontalk.com/]
                                      
Seymour Papert once described the design of the Logo programming
language as taking the best ideas in computer science about
programming language design and "child engineering" them. Twenty-five
years after Logo's birth, there has been tremendous progress in
programming language research and in computer-human interfaces.
Programming languages exist now that are very expressive and
mathematically very elegant and yet are difficult to learn and master.
We believe the time is now ripe to attempt to repeat the success of
the designers of Logo by child engineering one of these modern
languages.

When Logo was first built, a critical aspect was taking the
computational constructs of the Lisp programming language and
designing a child friendly syntax for them. Lisp's "CAR" was replaced
by "FIRST", "DEFUN" by "TO", parentheses were eliminated, and so on.
Today there are totally visual languages in which programs exist as
pictures and not as text. We believe this is a step in the right
direction, but even better than visual programs are animated programs.
Animation is much better suited for dealing with the dynamics of
computer programs than static icons or diagrams. While there has been
substantial progress in graphical user interfaces in the last
twenty-five years, we chose to look not primarily at the desktop
metaphor for ideas but instead at video games. Video games are
typically more direct, more concrete, and easier to learn than other
software. And more fun too.

We have constructed a general-purpose concurrent programming system,
ToonTalk (TM), in which the source code is animated and the
programming environment is a video game. Every abstract computational
aspect is mapped into a concrete metaphor. For example, a computation
is a city, a concurrent object is a house, birds carry messages
between houses, a method or clause is a robot trained by the user and
so on. The programmer controls a "programmer persona" in this video
world to construct, run, debug and modify programs. We believe that
ToonTalk is especially well suited for giving children the opportunity
to build real programs in a manner that is easy to learn and fun to
do.

A live demo of ToonTalk will be given.

Biography: ToonTalk was designed and built by Ken Kahn who, after
earning a doctorate in computer science from MIT, spent more than 15
years as a researcher in programming languages, computer animation,
and programming systems for children. He has been a faculty member at
MIT, University of Stockholm, and Uppsala University. For over eight
years he was a researcher at Xerox PARC. In 1992, Ken founded Animated
Programs whose mission is to make computer programming child's play.
                             ____________

                      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 III: Musical Composition
        Saturday, 8 November 1997, 11am-5pm (coffee at 10:30)
      Sunday, 9 November 1997, 10lam-4pm Sunday (coffee at 9:30)
              Campbell Recital Hall, Braun Music Center
    with concerts of music by EMI and human composers on both days

Jonathan Berger, Music, Stanford University Composer, researcher into
   algorithmic composition, and author on musical structure and
   pattern
David Cope, Music, UC Santa Cruz Author of Computers and Musical Style
   and Experiments in Musical Intelligence; developer of the musical
   style-imitation program EMI
Daniel Dennett, Philosophy, Tufts University Author of The Intentional
   Stance, Consciousness Explained, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, etc.,
   as well as improviser of jazz
Bernard Greenberg, Programmer/musician, Boston Co-founder of
   Symbolics, Inc., and improviser and composer of organ and choral
   music in various styles
Douglas Hofstadter, Cognitive Science, Indiana Univ.  Author of
   Goedel, Escher, Bach, Le Ton beau de Marot, etc.; developer of
   several computer models of human analogy-making and the human
   creative process; also composer for piano
Steve Larson, Music, University of Oregon
   Jazz improviser, developer of computer models of melodic logic, and
   author of articles on the psychological principles behind musical
   structure
Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Music, Stanford University
   Researcher and writer on structure and pattern in Baroque music
                             ____________

                             END MATERIAL

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                             ____________