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CSLI Calendar, 5 November 1997, vol. 13:8
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
______________________________________________________________________
5 November 1997 Stanford Vol. 13, No. 8
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
____________
ACTIVITIES DURING 5 NOVEMBER TO 14 NOVEMBER 1997
WEDNESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER
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 History of Science Lecture
History 200:002
Thoughts from "Image and Logic: A Material Culture of
Microphysics"
Peter Galison, Harvard University
Abstract below
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
Abstract below
4:15pm Symbolic Systems Forum
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
Ape Language and Symbolic Thought
Lisa Counts
The Gorilla Foundation
Abstract below
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Gates 100
Some New Aspects on the General Debate of Model Selection
in Statistics and Machine Learning
Gholamreza Nakhaeizadeh
Daimler-Benz, Research and Technology, Ulm, Germany
Abstract below
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 Mathematics Seminar
Bldg. 380:380C (Math corner)
Beyond the Turing Machine: Will physics offer a
better model of computation?
Michael Freedman
UC San Diego and Microsoft
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
MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER
3:30pm Psychology Social Lab
Jordan Hall 420:100
Deviance or Uniqueness?: Cultural Difference in
Norms about Norms Between East Asians and Caucasian
Americans
Heejung Kim
SSPP
and To be announced
David Sherman
SSPP
4:30pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
Gates B08
Ken Dowlin
San Jose State University
TUESDAY, 11 NOVEMBER
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Math 380:381T
Applicative theories and variable types
(first of a series of lectures)
Sol Feferman
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 12 NOVEMBER
12:15pm Developmental Brownbag
Jordan Hall 420:286
Elena Lieven
University of Manchester
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall (420:050)
Relational reasoning in a physical symbol system
Keith Holyoak
UCLA
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
PlaceWare Web-based Collaborative Apps Made Simple
Pavel Curtis
PlaceWare, Inc.
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 13 NOVEMBER
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
How the Direct Methanol Liquid-Feed Fuel Cell Works,
and Prospects for Ubiquity
Gerald Halpert
JPL, California Institute of Technology
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Gates 100
Bias, Variance, and Error Correcting Output Codes
for Local Learners on Binary Classification Tasks
David Aha
Naval Center for Applied Research in Artificial
Intelligence, Washington, DC.
Abstract below
7:30pm Stanford Phonology Workshop
Margaret Jacks 460:146
Destressing and Correspondence in the Clitic Group:
Evidence from Tohono O'odham
Colleen Fitzgerald
San Jose State University
FRIDAY, 14 NOVEMBER
12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Gates B01 (HP classroom)
Primitive Man in the Electronic Work Environment
Anatol Holt
3:15pm Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
How the brain changes during learning
Russ Poldrack
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Epicurus on Pleasure and Desire"
John Cooper, Princeton University
____________
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.
____________
HISTORY OF SCIENCE LECTURE
on Wednesday, 5 November 1997, 8:00pm
History 200:002
For more information, call the HPS office at (650) 725-0714
Thoughts from his new book
Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics
Peter Galison
Harvard University
As we think back on the history of twentieth century physics, we are
accustomed to dividing it by the markers of theoretical changes: 1905
(special relativity), 1915 (general relativity), 1926-27
(non-relativistic quantum mechanics), and so on: each date seems to
break up physics into periods of continuity and sudden breaks.
Here I would like to explore how the history would look if one does
*not* assume that experimentalists, instrument makers and theorists
all march in lockstep. In particular, we can learn about what it has
meant to be an experimentalist (or to do an experiment) by tracking
the history of the material objects of the laboratory: cloud chambers,
nuclear emulsions, spark chambers, bubble chambers, and the electronic
hybrid detectors that now cost hundreds of millions of dollars. By
following these detectors historically, we can see the complex
interactions experiment has had with industry, with warfare, and with
other fields of scientific inquiry. On the broadest level, we can
track the competition (and eventual union) between the long tradition
of image-making devices and the equally powerful tradition of
electronic logic devices.
To understand the links between these various physics subcultures, I
explore what it means to abandon talk of "translation" and to adopt
instead a picture of scientific trading languages, that is the
scientific equivalent of pidgins and creoles that allow the different
sectors of the community to communicate without necessarily sharing
global belief.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 6 November 1997, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
[http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/]
How the Internet Will Determine the Future of Publishing!
Giordano Beretta
Hewlett-Packard Labs
In 1990 the first print-on-demand (POD) systems were successfully
brought to market. The Internet and the World Wide Web are enabling
technologies that are fostering new print models. A popular scenario
for the future of printing is that decentralized POD systems will
allow to dramatically reduce warehousing and distribution costs; the
ability to print very short runs will also eliminate the risk of
volume forecasting.
I will present a second scenario based on individual printing. In this
scenario a print job is distributed to end-users for printing at their
discretion. While POD is capital intensive and inexpensive to operate,
individual printing requires low capital expenditure but can be
expensive to operate. Depending on which scenario will be prevalent,
the printer market will be radically different.
Especially for the second scenario there is a difficult issue with the
structuring of information and the creation of knowledge. I will
discuss how in the past year the Web has changed as a medium and
speculate on how it could change again in the near future. I will
conclude by presenting some ideas that could be useful for structuring
information on the Web.
This is an extended version of a talk presented at "Electronic
Imaging: Science and Technology -- Color Imaging: Device-Independent
Color, Color Hard Copy and Graphic Arts II," San Jose, February 10-14,
1997. SPIE Proceeding Vol. 3018.
Biography: Giordano Beretta holds a diploma in mathematics and a
doctorate in computer science of the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich. Major past research areas include human-computer
interaction, framework architectures, computational geometry, design
automation tools, computational color science, and data
compression. Other than research, he has also worked in strategic
planning and intellectual property. He is currently a software design
engineer in the Imaging Technology Department at HP Labs. He holds
several patents related to color imaging technology.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 6 November 1997, 4:15pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
[http://www.stanford.edu/dept/symbol/forum.html]
Ape Language and Symbolic Thought
Lisa Counts
The Gorilla Foundation
The Gorilla Foundation was established in 1976, to promote the
protection, preservation and propagation of gorillas. Project Koko, a
primary focus of the Gorilla Foundation, involves teaching a modified
form of American Sign Language to two lowland gorillas, Koko and
Michael.
1. Brief intro to Gorilla Foundation and its research purposes.
2. Ape language and controversies surrounding it
3. Discussion of symbolic thought as it applies to nonhuman primates
concentrating on ideas presented in Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic
Species"
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 6 November 1997, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates 100
[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html]
Some New Aspects on the General Debate of Model
Selection in Statistics and Machine Learning
Gholamreza Nakhaeizadeh
Daimler-Benz, Research and Technology,
Ulm, Germany
mailto:nakhaeizadeh@dbag.ulm.daimlerbenz.com
A survey of the literature on model selection shows that by now in
most of the cases the selection has been based only on one criterion,
namely the forecast accuracy. This means that most of the available
model selection methods in the literature are mono-criterion
approaches. In our approach, however, we regard a model as a product
(e.g. a car) or a production unit (e.g. a car factory) that can have
different properties. Some of these properties are positive and some
negative. To the positive properties of the models belong the
validity, understandability and usability of the results. Complexity,
extensive computing time and misclassification costs can be considered
as negative properties of the models. In evaluating products (e.g.
cars) a buyer considers all their positive and negative properties. If
we regard models as products as well, we should evaluate them in the
same manner. This means that we should use multi-criteria metrics for
model selection that are able to take into account all positive and
negative properties of the models. This allows us to make a more fair
evaluation and select between the alternative models. Data Envelopment
Analysis (DEA), which was developed in Operations Research and is used
to select between alternative products is an appropriate methodology
to compare the alternative models using their positive and negative
properties. It also allows consideration of the background knowledge
and preferences of the user. For example, it can be that for one user
the forecast accuracy of the model is more important than the
understandability of the results. In DEA, it is possible to consider
such preferences. In this talk, we report how DEA can be applied to
evaluate and select between alternative models. We conclude that DEA
and perhaps the other multi-criteria based metrics that can take into
account all positive and negative criteria of the models can lead to a
more fair selection between the alternative models. Such approaches
open a new perspective to the statistical and machine learning
community in revising the general problem of model selection.
____________
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
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 11 November 1997, 4:15pm
Math Corner 380:381T
Applicative Theories and Variable Types
(first of a series of lectures)
Sol Feferman
I will go over the material for a 5-day course offered by Gerhard
Jaeger and myself at the European Summer School for Logic, Language
and Information (ESSLLI97) held in Aix-en-Provence in Aug.97. This
material will prepare participants for more recent work on these
topics to be presented by several visitors in the Winter and Spring
quarters of 1998: Gerhard Jaeger, Reinhard Kahle and Thomas Strahm.
The description of the course for ESSLLI97 ran as follows.
The approach to be exposited here originates with the program of
Explicit Mathematics introduced by Feferman in the mid-1970s. This
introduced new axiomatic theories for the formalization of varieties
of constructive and semi-constructive (e.g. predicative) mathematics
in a style closer to everyday mathematical practice, while remaining
in accord with their underlying requirements for explicit presentation
of functions by rules and of classes by defining properties. This
dictated a conceptual separation between these two basic mathematical
notions. In the case of functions, the core axioms take the form of
an untyped theory of partial function application. In the case of
classes, they take the form of a theory of variable types. Typed
formalisms in the usual sense can be represented within these, so the
approach is more general. Considerable progress has been made on
theories of application and variable types in recent years both as to
their metamathematical properties and their applications, especially
to mathematics and theoretical computer science. Some applications to
linguistics have been suggested and look promising. We believe an
introductory course in the context of ESSLI97 would be useful at this
point to bring the attention of this work to a wider audience.
Tentative outline of the course:
I.Introduction: Informal development of some central ideas and
concepts, philosophical and mathematical motivations, related
approaches.
II.The syntactical framework: The logic of partial terms, basic axioms
of applicative theories, specific applicative theories for various
purposes. Construction principles for variable types.
III. Models for applicative theories: Recursion-theoretic models, term
models, generated models. Models for theories of variable types over
applicative models.
IV. Proof theory: A survey of some results which illustrate the
relationship between the considered theories and more usual systems of
first and second order arithmetic and type theories.
V. Applications: Some directions of application to mathematics,
theoretical computer science and linguistics. Relationship of the
variable types approach to polymorphic constructions in the latter two
areas.
____________
EE380 COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 12 November 1997, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
[http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/]
The PlaceWare Platform:
Web-based Collaborative Apps Made Simple
Pavel Curtis
Principal Architect
PlaceWare, Inc.
[http://www.placeware.com]
PlaceWare, a recent spin-off from the Xerox Palo Research Center
(PARC), builds highly interactive, Web-based collaborative
environments that are accessible to anyone who has a Java-enabled
browser and a 28.8Kb modem. Our lead application is the PlaceWare
Auditorium, which allows one or more people to give an interactive,
online, multimedia presentation via the Web to hundreds or thousands
of simultaneous attendees; the presentation can include slides (made
in PowerPoint or any GIF-image editor), live annotation on the slide
images, real-time polls of the audience, live audio from the presenter
and those asking questions, private text and audio conversations in
the auditorium's "rows", and other features.
This talk, however, is not primarily about the PlaceWare Auditorium
product, but rather about the software infrastructure that made its
swift implementation possible: the PlaceWare Platform. This collection
of APIs, server structure, and support libraries for network
communication, data persistence, user authentication and
authorization, along with the PlaceWare "parts" library of reusable
distributed-application components, made it possible for the first
fully functional version of Auditorium to be built in just two
man-months.
In this talk, I'll discuss the PlaceWare system architecture and
facilities as they are made visible to application developers and
illustrate the use of some of these facilities with source code from
several sample PlaceWare applications. The PlaceWare Developer's Kit
(PDK), which includes a fully functional PlaceWare server, complete
API documentation, and full source code to many sample applications,
is now in limited public beta-testing; I'll close my talk with an open
invitation to join our free PDK evaluation program and start writing
the applications that can turn a Web site from a passive collection of
documents into a lively and productive populated place. For more
information about the PDK beta-test, see
http://www.placeware.com/product/download.html .
Biography: Pavel Curtis, an internationally recognized expert on
online communities, is a Principal Architect and co-founder of
PlaceWare, Inc.; his work there centers on investigating, designing,
and implementing applications and systems to support and further
develop the PlaceWare technology. The PlaceWare platform enables the
rapid development of highly interactive, multimedia, shared,
Java-based applications for large-group interaction and collaboration
seamlessly integrated with the World-Wide Web.
Pavel was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC) for over 13 years. At PARC, his focus was on
the design and implementation of programming languages, such as
Smalltalk, Interlisp, Cedar and Scheme. He is the founder and chief
administrator of LambdaMOO, one of the most popular recreational
social virtual realities on the Internet. His LambdaMOO server
software currently supports over 150 virtual communities on the
Internet, including the original 8,000-member LambdaMOO community.
Much of Pavel's research and development work was the foundation for
the Jupiter project at PARC, which served as the prototype for
PlaceWare's product and technology.
Pavel is a frequent lecturer around the world at seminars and
symposiums on virtual communities and Internet-based collaboration. He
has published a number of papers, articles, and book chapters on
online communities and collaboration.
Pavel was awarded an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell
University in 1983 and 1990, respectively, and a B.A. from Antioch
College in 1981.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 13 November 1997, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates 100
[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html]
Bias, Variance, and Error Correcting Output Codes for
Local Learners on Binary Classification Tasks
David W. Aha
NCARAI/Naval Research Labs
Washington DC
(Collaborator: Francesco Ricci)
Error-correcting output codes (ECOCs) represent classes with a set of
output bits, where each bit encodes a binary classification task
corresponding to a unique partition of the classes. Algorithms that
use ECOCs learn the function corresponding to each bit, and combine
them to generate class predictions. ECOCs can reduce both variance and
bias errors for multiclass classification tasks when the errors made
at the output bits are not correlated. They work well with algorithms
that eagerly induce global classifiers (e.g., C4.5). However, previous
research explained that they cannot assist simple local classifiers
(e.g., nearest neighbor) because ECOCs yield correlated predictions
across the output bits. This is distressing because local learning
algorithms for classification are preferable to global classifiers for
some types of applications. We show that the output bit predictions of
ECOC-extended local learners can be decorrelated by selecting
different features for each bit. We present empirical evidence
suggesting that this combination of ECOCs, nearest neighbor, and
feature selection improves performance under some conditions. We
explain our modifications to the schemata racing algorithm that we
used for feature selection which improve its ability to retrieve good
feature subsets in this context. Finally, we perform a bias/variance
decomposition analysis for this algorithm for binary classification
tasks; it reveals that the local ECOC algorithm's performance
improvement is obtained by drastically reducing bias at the cost of
increasing variance.
____________
END MATERIAL
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