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CSLI Calendar, 4 March 1998, vol. 13:23
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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4 March 1998 Stanford Vol. 13, No. 23
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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 4 MARCH TO 13 MARCH 1998
WEDNESDAY, 4 MARCH
3:15pm ME297: Design Theory and Methodology Seminar
Captology: Computers as Persuasive Technologies
BJ Fogg, Ph.D.
Visioneer, Science Office, Sun Microsystems
Visiting Scholar/Visiting Lecturer,
Communication/Computer Science, Stanford
(this may be a closed seminar, check the web page)
http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Microsoft Research: Origins, Present and Future
Rick Rashid
Microsoft Research
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 5 MARCH
12 noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Epilepsy and Mechanisms of Cortical Discontrol
David Prince
Stanford, Neurology
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
SMART Play: Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity
in the Classroom
Dr. Brigid J.S. Barron
Stanford University, School of Education
Abstract below
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Gates 100
Between MDPs and Semi-MDPs:
Learning, Planning, and Representing Knowledge at
Multiple Temporal Scales
Rich Sutton
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 6 MARCH
12 noon Logic Lunch
Room 380:383N
Measuring Information Efficiency by Bounded Oracle
Computation
Paul Fahn
Stanford
Abstract below
12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Gates B01 (HP classroom)
Title to be announced
Larry Friedlander, Charles Kerns, Larry Leifer, Sheri
Sheppard
Stanford Learning Lab
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
The Meaning of 'Ouch' and 'Oops'
David Kaplan
Professor, UCLA
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
Narrative and Institutional Memory
Charlotte Linde
Institute for Research and Learning,
and Stanford University
Abstract below
MONDAY, 9 MARCH
3:30pm Psychology Social Lab
Jordan Hall 420:100
The Coexistence Of Self-Effacing And Group-Serving
Tendencies In Attribution In Japanese Culture
Yukiko Muramoto
Tokyo Univ.
4:30pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
Gates B08
The "Slider" Interface:
Learning Multi-topic User Profiles from Implicit Feedback
Marko Balabanovic
Stanford University
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 10 MARCH
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Room 380:381T
Universes in Explicit Mathematics (part 2)
Gerhard Jaeger
University of Bern (visiting Stanford)
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 11 MARCH
8:00pm Wesson Lecture
Jordan Hall 420:040
The Ironic Construction of Civic America
Theda Skocpol
Harvard University
THURSDAY, 12 MARCH
12 noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
The Creation of Virtual Pain
Howard Fields
UCSF, Neurology
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Gates 100
Learning Situation-Dependent Planning Knowledge from
Uncertain Robot Execution Data
Karen Zita Haigh
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Abstract below
7:30pm Phonology Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall, 460:146
Arman Maghbouleh
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
8:00pm Wesson Lecture
Jordan Hall 420:040
Democracy Unravelled: America in the Late 20th Century
Theda Skocpol
Harvard University
FRIDAY, 13 MARCH
all day Wilbur Knorr Memorial Conference
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Memorial.html
12 noon Logic Lunch
Room 380:383N
Frege Structures for Partial Applicative Theories
Reinhard Kahle
University of Tuebingen, visiting Stanford
Abstract below
12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Gates B01 (HP classroom)
3DDI: 3D Direct interaction
John Canny
UC Berkeley
SATURDAY, 14 MARCH
all day Wilbur Knorr Memorial Conference
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Memorial.html
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ME297: DESIGN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 4 March 1998, 3:15pm
http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
(seminar may be closed, check web page)
Captology: Computers as Persuasive Technologies
BJ Fogg, Ph.D.
Visioneer, Science Office, Sun Microsystems
Visiting Scholar/Visiting Lecturer,
Communication/Computer Science, Stanford
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/captology/
Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This
new field examines how computers can--and do--change attitudes and
behaviors. In my talk I will explain my view of captology and the
frameworks I propose for understanding and designing persuasive
computing technologies. I will demonstrate some examples of persuasive
computers, as well as sharing some conceptual designs Stanford
students created during my course on captology (CS377).
Because captology is a relatively new way to view technology and human
behavior, it offers advances in three areas: theory, design, and
analysis. I will present aspects of all three areas. If time permits,
I may also present some conceptual design methods I developed at
Interval Research; I may have people use these methods during my talk
to generate new insights into persuasive computing.
Biography: In my graduate work at Stanford, I collaborated with Cliff
Nass in researching how people respond socially to interactive
technologies. My particular focus in this area was investigating how
to make computers more likeable and persuasive (what I call
"charismatic computing"). In the last few years, I've focused more
specifically on the domain where computers and persuasion overlap, a
field I call "captology."
At the same time I was doing experimental work with Cliff, I was also
developing methods for conceptual design and using these methods at
places like HP and Interval Research. I'm now at Sun Microsystems,
where I direct the "Sun Summits on the Future," periodic workshops
that explore the implications of a networked world for various domains
of human activity.
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EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 4 March 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
Microsoft Research: Origins, Present and Future
Rick Rashid
Microsoft Research
In 1991 Microsoft was only the second largest software company in
Redmond, with significantly smaller revenues than Nintendo of America
located just across the street. The company was best known for a
text-based operating system called DOS and was working hard to
establish its Windows operating system in a DOS dominated world. It
was an unlikely candidate to house a major basic research organization
in computer science.
That year Microsoft Research began as a very small group of computer
scientists working in natural language processing, programming
languages and operating systems. Today virtually every product
Microsoft ships has been influenced by the work done in Microsoft
Research. The research organization has grown to over 280 people
working in 25 research areas with laboratories located in Redmond, San
Francisco and Cambridge, England. And it's still growing. It is
expected to reach over 600 researchers by the year 2000.
In this presentation I will talk about the creation of Microsoft
Research, the philosophy behind its organization and growth and the
impact research has had on Microsoft as a company. I'll also talk
about the key research projects going on within Microsoft Research and
future directions for the company.
Biography: Rick joined Microsoft in the fall of 1991 as its first
Director of Research and now holds the title of Vice President of
Research. He received Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and
Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1974 and he
received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester
in 1980. He was a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University for 12 years
and was best known during that time for the creation of the Mach
operating system. He has published papers in a number of areas of
computer science including computer vision, AI, programming languages,
data compression, networking, and distributed and parallel operating
system design. He is well known for his interest in computer gaming
and as a graduate student implemented (with Gene Ball) Alto Trek --
the first real-time network space game for the Xerox Alto. Among other
odd facts, he is the inventor of the term NUMA (non-uniform memory
architecture), is often credited with the term microkernel, is an avid
fan of Babylon 5 and continues to write nearly 30,000 lines of code a
year on various projects.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 5 March 1998, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
SMART Play:
Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity in the Classroom
Dr. Brigid J.S. Barron
Stanford University
Assistant Professor, School of Education
New learning theories emphasize the importance of engaging students in
knowledge building activities that connect concepts to contexts of
application and encourage the kinds of discourse and problem solving
occurring outside of school. As a consequence, there has been a
resurgence of interest in problem and project-based learning
approaches. These approaches afford opportunities for problem
formulation, data collection, and synthesis around complex simulated
problems or real world projects. While promising, one major hurdle in
implementing problem and project-based curricula is that they require
simultaneous changes in curriculum, instruction and assessment
practices--changes that are often foreign to the students as well as
the teachers.
In this talk, Dr. Barron will describe an integrated model of
assessment and instruction that supports teacher and student
learning. An episode from the videodisc series The Adventures of
Jasper Woodbury, created by the Cognition and Technology Group at
Vanderbilt, forms the basis for the problem-based activities.
Children's work is supported by explicit cycles of working on the
problem, feedback, and opportunities for revision. Resources in the
form of multimedia tools stimulate class discussion and provide
support for revision. These tools are embodied in what we call SMART
(Special Multimedia Arenas for Refining Thinking) programs. The
programs contain four segments that differ in their emphasis though
share the purpose of supporting formative assessment, reflection, and
contact with a larger community. The four segments are called Smart
Lab, Toolbox, Kids-on-Line and The Challenge. Dr. Barron will share
design principles that emerged from collaboration with teachers and
students, examples of these tools, and data on student learning.
Biography: Brigid Barron became one of the first members of the
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt while completing her
doctorate in developmental and clinical psychology. She is currently
an assistant professor in the School of Education at Stanford
University. She teaches in the Child and Adolescent Development
program and in a new graduate program called Learning, Design and
Technology. Her research involves developing and studying technology
supported learning environments, with an emphasis on the analysis of
processes and productivity in collaborative problem solving groups.
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SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 5 March 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Between MDPs and Semi-MDPs:
Learning, Planning, and Representing Knowledge
at Multiple Temporal Scales
Richard S. Sutton
University of Massachusetts
mailto:rich@cs.umass.edu
A key challenge for AI is how to learn, plan, and represent knowledge
at multiple levels of temporal abstraction. In this talk I develop an
approach based on the mathematical framework of reinforcement learning
and Markov decision processes (MDPs). The usual framework is extended
to include closed-loop multi-step options---whole courses of behavior
that may be temporally extended, stochastic, and contingent on events.
Examples of options include picking up an object, going to lunch, and
traveling to a distant city, as well as primitive actions such as
muscle twitches and joint torques. Options can be used interchangeably
with primitive actions in reinforcement learning and planning methods,
and can be analyzed in terms of a generalized kind of MDP known as a
semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) (e.g., Puterman, 1994; Bradtke and
Duff, 1995; Parr, 1998; Precup and Sutton, 1997). In this talk I focus
on the interplay between the MDP and SMDP levels of analysis. I show
how a set of options can be improved by changing their termination
conditions to improve over SMDP planning methods with no additional
cost. I also present novel intra-option temporal-difference methods
that substantially improve over SMDP methods. Finally, I discuss how
options themselves can be learned, introducing a new notion of subgoal
and subtask into reinforcement learning. Overall, I argue that options
and models of options provide hitherto missing aspects of a powerful,
clear, and expressive framework for representing and organizing
knowledge.
[This is joint work with Doina Precup and Satinder Singh.]
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 6 March 1998, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/Logic/
Measuring Information Efficiency by Bounded Oracle Computation
Paul Fahn
Stanford
What does it mean for two nonrecursive sets of natural numbers to
contain the same information? If two sets contain the same
information, how can we compare the efficiency with which they
represent the information? We introduce quantitative measures of
relative information efficiency between two sets A and B by asking a
series of questions along the lines of "How many bits of A can be
computed from n bits of B?"
We show how to make these questions mathematically precise using a
model of computation with a bounded number of oracle queries. The
oracle queries can be either "parallel," where all n questions are
asked at once, or "sequential," where each oracle query can depend on
the answers to earlier queries. We examine, and present results for,
both models of bounded oracle computation, using the complete sets of
Ershov's difference hierarchy as natural examples.
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LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 6 March 1998, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:146
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/colloq.html
Narrative and Institutional Memory
Charlotte Linde
Institute for Research on Learning
and Stanford University
This study provides a taxonomic structure for the discourses which
constitute institutional memory and the ways in which such memory
structures identity of an institution and of people within an
institution. It proposes the dimensions of written - oral, official -
unofficial, and intentional - secondary, and discusses how these
categories shape the landscape of memory, with particular attention to
informal and formal oral narratives told over a long period of time,
and their relation to materially preserved forms of memory. The social
aspect of memory is remembering: for example, a file cabinet preserves
some of a corporations' written memories, but it does so only if
people use it as a resource for remembering. Similarly a narrative
functions in an institution only if it is regularly told, and has the
potential to be transmitted to new tellers. Therefore, a taxonomy of
occasions for narrative remembering is also presented. Finally, this
study examines who in institutions have or do not have the right to
represent the institution's memory, and the ways in which silences and
erasures can be recognized and studied.
____________
STANFORD DIGITAL LIBRARIES SEMINAR
on Monday, 9 March 1998, 4:30pm
Gates Building, B08
http://diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/seminars/seminars.html
The "Slider" Interface:
Learning Multi-topic User Profiles from Implicit Feedback
Marko Balabanovic
Stanford University
A text recommender system recommends sets of documents for individual
users on the basis of user models, which are incrementally constructed
given feedback on previous recommendations. Users are reluctant to
take the time to provide such feedback explicitly. One of the
contributions of this research is an interface design for a
recommender system which infers document preferences by monitoring
users' actions. A second problem for recommender systems is
determining the composition of a set of recommendations, especially
when users have many interests. The interface presented provides a
mechanism for users to define multiple topics of interest and control
the proportions between them. Observations from initial usability
tests are encouraging---they demonstrate the system successfully
learning multi-topic user profiles using only the implicit feedback of
users' clicking and drag-and-drop actions.
Biography: Marko Balabanovic is finishing up a PhD here at Stanford's
Computer Science Department, entitled "Learning to Surf: Multiagent
Systems for Adaptive Web Page Recommendation." It concerns systems
that find and deliver Web pages or news articles matching the
interests of particular users, creating what are sometimes called
"personalized newspapers."
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 10 March 1998, 4:15pm
Math Corner 380:381T
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/Logic/
Universes in Explicit Mathematics (Part II)
Gerhard Jaeger
University of Bern (visiting Stanford)
In one form or the other, universes play an important role in many
(sub)systems of set theory and analysis and in various formalizations
of constructive mathematics. One aspect of universes is that they
expand the set or type formation principles in a very natural and
perspicuous way and provide great proof-theoretic strength.
These two talks will be centered around universes in Feferman's
explicit mathematics. We begin with introducing some minimal
requirements for universes, compare these to related approaches in
other areas of proof theory and discuss several crucial ontological
aspects of universes.
Later we will make use of universes for calibrating theories of
explicit mathematics going in strength beyond the famous theory
$T_0$. By omitting the principle of inductive generation we obtain, in
addition, natural metapredicative systems of explicit mathematics.
Furthermore, the notion of Mahloness in explicit mathematics - in its
metapredicative and impredicative form - will be presented. If time is
left, then we also want to indicate how to proceed to even stronger
theories.
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SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 12 March 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Learning Situation-Dependent Planning Knowledge
from Uncertain Robot Execution Data
Karen Zita Haigh
Carnegie Mellon University
mailto:Karen_Zita_Haigh@seldon.prodigy.cs.cmu.edu
Real-world domains are notoriously hard to model completely and
correctly. Robotics researchers have developed some learning
capabilities for their systems, but generally these have been limited
to learning operational parameters or other low-level information.
Machine Learning techniques, meanwhile, have generally not been
applied to real-world domains.
Real-world systems should adapt to changing situations and absorb
information that will improve their performance. My approach
automatically extracts information from execution experience, which is
then used by planning systems to improve performance.
I will be presenting the complete integrated planning, executing and
learning robot ROGUE. ROGUE analyzes execution experience to detect
patterns in the environment that affect plan quality. ROGUE extracts
learning opportunities from massive, continuous, probabilistic
execution traces. These learning opportunities are then correlated
with environmental features, thus detecting patterns in the form of
situation-dependent rules. I will describe the development and use of
these rules for two planners: the path planner and the task planner,
and present empirical data to show the effectiveness of ROGUE's novel
learning approach.
This learning approach is applicable for any planner operating in any
real-world domain. Situation-dependent rules effectively improve the
planner's model of the environment, thus allowing the planner to
predict and avoid failures, to respond to a changing environment, and
to create plans that are tailored to the real world.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 13 March 1998, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/Logic/
Frege Structures for Partial Applicative Theories
Reinhard Kahle
University of Tuebingen, visiting Stanford
Beeson has discovered that Frege structures can be considered as a
truth theory over applicative theories. Due to problems concerning
strictness the straightforward approach works in the total framework
only. Here we define a truth theory for the partial setting, by use of
a certain notion of pointer. This concept is closely related to the
treatment of streams in strict functional programming languages.
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END MATERIAL
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____________