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CSLI Calendar, 11 March 1998, vol. 13:24
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
______________________________________________________________________
11 March 1998 Stanford Vol. 13, No. 24
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
____________
ACTIVITIES DURING 11 MARCH TO 20 MARCH 1998
WEDNESDAY, 11 MARCH
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
AltaVista: A Look Under the Hood
Paul Flaherty
DEC
Abstract below
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
3:00pm Shimizu Talk 1
CSL Commons #2230, Xerox PARC
The Dual-Centered Model of the Self: An overview of the
Theory of Ba and Basho
Hiroshi Shimizu
Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, University of Tokyo
Founder and Director of The "Ba" Research Institute,
Kanazawa Institute of Technology
(If you are interested in attending, please contact Kim
Paulon (kpaulon@parc.xerox.com) at least one day ahead to
arrange for escort. Please plan to arrive not later than
2:45.)
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
Nanotechnology
Dr. Ralph Merkle
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Abstract below
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
From Bumps to Phonology: A Model for Recognizing
Intonational "phonemes" from Duration and Fundamental
Arman Maghbouleh
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Abstract below
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
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 14 MARCH
all day Wilbur Knorr Memorial Conference
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Memorial.html
MONDAY, 16 MARCH
3:30pm Psychology Social Lab
Jordan Hall 420:100
Old Sexism In New Guise
Douglas Hofstadter
Indiana University
4:15pm Shimizu Talk 2
Cordura 100
Fusing Eastern and Western Models of the Self: The "Logic
of Self" and the "Logic of Science"
Hiroshi Shimizu
Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, University of Tokyo
Founder and Director of The "Ba" Research Institute,
Kanazawa Institute of Technology
Abstract below
4:30pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
Gates B08
Active Security Models: An Approach to
Enterprise-oriented and Self-administering Security in
Distributed Collaborative Environments
Roshan Thomas
Odyssey Research Associates
Abstract below
7:30pm George and Sandra Forsythe Memorial Lecture
Hewlett-Packard classroom (Gates B01)
Rationality and Intelligence
Professor Stuart Russell
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 17 MARCH
2:00pm Shimizu Talk 3
FX Palo Alto Laboratories
Design Principles for Knowledge Systems from the
Dual-Centered Perspective
Hiroshi Shimizu
Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, University of Tokyo
Founder and Director of The "Ba" Research Institute,
Kanazawa Institute of Technology
(If you are interested in attending, please contact Livia
Polanyi (polanyi@pal.xerox.com) at least one day in
advance to get directions and arrange for escort.)
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 200:305
Laws and Induction
Barry Loewer
Professor, Rutgers University
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Room 380:381T
Recent Results in Metapredicative Proof Theory
Thomas Strahm
University of Bern, Switzerland (visiting Stanford)
Abstract below
4:15pm George and Sandra Forsythe Memorial Lecture
Hewlett-Packard classroom (Gates B01)
Object Identification in a Bayesian Context
Professor Stuart Russell
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 18 MARCH
3:15pm ME297: Design Theory and Methodology Seminar
Grammatical Generation and Optimizing Search in Early
Design
Professor Jonathan Cagan
George Tallman and Florence Barrett Ladd Development
Professor in Engineering
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Carnegie Mellon University
(this may be a closed seminar, check the web page)
http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 19 MARCH
12 noon CSLI Talk
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Global Intelligence Project
Prof. Masa Numao
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Abstract below
2:15pm Semantics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
Frank Veltman
University of Amsterdam and the Department of Philosophy,
Stanford University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/semgroup/
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Gates 100
Learning Evaluation Functions for Optimization
Justin Boyan
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 20 MARCH
12 noon Logic Lunch
Room 380:383N
Reductions of Theories of Countable Tree Ordinals to ID_1
Sol Feferman
Abstract below
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 11 March 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
AltaVista: A Look Under the Hood
Paul Flaherty
DEC
Three years ago, a team of three researchers at Digital Equipment
Corporation combined lots of memory, lots of compute power, and some
innovative ideas about databases and the Internet to create (in four
months) a search engine called Alta Vista. The primary goal was to
create a public showpiece for DEC's database and Internet performance
prowess. However, the Law of Unintended Consequences seems to have
guaranteed an interesting life for what was originally a demo. People
around the world have found all sorts of interesting uses for the
search engine, the company managed to put together a business model
for perpetuating the demonstration, and the spammers have made life
very interesting for the production team.
This talk will have both technical and nontechnical portions. The
technical portion will cover some of the details of the database, the
crawler, and the front end. The nontechnical portion will cover
marketing(!), and some of the unexpected social issues that the
production team has encountered in operating a public service, which
is used more than 90 million times per day.
Biography: Paul Flaherty was the inventor of AltaVista (for some value
of invention). His current work includes projects in infrared LANs
and signal processing (spam filtering). For fun, he runs the domain
viking.org, dabbles in ham radio, and is trying to brush up on his
Danish.
Dr. Flaherty received his Masters and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
from Stanford. During his eight year tenure, he worked on a diverse
collection of projects, from radioscience to error coding to computer
architecture and networking.
____________
SHIMIZU TALKS
Hiroshi Shimizu
Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, University of Tokyo
Founder and Director of The "Ba" Research Institute,
Kanazawa Institute of Technology
http://www.kanazawa-it.ac.jp/index_e.html
Talk 1
The Dual-Centered Model of the Self:
An Overview of the Theory of Ba and Basho
On Thursday, 12 March 1998, 3:00 - 4:00pm
Xerox PARC (CSL Commons #2230, PARC)
(If you are interested in attending, please contact Kim Paulon
(kpaulon@parc.xerox.com) at least one day ahead to arrange for escort.
Please plan to arrive not later than 2:45.)
Talk 2
Fusing Eastern and Western Models of the Self:
The Logic of Self and the Logic of Science
On Monday, 16 March 1998, 4:15pm
Cordura 100
Talk 3
Design Principles for Knowledge Systems from
the Dual-Centered Perspective (Kumo)
On Tuesday, 17 March 1998, 2:00 - 4:00pm
FX Palo Alto Laboratories
(If you are interested in attending, please contact Livia Polanyi
(polanyi@pal.xerox.com) at least one day in advance to get directions
and arrange for escort.)
In recent years, scientists have recognized that information is
generated only with life and that humans are living members of the
earth's ecological system. As a living system, we live in the
non-deterministic complex world, with an indefinite and vague future.
It is important, then, for the sciences to embrace complexity,
subjectivity and vagueness if we are to answer the perplexing
questions which face us all. The concepts of Ba and Basho, strongly
related with Eastern (especially Japanese) culture, can be useful to
our thinking about these issues. As the philosopher Kitaro Nishida
pointed out, Ba and Basho, are based on non-separated self, and must
be expressed by a predicative logic in contrast to the logic of
Western rational thinking which is subjective, based on separated
self, where the object is observed as definitely separate by the
subject which occupies the position of observer).
A living system lives, however, by fusing both selves, the separated
self and the non-separated self. How do these systems achieve
integration, maintaining self-consistency while avoiding contradiction?
A number of aspects of these issues will be addressed in this series of
public talks.
Biography: Professor Hiroshi Shimizu, a leading Japanese biophysicist,
has been working for many years on philosophical issues about the
nature of self, representation and the environment. His work combines
Eastern and Western views of the Self and Consciousness in order to
answer the fundamental question of how an organism can function in a
world in which it, itself, both forms part of the environment and is
determined by it. His "dual centered theory of self" which builds on
and extends the Japanese concepts of "ba" and "basho" has emerged
recently as a very powerful unifying concept in Japanese thought not
only within theoretical philosophical circles but also in both the
business and national governmental sectors. In the corporate realm,
many major Japanese corporations are currently exploring how to build
upon his model in the design of products ranging from automobiles to
robots to assist people disabled by stroke or other brain injury to
learn to walk again. On a broader social level, the Japanese
government is interested in the application of Shimizu's theoretical
perspective to broader social issues including the resolution of
societal conflicts and the management of cultural diversity in a
global economy.
Since 1993. Professor Shimizu has been a Professor in the Faculty of
Information Technology, Kanazawa Institute of Technology and Director
of the "Ba" Institute. Before joining Kanazawa Institute, Professor
Shimizu was Professor at the University of Tokyo from 1977-1993.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 12 March 1998, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
Nanotechnology
Dr. Ralph Merkle
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those
products depend on the arrangement of those atoms. Today's
manufacturing methods arrange atoms statistically, without control
over the placement of individual atoms. Casting, milling,
lithography, and other traditional "bulk" manufacturing technologies
provide only approximate control over the molecular structure of the
material being manufactured. In the future, we will be able to
inexpensively manufacture structures in which each individual atom is
in its proper place. This will be essential for the manufacture of
molecular computers, and will also let us cleanly make diamondoid
products of remarkable strength and lightness.
This talk will provide a general introduction to the field: where we
are, where we're going, and some of the possibilities once we get
there.
Biography: Dr. Merkle got his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1979
where he co-invented public key cryptography. He joined Xerox PARC in
1988, where he is pursuing research in computational nanotechnology.
He chaired the Fourth and Fifth Foresight Conferences on
Nanotechnology and is on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal
Nanotechnology. Dr. Merkle has seven patents and has published
extensively.
____________
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.
____________
STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 12 March 1998, 7:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/pinterest/
From Bumps to Phonology: a model for recognizing
intonational "phonemes" from duration and fundamental frequency
Arman Maghbouleh
Department of Linguistics
Stanford University
The mapping from low-level phonetic features of intonation, such as
fundamental frequency and duration, to high-level phonological
descriptions, such as ToBI labels, is complex because of linguistic
variability, interactions with phone segments, and errors in physical
measurements. In this talk, I will present a model for performing this
mapping. In particular, I will motivate, explain and analyze a set of
statistical models for recognizing ToBI accents from duration and
fundamental frequency (F0).
The models I have developed are theoretically relevant because their
structure reflects the underlying structures of intonation in
language. They also have practical uses in human-computer dialog
systems or for labeling corpora in language research. I will explore
both the practical and theoretical implications of the models.
This talk will not presume any knowledge of intonation or statistics.
Technical Abstract
------------------
The difficulties in mapping duration and F0 to intonational labels arise
for three reasons:
1. The realization of each intonational gesture is affected by its
intonational context (e.g., the neighboring gestures, rate of
speech, stress pattern). For example, the fundamental frequency
(F0) contour associated with an H* label at the end of a phrase
looks very different from the F0 of an H* in relative isolation.
2. The duration and F0 of an utterance is affected by the segmental
makeup as well as the intonational content of the utterance. For
example, F0 gaps due to unvoiced segments and F0 perturbations
due to consonants can be even more visually striking than F0
variations due to intonation.
3. There is uncertainty and error in measurements of duration and
F0. For example, pitch trackers often report erroneous values
for "creaky" sections of speech and report F0 values twice or
half of the actual values.
In a previous Phonology Workshop, I outlined a method for recognizing
prominences in speech using duration values of syllable nuclei. In
that work, I explicitly factored out the segmental contributions to
duration (problem 2 above) and relied on the observation that
prominences lengthen syllable nuclei differentially more than
boundaries do (Campbell and Sagisaka, 1992) to distinguish prominences
from boundaries (problem 1 above).
In this workshop, I will concentrate on F0. I have followed other
researchers (Pierrehumbert, 1983; Hirst and Espesser, 1993; Taylor,
1994) in smoothing and stylizing F0 contours in order to tackle F0
detection errors and segmental perturbations (problems 2 and 3 above).
For recognizing accents, I have chosen to view the problem in the
framework of statistical pattern recognition (Devijver, and Kittler,
1980; see Wightman et al., 1994 and 1995 for a contrasting
application). Assuming that prominent syllables can be located in a
stream of speech by duration factors, the problem of recognizing
prominence types can be reduced to classifying the pitch movements on
prominent syllables. Surprisingly, the classification methods I am
using (Hastie et al., 1995) have been able to recognize distinctive
features of various intonational gestures even in the presence of
contextual factors (problem one above). In addition to describing the
results of the models, I will analyze their structure to shed light on
the distinctive features in intonational prominence.
____________
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.
____________
SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
on Friday, 14 October 1998, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01 (HP Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/seminar/
(SITN Channel E2)
3DDI: 3D Direct interaction
John Canny
Computer Science Division. UC Berkeley
mailto:jfc@cs.berkeley.edu
The 3DDI project is about direct interaction with simulated or remote
3D worlds. Users interact with the world without gloves or motion
capture sensors and view the world stereoscopically without glasses.
3D interaction preserves the spatial relationships and body language
cues among a group of people in ways that 2D video cannot. It also
supports a strong form of direct interaction where humans see no
interface at all, only 3d objects in the world.
The project involves 3 campuses and covers the technologies from
real-time 3d capture through physical modeling, to rendering on
autostereoscopic and volumetric displays. This talk will summarize the
project, and give details of 3 of its components: real-time depth
capture, physical behavior prototyping, and volumetric display. 3DDI
is one of the seeds of a much larger effort at Berkeley toward
Human-Centered Computing (HCC). I will talk about one other seed,
which is strong telepresence through "PRoPs" or robot avatars, and
then say something about what the rest of the HCC effort will
comprise.
Biography: John Canny is a professor in Computer Science at UC
Berkeley. He came from MIT in 1987 after his thesis on robot motion
planning, which won the ACM dissertation award. He received a Packard
Foundation Fellowship and a PYI while at Berkeley. His robotics work
was on path planning, grasping and the co-creation (with Ken Goldberg)
of RISC robotics, which is a fusion of algorithmic intelligence and
traditional manufacturing hardware. He has worked in applied
computational geometry and with Brian Mirtich on the development of a
physically-based simulator called IMPULSE. He developed inexpensive,
ubiquitous telepresence robots called "PRoPs", which evolved from
airborne to terrestrial locomotion. Two years ago, he started the 3DDI
project on direct 3D interaction with researchers from Berkeley, MIT
and UCSF. 3DDI includes the balanced co-development of simulation and
rendering algorithms with radically new hardware for acquiring and
displaying "into the world".
This is the last PCD talk of the Winter Quarter. Spring Quarter
sessions will begin on April 3.
____________
STANFORD DIGITAL LIBRARIES SEMINAR
on Monday, 16 March 1998, 4:15pm
Gates Building, B08
http://diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/seminars/seminars.html
Active Security Models:
An Approach to Enterprise-oriented and Self-administering
Security in Distributed Collaborative Environments
Roshan Thomas
Odyssey Research Associates
We argue for the need for a new paradigm for access control and
security to handle the demands of emerging applications and
environments. These include workflow applications involving multiple
points of decision making and distributed control, distributed
collaboration involving dynamically formed teams, as well as
agent-based systems. We introduce the notion of "active" security
models as an approach to overcoming the limitations of existing
security models. By active security models, we mean models that
approach security modeling and enforcement from the perspective of
activities or tasks, and as such, provide the abstractions and
mechanisms for the active runtime management of security as tasks
progress to completion. This task-based, active view of access control
and security is in sharp contrast to the existing passive,
resource-centric subject-object view of security typically found in
access control list based systems, where a subject is given access to
objects in a system based on some permissions (rights) the subject
possesses. The subject-object view of security typically divorces
access mediation from the larger context (such as the current state of
tasks) in which a subject performs an operation on an object and is
really an artifact of the early development of computer security. We
show how active access controls can be used to overcome the
limitations of passive models by providing context-based security
management and enforcement, strict controls on usage, and an approach
to security administration that is scalable and self administering.
Through out the talk, we will illustrate the usefulness of active
controls with examples from workflow-based office automation and
healthcare applications.
Biography: Roshan Thomas is a researcher and Principal Scientist at
Odyssey Research Associates in Ithaca, NY. He is currently a principal
investigator on two DARPA-funded research projects exploring various
aspects of next generation security models and also the technical lead
on a consulting project with General Electric that is investigating
security in clinical workflows. He was previously involved as a
security consultant to Microsoft Corporation and worked on security
for Microsoft's OLE DB component database framework.
____________
THE GEORGE AND SANDRA FORSYTHE MEMORIAL LECTURES
Two lectures given by
Professor Stuart Russell
University of California, Berkeley
Lecture 1: Rationality and Intelligence
on Monday, 16 March 1998, 7:30pm
Gates, Hewlett-Packard classroom (B01)
Lecture 2: Object Identification in a Bayesian Context
on Tuesday, 17 March 1998, 4:15pm
Gates, Hewlett-Packard classroom (B01)
Stuart Russell was born in 1962 in Portsmouth, England. He received
his B.A. with first class honours in Physics from Oxford University
in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1986
(working with Prof. Michael Genesereth). He then joined the faculty
of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently a
Professor of Computer Science. He is a recipient of the Presidential
Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the 1995
Computers and Thought Award, and a 1996 Miller Professorship of the
University of California. He was elected Fellow of the American
Association of Artificial Intelligence in 1997.
His research interests include machine learning, limited rationality,
real-time decision-making, intelligent agent architectures, autonomous
vehicles, search, game-playing, reasoning under uncertainty, and
commonsense knowledge representation. He has published over ninety
papers and three books, "The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and
Induction" (Pitman, 1989), "Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited
Rationality" (MIT Press, 1991, with Eric Wefald), and most recently
"Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (Prentice Hall, 1995,
with Peter Norvig).
The first lecture, entitled "Rationality and Intelligence" will be
given in the Hewlett-Packard classroom (B01) in the Gates Computer
Science Building at 7:30 in the evening on March 16. The lecture will
be of general interest to people in the computing, engineering, and
cognitive community. It will outline a gradual evolution in our
formal conception of intelligence that brings it closer to our
informal conception and simultaneously reduces the gap between theory
and practice. There will be a reception after the lecture in the
lobby.
The second lecture, entitled "Object Identification in a Bayesian
Context" will be given in the Hewlett-Packard classroom (B01) in Gates
at 4:15 on March 17. It will discuss the fundamental problem of
object identification, by computing the probability that any two
perceived objects are the same, given a stream of noisy observations.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 17 March 1998, 4:15pm
Math Corner 380:381T
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/Logic/
Recent Results in Metapredicative Proof Theory
Thomas Strahm
University of Bern, Switzerland (visiting Stanford)
Metapredicativity is a new general term in proof theory which
describes the analysis and study of formal systems whose
proof-theoretic strength is beyond the Feferman-Schuette ordinal
Gamma-0 but which are nevertheless amenable to predicative methods.
In this talk we give a general survey and introduction to
metapredicativity. In particular, we discuss various examples of
metapredicative systems, including (i) subsystems of second order
arithmetic, (ii) first and second order fixed point theories, (iii)
extensions of Kripke-Platek set theory without foundation, and (iv)
systems of explicit mathematics with universes.
Relevant keywords for our talk are: arithmetical transfinite recursion
and dependent choice; restricted bar induction; transfinite
hierarchies of fixed points; transfinite fixed point recursion; hyper
inaccessibility, Mahloness and Pi-3 reflection without foundation;
universe operators.
____________
ME297: DESIGN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 18 March 1998, 3:15pm
http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
(seminar may be closed, check web page)
Grammatical Generation and Optimizing Search in Early Design
Jonathan Cagan
George Tallman and Florence Barrett Ladd
Development Professor in Engineering
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
The early stages of design require search through large spaces of
design concepts. To keep the process tractable and productive, the
description of the design space must be concise, yet the scope of the
space still vast. Further, once a design space is defined it must be
searched in an efficient manner to determine good design solutions. In
this presentation we will explore the benefits of shape grammars to
describe engineering design spaces. These grammars either model
knowledge intensive products such as coffee makers, or
near-knowledge-free configurations such as truss structures. To search
design spaces such as those generated by knowledge-free grammars,
techniques must be able to move through discontinuous, non-smooth
topologies and models and determine not only feasible solutions but
optimally directed ones. We will explore how stochastic optimization
methods find optimal configurations in these spaces. One such
application will be in the area of structural topology design and
another in the area of product layout. We will also briefly examine
the relationship between these search methods and cognitive models of
human problem solving.
____________
CSLI TALK
on Thursday, 19 March 1998, 12 noon
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/
Global Intelligence Project
Masa Numao
Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology
http://www.titech.ac.jp/home.html
We propose a cooperative system of human beings and computers, called
"Global Intelligence" (GI). Human workers in GI are supported by a
computer system called GIANT (GI Associating NeTwork), which consists
of an inference mechanism by using a dynamically transforming network,
and has a learning mechanism by adjusting a weight on each link in the
network. After showing their structures and experiments, we point out
that we can construct an interesting model of intelligence not only by
analyzing a "Society of Mind", but also by synthesizing "Mind of a
Society".
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 19 March 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Learning Evaluation Functions for Optimization
Justin Boyan
mailto:jab@lefty.sp.cs.cmu.edu
STAGE is a new search technique which learns a problem-specific
heuristic evaluation function as it searches. The heuristic is trained
by least-squares TD(lambda) to predict, from features of states along
the search trajectory, how well a fast Markovian search method such as
hill-climbing will perform starting from each state. Search proceeds
by alternating between two stages: performing the fast search to
gather new training data, and following the learned heuristic to reach
a promising new start state.
STAGE has produced good results on a variety of combinatorial
optimization domains, including VLSI channel routing, Bayes net
structure-finding, bin-packing, Boolean satisfiability, radiotherapy
treatment planning, and geographic cartogram design. I'll discuss as
many of these successes as time permits, and also explain a STAGE
failure on the domain of inverse Boggle.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 20 March 1998, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/Logic/
Reductions of Theories of Countable Tree Ordinals to ID_1.
Sol Feferman
This is the last logic lunch of the quarter. We plan an informal
lunch at the coffee house afterward.
This is a report of a section from the forthcoming chapter by Jeremy
Avigad and myself on Goedel's functional ("Dialectica"
interpretation.* I will sketch two applications of this
interpretation, one for a classical and one for an intuitionistic
theory of countable tree ordinals, to reduce them to corresponding
systems of one arithmetical inductive definition. The questions
following this work are: (i) how these are related, and (ii) can
anything similar be done for theories of higher ordinal number
classes?
*To appear in the Handbook of Proof Theory, S. Buss ed.
____________
END MATERIAL
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