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CSLI Calendar, 15 April 1998, vol. 13:29



   
     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
______________________________________________________________________

15 April 1998                    Stanford               Vol. 13, No. 29
______________________________________________________________________

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

             ACTIVITIES DURING 15 APRIL TO 24 APRIL 1998

WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL
        12 noon Semantics Workshop 
                Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
                The Semantics and Pragmatics of Presupposition
                Alex Lascarides
                Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh and
                CSLI
                Abstract below

         3:15pm ME297 Design Theory and Methodology Seminar
                How Technologies Change the Social Organization of Work
                Prof. Stephen Barley
                Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering 
                Management, Stanford University 
                Abstract below

         3:30pm CSLI Publications Talk
                Ventura 17
                Aristotle and the Lexicon of Space
                Claude Vandeloise
                Linguistics / Louisiana State University
                Abstract below

         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                Mission Possible: Be and the BeOS
                Scott Paterson
                Be Incorporated
                Abstract below

THURSDAY, 16 APRIL
        all day Causality Seminar
                Ventura 17 
                Information below

        12 noon CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100  
                How Rational Are Internet Users?
                Bernardo Huberman
                Xerox PARC
                http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/

         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                Advancing Xerox Technology By Selling Services
                Rick Beach 
                Region Manager, Advanced Services Team
                Xerox Business Services
                http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/

         4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
                Gates 100
                Rotation Invariant Neural Network-Based Face Detection
                Shumeet Baluja
                Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center/CMU
                Abstract below

         4:15pm AI-Vision-Robotics Division Colloquium
                Gates 104
                Exploration and Reasoning in Large-Scale and Visual
                Spaces
                Ben Kuipers
                University of Texas at Austin
                Abstract below

         4:15pm Frontiers of Neuroscience Seminars
                Munzer Auditorium
                Intracellular Ca2+ imaging reveals high affinity of
                release for Ca2+, then what determines initiation and
                termination of release in fast synapses?
                Dr. Hanna Parnas and Dr. Itzchak Parnas
                Hebrew University, Jerusalem
                Host: Dr. Eric Shooter
                http://www.stanford.edu/dept/nbio/Spring98.html

         7:30pm Phonology Workshop
                Margaret Jacks Hall, 460:146
                Phonetics in Phonology: More and Less
                John Ohala
                Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
                Abstract below

         8:00pm Tanner Lectures
                Bldg. 200:002 (History Corner)
                Experience and its Moral Codes:
                Culture, Human Conditions, and Disorder
                "The Moral, the Political, and the Medical: Ethnographic
                and Clinical Approaches to Human Engagement"
                Arthur Kleinman
                Harvard University
                Dept. of Anthropology and Medical School
                http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/general/colloqs.html

FRIDAY, 17 APRIL
        all day Causality Seminar
                Ventura 17
                9:00am - 5:00pm
                Information below

        12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
                The Design of the Palm Pilot
                Rob Haitani
                3Com (Palm Computing)
                Abstract below 

         3:15pm Computer Science Database Seminar
                Gates B-12
                Old Media Meet New
                Kevin McKenna
                The New York Times
                Abstract below

         3:15pm Cognitive Seminar
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                An Explanation for why the World Appears Small in the
                Enright (1970) Illusion: Mutual Constraint of Structures
                from Stereo and Motion
                Dr. Ben Backus 
                
         3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
                Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
                Reconstructing the Historical Development of African
                American
                Walt Wolfram
                North Caroline State University
                Abstract below

MONDAY, 20 APRIL
         3:30pm Psychology Social Lab
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                Getting Stuck In The Past: Temporal Orientation And
                Coping With Trauma
                Alison Holman
                UCLA
          
         4:10pm Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium
                210 Wheeler Hall (Berkeley)
                Archives of the Languages of Russia
                Tjeerd de Graaf 
                University of Groningen
                http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/Colloquia/
                
         4:30pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
                Gates B08
                To be announced
                http://diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/seminars/seminars.html

TUESDAY, 21 APRIL
         3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
                Bldg. 420:050 (Jordan Hall)
                Affective Style: Perspectives from Affective Neuroscience
                Richard Davidson
                University of Wisconsin
               
WEDNESDAY, 22 APRIL
         3:15pm History of Science Colloquium
                Landau Bldg., room 140
                Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic
                Policy in the United States, 1921-1953  
                David M. Hart
                John F. Kennedy School of Government
                Harvard University
                http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/

         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                Towards Practical Verification for Microprocessors
                David Dill
                Stanford  
                Abstract below
                
THURSDAY, 23 APRIL
        all day CSLI Mini-symposium
                Practical Acquisition of Large-Scale Lexical Information
                Ventura 17
                Information below

        12 noon CSLI CogLunch 
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Automatic Detection of Hidden Events in Spontaneous
                Speech
                Elizabeth Shriberg
                SRI International
              
         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                Visualization of Topological Structures in Quantum
                Mechanics and Molecular Physics - Some Deep Connections
                Creon Levit
                NASA Ames Research Center
                http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum

         4:15pm AI-Vision-Robotics Division Colloquium
                Gates 104
                John McCarthy
                Stanford
                http://www-formal.stanford.edu/aicolloq/
        
         4:30pm History of Science Colloquium
                History corner, room 307
                Ontogeny, Phylogeny and Conceptual Development
                Stephen Downes
                Philosophy, University of Utah
                http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/
                
FRIDAY, 24 APRIL
        12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
                Distance Matters:
                Intellectual Work Among Geographically Separated Group
                Members
                Gary and Judith Olson
                University of Michigan
                Abstract below

         3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
                Bldg. 90:92Q (Philosophy)
                A Theory of Mathematical Correctness and Mathematical
                Truth
                Mark Balaguer
                California State Los Angeles
                
         3:15pm Cognitive Seminar
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                Jeff Zacks
                Dr. Rose Zacks
                Michigan State
        
         3:15pm Computer Science Database Seminar
                Gates B-12
                Abstractions for Advanced GUI Programming
                Moshe Zloof
                Hewlett-Packard
                Abstract below
                             ____________

                             ANNOUNCEMENT

Two things, first, an apology for those of you who got last week's
calendar in two parts.  It seems my mail program doesn't like single
messages longer than 1000 lines.  I'll try to keep future calendars
under that limit (I suspect you don't want messages longer than 1000
lines in your mailboxes).  Second, this calendar is coming out a bit
earlier than usual.  This is so people will have some time to plan
things if they intend to come to the Causality Seminar on the 16 and
17 of April. 
                             ____________

                     STANFORD SEMANTICS WORKSHOP
                 on Wednesday, 15 April 1998, 12 noon
                     Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
      http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/semgroup/

            The Semantics and Pragmatics of Presupposition
                          Alex Lascarides 
    Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh and CSLI
             
This talk is based on joint research with Nicholas Asher.  I will
offer a novel analysis of presuppositions, paying particular attention
to the interaction between the knowledge resources that are required
to interpret them.  The analysis has two main features.  First, I
capture an analogy between presuppositions, anaphora and scope
ambiguity (cf. van der Sandt, 1992), by utilizing semantic
underspecification (cf. Reyle, 1993).  Second, resolving this
underspecification requires reasoning about how the presupposition is
rhetorically connected to the discourse context.
   
This has several consequences.  First, since pragmatic information
plays a role in computing the rhetorical relation, it also constrains
the interpretation of presuppositions.  Our account therefore goes
beyond existing ones, and provides a forum for analyzing problematic
data, that require pragmatic reasoning.  Second, binding
presuppositions to the context via rhetorical links replaces
accommodating them, in the sense of adding them to the context
(cf. Lewis, 1979).  Thus, unlike previous theories, I don't resort to
interpretation mechanisms that are peculiar to presuppositions.
Rather, they are handled entirely in terms of the discourse update
procedure.
       
I will formalize this approach in SDRT (Asher 1993, Lascarides and
Asher 1993), but I won't assume any prior knowledge of this framework.
I will assume prior knowledge of DRT and what presuppositions are.
       
If you would like to read the paper that this talk is based on in
advance of the meeting, then you can pick it up at:
       
        http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~alex/papers/presupposition.ps
                             ____________

             ME297: DESIGN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY SEMINAR
                 on Wednesday, 15 April 1998, 3:15pm
              http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
               (seminar may be closed, check web page)

       How Technologies Change the Social Organization of Work
                         Prof. Stephen Barley
   Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management
                         Stanford University
            
I will draw on data collected during a year long ethnography of
computerized medical imaging devices in two hospitals to show how new
technologies can alter organizations by altering roles and networks. I
will use the data to illustrate what I call, "the reverberation model"
of technologically driven social change. The model enables one to
trace changes in organizational structure to changes in actual work
practices.

Biography: Professor Barley is a Professor of Industrial Engineering
and Engineering Management at Stanford. He is also the director of
Center for Work, Technology and Organization and the editor of the
Administrative Science Quarterly, the leading research journal in the
field of organizational behavior. He has written widely on the topics
of careers, work, organizational culture, occupational communities,
and technological change, and his papers have appeared in both
organizational and sociological journals and books. He has recently
co-published a monograph entitled The New Work of Work, and is
currently writing a book entitled The New Crafts which summarizes a
five-year study of technicians. He holds a Ph.D. in Organization
Studies from MIT.
                             ____________

                        CSLI PUBLICATIONS TALK
                 on Wednesday, 15 April 1998, 3:30pm
                              Ventura 17

                  Aristotle and the Lexicon of Space
                         by Claude Vandeloise
               Linguistics / Louisiana State University
                        mailto:Vdllsu@aol.com

The French linguist Emile Benveniste establishes a parallel between
Aristotle's Categories and the grammar of Greek. From a structuralist
point of view, this means that the philosopher remains trapped in the
structures of language. From a cognitive perspective, in contrast, it
will be shown that Aristotle establishes a `naive physics' well fitted
to the description of the spatial lexicon. In particular, the two
conflicting approaches of place (topos) proposed in the Categories and
in the Physics correspond to two different meanings of the word
`place' in French. Of special interest is the description of the Greek
preposition `en' (in) proposed in the fourth book of the Physics and
developed by Aristotle's commentators, Porphyrus, Ammonius and
Dexippus. From this analysis, it appears that the appellation of
`Aristotelician categories' attributed by Lakoff to classical
categories in contrast with natural `Roschian' categories is a
misnomer.
                             ____________
                                   
                  EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
            on Wednesday, 15 April 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
        NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
             http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/

               Mission Possible: Be, Inc. and the BeOS
                            Scott Paterson
                               Be, Inc.
   
Specialty operating systems are now taking on important roles in daily
computing. Linux has served the Internet community very well. The BeOS
aims to accomplish a similar role within the audio and video editing
niche where performance and stability are paramount. The BeOS is a
modern, multitasking, protected memory operating system based on
pervasive multithreading, symmetric multiprocessing and includes a
64-bit journaling file systems. The result is unprecedented user
responsiveness, enabling real-time manipulation and feedback of
digital sources.

Scott Paterson will give a brief overview of Be's history leading up to
the recent BeOS Release 3 for both Intel Pentium and PowerPC
platforms. Most of the talk will focus on the operating system demo
itself.

Biography: Scott Paterson joined Be in August 1996 as an Evangelist to
promote third party software development for the BeOS and is now the
Product Manager. Scott graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990.
                             ____________

                          CAUSALITY SEMINAR
                         16 and 17 April 1998
                        Ventura Hall, Room 17
           Center for the Study of Language and Information
                         Stanford University
                     Organized by Patrick Suppes

Anyone who is interested is cordially invited to attend any of the
lectures in this 2-day Causality Seminar.

Thursday, April 16, 1998

9:00 a.m.       James Woodward (CalTech)
                Causation and Invariance

10:30 a.m.      Yair Guttmann (Stanford)
                Continuity, Differentiability and Causality

2:30 p.m.       Domenico Costantini (Bologna)
                A Characterization of Creation and Destruction Propensity

4:00 p.m.       David Freedman (Berkeley)
                Association, Causation and Statistical Inference

Friday, April 17, 1998

9:00 a.m.       Paul Holland (Berkeley)
                Causation and Latent Variables

10:30 a.m.      Brian Skyrms (CalTech)
                Resiliency, Projectibility and Causal Necessity

2:30 p.m.       Maria Carla Galavotti (Trieste)
                Some Remarks on Causality and Manipulability

4:00 p.m.       Patrick Suppes (Stanford)
                Computation and Causality
                             ____________
   
       SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
             on Thursday, 16 April 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
                              Gates 100
              http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html

           Rotation Invariant Neural Network-Based Face Detection

                               Shumeet Baluja
                 Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center/CMU
                               Pittsburgh, PA
                        mailto:baluja@jprc.com
   
We will present a state-of-the-art neural network-based face detection
system. Unlike similar systems, this system is not limited to
detecting upright, frontal faces; our system detects faces at any
degree of rotation in the image plane. The system employs multiple
networks. First, ``router'' networks are used to determine each input
window's orientation. This information is used to transform the image
into a standard orientation for input into multiple ``detector''
networks. The training methods and analyses for both types of networks
are described in detail. We will present empirical results on several
large test sets and discuss ideas for extending this work to
out-of-plane rotations.

Joint work with Henry Rowley (CMU) and Takeo Kanade (CMU).

Relevant Papers and an On-Line Demo can be found at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~baluja
                             ____________

                AI-VISION-ROBOTICS DIVISION COLLOQUIUM
           on Thursday, 16 April 1998, 4:15pm until 5:30pm
                              Gates 104
               http://www-formal.stanford.edu/aicolloq/

      Exploration and Reasoning in Large-Scale and Visual Spaces
                           Benjamin Kuipers
                     Computer Sciences Department
                  The University of Texas at Austin
        
We have developed the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy (SSH) as a
heterogeneous representation for knowledge of large-scale space: the
cognitive map. Each level of the SSH has its own descriptive ontology
and its own mathematical foundation. The objects, relations, and
assumptions at each level are abstracted from the levels below. The
control level allows the robot and its environment to be formalized as
a continuous dynamical system, whose stable equilibrium points can be
abstracted to a discrete set of ``distinctive states.'' Trajectories
linking these states can be abstracted to actions, giving a discrete
causal graph representation of the state space. The causal graph of
states and actions can in turn be abstracted to a topological network
of places and paths. Local metrical models, such as occupancy grids,
of neighborhoods of places and paths can then be built on the
framework of the topological network without their usual problems of
global consistency.
  
We are extending these ideas in two directions. First, we are
exploring the hypothesis that a similar hierarchy of representations
can be used for acquisition and use of knowledge of visual space,
building from active feature trackers to multiple frames of reference
for spatial relations. Second, we are applying our ideas to the
development of an intelligent wheelchair, intended to serve a driver
with normal cognition but severely impaired mobility and communication
capabilities. The intelligent wheelchair application raises a number
of exciting issues in spatial reasoning about both large-scale and
visual space, multi-modal sensor integration, and mixed-initiative
human-computer interfaces.
                             ____________

                     STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
                  on Thursday, 16 April 1998, 7:30pm
                     Margaret Jacks Hall 460:146
      http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/pinterest/

                Phonetics in Phonology: More and Less
                              John Ohala
                      Department of Linguistics
   
Phonology attempts to explain the behavior -- the patterning -- of
speech sounds. Psychology and scientific phonetics provides some of
the required explanatory principles. When explaining common
cross-language sound patterns, phonetics (in contrast to most
mainstream phonological accounts) provides principles which are
real-world, empirically testable, and which do not pertain exclusively
to the domain of speech, i.e., they cover non-linguistic phenomena as
well. These principles allow us to achieve the goals sought by any
scientific endeavor: insight and generality. This will be illustrated
briefly with three phonological phenomena: emergent (i.e., so-called
'epenthetic') obstruents (e.g., 'pul[t]se', Middle English 'nem[p]ne'
"name") sound patterns due to the aerodynamic voicing constraint
(e.g., [g] as the most common gap in voiced stop series), and
asymmetries in the direction of sound change (e.g., palatalized
labials change into apicals but not the reverse). The principles
underlying these phenomena influence speech sounds and their behavior
in the act of transmission of a pronunciation norm from the speaker to
the listener. Specifically, they lead to ambiguity in the speech
signal and thus variability in its interpretation. The norm created by
the listener may end up being different from that held by the speaker.
This is, I believe the basic mechanism of the vast majority of sound
changes. It is in this area that it is desirable to have more
phonetics in phonology than is currently the practice.  But such
'natural' processes -- some phonetic and some psychological (what
listeners have to do to parse the phonetic events in the signal) --
take place OUTSIDE what may be regarded as the message 'source' and
the message 'destination'. Thus, there is no logical necessity of
complicating the account of how speakers represent and deal with the
sound patterns of their language by attributing to these speakers a
sense of what is 'natural' or common in languages and what is not. In
fact speakers' concepts about sound patterns are greatly influenced by
orthography (which in many cases bears little relation to sound or
phonetic naturalness). The phonetics that speakers do know seems to be
limited, shallow, inductively derived, and language-specific (in other
words, not innate): how to produce and perceive the distinctive sounds
in their language, including how to maintain (and occasionally to
exaggerate or attenuate) the differences between sounds. In the
psychological representation of words and their constituent sounds
less phonetics is desirable than what is currently advocated.
                             ____________

               SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
                on Friday, 17 April 1998, 12:30-2:00pm
                      Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
                 http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/seminar/
                          (SITN Channel E2)

                     The Design of the PalmPilot
                             Rob Haitani
                            Palm Computing
                       mailto:rhaitani@palm.com

Handheld devices present unique obstacles to user interface design.
The standard approach is to simulate a PC environment and apply it on
a smaller scale.  There are two major problems with this approach.
First, the usage model for handheld devices is fundamentally different
than that of PC's and laptops.  Handheld devices are accessed
frequently for short bursts (e.g., checking one's schedule or looking
up a phone number), whereas PC's are accessed infrequently for long
sessions (e.g., creating spreadsheets or writing memos).  This results
in different tradeoffs and design decisions.  For example, it becomes
critical to minimize the number of steps to perform common functions.
The second problem is that PC designs are designed for 640 x 480
resolution.  On smaller screens, every pixel matters and control
objects designed for larger screens take up valuable real estate that
could be put to better use displaying information.

We have designed an operating system specifically for handheld
computers that addresses these issues.  The presentation focuses less
on theory and more on the real-life application of our design,
covering the following topics:

* Lessons learned from early PDA software design
  
* PalmPilot design goals and informal metrics used to measure our success.
  Special emphasis will be placed on addressing the conflicting goals
  of minimizing the number of objects displayed for simplicity
  vs. maximizing the number of objects for fast access.
  
* PalmPilot design process

Biography: Rob Haitani is a Product Line Manager at Palm Computing
Inc., a 3Com company.  Mr. Haitani was the original product manager
for the Pilot 1000, and was the lead designer for the OS and
application UI design.  He also led the UI design effort on a second
generation of software for the Zoomer, a predecessor to the PalmPilot,
that ultimately did not reach the market.  Prior to working for Palm,
Mr. Haitani worked as a product manager for Radius, a Macintosh
peripheral company, and spent five years working in product planning
for Sony Corporation in Japan.
                             ____________

                  COMPUTER SCIENCE DATABASE SEMINAR
              on Friday, 17 April 1998, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
                              Gates B12
         http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html

                          Old Media Meet New
                            Kevin McKenna
                          The New York Times

As the Internet and other new media emerge, traditional publishers are
finding themselves with new opportunities and new competitors. What
have they learned so far about this new communications frontier, and  
how will it change the roles of information providers and users? What
moves publishers and consumers into a new realm is the unique
potential of the Internet in four areas: immediacy, interactivity,
customization and the ability to search a database. My presentation 
will discuss what The New York Times and other publishers are doing in
these areas to reinvent themselves on the Internet, as well as the
privacy issues surrounding the vast databases we are compiling on our
usage and users.
   
Biography: Kevin McKenna is a Knight Journalism Fellow for the 1997-98
academic year at Stanford University, on leave from The New York
Times, where he had been an editor for 13 years.

Most recently, he served for more than two years as editorial director
of The New York Times Electronic Media Company, a group formed in 1995
to oversee the newspaper's on-line and multimedia endeavors, including
The New York Times on the Web, of which he was founding editor.

He began his career as a reporter for The Associated Press in Los
Angeles and Raleigh, N.C., and spent five and a half years in Paris as
an editor for The International Herald Tribune. He joined The New York
Times as a copy editor in 1984, and went on to serve as assistant
foreign editor, deputy news editor and assistant metropolitan editor.

He graduated from the University of Southern California and has a
master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
                             ____________

                  LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
                   on Friday, 17 April 1998, 3:30pm
                  Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:146
        http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/colloq.html

Reconstructing the Historical Development of African American English:
                     New Evidence on an Old Theme
                             Walt Wolfram
                   North Carolina State University
   
An expanding database on earlier African American English that
includes ex-slave written and spoken records as well as data from
expatriate insular black speech communities has led to an extensive
reexamination of the historical development of AAVE.  Curiously, these
investigations have often overlooked one the most diagnostic
sociolinguistic situations of all-that of the longstanding, insular
rural Southern black community in the United States (i.e., other than
the Sea Islands where Gullah is spoken).  This presentation considers
data from a historically isolated community of African Americans in
mainland, coastal North Carolina located by the Pamlico Sound. Many
white and black families have co-existed in this remote marshland
since the early 1700s, thus providing a unique laboratory for
investigating critical questions about the historical status and the
present-day development of AAVE. To what extent have African Americans
participated historically in localized Anglo dialects? For example, do
African Americans in the Pamlico Sound area speak the distinctive
"Outer Banks brogue" strongly associated with their Anglo cohorts in
the area (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997)? Are there "core"
AAVE features that co-exist with local dialect features? Have
ethnolinguistic boundaries become more or less robust over time?
These questions are considered by examining both particular diagnostic
structures (e.g. copula absence, past be leveling, subject-verb
concord) along with overall dialect profiles (e.g.  comparative vowel
systems) based on an extensive set of sociolinguistic interviews
recently conducted with speakers spanning over a century in apparent
time. The analysis suggests: (1) that the earlier vernacular speech of
African Americans was much more localized than many contemporary
versions of AAVE; (2) that AAVE has maintained long-term, selective
ethnolinguistic distinctiveness even while accommodating detailed
features of localized Anglo varieties; and (3) that current-day AAVE
is moving toward a more expansive set of core AAVE features as it
moves away from marked regional varieties associated with Anglo
speakers.  Explanation for this development centers on the structural
dynamics of linguistic accommodation in language contact, the changing
character of migration and social interaction in many African American
communities, and the ethnic focusing of a common core AAVE features
that has accelerated over the last half century.
                             ____________
                                   
                  EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
            on Wednesday, 22 April 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
        NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
             http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/

       Towards Practical Formal Verification of Microprocessors
                            David L. Dill
                         Stanford University
   
Full formal verification of a commercial microprocessor design could
be considered a "grand challenge" problem for formal verification
researchers. However, many of the grand challenges that have been
proposed (such as weather prediction) don't double in complexity every
couple of years!

In this talk, I will reveal what our research group has learned about
formally verifying microprocessor designs. Where do current approaches
fall short? What special characteristics of the designs can we
exploit? What new methods might help? And, what are the prospects for
this work producing a useful result?

About the speaker: David L. Dill is Associate Professor of Computer
Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford
University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has
an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and
Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987).
    
His primary research interests relate to the theory and application of
formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware,
protocols, and software.
    
Prof. Dill's Ph.D. thesis, "Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical
Verification of Speed Independent Circuits" was named as a
Distinguished Dissertation by ACM and published as such by M.I.T.
Press in 1988. He was the recipient of an Presidential Young
Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1988, and a
Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research in 1991. He
has received Best Paper awards at International Conference on Computer
Design in 1991 and the Design Automation Conference in 1993. He was a
visiting professor during the summer of 1996 at Intel in Hillsboro,
Oregon (where he learned how many orders of magnitude short of being
able to verify the Pentium Pro he was). From July 1996 to September
1997 he was Chief Scientist (and one of the founders) of 0-In Design
Automation, a start-up that is developing verification tools that
combine conventional simulation and formal verification technology.
                             ____________

                         CSLI MINI-SYMPOSIUM
       Practical Acquisition of Large-Scale Lexical Information
                            23 April 1998
                              Ventura 17

Lexical acquisition is still a bottleneck for the production of broad
coverage Natural Language Processing systems.  Presentations in this
mini-symposium will describe research on practical techniques for
acquiring syntactic and semantic information, and also lexical
frequencies.  The discussion session will focus on ways in which the
distinct approaches could complement each other and how we might share
resources.  Please contact Ann Copestake
(mailto:aac@csli.stanford.edu) if you are interested in attending.

PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE 

10:30am - 12:30pm

  John Carroll, University of Sussex
  Automatic acquisition of subcategorization frames and 
  selectional preferences from corpora

  Susanne Gahl, Berkeley
  Validating subcategorization patterns

coffee break

  Judith Eckle-Kohler, University of Stuttgart
  Lexicon building with corpus-based acquisition for German and English

  Ann Copestake, CSLI
  Using Levin's verb classes to construct a lexicon semi-automatically

12:30pm - 1:30pm Lunch

1:30pm

  Charles Fillmore, Berkeley
  Lexicographical relevance

2:15pm

  Discussion session

4:30pm  end
                             ____________

               SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
                on Friday, 24 April 1998, 12:30-2:00pm
                      Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
                 http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/seminar/
                          (SITN Channel E2)

                          Distance Matters:
    Intellectual Work Among Geographically Separated Group Members
                   Gary M. Olson & Judith S. Olson
            School of Information, University of Michigan
             mailto:gmo@umich.edu mailto:jolson@umich.edu
   
It is widely believed that effective intellectual work can be done
among team members who are geographically dispersed.  We have studied
this in both the field and the laboratory, and are beginning to
understand the boundary conditions on when such effective work can be
achieved.  Our research goal has been to understand what kinds of
tasks can be carried out effectively, and what kinds of technology
support are needed to support effective task outcomes.  In the field
we have studied distributed teams of scientists working in
"collaboratories" (e.g., http://www.si.umich.edu/UARC/, a longitudinal
project now in its sixth year) and teams in global corporations as
they try to work together across great distances (cf.
http://www.crew.umich.edu/).  We find that closely coupled work is
still difficult to support at a distance.
        
Similarly, such critical stages of team work as establishing mutual
trust appear to require some level of face-to-face interaction.
However, we have seen that teams of scientists are able to carry out
effective work, and indeed evolve totally new ways of working that
have great impact on their science.  We have also examined
cross-national teams, and the support issues for them are somewhat
different than for within-nation teams.  In the laboratory we have
compared face-to-face and distributed groups, and we have done
intensive analyses of the process as well as the outcome of work under
both kinds of conditions.  We draw general conclusions about the
nature of distance-based work, including both the technical challenges
involved in supporting it and the social and organization processes
that mediate it.  
          
Gary M. Olson is Professor and Associate Dean in the School of
Information and Professor of Psychology, all at the University of
Michigan.  He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in cognitive
psychology, and has been at Michigan since 1975. He is also a
Professor at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of
Science.
         
Judith S. Olson is Professor in the School of Information, Professor
of Computer and Information Systems in the School of Business
Administration, and Professor of Psychology, all at the University of
Michigan.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in
psychology, and did a postdoc at Stanford University.  She has been at
Michigan since 1970, except for three years (1980-83) when she was
manager of a human factors group at Bell Labs.

The Olsons current research interests are in the cognitive and social
aspects of computer use, with a particular focus on how people use
computing and communication technologies to enable group work at a
distance. Their work involves both laboratory and field research on a
variety of collaboration technologies.  The field work has been
conducted in both companies and in science communities.
                             ____________

                  COMPUTER SCIENCE DATABASE SEMINAR
              on Friday, 24 April 1998, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
                              Gates B12
         http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html

              Abstractions for Advanced GUI Programming
                            Moshe M. Zloof
          Principal Architect, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
                
In the last twenty years, we have witnessed considerable progress in  
an ever-increasing bandwidth from the computer to the user.
Application screens evolved from static text only screens to
interactive GUI screens. These screens contain numerous graphical
elements or "widgets", supporting multiple data types, such as text,
voice, image, and video. The widgets can range from simple ones like a
combo box or slider to more complicated OCX's such as interactive
graphs or maps.

On the other hand, the tools to program this application are still in
the domain of programmers. Although there has been much progress in
various TAD tools, visual language and 4GL to improve ease of use,
they still mostly target programmers. We believe that in order to
allow end-users to develop their own advanced UI applications, it is
necessary to create higher-level application abstractions or 'algebra'
for stating the application in a declarative manner. This can be
compared to the relational algebra operators in the data base area.
They were created as abstractions for data base queries, enabling end
users to express their own queries in a declarative manner. In doing
so, bugs are minimized and program modifications and maintenance
becomes trivial. In this talk, I will motivate the audience to see the
need for these abstractions and classify them into categories,
followed by a demo.

Biography: Dr. Moshe Zloof, Principal Architect at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories, is considered a pioneer researcher in the area of data
base languages and user interfaces. Back in the 1970's, during a
complete departure from the traditional approach and while working at
IBM, Dr. Zloof created QUERY-BY-EXAMPLE (QBE) and OFFICE-BY-EXAMPLE
(OBE), the first visual programming languages which not only set the
stage for considerable research agenda, but also have been
incorporated in many successful products such as PARADOX, DBASE IV,
ACCESS and many more.
  
At Hewlett-Packard, Dr. Zloof is currently involved in developing the
IC-BY-EXAMPLE language - a new paradigm to enable non-programmer
professionals to construct the own applications.

Dr. Zloof has published numerous papers and articles, has chaired and 
served as invited and keynote speaker at many national and
international conferences and universities. He has also received
several awards including the most prestigious IBM Corporate Award. He
has served as an adjunct professor at the Courant Institute of NYU and
Columbia University.
  
Dr. Zloof received his B.S. from the Technion Institute of Haifa,
Israel, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1969 and 1972 respectively.
                             ____________

                             END MATERIAL

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