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CSLI Calendar, 22 April 1998, vol. 13:30



   
     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
______________________________________________________________________

22 April 1998                   Stanford               Vol. 13, No. 30
______________________________________________________________________

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

               ACTIVITIES DURING 22 APRIL TO 1 MAY 1998

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
                Abstract below
              
         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

         4:00pm SRI AI Seminar 
                EK 109: Computer Dialogue Lab Demo Room (SRI) 
                The AMPHION Deductive Synthesis Project at NASA Ames
                Research Center
                Jeffrey Van Baalen & Michael Lowry
                NASA Ames Research Center
                Abstract below

         4:00pm Berkeley Phonology Laboratory Colloquium
                46 Dwinelle Hall
                The Development of Lexical Representation: Evidence from
                Young Children's Slips of the Tongue
                Jeri J. Jaeger
                Associate Professor
                Department of Linguistics  
                State University of New York, Buffalo
                http://trill.berkeley.edu/

         4:15pm AI-Vision-Robotics Division Colloquium
                Gates 104
                From Where AI Is Now to Human-Level AI
                John McCarthy
                Stanford
                Abstract below
        
         4:15pm CS548: Distributed Systems Research Seminar
                Gates B01
                Low Latency Media Delivery in a Consumer Internet Service
                Mike Schwartz
                @Home Network
                http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/

         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 noon Logic Lunch
                Room 380:383N 
                A Fictionalist Account of the Indispensable Applications
                of Mathematics
                Mark Balaguer, Cal State, L.A.
                Abstract below

        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

         2:00pm International Computer Science Institute
                Main Lecture Hall at ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley
                MPEG7: Current State and First Possible Applications
                Arnd Steinmetz and Frank Nack
                GMD-IPSI, Mobile Interactive Media, Darmstadt
                http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/talks/

         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

SATURDAY, 25 APRIL
        all day Trilateral Phonology Weekend
                1229 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley
                Information below

MONDAY, 27 APRIL
        12 noon Berkeley Phonology Laboratory Colloquium
                46 Dwinelle Hall
                Bird Song Synthesis and Physiology
                Chris Fry
                Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD
                Abstract below
     
         2:00pm International Computer Science Institute
                Main Lecture Hall at ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley
                Using Waveform Information Vectors (WIVS) in Multi-level
                Speech Perception
                John K. Bates
                Time/Space Systems 
                http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/talks/

         3:30pm Psychology Social Lab
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                Understanding And Learning Concepts Considered As Social
                Activity
                James G. Greeno
   
         3:30pm International Computer Science Institute
                Main Lecture Hall at ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley
                Structured Documents and their Manipulation in Database
                Systems
                Karl Aberer
                GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
                Abstract below
   
         4:10pm Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium
                210 Wheeler Hall (Berkeley)
                Almerindo Ojeda
                UC Davis
                http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/Colloquia/

         4:30pm Stanford Digital Libraries Seminar
                Gates B08
                Safeguarding Digital Library Contents and Users
                Protecting Documents Rather than Channels
                Ulrich Kohl and Jeffrey B. Lotspiech
                IBM Almaden
                Abstract below
   
WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL
         4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
                Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
                SuperComputers from CyberBricks?
                Jim Gray 
                Microsoft Research
                Abstract below
                
THURSDAY, 30 APRIL
        12 noon CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                The Perception of Cross-Modal Simultaneity
                (or The Greenwich Observatory Problem Revisited)
                Daniel Levitin
                visiting Stanford, Psychology / Interval Research
        
         2:00pm International Computer Science Institute
                Main Lecture Hall at ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley
                Roomware and Cooperative Buildings: Extending the Scope
                of Interaction and Cooperation beyond Desktops
                Norbert A. Streitz
                GMD - German National Research Center for Information
                Technology
                Darmstadt, Germany
                Abstract below
      
         4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
                George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
                Delivery, Deployment, and Use of Digital Images:
                Lessons from a major University/Museum Consortial Project
                Howard Besser
                UC Berkeley
                http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum

         4:15pm AI-Vision-Robotics Division Colloquium
                Gates 104
                Christos Papadimitriou
                U.C.Berkeley
                http://www-formal.stanford.edu/aicolloq/
                
         4:15pm Frontiers of Neuroscience Seminars
                Munzer Auditorium
                Cross-correlation in the auditory system: brain and
                behavior
                Masakazu Konishi
                California Institute of Technology
                Host: Dr. Eric Knudsen
                http://www.stanford.edu/dept/nbio/Spring98.html
                
         4:15pm CS548: Distributed Systems Research Seminar
                Gates B01
                (Tentative) Economics of the Push Model
                Dale Skeen
                Vitria
                http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/
                
FRIDAY, 1 MAY
        all day History of Science Conference
                Materializing Cultures: Science, Technology, and Medicine
                in a Global Context
                http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/

        12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
                Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
                Networks of Discourse Economic and Political Themes in
                the Emergence of Information Infrastructure
                Phil Agre
                UC San Diego
                Abstract below

         3:15pm Cognitive Seminar 
                Jordan Hall 420:100
                Alex Huk 
   
         3:15pm Computer Science Database Seminar
                Gates B-12
                The Architecture Required for Applications on the Web
                Adam Bosworth
                Microsoft
                Abstract below
   
SATURDAY, 2 MAY
        all day History of Science Conference
                Materializing Cultures: Science, Technology, and Medicine
                in a Global Context
                http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/
                             ____________
                                   
                  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
                             ____________

                            CSLI COGLUNCH
                 on Thursday, 23 April 1998, 12 noon
                        Cordura Hall, Room 100
             http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/

      Automatic Detection of Hidden Events in Spontaneous Dialog
                          Elizabeth Shriberg
              Speech Technology and Research Laboratory
                          SRI International
        http://www-speech.sri.com/projects/hidden-events.html
                                   
Current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems output a string of
words.  Most natural language understanding (NLU) systems, however,
require structural and functional information information such as
punctuation that is present in text, but not overtly indicated in
spoken language.  Similarly, for spontaneous dialog, NLU systems could
benefit from information on the location and extent of disfluencies,
so that a speaker's intended meaning can be inferred.

We have recently began to address this gap between ASR output and NLU
input in a project aimed at detecting such "hidden" events by purely
automatic means.  Our approach extends the standard ASR paradigm by
adding three new knowledge sources: an event language model, and event
grammar, and an event prosodic model. All models are statistical and
trained from data.

We applied the approach to a large subset (over 1M words) of the
Switchboard corpus of human-human telephone conversations, and found
significant improvement over chance for the detection of various
hidden events. The talk will describe overall results, the relative
contribution of features from the various knowledge sources, the
effect of the approach using actual words versus recognizer
hypotheses, and remaining open issues.

Joint work with Andreas Stolcke (SRI), and Mari Ostendorf and Rebecca
Bates (Boston University).
                             ____________

                        SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
             on Thursday, 23 April 1998, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
            EK 109: Computer Dialogue Lab Demo Room (SRI)

               The AMPHION Deductive Synthesis Project
                     at NASA Ames Research Center
                Jeffrey Van Baalen and Michael Lowry,
                      NASA Ames Research Center

AMPHION is a deductive synthesis project in the Automated Software
Engineering (ASE) Group at NASA Ames Research Center. This talk will
describe and demonstrate the Amphion/NAIF system. Amphion/NAIF is a
deductive synthesis application for generating solar system
observation opportunity analyzers. Suppose a space scientist wants to
determine the opportunities for the Cassini spacecraft, while orbiting
Saturn, to transmit an unobstructed signal to the Goldstone
observatory on earth.  Before Amphion/NAIF the scientist was required
to write a Fortran program consisting of calls to subroutines in the
SPICE library (developed at JPL).  Amphion/NAIF provides the space
scientist with a high-level graphical editor with which desired
observation opportunities can be specified without knowing about the
SPICE library. Amphion/NAIF automatically generates required Fortran
programs from such specifications. The system also includes an
animation component that provides scientifically realistic simulations
of generated programs.

This talk will also present an overview of Meta-Amphion, a long range
activity in the ASE group. Meta-Amphion is a system that specializes a
deductive synthesis system consisting of a domain theory and a
general-purpose theorem prover. The specialization technique takes as
input a domain theory and a library of parameterized decision
procedures. It identifies instances of the theories of these
procedures in the domain theory, interfaces the procedure instances to
a refutation-based theorem prover (SNARK), and often removes the
identified axioms from the domain theory. The result is a deductive
synthesis system that is specialized to the given domain theory and
usually far more efficient than the original system.

Note for Visitors to SRI: Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in
order to sign in and be shown to the conference room.  SRI is located
at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park.  Visitors may park in the
visitors lot in front of Building A or E, and should sign in at the
lobby of Building E and call 2641 to be escorted to the meeting room.
Directions to SRI, as well as maps, are available online through the
WWW at URL http://www.sri.com/local.html
                             ____________

                AI-VISION-ROBOTICS DIVISION COLLOQUIUM
           on Thursday, 23 April 1998, 4:15pm until 5:30pm
                              Gates 104
               http://www-formal.stanford.edu/aicolloq/

                From Where AI Is Now to Human-Level AI
                            John McCarthy
                     Computer Sciences Department
                         Stanford University
                         
It is not surprising that reaching human-level AI has proved to be
difficult and progress has been slow - though there has been definite
progress. The slowness and the demand to exploit what has been
discovered has led many to mistakenly redefine AI, sometimes in ways
that preclude human-level AI - by relegating to humans parts of the
task that human level computer programs should do. Taking such
redefinitions seriously impedes progress, especially by students.
     
This lecture tries to characterize the tasks that lie between us and
human-level AI, independent of the AI methodology chosen. These
problems include representation and reasoning.

Ideas for overcoming these problems, including nonmonotonic reasoning,
approximate concepts, formalized contexts and introspection, will be
discussed in the framework of logical AI.
                             ____________

                             LOGIC LUNCH
                   on Friday, 24 April 1998, 12 noon
                         Math Corner 380:383N
             http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html

                    A Fictionalist Account of the
              Indispensable Applications of Mathematics
                            Mark Balaguer
                           Cal State, L.A.

I explain why mathematical fictionalism is consistent with the
existence of indispensable applications of mathematics to empirical
science.  Field has tried to defend fictionalism against the
Quine-Putnam indispensability argument by arguing that mathematics is,
in fact, NOT indispensable to empirical science.  I take the opposite
strategy: I assume (for the sake of argument) that mathematics IS
indispensable to empirical science, and I simply account for this from
a fictionalist point of view.
                             ____________

               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.
                             ____________

                     TRILATERAL PHONOLOGY WEEKEND
                       Saturday, 25 April 1998
                          1229 Dwinelle Hall
                  University of California, Berkeley

10:00           Coffee etc.

10:30-11:30     Keynote talk: Edward Flemming, Stanford University.
                "Natural Classes"
11:30-12:10     Gunnar Hansson, UC Berkeley. Title TBA

12:10-1:40      LUNCH

1:40-2:20       Kazutaka Kurisu, UC Santa Cruz.
                "Richness of the Base and Root Fusion in Sino-Japanese"
2:20-3:00       Paul Kiparsky, Stanford.
                "Arabic syllable structure:  CV-, VC-, and C-dialects"

3:00            Refreshments

3:20-4:00       Larry Hyman, Sharon Inkelas and Galen Sibanda, UC Berkeley.
                "Sub-tree correspondence in Bantu reduplication"
4:00-4:40       Dan Karvonen, UC Santa Cruz. Title TBA
4:40-5:20       Kristin Hanson, UC Berkeley.
                "The Linguistic Structure of Rhymes in Robert Pinsky's
                'The Inferno of Dante'"

5:30 onward:    dinner at Inkelas/Orgun residence

Please RVSP (to mailto:inkelas@cogsci.berkeley.edu) if you plan to
attend dinner.
                             ____________

               BERKELEY PHONOLOGY LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
              on Monday, 27 April 1998, 12 noon - 1:00pm
                     46 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
                      http://trill.berkeley.edu/

                  Bird Song Synthesis and Physiology
                              Chris Fry
                Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD

Song production in oscine birds is a complex, learned behavior used to
coordinate individuals in the avian world. Biologists have looked to
the song system as a simple model of learned vocalizations in humans,
however despite extensive study, we lack a clear understanding of how
motor commands are translated into sound at the level of the syrinx
(the avian vocal organ).  Syringeal function has been compared to both
musical instruments and the human voice. Recent physiological studies
indicate that the syrinx may function more like the human voice than
was previously thought.  The current study uses methods developed for
speech synthesis to model the air sacs, bronchi, oscillators and vocal
tract of several oscine species.  The model produces both voiced and
pure-tone sounds and replicates a previous study of vocal tract
filtering in song birds.  It represents the first unified theory of
sound production in song birds and suggests that song may function
similarly to speech at the level of the periphery.
                             ____________

          BERKELEY INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
              on Monday, 27 April 1998, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
  Main Lecture Hall, ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley
                 http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/talks/

   Structured Documents and their Manipulation in Database Systems
                             Karl Aberer
                     GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
                    mailto:aberer@darmstadt.gmd.de

At GMD-IPSI over the past years the problem of managing SGML/HyTime,
and recently XML, compliant documents have been investigated.
Prototypes for managing structured documents within object-oriented
and object-relational database management systems have been
developed. In the course of this work approaches for the classical
data management problems of modeling, declarative access and physical
storage management have been reworked to account for the structural
and behavioral properties of structured documents. We will discuss the
object-oriented modeling of documents, declarative access and query
optimization for document bases, and optimized storage schemes based
on document fragmentation. These results are of increasing importance,
since a substantial part of future information management will be
document based. This fact is best reflected by the explosive
development around the XML standard family within the WWW context.
                             ____________

                  STANFORD DIGITAL LIBRARIES SEMINAR
                   on Monday, 27 April 1998, 4:30pm
                         Gates Building, B08
       http://diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/seminars/seminars.html

           Safeguarding Digital Library Contents and Users
              Protecting Documents Rather than Channels
                 Ulrich Kohl and Jeffrey B. Lotspiech
                             IBM Almaden

In the digital world, a scenario in which publishers offer digital
contents directly to customers is technically feasible. However, the
role of the library as a middle tier between publisher and customer
offers so many advantages that it should be retained.

But both two- and three-tier digital library services must protect the
transactions between content owners and users.  These not only include
the protection of the content, but also include payment, assertion of
copy- and usage rights, and protection of privacy. The talk contrasts
two different security technologies that enable these transactions:
secure connections and secure containers. We explain the concepts of
both approaches, using the IBM cryptolope technology as an example for
secure containers. We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of
Cryptolopes in comparison to secured communication channels like SSL
or S-HTTP.
                             ____________
                                   
                  EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
            on Wednesday, 29 April 1998, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
        NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
             http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/

   Can you really Build SuperComputers from Commodity CyberBricks?
                               Jim Gray
               Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research,
               http://research.microsoft.com/barc/gray/
   
Fat servers are the dual of thin clients. Many forces are pushing us
to build huge compute and storage servers. The hardware to build such
servers is from commodity components is available today. Even more
extraordinary hardware is expected soon. The required software has
been slow to arrive. There are a few success stories: transaction
processing systems, parallel database systems for datamining, and more
recently web servers. This talk explains the key properties that
enabled these successes: a simple programming model and parallelism
that comes from many small requests or from massive dataflows.

Biography: Dr. Gray is a specialist in database and transaction
processing computer systems. At Microsoft his research focuses on
scalable computing: building super-servers and workgroup systems from
commodity software and hardware. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked
at Digital, Tandem, IBM and AT&T on database and transaction
processing systems. He is editor of the Performance Handbook for
Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and coauthor of
Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques. He holds doctorates
from Berkeley and Stuttgart, is a Member of the National Academy of
Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, a member of the National Research
Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Trustee of
the VLDB Foundation, and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data
Management.
                             ____________

          BERKELEY INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
             on Thursday, 30 April 1998, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
  Main Lecture Hall, ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley
                 http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/talks/

                 Roomware and Cooperative Buildings:
 Extending the Scope of Interaction and Cooperation beyond Desktops"
                          Norbert A. Streitz
   GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology
   IPSI - Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute
                          Darmstadt, Germany
       
In this talk, I will report about our new ideas on extending the scope
of collaboration not only from desktops to meeting room support but
taking a more comprehensive perspective resulting in highly flexible
and dynamic work environments. This perspective is provided by the 
notion of "cooperative buildings" which addresses the issues of how to
integrate information technology, new work practices resulting from
organizational innovation, and the physical environment, the
architectural structures and facility management. It incorporates also
ideas from augmented reality and ubiquitous computing.
             
In order to illustrate this, we have developed i-LAND: an interactive
landscape for creativity and innovation. i-LAND integrates several
so-called "roomware" components into a combination of real,
architectural as well as virtual, digital work environments for
creative teams. By "roomware", we mean computer-augmented objects in
rooms, like furniture, doors, walls, and others. The current
realization of i-LAND covers an interactive electronic wall 
(DynaWall), an interactive table (InteracTable), two versions of
computer-enhanced chairs (CommChairs). More components are planned;
i-LAND is an example application of our vision of the Workspaces of 
the Future. At the same time, it is a testbed for developing new forms
of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work.
                             ____________

               SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
                 on Friday, 1 May 1998, 12:30-2:00pm
                      Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
                 http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/seminar/
                          (SITN Channel E2)

                     The Architecture of Identity
                              Phil Agre
              Department of Communication, UC San Diego
                     mailto:pagre@weber.ucsd.edu
                
Privacy issues arise, according to the traditional analysis, when
computers are used to capture and circulate individually identifiable
information. Unfortunately, this theory leads to intractable political
controversies because it only offers two extreme options: complete
identification and complete anonymity.  It is well known that new
cryptographic protocols provide a complicated space of options between
these two extremes.  Before we can make reasoned political and
technical choices about the adoption of these technologies, however,
we need a much fuller understanding of the "natural history" of
identity in face-to-face and computer-mediated interactions as they
already exist.  In this talk, I will sketch some of the cognitive and
institutional aspects of identity.  Then I will apply this analysis to
various questions of economics and Internet architecture. 
        
Biography: Phil Agre teaches in the Department of Communication at UC
San Diego.  He is perhaps best known as the creator and editor of the
popular on-line information source, the Red Rock Eater, which provides
a wide range of material on computing, technology, and society.  He is
also the author of Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge
University Press, 1997), co-editor with Doug Schuler of Computation
and Human Experience (Ablex, 1977) and co-editor with Marc Rotenberg
of Technology and Privacy : The New Landscape (MIT Press, 1997).
                             ____________

                  COMPUTER SCIENCE DATABASE SEMINAR
                on Friday, 1 May 1998, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
                              Gates B12
         http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html

        The Architecture Required for Applications on the Web
                            Adam Bosworth
           General Manager, Microsoft and Weblications Team
  
This talk focuses on why XML makes sense as a basic building block for
applications on the Web and what things remain to be done. Areas
covered include:

RPC:                             
       XML provides an extraordinary opportunity to build the right
       sort of RPC for the Web; one that is open, easy, asynchronous,
       and coarse grained. All that is required is a standard grammar
       for marshalling the arguments and describing the return
       strategy.
             
Grammars:
       Applications require in addition to the application specific
       grammars some standard generic XML grammars, which are listed
       below.

       + Generic Grammars
       + Rich meta-data and Data-typing
       + Discovery
       + Filtering
       + Updating
       + Presentation

API:
       The World Wide Web Consortium is trying to finalize a
       recommendation on an API known as the DOM (Document Object
       Model) for accessing XML data. This API must be ubiquitous,
       optimizable, and efficient to implement.

Stores:
       XML will frequently be cached on machines either in queues or
       in stores that allow more intelligent and rapid access. Some of
       these stores will need to seem to the client code to be virtual
       XML documents. Others will appear to be traditional queues.

Converters: 
       XML will act as an abstraction layer or logical view layer
       between the implementation and other interested parties. As
       such mapping engines or converters are required between the 
       actual implementation and the XML itself. There will need to be
       at least three types of converters:

       + Converters between relational databases and XML.
       + Converters between objects and XML
       + Converters between XML and other XML including HTML for
         presentation.
   
Biography: Adam Bosworth started at Microsoft in 1989 as a group
program manager.  During his tenure at Microsoft, he was instrumental
in building Microsoft Access, he ran ODBC for a period of time, and he
developed the Database Outliner that shipped with Access Developer's
Toolkit.  Recently, he led the development effort for Forms3 96, the
HTML forms technology for Microsoft Office '97 and the HTML Layout
Control. In the prior year, Adam was been the General Manager of the
Trident (DHTML in IE 4.0) project. Before coming to Microsoft, Adam
built a set of VAX-based MIS systems at Citicorp, started a company,
Analytica, and built Reflex (which was sold to Borland), and built
Borland's first version of Quattro. Adam graduated from Harvard with a
degree in Far Eastern and American History. Currently Adam is the
General Manager of Weblications which builds core technology for
building applications for the web and among other things is shipping
XML and XSL technology for Microsoft.

                             ____________

                             END MATERIAL

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                             ____________