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CSLI Calendar, 2 June 1999, vol. 14:34
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
______________________________________________________________________
2 June 1999 Stanford Vol. 14, No. 34
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
____________
ACTIVITIES DURING 2 JUNE TO 11 JUNE 1999
WEDNESDAY, 2 JUNE
12 Noon SCIP Seminar
Room L103, Littlefield Management Center, GSB
Building Trust on the Internet
Hoyt Kesterson
Fellow, Bull Worldwide Information Systems
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scip/seminar_S99/index.html
Abstract Below
12:15pm Developmental Brownbag
Jordan Hall, 420:286
Title To Be Announced
James Gibbons
Stanford University
http://matia.stanford.edu/html/talks.html
12:45pm Distributed Systems Research Seminar
Room 150, McCullough Building
Long Waits at the Web: some causes and solutions
Edith Cohen
AT&T Labs-Research
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Colloquium
NEC Auditorium (Gates B03)
Making Web Publishing Irreversible
Dave Rosenthal
Vicky Reich
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/schedule.html
Abstract Below
4:15pm AI-Vision-Robotics Division Colloquium
Gates B12
Multiview Geometry and Self Calibration Revisited:
A Differential Geometric Approach
Shankar Sastry
UC Berkeley
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/aicolloq/
THURSDAY, 3 JUNE
12:15pm CSLI Coglunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Compression and Adaptation in the Evolution of Language
Charles Taylor
Biology, UCLA
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/schedule.shtml
Abstract below
1:30pm Experiments in Learning at Stanford
Oak Lounge, Tresidder
Learning by Design
http://sll.stanford.edu/
Description below
1:30pm Formal Methods Talk
Gates 100
Formal Development and Verification of a Distributed
Railway Control System
Anne Haxthausen
Department of Information Technology
Technical University of Denmark
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
@Home Network Architecture
Milo Medin
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
Abstract below
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Cordura 100
Introduction to Adaptive Resonance Theory
Chris Pribe
DaimlerChrysler
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Frontiers of Neuroscience
Munzer Auditorium
Assembly, Trafficking, and Degradation of Mutant Gap
Junction Proteins Linked to a Human Peripheral Neuropathy
Dr. Linda Musil
Oregon Health Services University
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/nbio/frontneuroscisem1999.html
4:30pm EESOR Colloquia
Math 380:380Y
Presentation of 3 Student Projects From EESOR 402
A Queueing Model and Performance Evaluation Tool for
Wells Fargo ATM Sites
by John Angwin, Olga Demler, Sommer Gentry, Tim Holliday,
Daniel Lieb, and Wing Yan Seto
New Insights in Global Supply Chain Management for R. B.
Webber
by Chean Wai Leong, Arnold Pravinata, Paat
Rusmevichientong, Henry Widjaja, and Sinclair Wu
Hedging China Risk Through Publicly Traded Hong Kong
Instruments for Lehman Brothers
by Alan Chan, Andrew Jobst, Julia Lin, and Steve Liu
http://www.stanford.edu/class/eesor406/
FRIDAY, 4 JUNE
12 noon Logic Lunch
Room 380:381T
Elementary Infinitesimal Analysis
Rick Sommer
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall, 420:100
Title To Be Announced
Julie Morrison
http://matia.stanford.edu/html/talks.html
3:15pm Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 92Q
Should Virtue Make You Happy?
Julia Annas
Professor, University of Arizona
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/general/colloqs.html
3:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B-12
All the news that's fit to NNTP
Landon Curt Noll
SGI
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
MONDAY, 7 JUNE
4:15pm CAMPS/SCRDP Special Seminar
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman Center, Medical Center
Digital Recording and Transfer of Biological Information
Jacques Benveniste, MD
Digital Biology Laboratory, INSERM, Director of Research
http://www.iptq.com/benveniste/Default.htm
TUESDAY, 8 JUNE
9:45am Virtual Worldwide Seminar on Context
Gates 260
Question Answering Systems
Vinay Chaudhri
SRI International
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/virtual_seminar/talks/talk6.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 10 JUNE
3:15pm Experiments in Learning at Stanford
Stanford Press Warehouse, room 114
Visual Confection, Event Montage, and Cognitive
Through-Line: Creating Dynamic Information Architectures
Peter Esmonde
http://sll.stanford.edu/
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
Volumetric High Density Optical Data Storage
Professor Lambertus Hesselink
Stanford University
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum
____________
SCIP SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 2 June 1999, 12 Noon
Room L103, Littlefield Management Center, GSB
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scip/seminar_S99/index.html
Building Trust on the Internet
Hoyt Kesterson
Fellow, Bull Worldwide Information Systems
Trust has always been a prerequisite to the development of commercial
relations. The trust that one has in the form of the identification
(e.g. how resistant to forgery is it?) and in the party issuing the
identification is a significant factor in determining the risk one
will take in a transaction. As the economy is shifting toward
electronic exchanges, this is even truer. What technologies can be
implemented to achieve the same trust environment that exists in the
material world? This talk describes how those technologies (public key
cryptography, digital signatures, certificates) can be applied to meet
these requirements and what trust relationships can be constructed
using them. It covers both the technological and liability aspects, as
they have been examined by the American Bar Association and codified
by some state legislatures.
Hoyt Kesterson is a Fellow at Bull Worldwide Information Systems in
Phoenix, Arizona. He has chaired the international committee
responsible for defining the OSI Directory standard, X.500, and its
associated part, X.509, on digital signature since 1986. He
participates in the American Bar Association's work on the legal
aspects of digital signatures in electronic commerce and is also
participating in the efforts on key recovery. He has published in
several journals; the most recent is an article on EDI and Digital
Signatures in the ABA's Jurimetrics: Journal of Law, Science, and
Technology.
____________
CS548: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS RESEARCH SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 2 June 1999, 12:45pm
McCullough 150
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/
Long Waits at the Web: some causes and solutions
Edith Cohen
AT&T Labs-Research
The central performance problem of the Internet today is
user-perceived latency, that is, the period from the time a user
issues a request for a document till the time a response is received.
Even users enjoying persistent HTTP, caching proxies, and
high-bandwidth connectivity are frequently afflicted with annoying
long waits.
A key realization is that transmission time often does NOT dominate
latency. This suggests that techniques other than caching and
prefetching of content may significantly reduce wait-time. Guided by
this, we dissect and measure contributing factors to long Web waits
and propose natural techniques to address them. Our techniques are
deployable at Web browsers, proxy servers, and search engines. They
address latency due to factors other than transmission time by
"prefetching" and "caching" components of the request-response process
other than contents. They require low-bandwidth, complement document
(content) caching, and may either complement or constitute a
network-friendly alternative to document prefetching. Performance
evaluation on request sequences extracted from a proxy trace
demonstrates potentially dramatic reductions in perceived latency.
This work is joint with Haim Kaplan.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 2 June 1999, 4:15pm
NEC Auditorium (Gates B03)
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/schedule.html
Making Web Publishing Irreversible
Dave Rosenthal
Vicky Reich
Stanford's Highwire Press publishes the Web editions of 127 of the
most significant scientific journals, mostly in biochemistry and
medicine. The Web makes the journals far more useful, with services
such as links to cited and citing papers, searches, e-mail
notification of new citations and papers by selected authors, and so
on. Librarians, who subscribe to these journals on behalf of their
readers, insist on paper because they have no way of assuring
continued access to the Web editions for the decades to come. Digital
library research has yet to produce practical solutions for preserving
bits over library timescales. And in this case preserving the bits
isn't enough; the service based on the bits must be preserved.
Highwire is working to provide librarians with a cheap and effective
way to preserve access to Web journals they have purchased. The talk
will demonstrate the problem and discuss the design of this proposed
solution. It is an attempt to model for the Web the way that libraries
act to preserve information on paper over very long periods of time.
It is a distributed, robust Web cache/archive with no hierarchy, no
encryption, and no configuration data. Above all it is designed to
operate extremely slowly.
David S. H. Rosenthal is currently working at Stanford's Highwire
Press, taking a break after two startups in six years. The first was
Nvidia, which builds the best graphics chips in the industry, where he
worked on I/O architecture. The second was Vitria Technology, which is
a leading supplier of enterprise integration technology, where he
worked on reliable multicast protocols and the problems of testing
enterprise-scale distributed systems. Before that he was for many
years a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems working on window
systems and the operating system.
Vicky Reich is Assistant Director of Highwire Press, a librarian and
one of the team that originally got Stanford into the business of
publishing the Web editions of scientific journals. Before joining
Stanford she worked at the Library of Congress.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 3 June 1999, 12 noon
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/
Compression and Adaptation in the Evolution of Language
Charles Taylor
Biology, UCLA
What permits some systems to evolve and adapt more effectively than
others? Gell-Mann (1990) has stressed the importance of "compression"
for adaptive complex systems. Information about the environment is
not simply recorded as a look-up table, but is rather compressed in a
`theory' or `schema'. Several conjectures are proposed: (I) organisms
generalize for compression; (II) compression occurs more easily on a
"smooth", as opposed to a "rugged", adaptive landscape; and (III)
constraints from compression make it likely that natural languages
evolve towards smooth adaptive landscapes. We have been examining the
role of such compression for learning and evolution of formal
languages by artificial agents. Our system does seem to conform
generally to these expectations, but the tradeoffs between compression
and the errors that sometimes accompany it need careful consideration.
____________
STANFORD LEARNING LAB
on Thursday, 3 June 1999, 1:30pm - 4:30pm
Oak Lounge, Tresidder
http://sll-6.stanford.edu/speakers/LbyD99.html
Learning by Design
Stanford Learning Lab in partnership with BMW AG
a concurrent product development and learning research
project for defining work-based continuous learning environments
for global teams
"Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the world
of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. ... The future
of work consists of learning a living in the automation age"
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
Today's automobile products and the people who make them must succeed
in a complex and fast-changing global environment. This highly
competitive marketplace demands innovative products that meet the
needs of a diverse customer base. The development process for these
products requires improved management of globally distributed R&D
teams, rapid generation and acquisition of new knowledge, and the
integration of knowledge across several disciplines. This project
establishes a global partnership between the Stanford University
Learning Laboratory and BMW AG that is capable of concurrent product
R&D and learning-organization R&D.
A globally distributed, multi-disciplinary product design team works
toward the development of innovative applications for BMW automobiles.
The product design R&D teams are distributed between Munich and Palo
Alto and include BMW engineers and Stanford students in courses such
as mechatronic systems engineering and human computer interaction
design.
Simultaneously, a learning research team, including researchers at
Stanford University and Corporate Learning/HR professionals at BMW in
Munich, study their behavior and suggest interventions aimed at
prototyping alternative work situations and processes. New
technologies, social protocols and management strategies will be
deployed in this manner and their effectiveness formally evaluated by
members of the Learning Laboratory's assessment team and BMW R&D
management team. Specific issues of interest include:
* The influence of information processing styles of individual
members on knowledge creation, team performance, and innovation
* The development of technologies and practices to support and
promote the sharing of tacit knowledge within and between teams
* The maximization of in-the-job learning together with reduction in
project time cycles
Figure 1. The Stanford Learning Lab is a collaborative venture to
improve student and worker learning and to promote creativity in
academia and industry through the introduction theoretically informed
technology and work practices. By exploiting differences in time
constants to run experiments in the university and corporate setting,
the lab is able to speed up its rate of discovery and gain important
insights in significantly reduced times.
The Learning Lab was established in 1997 by President Casper and the
Commission on Technology in Teaching and Learning, and it is central
to Stanford's response to the revolutionary changes now facing
knowledge intensive institutions. Realizing the relatedness of
knowledge work in academia and in industry and the potential for
greater synergy centered on the issue of learning, the Lab is entering
into creative partnerships with educational, industrial, corporate,
and research groups throughout the world (see figure 1).
Learning Research Team:
Melissa Regan,Tao Liang, Ken Carrizosa, John Nash (Learning Lab)
Peter Troeber (BMW Corporate)
Product Design Team:
Gabe Aldaz, Derek Pai, Dorota Shortell (Mechanical Engineering)
Antoine Picard (Computer Science) Sarah Jain (Anthropology)
Ade Mabogunje (Center for Design Research)
Manfred Spreng, Gabrielle Schrivers, Mathias Kopf (BMW R&D)
Instructors:
Mark Cutkosky (Mechanical Engineering)
Terry Winograd (Computer Science)
____________
FORMAL METHODS TALK
Thursday, 3 June 1999, 1:30pm
Gates 100
Formal Development and Verification of a
Distributed Railway Control System
Anne Haxthausen
Department of Information Technology
Technical University of Denmark
In this seminar we introduce a concept for a distributed railway
control system and present the specification and verification of the
main algorithm used for safe distributed control. The design and
verification approach is based on the RAISE method, starting with
highly abstract algebraic specifications which are transformed into
directly implementable distributed control processes by applying
series of refinement and verification steps. Concrete safety
requirements are derived from an abstract version that can easily be
validated wrt. soundness and completeness. Complexity is further
reduced by separating the system model into a domain model describing
the physical system in absence of control and the controller model
introducing safety-related control mechanisms as a separate entity
monitoring observables of the physical system to decide whether it is
safe for a train to move or for a point to be switched.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 3 June 1999, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
@Home Network Architecture
Milo Medin
Senior Vice President, Engineering and Chief Technical Officer,
@Home Network
http://www.home.net/about/network.html
Milo Medin is Chief Technical Officer, overseeing the development of
@Home Network's high-speed backbone. @Home's performance-engineered
scalable network removes Internet "traffic jams" and enables true
end-to-end management. In addition, the Network employs replication
and caching technologies that dramatically improve network efficiency.
Prior to joining @Home Network, Medin served as project manager at
NASA Ames Research Center. During his tenure, he directed the NASA
National Research and Education Network project that, in combination
with partners at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, deployed a high
speed national ATM infrastructure connecting major supercomputing and
data archiving centers. He also supervised the primary west coast
Internet interconnect network. In addition, he pioneered the global
NASA Science Internet project, providing network infrastructure for
science at more than 200 sites in 16 countries and 5 continents,
including Antarctica, and initially helped establish the TCP/IP
protocol as an industry standard
Before NASA, Medin held various positions at Science Applications
Inc., programming supercomputers for defense program activities at the
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Los Alamos National Lab under
contract to the Defense Nuclear Agency.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 3 June 1999, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Introduction to Adaptive Resonance Theory
Christopher A. Pribe
DaimlerChrysler Research & Technology Center
This talk will introduce the Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) family of
memory models. ART models provide the most accessible entry point
into the large array of neural network models pioneered by Stephen
Grossberg. ART models are classifiers built from neurophysiologically
plausible neurons. These classifiers are unsupervised not only in the
sense that they learn patterns without an external teacher, but also
in the sense that input patterns need not be artificially separated.
This talk will cover cooperative-competitive fields (a.k.a.
center/surround anatomies), pre- and post-postsynaptic activity gated
STM->LTM transfer, and the ART(1) architecture. It will also touch on
later ART models, an adaptive user interface product which uses ART,
and related neural models.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 4 June 1999, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Elementary Infinitesimal Analysis
Rick Sommer
Stanford
In this talk I will describe a formal system of infinitesimal analysis
that is weak in proof-theoretic terms, yet it is strong enough to
formalize a significant fragment of classical real analysis. The
system, called Elementary Infinitesimal Analysis (EIA), has the
property that the computational time bounds of its provably computable
functions on the natural numbers are given by exponential terms. On
the other hand, EIA can prove important theorems of classical real
analysis; we show, as an example, that the existence theorem for
ordinary differential equations, in the language of infinitesimal
analysis, can be directly carried out in EIA. Moreover, EIA uses
infinitesimals and infinite numbers in a simple and natural way so
that proofs in this system are easy to comprehend.
____________
CAMPS/SCRDP SPECIAL SEMINAR
(Complementary & Alternative Medicine Program At Stanford)
on Monday, 7 June 1999, 4:15pm
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman Center, Stanford Medical Center
http://scrdp.stanford.edu/camps.html
Digital Recording and Transfer of Biological Information
Jacques Benveniste, MD
Digital Biology Laboratory, INSERM, Director of Research
http://www.iptq.com/benveniste/Default.htm
Our present research involves what has been named "the memory of
water". First we empirically observed that highly dilute biological
agents (i.e. in the absence of any physical molecule) triggered
relevant biological systems. Some of these experiments were
reproduced in three external laboratories which cosigned an article on
the subject (Nature, 1988, 333, 816-818). Next, blind experiments with
an external (CNRS) team showed that the activity of highly dilute
agonists was abolished by an oscillating magnetic field, which had no
comparable effect on the genuine molecules. Later, several hundred
experiments have confirmed our ability to transfer to water, using an
amplifier, the specific molecular activity of more than 30 substances,
such as physiological and pharmacological agonists, antibodies
(purified or in whole serum) and antigens. More recently, we digitally
recorded (sampling 44 kHz) specific biological activities -- including
the specific signals of bacteria -- on a computer. When "replayed" to
water, plasma, target organs, cells, or an antigen-antibody reaction,
the recorded signal induced an effect characteristic of the original
substance.
These results strongly suggest the electromagnetic nature of the
molecular signal, heretofore unknown. This signal, "memorized" and
then carried by water, most likely enables in vivo transmission of the
specific molecular information. We have recently obtained direct
evidence for the critical role of water in the transmission of the
molecular signal, at usual concentration as well as at high
dilution. Homeopathic applications rely empirically on this property
of water.
At the least, these advances illustrate the reality of the high
dilution phenomenon and allow for the transmission and detection at a
distance of any normal or pathological molecular activity. They also
attest to the influence of electromagnetic fields on living matter. At
most, they could profoundly change biology and medicine.
Jacques Benveniste, MD, is Director of Research at INSERM, and founder
of the Digital Biology Laboratory, Clamart, France. His main
scientific achievements are: discovery of Platelet-Activating Factor
in 1970, and authoring the controversial Nature article on the "memory
of water" in 1988. The latter achievement brought great controversy.
On his website, http://www.digibio.com he asks: "Why the fuss,
excommunication, resentment, insults, injuries and, last but not
least, the crash landing of fraud-seeking commandos? Will the eternal
'Understand I do not, therefore it is not' prevail forever in science?
Can we not say once and for all "bye-bye" to Galileo-style prosecution
and replace it with genuine scientific debate?"
____________
VIRTUAL WORLD SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 8 June 1999, 9:45am
Gates 260
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/virtual_seminar/
Question Answering Systems
Vinay Chaudhri1
SRI International
Since the days of "Turing test", "question answering" (QA) has been a
powerful paradigm in AI. Even though AI has diversified much beyond
the notion of intelligent behavior proposed in the Turing test, QA
remains a fundamental capability needed by a large class of
systems. It is a powerful methodological tool to structure a task and
specify its scope using a question grammar. The QA paradigm may not be
necessarily associated with intelligent behavior. For example, QA has
an interesting parallel to query processing in database systems which
command a strong foothold in the commercial world. QA, however, goes
much beyond what can be achieved using database systems. For example,
many analytical tasks that involve gathering, correlating and
analyzing information can naturally be formulated as QA problems. With
the recent explosion of information available on the world-wide web,
QA is a compelling framework for finding information that closely
matches user needs.
In this seminar, I will talk about a QA system that is being developed
under a DARPA-sponsored project on High Performance Knowledge Bases.
At the heart of the system is a geo-political KB representing
information about international actions, interests and agent
capabilities. A first order theorem prover is used to reason with the
KB with the goal of supporting an analyst in the domain of crisis
management. Building this system has posed numerous issues including
difficult representational choices, efficient reasoning,
reformulation, merging and explanation generation. Even more difficult
has been to characterize its performance and measure its capabilities.
During this seminar, I will give an overview of technical problems,
address one or two of them indepth, and present a prototype
demonstration.
____________
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____________