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CSLI Calendar, 22 September 1999, vol. 15:1
C S L I C A L E N D A R O F P U B L I C E V E N T S
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22 September 1999 Stanford Vol. 15, No. 1
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
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ACTIVITIES DURING 22 SEPTEMBER TO 1 OCTOBER 1999
WEDNESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER
1:15pm CS353: Algebraic Logic, First Lecture
(Cross-listed as Math 297)
Gates 100, MW 1:15-2:30
Vaughan Pratt
Computer Science Department
http://boole.stanford.edu/cs353.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Defect Tolerant Molecular Electronics Algorithms,
Architectures, and Atoms
Phillip J. Kuekes
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
Proof-Carrying Code: Design, Implementation and
Applications
George C. Necula
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum
Abstract below
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Cordura 100
Kernel-Based Reinforcement Learning
Dirk Ormoneit
Department of Statistics
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER
10:00am Knowledge on the Web Seminar
Gates 104
SHOE, a Markup Language For
Representing Knowledge on the Web: part 1
Jeff Heflin
Parallel Understanding Systems Group
University of Maryland
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/KnOWS.html
Abstract below
12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
Introduction to Haptics
Kenneth Salisbury
Stanford, Departments of Computer Science and Surgery
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm CS545: Infolab Seminar
188 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
Research in the Stanford Database group
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Dennis Tsichritzis
GMD
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
WEDNESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER
10:00am Knowledge on the Web Seminar
Gates 104
SHOE, a Markup Language For
Representing Knowledge on the Web: part 2
Jeff Heflin
Parallel Understanding Systems Group
University of Maryland
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/KnOWS.html
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
To be announced
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
THURSDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER
11:00am CCRMA Hearing Seminar
CCRMA Ballroom
Beam Forming Hearing Aid
Bernie Widrow
Stanford
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Cordura 100
An Introduction to Collective Intelligence
Kagan Tumer
Computational Science Division NASA Ames Research Center
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 1 OCTOBER
12 noon Logic Lunch
Room 380:383N
Responses to the survey:
Proof Theory on the Eve of Year 2000
Sol Feferman
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
Globalization of UI design for the Web Aaron Marcus
Aaron Marcus and Associates
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
3:15pm CS545: Infolab Seminar
188 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
Where Is Knowledge? Discovering Semantic Proximity using
User Access
Matthew Merzbacher
Mills College
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Abstract below
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ANNOUNCEMENT
Welcome to the 15th (or 17th depending on how you count) year of the
CSLI Calendar. Few brief bits of news:
1. John Perry has stepped down as director and returned to research.
2. David Israel is the interim director for 1999/2000. See
http://www.ai.sri.com/~israel/ for more information about him.
3. CogLunches will be starting in a few weeks.
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XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 23 September 1999, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
Proof-Carrying Code: Design, Implementation and Applications
George C. Necula
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
In an environment where more and more code cannot be trusted to
behave safety it is becoming necessary to employ mechanisms for
detecting and preventing unsafe program behavior. Proof-Carrying
Code is such a technique that allows a code receiver to verify
statically that the code has certain required properties, which are
stated in the form of a trusted safety policy. To make this
possible the code is accompanied by a representation of an easily
checkable formal proof of compliance with the safety policy. This
talk discusses first the general properties of the Proof-Carrying
Code technique and then explores a particular implementation of the
idea using verification condition generators.
There are two major challenges in using Proof-Carrying Code. One
lies in producing the necessary formal compliance proofs. The talk
will describe briefly an optimizing compiler that, while compiling
a safe subset of the C programming language, produces proofs of
type safety for the resulting machine code.
The final part of the talk will give a hint of how Proof-Carrying
Code could be used to enforce more that just type safety. This will
be done for an example of a safety policy for active network
packets that imposes running time and bandwidth usage limitations.
Part of this work has been done jointly with Peter Lee from
Carnegie Mellon University. Further information and an online demo
can be found at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~necula/pcc.html
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SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 23 September 1999, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Kernel-Based Reinforcement Learning
Dirk Ormoneit
Department of Statistics
Stanford University
mailto:ormoneit@stat.stanford.edu
Kernel-based methods, which approach induction by placing weights on
training cases, have attracted considerable attention in the machine
learning and the statistics literatures. In this talk, we suggest a
new application of kernel-smoothing to variants of reinforcement
learning that attempt to estimate the value function for a
continuous-state Markov decision process. Using standard methods, such
as temporal-difference learning, one cannot show consistency, but, for
the kernel-based method, we can derive the asymptotic distribution of
the value-function estimate and establish rates of convergence. In
closing, we consider an optimal investment problem that demonstrates
the practical benefits of the kernel-based approach to reinforcement
learning.
Joint work with Saunak Sen.
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KNOWLEDGE ON THE WEB SEMINAR
on Friday and Wednesday, 24 and 29 September 1999, 10:00am-Noon
Gates 104
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/KnOWS.html
Most of the vast amount of information available on the Web today is
expressed in formats that are designed primarily for human consumption
and that make the information essentially uninterpretable by
computers. Major advances in intelligent information processing can
become realizable by developing means for enabling the information
that is routinely put on the Web to be in computer interpretable form,
and there is increasing activity in the computer science research and
development communities focused on achieving that goal. This seminar
is a weekly series of presentations and discussions aimed at
understanding that activity and furthering the development of
computer-interpretable Web documents, languages in which they are
written, techniques for interpreting them, tools for creating them,
and innovative uses for them.
First seminar is:
SHOE, a Markup Language For Representing Knowledge on the Web
Jeff Heflin
Parallel Understanding Systems Group
University of Maryland
(with an introduction by Richard Fikes that will include an overview
of XML and DTDs)
We describe SHOE, a set of Simple HTML Ontological Extensions that
allows Web authors to annotate their pages with machine-readable
knowledge that can then be used by agents and query engines. There
are two types of SHOE enabled pages: those that define ontologies and
those that declare instances. SHOE ontologies are made available to
document authors and SHOE agents by placing them on the Web. Each
ontology typically extends the base SHOE ontology and may extend other
preexisting ontologies. Instances are distinct entities that can be
classified in categories and can have relationships to other
instances. Every instance states which ontologies it is using to make
claims. We also describe an initial set of applications to
demonstrate SHOEs promise, including Expose, a web-crawler that looks
for SHOE pages and loads them into a Parka knowledge base; and
Knowledge Annotator, a graphical application for annotating Web pages
with SHOE.
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SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
on Friday, 24 September 1999, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Introduction to Haptics
Prof. Kenneth Salisbury
Stanford Depts of Computer Science and Surgery
This talk will introduce some aspects of the field of haptics.
Emerging as a new and practical interface modality, haptic technology
is beginning to provide users with a physical means for interacting
with virtual and remote task environments. In applications ranging
from the desktop to the operating room, haptic technology is moving
out of the lab and becoming a commercially viable field. The class
presentation will cover terminology, psychophysical issues, hardware
past and present, rendering and applications.
Biography: Professor Salisbury received his PhD from Stanford in
Mechanical Engineering in 1982. He then joined MIT where he served as
Principal Research Scientist in Mechanical Engineering and as a member
of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Some of the projects with
which he has been associated include the development of the
Stanford-JPL Robot Hand, the JPL Force Reflecting Hand Controller, the
MIT-WAM arm, and the Black Falcon Surgical Robot. His work with
haptic interface technology led to the founding of SensAble
Technology, producers of the PHANTOM haptic interface and software. In
1997 he joined the staff at Intuitive Surgical, in Mountain View,
where his efforts have focused on the development of telerobotic
systems for the operating room. In the fall of 1999 he joined the
faculty at Stanford in the Departments of Computer Science and
Surgery.
My research is focused on two areas, robotics and haptics. My work
in robotics is in the development of new robot arm that will work
in proximity, contact, and cooperation with humans. My second focus
is on the development of haptic interfaces, rendering techniques
and methods for physical interaction with virtual objects. In
collaboration with the Department of Surgery and we are building a
multi-person/multi-hand surgical simulator.
Under NASA funding we are developing a virtual environment for
planetary geologists in which remote geophysical data can be viewed
and felt.
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SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 30 September 1999, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
An Introduction to Collective Intelligence
Kagan Tumer
Compuational Science Division
NASA Ames Research Center
mailto:kagan@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
This talks introduces the concept of ``COllective INtelligence''
(COIN) and the crucial steps involved in COIN design. A COIN is a
large multi-agent system where:
1. There is no centralized communication among agents;
2. There is no centralized control among agents;
3. There is a well-specified global objective, and we are confronted
with the inverse problem of how to configure the system to achieve
that objective.
4. Agents are ``greedy'' in that they act to try to optimize their
own utilities, without explicit regard to cooperation with other
agents.
In particular, we are interested in COINs in which each agent runs a
reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. Rather than use a conventional
modeling approach (e.g., model the system dynamics, and hand-tune
agents to cooperate), we aim to solve the COIN design problem
implicitly, via the ``adaptive'' character of the RL algorithms of
each of the agents. This approach introduces an entirely new, profound
design problem: Assuming the RL algorithms are able to achieve high
rewards, what reward functions for the individual agents will, when
pursued by those agents, result in high world utility? In other words,
what reward functions will best ensure that we do not have phenomena
like the tragedy of the commons, Braess's paradox, or the liquidity
trap?
Although still very young, research specifically concentrating on the
COIN design problem has already resulted in successes in artificial
domains, in particular in packet-routing, the leader-follower problem,
and in variants of Arthur's El Farol bar problem. It is expected that
as it matures and draws upon other disciplines related to COINs, this
research will greatly expand the range of tasks addressable by human
engineers. Moreover, in addition to drawing on them, such a fully
developed science of COIN design may provide insight into other
already established scientific fields, such as economics, game theory,
and population biology.
Joint work with David Wolpert.
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LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 1 October 1999, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Responses to the survey:
Proof Theory on the Eve of Year 2000
Sol Feferman
The approach of the Year 2000 is occasion for stock-taking all round,
and that's hard to resist. But aside from that, in some subjects like
proof theory, this seems to be a very appropriate time to make such an
assessment.
Early in September I circulated a list of questions concerning the state
and future of the subject of proof theory to about 35 workers in that
field. So far, about a third of them have responded. At the Logic Lunch
next Friday, I will present various of the responses received and then
open up the meeting for discussion.
Here is the list of questions I sent out.
1. What are, or should be, the aims of proof theory?
2. How well has it met those aims?
3. What developments or specific achievements stand out?
4. What, now, are the main open problems?
5. Are there any neglected directions in proof theory?
6. In what ways can or should proof theory relate to other parts of
logic/foundations/mathematics/computer science/linguistics/etc.?
7. Where do you think the subject is heading?
Where do you think it should be heading?
8. Do you think more students/researchers should be involved in the
subject? If so, how can they be encouraged to do so?
9. Do we need more/different kinds of general expository texts?
What about specialized texts?
10. Overall, how would you rate the state of health of our subject?
What is its promise for the future?
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COMPUTER SCIENCE INFOLAB SEMINAR
on Friday, 1 October 1999, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
188 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Where is Knowledge?
Discovering Semantic Proximity using User Access
Matthew Merzbacher
Mills College
Knowledge is everywhere, but is difficult to locate, isolate, and
understand. After a discussion of different kinds of knowledge, we
discuss our "Dynamic Nearness" data mining algorithm that detects
semantic relationships between objects in a database, based on access
patterns. The approach can be applied to web pages to allow automatic
dynamic reconfiguration of a web site. We finish by experimentally
answering some questions about the scalability of Dynamic Nearness.
Biography: Dr. Matthew Merzbacher went to Brown University as an
undergraduate. After receiving his Sc.B. in Applied Math from Brown,
he continued there and earned an Sc.M. in Computer Science in the area
of computer graphics. In 1993, Dr. Merzbacher received his Ph.D. from
UCLA in the area of cooperative database systems. Since then, he has
taught at liberal arts colleges, currently holding an assistant
professorship at Mills College in Oakland, where he also directs the
graduate programs in Computer Science. His research interests continue
to be databases, artificial intelligence, and computer graphics.
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