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CSLI Calendar, 29 September 1999, vol. 15:2
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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29 September 1999 Stanford Vol. 15, No. 2
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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 29 SEPTEMBER TO 8 OCTOBER 1999
WEDNESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Image-Based Modeling, Rendering, and Lighting in "Fiat
Lux"
Dr. Paul E. Debevec
Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
Abstract below
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium
Gates B12
AI Rising
Nils J. Nilsson
Computer Science Department
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER
11:00am CCRMA Hearing Seminar
CCRMA Library
A Microphone Array for Hearing Aids
Bernie Widrow
Stanford
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Events/Events.html#hearing
Abstract below
3:15pm Stanford Learning Lab
Stanford Press Warehouse, rm 118
A Learning Technology Evaluator's Casebook: Challenges,
Pitfalls, and Strategies
Barbara Means
Assistant Director, Assessment and Evaluation Center for
Technology in Learning SRI International
http://sll.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
A Survey of the AES Process
David Wagner
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
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)
Scenarios of Future User-Interface Design
Aaron Marcus and Associates
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
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
TUESDAY, 5 OCTOBER
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Room 380:381T
Organizational meeting
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Description below
WEDNESDAY, 6 OCTOBER
10:00am Knowledge on the Web Seminar
Gates 104
To be announced
Tom Gruber
Chief Technical Officer for Intraspect
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/KnOWS/
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium
Gates B12
Electronic Commerce: from Game-Theoretic and Economic
Models to Working Protocols
Moshe Tennenholtz
Technion
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
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, 7 OCTOBER
11:00am CCRMA Hearing Seminar
CCRMA Library
Perception of Virtual Sources
Ville Pulkki
CNMAT
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Events/Events.html#hearing
12:15pm CSLI Coglunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Multi-Language Acquisition System
Prof. Tetsuo Suga
Department of Psychology, Nihon Joshi University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 8 OCTOBER
12:30pm Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Gates B03 (NEC classroom)
Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st
Century
Bob Horn
Stanford CSLI and Information Mapping
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm CS545: Infolab Seminar
188 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
Fuzzy Queries in Multimedia Systems
Ron Fagin
IBM Almaden Research Center
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 92Q
Donor's Lecture: Changing the Cartesian Mind
Alison Simmons, Philosophy
Harvard University
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EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 29 September 1999, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
Image-Based Modeling, Rendering, and Lighting in "Fiat Lux"
Dr. Paul E. Debevec
Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley
In this talk I will present how a variety of new computer graphics
techniques which rely on digital photography were used to create the
computer animation "Fiat Lux", a photorealistic film featuring a large
dynamic simulation of synthetic objects in St. Peter's Basilica.
Image-Based Modeling involves deriving models of objects and
environments based on photographs. Some techniques for recovering
geometry included stereo correspondence and photogrammetry. I'll talk
about Facade, an interactive photogrammetric modeling system developed
at UC Berkeley, which is based on using geometric primitives to model
the scene. Recent results also allow lighting-independent texture maps
and specular properties to be derived from images, allowing scenes to
be re-illuminated.
Image-Based Rendering involves generating renderings of scenes from
arbitrary viewpoints based on their appearance in a set of images.
Often, geometry from image-based modeling techniques is used to
determine how to interpolate between available viewpoints to create
synthetic camera moves.
Image-Based Lighting involves using measurements of real illumination
in the real world to illuminate synthetic objects. The technique
leverages high dynamic range photography, in which a series of
exposures is taken with varying shutter speeds and combined into a
single image that spans the full range of brightness (often exceeding
1:100,000) in a scene. Such lighting can be used to render synthetic
objects into real scenes with the correct lighting, and to
automatically generate the proper reflections and shadows in the
scene. A device called a "light probe" for measuring incident
illumination on location will be presented.
I'll show these techniques using examples from several recent animation
projects, including:
* The Campanile Movie, SIGGRAPH 97
* Rendering with Natural Light, SIGGRAPH 98, and
* Fiat Lux, SIGGRAPH 99
Information on these various projects is available at:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~debevec/ and
http://fiatlux.berkeley.edu/
Biography: Paul Debevec studied math and computer engineering at the
University of Michigan and received his Ph.D. in computer science from
UC Berkeley where he is now a research scientist. While helping
develop computer graphics technology, he has also collaborated with
leading media artists to apply such technology to creative
applications. He has directed several internationally exhibited
computer animations, many of which have premiered at the SIGGRAPH
Electronic Theater. His current work involves applying new
image-based graphics techniques to interactive virtual environments,
digital filmmaking, and cultural heritage. preservation.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 29 September 1999, 4:15pm
Gates B12
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
AI Rising
Nils J. Nilsson
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Serious work toward artificial intelligence (AI) began about fifty years
ago. In this talk I review what I think are the major milestones of our
first half-century and make some guesses about what might lie ahead. In
the spirit of millennial appraisals, I will survey what I think are the
most important things we have learned about AI in the last fifty years.
Are these lessons sufficient to produce human-level artificial
intelligence within the next fifty?
This is the Key Note talk that Professor Nilsson presented at the AAAI
conference this year.
Biography: Nils J. Nilsson, Kumagai Professor of Engineering
(Emeritus) in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford
University, received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from
Stanford in 1958. He spent twenty-three years at the Artificial
Intelligence Center of SRI International working on statistical and
neural-network approaches to pattern recognition, co-inventing the A*
heuristic search algorithm and the STRIPS automatic planning system,
directing work on the integrated mobile robot, SHAKEY, and
collaborating in the development of the PROSPECTOR expert system. He
has published five textbooks on artificial intelligence. Professor
Nilsson returned to Stanford in 1985 as the Chairman of the Department
of Computer Science, a position he held until August 1990. Besides
teaching courses on artificial intelligence and on machine learning,
he has conducted research on flexible robots that are able to react to
dynamic worlds, plan courses of action, and learn from experience.
Professor Nilsson served on the editorial boards of the journal
Artificial Intelligence and of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Research. He was an Area Editor for the Journal of the Association for
Computing Machinery. He is a past-president and Fellow of the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence and is also a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a founding
director of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. In 1993, he was elected a
foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 30 September 1999, 11:00am
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Events/Events.html
A Microphone Array for Hearing Aids
Prof. Bernard Widrow
Stanford University
A directional acoustic receiving system is constructed in the form of
a necklace including an array of two or more microphones mounted on a
housing supported on the chest of a user by a conducting loop
encircling the user's neck. Signal processing electronics contained in
the same housing receives and combines the microphone signals in such
a manner as to provide an amplified output signal which emphasizes
sounds of interest arriving in a direction forward of the user. The
amplified output signal drives the supporting conducting loop to
produce a representative magnetic field. An electroacoustic transducer
including a magnetic field pick-up coil for receiving the magnetic
field is mounted in or on the user's ear and generates an acoustic
signal representative of the sounds of interest.
The microphone output signals are weighted (scaled) and combined to
achieve desired spatial directivity responses. The weighting
coefficients are determined by an optimization process. By bandpass
filtering the weighted microphone signals with a set of filters
covering the audio frequency range and summing the filtered signals, a
receiving microphone array with a small aperture size is caused to
have a directivity pattern that is essentially uniform over frequency
in two or three dimensions. This method enables the design of
highly-directive hearing instruments which are comfortable,
inconspicuous, and convenient to use. The invention provides the user
with a dramatic improvement in speech perception over existing hearing
aid designs, particularly in the presence of background noise and
reverberation.
Biography: Bernard Widrow is Professor of Electrical Engineering at
Stanford University. He was educated at M.I.T., where he received his
B.S., M.S., and Sc.D. degrees between 1951 and 1956. He taught at
M.I.T. for three years and then joined the Stanford University
faculty in 1959. His field of research and teaching are signal
processing, pattern recognition, neural networks, adaptive signal
processing, and adaptive control systems. Dr. Widrow is the author of
two Prentice-Hall books: Adaptive Signal Processing, with San Stearns,
and Adaptive Inverse Control, with Eugene Walach. A third
Prentice-Hall book entitled Quantization Noise with Istvan Kollar,
will soon be completed. His work on adaptive algorithms has had
worldwide application. Almost every modem in the world uses adaptive
filters driven by the Widrow-Hoff LMS algorithm. The LMS algorithm is
at the foundation of the Backpropagation algorithm of neural
networks. Dr. Widrow has received many awards for his work. He is a
Life Fellow of the IEEE and received the IEEE Centennial Medal and the
IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. The IEEE Neural Network Council has
designated him a pioneer in the Field. In 1995, he was inducted into
the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Widrow is Associate Editor of
a half dozen journals and supervises ten doctoral students conducting
research on neural control systems (the "truck backer-upper") and
"learning with a critic" at Stanford University. He is a member of
the Governing Board and Past President of the International Neural
Network Society.
____________
STANFORD LEARNING LAB
on Thursday, 30 September 1999, 3:15pm
Stanford Press Warehouse, room 118
http://sll.stanford.edu/
A Learning Technology Evaluator's Casebook:
Challenges, Pitfalls, and Strategies
Barbara Means
Assistant Director, Assessment and Evaluation
Center for Technology in Learning
SRI International
Drawing on her experience as Assistant Director for Evaluation and
Assessment within SRI's Center for Technology in Learning
(http://www.sri.com/policy/ctl/), Barbara Means will discuss
methodological and practical issues entailed in evaluating learning
technologies. These include complexities involved in defining the
intervention and the intended learning goals, the existence of
multiple types and levels of technology use, and the requirement to
tailor learning outcome measures to the intervention. Dr. Means will
use examples drawn from her experience evaluating programs such as
GLOBE (http://www.globe.gov), the Global Lab Curriculum
(http://globallab.terc.edu/), and the Challenge 2000 Multimedia
Project (http://www.jointventure.org/initiatives/ 21st/multi.html) to
illustrate these challenges and the strategies CTL evaluators use to
address them.
Biography: Barbara Means, Ph.D. is currently the Assistant Director of
Assessment and Evaluation at SRI International's Center for Technology
in Learning. She is co-principal investigator for the Center for
Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) funded by NSF. Dr. Means heads
the evaluations of several innovative educational projects, including
the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment
(GLOBE) program and Silicon Valley Challenge 2000. Among many
professional activities, Dr. Means served (1995-1997) on the Committee
on Developments in the Science of Learning of the National Research
Council, and is currently(1998-200l) on the Board on Testing and
Assessment of the National Research Council . With well over 25
publications in the last decade, Dr. Means is a noted authority on
federal education programs and on the use of technology in promoting
school reform and student-centered classrooms.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 30 September 1999, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
A survey of the AES process
David Wagner
UC Berkeley
I will report on efforts to develop a worldwide standard for
next-generation encryption systems. The Advanced Encryption Standard
(AES) is expected to be widely-adopted by industry and to have a broad
impact on information security over the next 20--30 years. I will
survey progress made so far, the current candidates, and prospects for
the future.
____________
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
Computational 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.
____________
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?
____________
SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
on Friday, 1 October 1999, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Scenarios of Future User-Interface Design
Aaron Marcus
Aaron Marcus and Associates
After a brief look at the last 30,000 years of civilization in which
human beings have made tools and signs, I shall present some themes of
likely development for user-interface and information-visualization
design in the next decades of computer hardware and software. Among
other scenarios I shall explore are the emergence of style, of she-c's
in addition to he-c's, the growing importance of cultural diversity,
and consequent new metaphors and new hieroglyphics, giving rise to
"fabulous" new appearance and interaction paradigms.
Biography: Aaron Marcus, born in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, in 1943,
received a BA in physics from Princeton (1965) and a BFA and MFA in
graphic design from Yale Art School (1968). He is an internationally
recognized authority on designing user interfaces and information
visualization. He co-authored "Human Factors and Typography for More
Readable Programs" (1990) and "The Cross-GUI Handbook for
Multiplatform User Interface Design" (1994), and he authored "Graphic
Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces" (1992), all
published by Addison Wesley Longman.
Mr. Marcus was the world's first professional graphic designer to
work in computer graphics (1967), to program a desktop publishing
system (for the AT&T Picturephone, 1969-71), to design virtual
realities (1971-73), to establish a computer-based graphic design firm
(1982), and to receive the NCGA Industry Achievement Award for his
contributions to computer graphics (1992). As President of Aaron
Marcus and Associates, Inc., Emeryville, CA, he and his staff work
with Fortune 500 companies and start-ups as planners, consultants,
designers, and programmers.
Mr. Marcus programmed/designed his first user interface in 1969 and
wrote his first user interface design guidelines document in 1981. In
the last 15 years, he and his staff have designed or helped to design
at least 300 user interfaces for productivity tools, multimedia/CBT
applications, and the Internet.
____________
CS545: 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.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 5 October 1999, 4:15pm
Math Corner 380:381T
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Organizational Meeting
The theme of this year's logic seminar is mechanical proof-checking,
computer assisted construction of proofs, and logical frameworks in
which to carry these out. We will concentrate on Godel's
incompleteness theorems as test cases. A computer checked proof of the
first incompleteness theorem has been carried out by N. Shankar in the
Boyer-Moore logic. No comparable proof has yet been given for the
second incompleteness theorems. Some of the literature to be covered
is:
C. Smorynski, The incompleteness theorems, in J. Barwise (ed.)
Handbook of Mathematical Logic, North-Holland, 1977, 821-865.
S. Feferman, Finitary inductively presented logics, in: D. Gabbay (ed.)
What is a Logical System?, Oxford University Press,1994, 297-328.
N. Shankar, Metamathematics, Machines, and Godel's Proof,
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
K. Kunen, A Ramsey theorem in Boyer-Moore logic, J. Automated
Reasoning, 15, 1995, 217-235.
K. Kunen, Nonconstructive computational mathematics, J. Automated
Reasoning 21, no.1, 1998, 67-97.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 6 October 1999, 4:15pm
Gates B12
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Electronic Commerce:
From Economic and Game Theoretic Models to Working Protocols
Moshe Tennenholtz
Technion
Israel Institute of Technology
The design of protocols for non-cooperative computational environments
(e.g. Internet Auctions) is a major challenge for electronic commerce.
In order to address this challenge we should tackle several
complementary tasks: 1. Re-consider economic mechanisms in view of
their use in computational settings. 2. Incorporate distributed
systems features into the context of game-theoretic and economic
models. 3. Deal with computational aspects of mechanism design. In
this talk we present a (biased) overview of some of the work carried
out on these tasks. In particular, we will consider the effects of
having many participants, risk elements, and competition among sellers
in the Internet setup, on the study of auctions. In addition, we
consider the effects of the communication network and the asynchronous
nature of distributed systems on the implementation and analysis of
various economic mechanisms. Some results about the computational
treatment of economic mechanisms will be mentioned as well.
Biography: Moshe Tennenholtz received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from
Tel-Aviv University (1986), and his M.Sc. and Ph.D (1987,1991) from
the department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in Weizmann
Institute. He spent one year as a post-doctoral research affiliate,
and one year as a research associate at the Robotics Laboratory of the
Computer Science Department at Stanford University. In 1993 he joined
the faculty of industrial engineering and management at the Technion--
Israel Institute of Technology. His work is concerned with the
foundations of multi-agent systems. In particular, in joint work with
colleagues and students he introduced and developed theories of
artificial social systems, co-learning, and qualitative
decision-making. His recent line of research is concerned with the
adaptation of economic models to computerized/AI settings.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 7 October 1999, 12 noon
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/
Multiple-Language-Acquisition-System (MLAS):
An Infant Simulator
Tetsuo Suga
Department of Psychology, Nihon Joshi University
"Children are the only things (living or non-living) that are able to
attain the close-to-adult language proficiency by the age of 4-5
years" (L. Gleitman and P. Bloom, 1999). The NLP systems already
published such as Shrdlu, SAM, and so on showed remarkable linguistic
performances, but the performances were based upon lexical data and
syntactic rules equipped by researchers in advance. Language
acquisition system to simulate children should start with no
ready-made linguistic resources and acquire its linguistic knowledge
step by step for itself. I try to elucidate the hurdles concerning
morphological transformation, syntactic transformation, and lexical
meaning (above all the pragmatic aspect of it) which prevent us to
design such a system, and show how to overcome the difficulties
through demonstration of Multi-Language- Acquisition-System (MLAS) I
have investigated for years and which may be capable to attain about
4-5 years level of ability in any human language (English, Japanese,
French, and so on).
____________
SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
on Friday, 8 October 1999, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
Robert Horn
Stanford CSLI
Bob Horn will discuss his new book in which he claims an entirely new
language is emerging around the globe; a language that tightly
combines words and visual elements. On the world wide web, this visual
language has become widely used-and misused, so it has significant
implications for interface design. Horn claims that it is becoming a
new international auxiliary language, one that we will use in addition
to our native languages to communicate across cultural divides. Visual
language has already developed an elaborate syntax and semantics and
it is rapidly integrating vocabularies as diverse as diagraming and
cartooning into a single unified communicative tool. Horn claims that
visual language has been continuously invented over the past two
centuries to handle the increasingly complex communication about our
technology and organizations. He will illustrate part of his talk with
his recent invention of argumentation maps, large poster-size
diagrams, which enable students and instructors to navigate the Turing
debate about whether computers will ever be able to think.
Biography: Robert E. Horn is a researcher, former CEO, and author. For
the past few years, he has been a visiting scholar at the Program on
People, Computers, and Design of the Center for the Study of Language
and Information, Stanford University. His new book is "Visual
Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century" and the Turing
argumentation maps, "Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think?"
(Publisher of book and maps:www.macrovu.com)
____________
CS545: INFOLAB SEMINAR
on Friday, 8 October 1999, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
188 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Fuzzy Queries in Multimedia Database Systems
Ron Fagin
IBM Almaden Research Center
There are essential differences between multimedia databases (which
may contain complicated objects, such as images), and traditional
databases. These differences lead to interesting new issues, and in
particular cause us to consider new types of queries. For example, in
a multimedia database it is reasonable and natural to ask for images
that are somehow "similar to" some fixed image. Furthermore, there are
different ways of obtaining and accessing information in a multimedia
database than information in a traditional database. For example, in a
multimedia database, it might be reasonable to have a query that asks
for, say, the top 10 images that are similar to a fixed image. This is
in contrast to a relational database, where the answer to a query is
simply a set. In this talk, we survey some new issues that arise for
multimedia queries. This talk, which will be completely
self-contained, was an invited talk at the 1998 ACM Symposium on
Principles of Database Systems.
Biography: Ronald Fagin is manager of the Foundations of Computer
Science group at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose,
California. He received his B.A. degree in mathematics from Dartmouth
College in 1967 and his Ph.D. in mathematics, with his thesis in
finite-model theory, from the University of California at Berkeley in
1973.
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END MATERIAL
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