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CSLI Calendar, 1 March 2000, vol. 15:21
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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1 March 2000 Stanford Vol. 15, No.21
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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 FROM 1 MARCH TO 10 MARCH 2000
WEDNESDAY, 1 MARCH
9:30am Phonology Laboratory
46 Dwinelle Hall (UC Berkeley)
Things, Relations, and Interactions
Janet Pierrehumbert
Northwestern University
http://trill.berkeley.edu/Talks/Talksch.html
4:05pm Broad Area Colloquium For
AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
Planning at 96 Million Kilometers from Earth:
Challenges and Lessons
Nicola Muscettola
Computational Sciences Division
NASA Ames Research Center
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03
IA-64 Linux Kernel Internals
David Mosberger
HP Labs
Walt Drummond
VALinux
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380
Abstract below
4:15pm ME297: Design Theory and Methodology Seminar
Building 560
Learning and Designing Through Questioning
Ozgur Eris
Mechanical Engineering, Design Division
Stanford University
http://design.stanford.edu/Courses/me297/
THURSDAY, 2 MARCH
12:15pm CSLI Coglunch
Ventura 17
(please note room change from Cordura 100)
A New Look at Hume's Theory of Causal Inference
Mark Collier
Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Philosophy,
Stanford University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:45pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
Content Distribution in AT&T:
An Architecture and Research Overview
Fred Douglis
AT&T Labs - Research
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
Anatomy of a Startup
Ben Wegbreit
E.piphany
http://www.parc.xerox.com/forum
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 3 MARCH
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
Designing with Haptic Feedback
Karon Maclean
Interval Research
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
2:00pm ICSI: The International Computer Science Institute
ICSI, Rm 607
Number Theory in Physics and Music
Manfred Schroeder
University of Goettingen, Germany
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/location.html
Abstract below
2:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Gates 104
Integrating Multiple Sources of
Information in Text Classification
Haym Hirsh
Computer Science Department, Rutgers University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Abstract below
3:30pm Linguistics Colloquium
Building 460:126
Double Scope Creativity
Gilles Fauconnier
http://calendus.stanford.edu/linguistics-colloquia/
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Building 420:100
Conceptual and Perceptual Processes in
Picture-Name Priming
Justin Ream
http://matia.stanford.edu/html/talks.html#frisem
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Building 420:100
The Effects of Odorant Sorption Rate on
Olfactory Cortex Activation
Michael Martinez
http://matia.stanford.edu/html/talks.html#frisem
3:15pm Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90:92Q
Free Will Remains a Mystery
Peter van Invagen
Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/
SATURDAY, 4 MARCH
9:00am Bio-X Symposium:
Interdisciplinary Frontiers in Systems and
Cognitive Neuroscience
TCseq 201
Motion Perception:
Wedding Neurophysiology to Perceptual Psychology
Bill Newsome
Stanford University
9:45am The Mammalian Olfactory System:
Making Sense of Scent
Lawrence Katz
HHMI/Duke University
10:30am Playing Dice:
Why Do Neurons Communicate Unreliably?
Laurence Abbot
Brandeis University
11:15am Adaptive Optics:
From Astronomy to Visual Neuroscience
David Williams
University of Rochester
For further information on all talks, go to:
http://calendus.stanford.edu/biology/
MONDAY, 6 MARCH
12:30pm Special University Oral Examination
Gates Building:463A
Type Systems for Object-Oriented
Intermediate Languages
Stephen Freund
Stanford University
http://www-forum.stanford.edu
Abstract below
3:30pm Social Lab
Building 420:050
Digital History of the American Civil War:
An Experiment in Method
Ed Ayers
Professor of History, University of Virginia
http://matia.stanford.edu/html/talks.html#social_lab
4:00pm Computer Science Seminar
Packard EE Building:204
Dynamically Detecting Likely Program Invariants
Michael Ernst
University of Washington
http://calendus.stanford.edu/CS/
Abstract below
4:00pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Cordura 104
The Logic and Language of Plurals
Byeong-uk Yi
University of Glasgow
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/
Abstract below
7:00pm Stanford Presidential Lecture
Law School 290
The Art of Forbearance
Homi Bhabha
http://prelectur.stanford.edu
TUESDAY, 7 MARCH
3:15pm Stanford Learning Lab
Press Warehouse, Staff Training Room
Information Ecologies and Education
Bonnie A. Nardi
AT&T Labs-Research
Vicki L. O'Day
UC Santa Cruz
http://sll.stanford.edu/speakers
3:45pm Statistics Seminar
Sequoia Hall 200
Model Selection, Statistical Inference and
Data Compression
Amir Najmi
http://www-stat.stanford.edu/seminars/seminars.html
4:15pm Mathematics Department: de Leeuw Lecture
Building 380:040-041
Election Year; But Do We Really Elect Whom We Want?
Donald Saari
Northwestern University
http://math.stanford.edu/html/seminars.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 8 MARCH
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03
Commercial Rockets: Optimum Blending of Hardware,
Software and Meatware
Gary Hudson
Rotary Rocket
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380
Abstract below
4:15pm ME297: Design Theory and Methodology Seminar
Building 560
Synthesis Projects:
Thoughts on a School of Design
Moderator: Andrew Milne
http://design.stanford.edu/Courses/me297/
FRIDAY, 10 MARCH
8:30am Stanford Semantics Fest
Cordura 100
All Day Event
Various Speakers
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/semgroup/semfest.html
8:00am The Fourteenth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics
Ida Sproul Room at the International House,
2299 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley
All day Friday/Staurday event
Various speakers
http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/BLS
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
Social Tele-embodiment: Understanding Presence
Eric Paulos
UC Berkeley
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Building 420:100
Emotional Memory and the Amygdala
Etienne Benson
The Effects of Graphical Components on
Diagrammatic Reasoning
Julie Heiser
A Bayesian Approach to Predicting The Future
Tom Griffiths
http://matia.stanford.edu/html/talks.html#frisem
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BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 1 March 2000, 4:05pm
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Planning at 96 Million Kilometers from Earth:
Challenges and Lessons
Nicola Muscettola
Computational Sciences Division
NASA Ames Research Center
On May 17th, 1999, the Planner/Scheduler (PS) of the Remote Agent
autonomy architecture became the first automatic planner to operate in
inter-planetary space. Over a period of 4 days the Remote Agent
controlled the Deep Space One spacecraft, the first mission of NASA's
New Millennium program. During the experiment the Remote Agent
received high-level goals from Earth. On-board the spacecraft PS
produced detailed plans that achieved them. PS did do so by using a
constraint-based model of the spacecraft activities and devices. The
produced plan was executed on board the spacecraft without any
intervention from ground controllers. Also Remote Agent demonstrated
the ability of detecting device faults and reacting to them while
keeping control of the spacecraft. In some fault scenarios PS was
called on to generate new plans that still achieved the original goals
while taking into account the degraded spacecraft capabilities.
On-board planning is a crucial capability for realizing NASA's vision
of a "virtual presence" in the universe, an armada of spacecraft and
rovers exploring celestial bodies in the Solar System and
beyond. Autonomy technology will boost the capabilities of ground
controllers to the point in which a single team will be able to
operate multiple missions simultaneously. On-board autonomy will
handle routine operations while ground controllers will be required
only during unanticipated off-nominal situations. Also, a spacecraft
that can recognize scientific phenomena, formulate new goals and
adjust its plans autonomously will significantly expand the kinds of
space exploration missions beyond those that are possible today.
In this talk we will discuss the PS component of the Remote Agent, its
constraint-based technology and the lessons learned during the Remote
Agent, particularly with respect to how to effectively use a plan
during reactive execution and how to validate a planner's
functionality in an operational, mission-critical application.
About the Speaker:
Nicola Muscettola is lead of the Autonomy and Robotics Area in the
Computational Sciences Division of the NASA Ames Research Center. He
received both his Diploma di Laurea (B.S./M.S) and his Dottorato di
Ricerca (Ph.D.) from the Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy. Before
Ames he was a member of the research staff and then system scientist
at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Nicola's
research interests are in planning, scheduling, reactive execution,
temporal reasoning, constraint propagation and planning-based method
for concurrent system verification.
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EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 1 March 2000, 4:15pm
Gates B03
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380
IA-64 Linux Kernel Internals
David Mosberger
HP Labs
Walt Drummond
VALinux
The Trillian Project was formed in early 1999 to port the Linux
operating system to the IA-64 architecture. The project currently
includes Caldera, CERN, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Red Hat (Cygnus),
SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux Systems, and represents the first
major effort by the server and workstation industry to support an Open
Source project of this depth and scale.
On February 2nd, the Trillian project released the IA-64 Linux source
code to the open source community (available at www.kernel.org
). Today, two of the lead engineers from the Trillian project will
discuss the internals of IA-64 Linux and they will detail how Linux
will take advantage of the new features of the IA-64 architecture.
About the speaker: David is a member of the technical staff at HP Labs
where he is working on Internet and Linux related projects. His
research interests are in high-performance Internet systems, operating
systems, and computer architecture. He holds a professional degree as
an Electronics Engineer, an HTL Diploma (BSc degree) in Computer
Science from HTL Brugg-Windisch, Switzerland and M.Sc. and
Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Arizona. He is a
member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and USENIX.
In his former life at the University of Arizona, David was one of the
primary contributors to making Linux 64-bit clean and getting it to
work on the Alpha platform. For the two years or so, he has been
spearheading the effort at HP Labs to bring Linux to the forthcoming
IA-64 platform.
Walt Drummond is the Director of Software Engineering at VA Linux
Systems. Walt leads the IA-64 Linux development effort at VA,
concentrating on the kernel and platform implementation details. Prior
to joining VA he was part of the Network Engineering group at SGI.
Walt received his degree from Rutgers University where he spent time
researching linux-based clusters and appliance-style servers.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 2 March 2000, 12:15pm to 1:30pm
Ventura 17
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
A New Look at Hume's Theory of Causal Inference
Mark Collier
Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Philosophy,
Stanford University
In this talk, I offer a new interpretation and evaluation of Hume's
theory of causal inference. According to my interpretation, Hume
argues for his theory on the grounds that it provides a unified
explanation of a wide variety of experimentally observed phenomena,
such as the incremental nature of causal learning, the "hesitating"
confidence which accompanies probabilistic inferences, and the
tendency of human nature to succumb to the "illusion" of seeing a
necessary connection between correlated events. I then look at some
recent evidence from cognitive science which, I claim, forces us to
take Hume's theory seriously. I argue that this research gives new
plausibility to his explanation of probabilistic inference, yet it
fails to vindicate his "projectivist" account of necessity. The
philosophical upshot of this is that Hume's naturalistic investigation
into causal inference does not support the skeptical conclusions he
draws from it.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 2 March 2000, 12:45pm
Gates 104
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Content Distribution in AT&T:
An Architecture and Research Overview
Fred Douglis
AT&T Labs - Research
Caching and replication, collectively referred to as content
distribution, are rapidly growing in importance in the Internet. On
the web hosting side, the marketplace has already passed $1B and could
reach $11B by 2002. AT&T aspires to be one of the largest web hosting
providers in addition to already being one of the largest Internet
service providers. This talk describes the Content Distribution
component of the AT&T Internet Architecture. It surveys the existing
commercial landscape and discusses some of the architectural
alternatives. Then it discusses several related research projects
within AT&T, such as delta-encoding, prefetching, connection
management, and proxy performance.
About the speaker:
Fred Douglis is the head of the Distributed Systems Research
Department at AT&T Labs--Research. He has published several papers in
the area of World Wide Web performance and is responsible for the AT&T
Internet Difference Engine, a tool for tracking and viewing changes to
resources on the Web. He has taught distributed computing at Princeton
University and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is the chair of
the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on the Internet, and the
1999 USENIX Symposium on Internetworking Technologies and Systems. He
has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 2 March 2000, 4:00pm to 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
http://www.parc.xerox.com/forum
Anatomy of a Startup
Ben Wegbreit
E.piphany
What does it take to create a successful startup? This question will
be addressed taking the company, E.piphany, as an example. E.piphany
was founded in January 1997. It shipped its first product in November
1997, received its first revenue check in December 1997, and went
public in September 1999. Today, its customers include Macromedia,
Autodesk, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, AAA, Hilton, KPMG, Capital
BlueCross, SallieMae, Wells Fargo, Nissan, Mitsubishi, American
Airlines, Amazon.com, and Procter Gamble. E.piphany tested certain
theories of how high technology companies should be created and lead.
It validated many of these ideas and refined others. Several elements
of Epiphany's success can be traced to directly to its origins. Other
elements of its success can be traced to correcting the flaws of its
origins. This talk will analyze both.
Dr. Wegbreit served his Silicon Valley apprenticeship at Xerox PARC.
He co-founded his first company, Convergent Technologies, in 1979; it
went public in 2.6 years. Subsequently, he joined Hambrecht and Quist
Venture Partners as a general partner where he invested in startups
for 10 years. In January 1997, he co-founded E.piphany where he served
as Chairman and CEO.
____________
ICSI: THE INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
on Friday, 3 March 2000, 2:00pm
ICSI, Rm 607
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/location.html
Number Theory in Physics and Music
Manfred Schroeder
University of Goettingen, Germany
Number Theory has long cherished the reputation of having no practical
use. Actually, there are numerous interesting applications from modern
cryptography, x-ray astronomy and quasicrystals to precision measure-
ments in general relativity and the design of better sounding concert
halls. (M.R.Schroeder:"Number Theory in Science and Communication, 3rd
ed., Springer 1999).
Manfred Scroeder holds 45 US patents for inventions in speech process-
ing and other fields. He has won the Gold Medal of the Audio Engineer-
ing Society, the Rayleigh Medal from the British Institute of
Acoustics and the Helmholtz Medal from the German Acoustical
Society. In 1991, the Acoustical Society of America awarded him the
Gold Medal "for his theoretical and practical contributions to human
communication through innovative applications of mathematics to
speech, hearing, and concert hall acoustics". Schroederis a memeber of
the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences,and the New York and Goettingen Academies.He has
written two books:"Number Theory in Science and Communication" and
"Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise".
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Friday, 3 March 2000, 2:15pm to 3:30pm
Gates 104
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Integrating Multiple Sources of
Information in Text Classification
Haym Hirsh
Computer Science Department, Rutgers University
One popular class of supervised learning problems concerns the task of
classifying items that are comprised primarily of text. Such problems
can occur when assessing the relevance of a Web page to a given user,
assigning topic labels to technical papers, and assessing the
importance of a user's email. Most commonly this task is performed by
extrapolating from a corpus of labeled textual training documents
procedures for classifying further unlabeled documents. This talk
presents an approach for corpus-based text classification based on
WHIRL, a database system that augments traditional relational database
technology with textual-similarity operations developed in the
information retrieval community. Not only does the approach perform
competitively when compared to state-of-the-art text classification
methods, we show that it enables the incorporation of a range of
hitherto unexploitable sources of information into the classification
process in a fairly robust and general fashion.
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 3 March 2000, 3:30pm to 4:45pm
Building 460:126
http://calendus.stanford.edu/linguistics-colloquia/
Double Scope Creativity
Gilles Fauconnier
I will discuss the human capacity for 'conceptual blending.'
Conceptual blending is a basic operation that leads to new meaning,
global insight, and compressions useful for memory and manipulation of
otherwise diffuse ranges of meaning. The essence of the operation is
to construct a partial match between two inputs, to project
selectively from those inputs into a novel 'blended' mental space,
which then dynamically develops emergent structure. It has been
suggested that the capacity for "double-scope" integration is a
crucial requirement for thought and language as we know them.
Empirical data from linguistic and other sources will be presented,
e.g. counterfactuals, polysemy, humor, rituals, action and design.
Governing principles and constraints will be also be examined, time
willing.
____________
SPECIAL UNIVERSITY ORAL EXAMINATION
on Monday, 6 March 2000, 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Gates Building:463A
http://www-forum.stanford.edu
Type Systems for Object-Oriented
Intermediate Languages
Stephen Freund
Stanford University
In the standard Java implementation, a Java language program is
compiled to bytecode. This bytecode may be sent across the network to
another site, where it is then executed by the Java Virtual Machine.
Since bytecode may be written by hand, or corrupted during network
transmission, the Java Virtual Machine contains a bytecode verifier
that performs a number of consistency checks before code is run.
These checks include type correctness, and, as illustrated by previous
attacks on the Java Virtual Machine, they are critical for system
security.
In order to study the process of verification for a language like the
Java bytecode language, this work develops a precise specification of
a statically-correct bytecode language. The specification takes
the form of a type system, and the language features examined include
classes, interfaces, constructors, methods, exceptions, and bytecode
subroutines. I present formal systems for the most complex features
in isolation and then merge these studies together to yield a type
system covering the whole language. In addition, I will describe a
prototype implementation of a type checker for our system and discuss
some applications of this work. For example, I show how to augment our
formal system with checks for other program properties, such as the
correct use of object locks.
This work has helped to clarify the original bytecode verifier
specification, uncovered a security flaw in the Sun verifier
implementation, and points to ways in which intermediate languages for
mobile code may be simplified and extended.
____________
COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR
on Monday, 6 March 2000, 4:00pm to 5:15pm
Packard EE Building:204
http://calendus.stanford.edu/CS/
Dynamically Detecting Likely Program Invariants
Michael Ernst
University of Washington
Explicitly stated program invariants can help programmers by
characterizing certain aspects of program execution and identifying
program properties that must be preserved when modifying code. In
practice, these invariants are usually absent from code. An
alternative to expecting programmers to annotate code with invariants
is to automatically infer invariants from the program itself.
This talk describes dynamic techniques for discovering invariants from
execution traces; the essential idea is to look for patterns in and
relationships among variable values over a set of executions. An
implementation has indicated that the approach is both effective --
successfully rediscovering formal specifications -- and useful --
discovering invariants that assisted a software evolution task.
A naive implementation of dynamic invariant inference suffers both
from excessive runtime and also from reporting irrelevant invariants
and failing to report relevant ones. I will discuss several
improvements that together make the system usable: statistical
confidence measures, eliminating unused polymorphism, suppressing
redundant and coincidentally true properties, and limiting which
variables are compared to one another. I will also show how to extend
dynamic invariant inference to pointer-directed data structures, which
requires traversal of data structures and discovery of conditional
rather than universally true invariants.
This is joint work with Jake Cockrell, Adam Czeisler, Bill Griswold,
Josh Kataoka, and David Notkin.
Michael D. Ernst will receive the Ph.D. in Computer Science and
Engineering from the University of Washington in June 2000. He has
previously been a lecturer at Rice University and a researcher at
Microsoft Research. He holds the S.B. and S.M. degrees from
MIT. Ernst's primary technical interest is programmer productivity,
encompassing software engineering, program analysis, compilation, and
programming language design. However, he has also published in
artificial intelligence, theory, and other areas of computer science.
____________
CSLI/SEMANTICS WORKSHOP
on Monday, 6 March 2000, 4:30pm
Cordura 104
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/
The Logic and Language of Plurals
Byeong-uk Yi
University of Glasgow
Elementary logic cannot do justice to the logic of arguments like
"Ezra and Thomas are critics who admire only each other; so, some
critics admire only one another", or "Russell and Whitehead cooperate,
and they are the coauthors of Principia Mathematica; so, the coauthors
of Principia Mathematica cooperate." This paper presents an extension
of elementary logic, the logic of plurals, that can account for
logical relations among plural constructions. The logic of plurals is
a conservative extension of elementary logic that has wider
jurisdiction than that of elementary logic, i.e. elementary
languages. In this respect, the logic of plurals is akin to
higher-order extensions of elementary logic. It differs from them
primarily in jurisdiction. Higher-order logics govern vertical
extensions of elementary languages; the logic of plurals governs its
horizontal extension, which includes plural counterparts of the
resources available in elementary languages.
(Copies of the paper can be obtained in advance.
Contact: zalta@stanford.edu)
Byeong-Uk Yi (Lecturer, Philosophy Dept, U. of Glasgow) received his
Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1995. He was awarded postdoctoral
fellowships both at the U. of Alberta (1996-1997) and at the U. of
Queensland (1998-1999). This talk presents a follow-up to his recent
piece in the Journal of Philosophy on the logic of plurals ("Is Two
a Property?", 96/4 (April 1999), pp. 163-190).
____________
MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT: DE LEEUW LECTURE
on Tuesday, 7 March 2000, 4:15pm
Building 380:040-041
http://math.stanford.edu/html/seminars.html
Election Year; But Do We Really Elect Whom We Want?
Donald Saari
Northwestern University
Starting in 1770 with the French mathematician Borda and moving in a
different direction in the 1950s with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem,
we have learned that an election outcome need not mean what we think
it does. In particular, it is arguable that with our election
procedures we can, unwittingly, elect the wrong person - and often we
do. After outlining how bad the situation can be, it is shown how
mathematical symmetries resolve the problem in the sense that, for an
important class of election procedures, all possible paradoxes can be
identified, explained and all illustrating examples characterized.
Symmetry also identifies the only decision procedure which avoids all
of these difficulties.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 8 March 2000, 4:15pm
Gates B03
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380
Commercial Rockets: Optimum Blending of Hardware,
Software and Meatware
Gary Hudson
Rotary Rocket
The Roton rocket, a reusable, single-stage-to-orbit space vehicle
being developed by the Rotary Rocket Company of Redwood City, is
intended to be the world's first fully-reusable commercial launch
vehicle. Piloted by a crew of two, the Roton takes off vertically like
a conventional liquid-fueled rocket and returns to Earth and lands
like a helicopter, using a nose-mounted rotor and rotor-tip thrusters
to hover and maneuver.
Other than fuel and coolant, no components are discarded or expended
during flight, so minimal servicing and maintenance is required
between missions. A fleet of Roton vehicles would be able to provide
flexible, flight-on-demand service somewhat like today's airfreight
companies, fundamentally changing the economics of the space launch
industry.
This presentation will include a summary of the development and
preliminary approach and landing flight tests of the Roton ATV launch
vehicle, and compare the role of human pilots with that of on-board
computer systems. A videotape of the third translational test flight
will also be shown.
About the speaker:
Gary Hudson is a founder of Rotary Rocket Company, and currently
serves as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the
Board of Directors. He has worked in the field of commercial space for
over 25 years with an emphasis on the development of innovative
low-cost systems. His experience includes both management and
engineering in high-tech, entrepreneurial settings. He is the designer
of the Phoenix VTOL/SSTO family of launch vehicles and has
participated in many Single-Stage-To-Orbit launch vehicle projects
including support for both General Dynamics and Boeing Aerospace
corporation during the SDIO program. He has published numerous papers
on space vehicles and systems and has authored several studies on low
cost and advanced propulsion systems.
In 1994 Mr. Hudson co-founded HMX, Inc. which designs and develops
innovative aerospace propulsion systems. In 1995 HMX developed a
monopropellant rocket engine propulsion system, including engines,
tankage and support systems, for Kistler Aerospace Corporation of
Kirkland, WA. Mr. Hudson had previously been co-founder, President,
and Chief Executive Officer of Pacific American Launch Systems, Inc.;
served as a consultant to the United States Air Force's Project
Forecast II; designed the Percheron 055 experimental launch vehicle;
and spent ten years as a consulting Systems Designer on low cost
commercial space systems.
Mr. Hudson attended the University of Minnesota. He has conducted
seminars for the US Naval Postgraduate School and the Institute for
Space and Astronautical Sciences of Tokyo University, and has taught
graduate-level launch vehicle design at Stanford University. He is a
Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a Senior Member of
the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics. In January
1994 he received the Laurel Award from Aviation Week & Space
Technology "for the vision, drive and competence that have pushed
[single-stage-to-orbit and reusable launch vehicles] to the front of
the U.S. launcher agenda."
____________
END MATERIAL
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http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Archive/calendar/current.html
and the archives at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Archive/calendar/.
People on most of the CSLI computers can type 'help csli-calendar' to
see the current issue.
The CSLI Calendar is also posted each week to
news://nntp-csli.stanford.edu/csli.bboard.
and
news://nntp.stanford.edu/su.events
Information about CSLI's research program is available at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/.
For maps to the Stanford University campus see
http://www.stanford.edu/home/visitors/maps.html.
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