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CSLI Calendar, 22 March 2000, vol. 15:23
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 March 2000 Stanford Vol. 15, No.23
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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 22 MARCH TO 31 MARCH 2000
THURSDAY, 23 MARCH
12noon CSLI Coglunch
Cordura 100
The IMC Smart Office Project: Past, Now, Future
Fumio Mizoguchi
Information Media Center
Science University of Tokyo
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
ReReading - Dispatches from XFR
Rich Gold
Xerox PARC
http://www.parc.xerox.com/forum
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 24 MARCH
11:10am UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics Colloquium
370 Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley
The Clausal Status of English Imperatives
Eric Potsdam
Yale University
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/Colloquia/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 27 MARCH
4:00pm Computer Science Department Seminar
Packard EE Building:202
Pseudorandomness: Connections and Constructions
Salil Vadhan
MIT
http://campus-calendar.stanford.edu/CS/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 29 MARCH
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium For
AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
Computer Modeling of Human Movement Abnormalities
Scott Delp
Biomechanical Engineering Division
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 30 MARCH
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
AspectJ(tm) OR
How to Use Aspect-Oriented Programming to Solve Common
Modularity Problems in Java(tm) Programs.
Gregor Kiczales
University of British Columbia & AspectJ.org
http://www.parc.xerox.com/forum
4:15pm US Japan Technology Management Center
Skilling Auditorium
Challenges and Opportunities in
Integration of Photonics and Electronics
David Miller
http://fuji.Stanford.edu/seminars/spring00/
FRIDAY, 31 MARCH
3:15pm Infolab Seminar
201 T-Seq
Pathway/Genome Databases and Software Tools
Peter D. Karp, Ph.D.
Bioinformatics Research Group
SRI International
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Abstract below
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ANNOUNCEMENT
Class to be offered Spring Quarter:
*Information update from a logical perspective*
Spring Quarter 2000
Johan van Benthem (Stanford & Amsterdam)
Inference is a dynamic activity of extracting information which is
akin to communication and other mechanisms of information flow. In
this course we develop and discuss a series of 'update logics' for
communication which have been proposed starting from the 80s,
continuing right until now. The road takes us from simple systems of
dynamic logic to current connections with game theory. We cover the
work of authors like Gardenfors, Veltman, Fagin/Halpern/Moses/
Vardi, Groeneveld, Gerbrandy, Baltag, van Ditmarsch,and several
others.
Literature:
(a) J. van Benthem, 1996, "Exploring Logical Dynamics", CSLI
Publications, Stanford, (b) R. Muskens et al., 'Dynamics', a chapter
in A. ter Meulen & J. van Benthem, eds., 1997, "Handbook of Logic and
Language", Elsevier, Amsterdam. (c) Lecture notes to be prepared.
List of topics:
(1) Individual update in propositional logic/logic puzzles
(2) Public update in epistemic logic
(3) Questions and answers
(4) Masked update in games and communication
(5) Action uncertainty and update in games
(6) Modelling misleading communication
(7) Analyzing crypto-protocols
(8) Updating probabilistic information states
(9) Updating preferences and other informational items
Contact Johan van Benthem (johan@wins.uva.nl)for more information.
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ABSTRACTS
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CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 23 March 2000, 12 noon
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
The IMC Smart office project: past, now, future
Fumio Mizoguchi
Information Media Center
Science University of Tokyo
In this talk we intend to give an overview of information media center
projects aimed at providing a variety of services to future office
environment through the use of state-of-art hardware and software
techniques. The aim of this project, is "AI for everyday
things". A smart office, wired with various sensors and controls
are used to experiment with providing convenient and user friendly
services in a flexible and secure manner. Videos will be presented
showing demos of these projects.
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XEROX PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 23 March 2000, 4:00pm to 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
http://www.parc.xerox.com/forum
ReReading - Dispatches from XFR
Rich Gold
Xerox PARC
"XFR: eXperiments in the Future of Reading" is the name of the
exhibition that we recently opened at the Tech Museum of Innovation.
We (Research in Experimental Documents or "RED") are 8 PARC
researchers. Through our individual highlights, we'll bring you along
the 18 months of brainstorming, searching out, designing, building,
negotiating, arguing, installing, documenting, testing, talking,
lighting, printing, lifting, renting, buying, schmoozing, (not)
sleeping, and driving around. We are proud of the result and the Tech
Museum is thrilled. (Even the stock price is up a little since we
opened.) We are gratified by the great support that we have had from
PARC and other parts of Xerox.
The title of the Forum -- being made of bits of the most persistent of
our many project titles -- reflects the evolving nature of the
project. The XFR project also represents a designerly approach to
research. We will report on the method; since it is still a work in
progress, we will highlight some of the issues that have arisen and
describe some examples of the research questions we are addressing.
We hope that everyone has had a chance to see the XFR show already; we
expect this Forum to whet your appetite to see it again.
This Forum is OPEN to the public. Refreshments will be served from
3:45 to 4:00.
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UC BERKELEY DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 20 March 2000, 11:10am
370 Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/Colloquia/
The Clausal Status of English Imperatives
Eric Potsdam
Yale University
A traditional view of English imperatives is that they are a reduced
clause type, essentially verb phrases. This conception is reasonable
given that imperatives are morphologically impoverished and they do
not participate in many syntactic phenomena typical of full
clauses. In this talk, I consider the structure of English imperatives
and argue that they instantiate the same clausal architecture as
better studied finite clauses. The defense of this claim has two
parts. First, I show that English imperatives are typologically
unusual in permitting a wide range of subjects, as in
Everybody/You/Those in front pay attention! I argue that these noun
phrases are not vocatives but, rather, they have typical subject
properties. The presence of imperative subjects provides an important
probe on clause structure. Second, I use these imperative subjects to
show that imperatives instantiate full clauses (IP or CP) and are not
simply verb phrases (VP). Evidence comes from VP ellipsis, adverb
placement, floated quantifiers, and imperatives with auxiliaries. The
specific result, that imperatives have conventional clause structure,
is important because it supports the larger claim that English
imperative syntax is largely regular and a grammar of English does not
need to countenance unusual syntactic mechanisms to account for them.
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COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
on Monday, 27 March 2000, 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Packard EE Building:202
http://campus-calendar.stanford.edu/CS/
Pseudorandomness: Connections and Constructions
Salil Vadhan
MIT
The power of randomness in computer science and combinatorics is a
striking phenomenon. By allowing algorithms to "flip coins", we are
able to efficiently solve problems that we do not know how to solve
efficiently otherwise. Randomization is also a powerful tool for
proving the existence of useful combinatorial objects, such as
error-correcting codes and expander graphs (sparse graphs with very
strong connectivity properties). However, we still do not know to what
extent the randomness is really "necessary" in these settings, and
understanding this is the topic of this talk.
Our approach to this issue is to use the paradigm of
"pseudorandomness", which is concerned with efficiently generating
objects that "look random" despite being constructed
deterministically, or at least using a reduced amount of
randomness. Within this paradigm, some beautiful connections have been
discovered between the problems of derandomizing probabilistic
algorithms, extracting randomness from weak (i.e. biased and
correlated) sources of random bits, and constructing various kinds of
expander graphs.
In this talk, I will survey some of the work I have done exploiting
these connections to yield:
- More efficient constructions of pseudorandom generators from hard
computational problems. (joint work with Madhu Sudan and Luca
Trevisan)
- The best known methods for extracting all the randomness from a weak
random source. (joint work with Ran Raz and Omer Reingold)
- A new Composition Theorem for expander graphs, which gives the first
explicit construction of constant-degree expander graphs with an
"elementary" analysis. For one measure of expansion, we obtain graphs
with the best degree-expansion relationship among existing explicit
constructions. (joint work with Omer Reingold and Avi Wigderson)
Salil Vadhan completed his Ph.D. at MIT in September 1999, under the
supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. The topic of his dissertation was
Zero-knowledge Proofs. He is currently an NSF postdoctoral fellow at
MIT, examining other aspects of cryptography, complexity theory, and
randomness in computation.
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BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 29 March 2000, 4:15pm
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Computer Modeling of Human Movement Abnormalities
Scott Delp
Biomechanical Engineering Division
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
The outcomes of surgeries performed to correct movement abnormalities
are unpredictable and sometimes unsuccessful. This problem exists
because: (i) the biomechanical causes of the abnormal movement
patterns are unclear, (ii) the effects of common surgical procedures
on muscle function are not understood, and (iii) the development and
testing of new operative techniques rely almost entirely on clinical
trials (i.e., trying surgeries on patients) in which the means to
quantify surgical changes or predict postoperative results do not
exist. I believe that the design of improved treatments will proceed
more effectively if computer models are developed that can help
explain the underlying causes of movement abnormalities and the
functional consequences of surgical interventions. This presentation
will describe a computer simulations that provides insight into the
mechanics several movement abnormalities. The presentation will also
review the results of simulations that demonstrate the utility of
computer-assisted design of corrective surgical procedures.
About the Speaker:
Scott Delp received the Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford
University in 1990. For the next eight years he held a faculty
position at Northwestern University, where he was jointly appointed
between the Medical and Engineering Schools. Scott moved to Stanford
this year as an Associate Professor in the newly formed Biomechanical
Engineering Division in the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Scott has established the Digital Human Lab at Stanford to focus on
the development and testing of human movement simulations. These
simulations are used to study mechanisms of neuromuscular diseases,
design surgeries and medical devices, guide the performance of
surgery, and educate engineers, medical students, and surgical
residents. Scott has received numerous awards for his work, including
the Young Scientist Award from the American Society of Biomechanics, a
National Young Investigator Award from NSF, and a TRP award for which
he was honored at a White House ceremony with President Clinton.
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INFOLAB SEMINAR
on Friday, 31 March 2000, 3:15pm to 4:30pm
201 T-Seq
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Pathway/Genome Databases and Software Tools
Peter D. Karp, Ph.D.
Bioinformatics Research Group
SRI International
One revolution sweeping molecular biology is the high-throughput
generation of massive amounts of experimental data, such as by the
human genome project. A second revolution is changing the substrate of
biological information from the biological literature to structured
databases. A pathway/genome database (DB) integrates information about
the genome, proteins, and biochemical pathways of an organism. For
example, the EcoCyc DB describes the full genome and metabolic-pathway
complement of E. coli. EcoCyc is the first DB to describe the full
biochemical network of an organism, and is used by thousands of
scientists for tasks ranging from metabolic engineering of bacteria to
analysis of other bacterial genomes.
The Pathway Tools software developed in conjunction with EcoCyc
includes algorithms for interrogation, visualization, editing, and WWW
publishing of pathway/genome DBs. The EcoCyc project has been a rich
environment for computer-science and bioinformatics research. The talk
will describe several computational contributions of the project
including (a) the Ocelot object/relational database manager, (b) a
reusable, schema-driven object-database editor, (c) a system for
dynamically translating X-windows into HTML and GIF images, (d)
hierarchical graph-layout algorithms for displaying the cellular
biochemical network, and (e) algorithms for prediction and analysis of
cellular biochemical networks.
http://ecocyc.DoubleTwist.com/ecocyc/
Biography:
Peter D. Karp received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from
Stanford University in 1989. He was a postdoctoral fellow at
the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National
Institutes of Health. He was a vice president at DoubleTwist Inc, a
bioinformatics company. He has spent seven years at the Artificial
Intelligence Center at SRI International, where he now directs a
bioinformatics research group. His research interests include
knowledge representation and database systems, machine learning,
scientific databases, and computing with biochemical networks.
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