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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 26 April 2000, vol. 15:28
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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26 April 2000 Stanford Vol. 15, No. 28
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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 26 APRIL TO 5 MAY 2000
WEDNESDAY, 26 APRIL 2000
12:45pm CS548: Distributed Systems Research Seminar
McCullough 150
A Stateless Core Approach for Scalable Internet Services
Ion Stoica
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/
Abstract below
2:00pm E-Commerce Seminar Series
Graduate School of Business, romm S161
Active Research - A Market Intelligence Infomediary
Tom DuBois
President and CEO, Active Research
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/CEBC/comun_act/seminar.html
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
The Statistical Natural Language Processing Revolution
Eugene Charniak
Brown University
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Cognitive Agents, What They are and What They can do
for You: The Road to Standards
Francis G. McCabe
Fujitsu Labs of America
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 27 APRIL 2000
12 noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
A Plausible, Incremental Strong AI Account
of the Origin and Evolution of Language
Jerry R. Hobbs
SRI International
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Graphics Lunches
Gates B03
Gaze-corrected Videoconferencing
Jim Gemmel
Microsoft Research
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/glunches/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 28 APRIL 2000
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
The Making of 'GUI Bloopers'
Jeff Johnson
UI Wizards, Inc.
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Infolab Seminar
201 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
Efficiently Publishing Relational Data as XML Documents
Jayavel Shanmugasundaram
University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Abstract below
3:30pm Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Syntactic vs. Pragmatic Context in Semantic Change
Andrew Garrett
Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
Combat Aircraft Research and Development
Brian L. Hunt
Northrop Grumman
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
Abstract below
Note date change
TUESDAY, 2 MAY 2000
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:381T (math corner)
What Mathematics Owes to Quantum Mechanics:
The work of John von Neumann, 1927-1932
Matthew Frank
Univ. of Chicago visiting Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
8:00pm Kant Lecture 1
Bldg. 300:300
Rational Beliefs, Rational Desires:
Rational Beliefs
Peter Railton
University of Michigan
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
WEDNESDAY, 3 MAY 2000
12 noon CS548: Distributed Systems Research Seminar
McCullough 150
Taming the Internet Service Construction Beast:
Persistent, Cluster-based Distributed Data Structures
Steven D. Gribble
University of California at Berkeley
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/
Abstract below
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
Humanoid Robots and Social Interaction
Rodney Brooks
Director, AI lab, MIT
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Wiring Tonga: From the Ground Up and the Sky Down
Dewayne Hendricks
Dandin Group
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
8:00pm Kant Lecture 2
Bldg. 300:300
Rational Beliefs, Rational Desires:
Rational Desires
Peter Railton
University of Michigan
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
THURSDAY, 4 MAY 2000
12 noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Josh Tenenbaum
Stanford University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
3:15pm Stanford Learning Lab Speaker Series
Press Warehouse, Press Staff Training Room
Evolution of an Online Education Community of Practice
Mark Schlager, Judith Fusco, Patricia Schank
SRI's Center for Technology in Learning
http://sll.stanford.edu/index.shtml
Abstract below
4:30pm ACM Allen Newell Award Lecture
Terman Auditorium
Computers and Trust
Nancy Leveson
MIT
http://calendus.stanford.edu/CS/read/event_8964_CS_read.html
Abstract below
8:00pm Kant Lecture 3
Bldg. 300:300
Rational Beliefs, Rational Desires:
Peter Railton
University of Michigan
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
FRIDAY, 5 MAY 2000
12 noon Logic Lunch
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
Abstract versus Concrete Models of
Computation on Partial Metric Algebras
Jeffrey Zucker
McMaster University
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
The Scent of a Site:
A System for Analyzing and Predicting Information
Scent, Usage, and Usability of a Web Site
Ed Chi
Xerox PARC
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Infolab Seminar
201 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
Ecologies on the Web
Lada Adamic
XEROX PARC
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
3:15pm Kant discussion seminar
Bldg. 90:92Q
Rational Beliefs, Rational Desires
Peter Railton
University of Michigan
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:30pm Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Discourse Structure
Wallace Chafe
UC Santa Barbara
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
____________
CS548: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS RESEARCH SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 26 April 2000, 12:45pm
McCullough 150
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/
A Stateless Core Approach for Scalable Internet Services
Ion Stoica
Carnegie Mellon University
Faculty Job Talk
As the Internet evolves into a global communication infrastructure,
there is a growing need to support powerful and flexible services such
as traffic management and quality of service (QoS). Over the past
decade, two classes of solutions have emerged: those maintaining the
stateless property of the original Internet architecture (e.g.,
Differentiated Services), and those requiring a new stateful
architecture in which routers maintain per-flow or per-connection
state (e.g., Tenet, Integrated Services). While stateless solutions
are more scalable and robust, stateful solutions can provide services
with higher flexibility, utilization, and assurance levels.
In this talk, I will present a novel technique and a network
architecture that bridge this long-standing gap between stateless and
stateful solutions. The key idea behind this technique, called
Dynamic Packet State (DPS), is that, instead of having routers
maintain per-flow state, packets carry this state. Based on DPS, we
have developed a network architecture called Stateless Core (SCORE) in
which core routers do not maintain any per-flow state. Yet, by using
DPS to coordinate actions of edge and core routers along the path
traversed by a flow, distributed algorithms can be designed to emulate
the behavior of a broad class of stateful networks in SCORE networks.
We have developed complete solutions including architectures,
algorithms and implementations which address three of the most
important problems in today's Internet: providing QoS guarantees,
differentiated QoS, and traffic management.
Biography: Ion Stoica is a doctoral student at CMU from where he
expects to receive his PhD in the summer of 2000. He received a MS in
Computer Science and Control Engineering in 1989 from Polytechnic
University Bucharest. From 1989 to 1992 he was a research scientist at
the National Institute for Research in Informatics in Romania, and
from 1992 to 1993 an associate instructor at Polytechnic University
Bucharest. Before joining CMU as a doctoral student in 1996, he spent
some time at Old Dominion University. His research interests include
scheduling bandwidth sharing in packet networks, and the development of
scalable solutions for end-to-end service guarantees.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM IN AI,
GEOMETRY, GRAPHICS, ROBOTICS, AND VISION
on Wednesday, 26 April 2000, 4:15pm to 5:15pm
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
The Statistical Natural Language Processing Revolution
Eugene Charniak
Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science
Brown University
Over the last ten years or so the field of natural language processing
(NLP) has become increasingly dominated by corpus-based methods and
statistical techniques. In this research, problems are attacked by
collecting statistics from a corpus (sometimes marked with correct
answers, sometimes not) and then applying the statistics to new
instances of the task. In this talk we give an overview of statistical
techniques in a few areas of NLP such as: parsing (finding the correct
phrase structure for a sentence), lexical semantics (learning meanings
and other properties of words and phrases from text), and anaphora
resolution (determining the intended antecedent of pronouns, and noun
phrases in general). As a general rule, corpus-based, and particularly
statistical techniques outperform hand-crafted systems, and the rate
of progress in the field is quite high.
Biography: Eugene Charniak is Professor of Computer Science and
Cognitive Science at Brown University and past chair of the Department
of Computer Science. He received his A.B. degree in Physics from
University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. He
has published four books: Computational Semantics, with Yorick Wilks
(1976) Artificial Intelligence Programming with Chris Riesbeck, Drew
McDermott, and James Meehan (1980, 1987), Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence with Drew McDermott (1985) and Statistical Language
Learning (1993). He is a Fellow of the American Association of
Artificial Intelligence and was previously a Councillor of the
organization. His research has always been in the area of language
understanding or technologies which relate to it. Over the last few
years he has been interested in statistical techniques for language
processing. In this area he has worked in the sub-areas of lexicalized
parsing, pronoun-reference, and lexical resource acquisition, all
through statistical means.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 26 April 2000, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
Cognitive Agents, What They are and What They can do for You:
The Road to Standards
Francis G. McCabe
Fujitsu Labs of America
Standardization is often seen as a dry, highly political process.
However, that has not been my experience of either FIPA or OMG. In
fact these venues seem to be almost as much about collaborative
research as the dry writing down of specifications of APIs.
There have been as many definitions of agents as workers in the field
(more perhaps). However, defining the term has been a central focus
for a variety of standardization efforts - including FIPA and OMG.
In this talk, I will start with our perspective of what intelligent
agents are, as the two communities of FIPA and OMG have converged on.
I will also introduce some of the key abstractions and specifications
that FIPA in particular has developed over the last few years.
A part of this process is the identification of potential applications
- the intuition is that there should be many applications of agent
technology but this hasn't happened to the same extent as object
oriented technology.
However, the future of business is more cooperative than the past,
more integrated than the past and probably more formal also. All of
these bode well for the future of Intelligent Agents in business.
Biography: Francis McCabe is a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Labs of
America. He is vice president of FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent
Physical Agents) and an active member of the Agents Working Group
(within OMG).
He has been working on computational formalisms for implementing
distributed intelligent agents since he participated in the ESPRIT
project Imagine. This has involved the design of an agent oriented
communications framework (ICM) and an agent oriented programming
language (April).
Recently, work has started on a new logic programming language that
aims to `do for logic programming what Java did to C++'.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 27 April 2000, 12 noon
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
A Plausible, Incremental Strong AI Account
of the Origin and Evolution of Language
Jerry R. Hobbs
Artificial Intelligence Center
SRI International
I assume an abductive account of interpretation in general, in which
to interpret a situation is to find the best explanation for the
observables. I also assume an abductive account of discourse
interpretation, in which to interpret a sentence is to find the best
proof of its logical form, allowing assumptions, with respect to a
knowledge base consisting of Horn clause axioms. Increases in
knowledge of language, whether in learning, development, or evolution,
are seen as results of incremental modifications on the axioms,
axiomatizations of common proofs, and the employment of theories
motivated independently of language. Within this framework, I
describe how two of the principal features of language could have
evolved -- Gricean non-natural meaning and syntactic structure. The
development of Gricean meaning is seen as the employment of
increasingly complex folk theories in the interpretation of utterances
as actions. The development of syntactic structure is seen as
increasingly specific constraints on the interpretation of the
adjacency and proximity of strings of words as expressing
predicate-argument relations. One of the principal difficulties in
understanding the origin and evolution of language is in imagining
plausible, incremental, intermediate steps. This talk seeks to begin
to remedy this situation.
____________
GRAPHICS LUNCHES
on Thursday, 27 April 2000, 12:15pm
Gates B03
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/glunches/
Gaze-corrected Videoconferencing
Jim Gemmel
Microsoft Research
Many desktop video-conferencing systems are ineffective due to
deficiencies in gaze awareness and sense of spatial relationship.
Previous work to correct this has employed special hardware. At
Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, we have been working on a
software-only approach. Heads and eyes in the video are tracked using
computer-vision techniques, and the tracking information is
transmitted along with the video stream. Receivers take the tracking
information corresponding to the video to place the head and eyes in a
virtual 3D space such that gaze awareness and a sense of space is
provided.
____________
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 28 April 2000, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
The Making of 'GUI Bloopers'
Jeff Johnson
UI Wizards, Inc.
mailto:jjohnson@uiwizards.com
http://www.uiwizards.com/
Jeff Johnson, user-interface consultant and author of the new book GUI
Bloopers: DON'Ts and DOs for Software Developers and Web Designers
(Morgan-Kaufmann), describes why he began collecting GUI design
bloopers several years ago, why he decided to publish them in a book,
how the bloopers are organized and presented, and how the book was
usability tested. His talk is illustrated with many examples of
bloopers.
Biography: Jeff Johnson is President and Principal Consultant at UI
Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm. He has worked in
the field of Human-Computer Interaction since 1978. After earning
B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked
as a user-interface designer and implementer, engineer manager,
usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West,
Hewlett-Packard Labs, Sun/FirstPerson (the predecessor of JavaSoft),
and SunSoft. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on a
variety of topics in Human-Computer Interaction and the impact of
technology on society.
____________
CS545: INFOLAB SEMINAR
on Friday, 28 April 2000, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
201 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Efficiently Publishing Relational Data as XML Documents
Jayavel Shanmugasundaram
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison
mailto:jai@cs.wisc.edu
XML is rapidly emerging as a standard for exchanging business data on
the World Wide Web. For the foreseeable future, however, most business
data will continue to be stored in relational database systems.
Consequently, if XML is to fulfill its potential, some mechanism is
needed to publish relational data as XML documents. A major challenge
here is finding a way to efficiently structure and tag data from one
or more tables as a hierarchical XML document. Different alternatives
are possible depending on when this processing takes place and how
much of it is done inside the relational engine. This talk will
characterize and compare the performance of these alternatives.
Biography: Jayavel Shanmugasundaram is a Ph.D. candidate in the
Computer Sciences department at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is also currently working on XML-related issues
at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research interests include
Internet databases, data mining, OLAP and transaction processing in
non-standard architectures.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 28 April 2000, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Syntactic vs. Pragmatic Context in Semantic Change
Andrew Garrett
University of California, Berkeley
I will consider two opposing views as to the nature of the "context"
in context-based reinterpretations, and I will argue that syntactic
context ("permutation") plays a greater role in semantic change than
is nowadays usually held while pragmatic context (e.g. "invited
inference") plays a smaller role. Case studies will include a new
account of the origin of the English "go" future.
____________
XEROX PARC FORUM
on Friday, 28 April 2000, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
Combat Aircraft Research and Development
Brian L. Hunt
Northrop Grumman
This seminar will describe how combat aircraft systems are developed.
The requirements levied on combat aircraft will be identified and used
to explain which technologies are of most importance. The lengthy
development cycle of combat systems will be described in some detail
and the use of analysis, design, testing, and simulation tools will be
explained. The historical contribution of technology to the
increasing capabilities of combat aircraft will be discussed.
Finally, the current state of some key technologies will be described
and forecasts will be made of the future directions in technology.
Biography: Brian Hunt is the Vice President of Engineering, Logistics
and Technology for Air Combat Systems at Northrop Grumman Corporation.
He has responsibility for Air Combat Systems engineering, logistics,
and technology development in support of all Air Combat Systems
products. Dr. Hunt has worked for Northrop for over 20 years where he
has been involved in many programs including the F/A-18 Super Hornet,
the YF-23, the F-20 and the F-5. He has also held faculty positions
at the University of Maryland and at the University of Bristol in
England, and he has published over forty papers on topics in aerospace
technology. He holds a Ph.D. in engineering from Brown University.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 2 May 2000, 4:15pm
Math Corner 380:381T
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
What Mathematics Owes to Quantum Mechanics:
The work of John von Neumann, 1927-1932
Matthew Frank
Univ. of Chicago visiting Stanford
The first abstract definition of a Hilbert space was given by John von
Neumann in a 1927 paper on the mathematical foundations of quantum
mechanics. This was the beginning of ten years in which von Neumann
was one of the most influential mathematicians in the world, and in
which essentially all of his work was connected with quantum
mechanics. In particular, considerations of measurements led him to
prove the spectral theorem for unbounded operators in 1929, and some
thermodynamic considerations eventually led him to his mean ergodic
theorem of 1931. In this talk I follow these two developments through
1932, the year of both von Neumann's famous book on the Mathematical
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and his priority dispute with
Birkhoff about the founding of ergodic theory. I also use the history
to comment critically on two theses in the philosophy of math: the
"indispensability" and "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in
natural science.
____________
CS548: DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS RESEARCH SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 3 May 2000, 12 noon
McCullough 150
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs548/
Taming the Internet Service Construction Beast:
Persistent, Cluster-based Distributed Data Structures
Steven D. Gribble
University of California at Berkeley
mailto:gribble@cs.berkeley.edu
This talk presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of
highly available, durable, scalable distributed data structures
(DDS's) on clusters of workstations, intended primarily to vastly
simplify the construction of scalable Internet services. A DDS is a
self-contained, self-managing, consistent and available repository
that exports a data-structure interface. A DDS platform decouples data
persistence and consistency requirements from the rest of
cluster-based Internet service logic, greatly simplifying service
design and implementation. The main hypothesis of this work is that by
providing service authors a small but carefully chosen selection of
DDS's (such as a log, a hash table, and a tree), these authors will
have enough flexibility to implement a wide variety of interesting
services, but will also be shielded from many of the complexities of
scalable, available, consistent state management on clusters. The
DDS's are built on an asynchronous I/O layer that uses state machines
to achieve high concurrency and data throughput, and design of the
DDS's exploits properties of clusters (such as ample bandwidth, low
latency, and a very small probability of a network partition) in areas
such as the design of consistency protocols and recovery techniques.
Example services built on the DDS platform, such as the instant
messaging gateway and translation proxy "Sanctio", will be discussed
in addition to the core platform.
About the speaker: Steven D. Gribble is a graduating Ph.D. student
from the University of California at Berkeley, working primarily with
Dr. Eric A. Brewer as part of the Ninja research group. Steve's
research interests include the design, implementation, and evaluation
of highly available, scalable Internet service platforms on cluster of
workstations, and in the use of such platforms to aid the deployment
and adoption of "Post-PC" devices and their infrastructure. Steve
received his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Physics from the University
of British Columbia in 1995, and his M.Sc. in Computer Science from
Berkeley in 1997. He was also a co-founder of ProxiNet, Inc. (recently
acquired by Puma Technology), which is commercializing thin client
technology created at UC Berkeley.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 3 May 2000, 4:15pm
TCseq201 (across from Gates)
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Humanoid Robots and Social Interaction
Rodney Brooks
Director, AI lab
MIT
Robots with humanoid form are a tool for investigating and validating
cognitive theories. We are building a number of humanoid robots (Cog,
Kismet, Coco, plus partial systems K2, M4, Lazlo, etc.) and use four
guiding principles: embodiment, multi-modal integration, development,
and social interaction. With these principles but without any
kinematic or dynamic models, and without any central system with
symbolic representations we are able to get our robots to carry out
complex manipulation tasks, and interact with people using the same
social cues that people have evolved over millions of years. Our
systems are modeled on how humans and animals achieve the same sorts
of performance.
About the Speaker: Rodney Brooks is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering the Director of the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Lab, and is the Chairman and CTO of iRobot
Corporation. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in
1981, was on the research staff at CMU and MIT, then on the CS faculty
at Stanford, and joined the MIT faculty in 1984. He developed many of
the key ideas of behavior-based robots which are finding applications
from consumer products to oil production to planetary exploration. His
current research focuses on humanoid robots, models of development of
cognition, and social interaction between people and robots.
____________
STANFORD LEARNING LAB SPEAKER SERIES
on Thursday, 4 May 2000, 3:15pm - 4:30pm
Press Warehouse, Press Staff Training Room
http://sll.stanford.edu/index.shtml
Evolution of an Online Education Community of Practice
Mark Schlager, Judith Fusco, Patricia Schank
SRI's Center for Technology in Learning
Traditionally, the K-12 education sector has lagged far behind the
corporate sector in providing its professional staff with the
communication channels, information resources, tools, and workplace
conditions needed to manage their own professional development. Most
teachers remain isolated from innovative tools and expertise, as well
as from their peers (who may not be in their own school). They are
left without support after a professional development project or
workshop ends. SRI's Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) has
developed a new community-based model of online teacher professional
development that we believe can help overcome isolation, access, and
support problems that teachers face. We have built an online
environment called TAPPED IN ( http://www.tappedin.org/ ) that serves
as a testbed for our research to into the efficacy and sustainability
of our model ( http://www.tappedin.org/info/papers/ ). TAPPED IN is
not a conventional Web portal. Rather, it is a virtual workplace where
education professionals can collaboratively serve as human resources
for one another. We are now preparing to scale up our research and
development efforts to support large segments of the K-12 educator
population. This talk will describe some of the successes we have had,
some surprises, and the challenges that lie ahead as we scale up the
TAPPED IN community, technology, and services.
Biographies:
Dr. Mark Schlager is a Senior Cognitive Scientist and Associate
Director of Learning Communities at SRI's Center for Technology in
Learning. Mark has worked in the area of online collaboration R&D in
industry, government, and education for more than 15 years. His
current research focuses on the development of community-based
pedagogy and online technologies for teacher professional development.
Mark earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, and a B.A. in Psychology at Temple University.
Dr. Judith Fusco is a Research Scientist at SRI's Center for
Technology in Learning. Judith's research focuses on the social and
technical infrastructures needed to cultivate and sustain online
communities. As TAPPED IN's Director of Online Community Research,
Judith has grown and managed the TAPPED IN online community, now
approaching 8,000 education professionals, with the help of a
dedicated crew of teacher affiliates, summer interns, and community
volunteers. Before joining SRI, Judith ran Convomania, an online
community of sick and disabled children hosted by Apple Computer.
Judith earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of
California, Riverside, and a B.A. in Psychology from Washburn
University.
Dr. Patricia Schank is a Senior Research Scientist at SRI's Center for
Technology in Learning. Patricia's research focuses on the design,
development, and evaluation of computer-mediated learning
environments. Recent projects include the development of collaboration
environments to support learning and professional development,
interactive shared representations to support inquiry and
argumentation in chemistry, and Web-based resource banks of evaluation
products and performance assessments. Patricia received her Ph.D. from
the University of California at Berkeley in Education in Mathematics,
Science, and Technology (EMST). She has an M.S. in Computer Science
from U.C. Berkeley, as well as a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer
Science from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
____________
ACM ALLEN NEWELL AWARD LECTURE
on Thursday, 4 May 2000, 4:30pm - 6:30pm
Terman Auditorium
sponsored by the Knowledge Systems Lab
Computers and Trust
Nancy Leveson
MIT
"We seem not to trust one another as much as would be desirable. In
lieu of trusting each other, are we putting too much trust in our
technology?" - T.B. Sheridan.
Computers are being introduced into the control of virtually every
dangerous system, including nuclear weapons, transportation systems
(aircraft, automobiles, trains), medical devices, and chemical and
nuclear power plants. Few engineering techniques exist to provide
assurance that safety is not being degraded by the substitution of
digital systems for the electro-mechanical designs that have been
perfected through decades and sometimes centuries of experience. At
the same time, nothing is absolutely safe, and computers provide
important advantages over the human operators, social systems, and
engineered devices they are replacing.
This talk will attempt to examine whether concern is justified. Are
we putting too much trust in computers? Will introducing computers to
assist or replace human operators eliminate or reduce the problem of
human error? Are there limits to the reasonable uses of computer
technology? If so, what do we need to do to stretch those limits?
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 5 May 2000, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract versus Concrete Models of
Computation on Partial Metric Algebras
Jeffrey Zucker
McMaster University
A model of computation is abstract if, when applied to any algebra,
the resulting programs for computable functions and sets on that
algebra are invariant under isomorphisms, and hence do not depend on a
representation for the algebra. Otherwise it is concrete. Intuitively,
concrete models depend on the implementation of the algebra.
The difference is particularly striking in the case of topological
partial algebras, and notably in algebras over the reals. We
investigate the relationship between abstract and concrete models of
partial metric algebras. In the course of this investigation,
interesting aspects of continuity, extensionality and non-determinism
are uncovered.
This is joint work with J.V. Tucker (Swansea, Wales).
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HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 5 May 2000, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
The Scent of a Site:
A System for Analyzing and Predicting Information Scent,
Usage, and Usability of a Web Site
Ed Chi
Xerox PARC.
mailto:echi@parc.xerox.com
Designers and researchers of users' interactions with the World Wide
Web need tools that permit the rapid exploration of hypotheses about
complex interactions of user goals, user behaviors, and Web site
designs. We present an architecture and system for the analysis and
prediction of user behavior and Web site usability. The system
integrates research on human information foraging theory, a reference
model of information visualization and Web data-mining techniques. The
system also incorporates new methods of Web site visualization (Dome
Tree, Usage Based Layouts), two new algorithms from a new predictive
modeling technique for Web site use (WUFIS and IUNIS), and new Web
usability metrics. The research was done with Peter Pirolli and James
Pitkow.
Biography: Ed H. Chi is a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center's User Interface Research Group. He has been working
on Information Visualization and User Interfaces since 1993. His area
of research and expertise is software systems for computer-human
interaction and 2D or 3D user interfaces. His most current project is
the study of information ecology---understanding how users navigate
and understand information environments, including the Web. His
Ph.D. project was "Spreadsheet for Visualization" -- a data
exploratory tool using a 'spreadsheet metaphor' that allows each cell
to hold an entire data set with a full-fledged visualization. In the
past, he has also worked on computational molecular biology, and
recommendation systems. Ed received his Ph.D. 1996-1999,
M.S. 1994-1996, and B. Comp Sci. 1992-1994.
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STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 5 May 2000, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Discourse Appreciation
Wallace Chafe
UC Santa Barbara
The implication of my title is that a piece of discourse resembles a
work of art, in the sense that it offers multiple levels of
understanding that one can learn to appreciate, more or less as one
might learn to appreciate a painting or a piece of music. After some
introductory remarks on the value of examining language in actual use,
I will illustrate various aspects of discourse structure with an
excerpt from a three-person conversation, emphasizing how such
material can provide evidence for the nature of mental phenomena such
as consciousness, memory, and affect. I will discuss the organization
of discourse into topics, subtopics, sentences, and prosodic phrases;
the ways in which such elements are linked through both words and
prosody; and the schematic and interactional factors that keep
language and thought moving forward through time. After introducing
the nature of "activation cost" in terms of given, accessible, and new
ideas, I will show how a hypothesized "one new idea at a time"
constraint can help explain the shape of discourse, and how apparent
counter-evidence can actually broaden our understanding of
lexicalization and the variable weight of ideas. I will mention also
the discourse basis of identifiability or "definiteness". Turning to
the discourse role of grammatical subjects, I will illustrate
ramifications of a hypothesized "light subject" constraint. Finally, I
will discuss and illustrate ways in which prosody expresses emotions
and attitudes, including humor.
The talk will build on ideas set forth in my book Discourse,
Consciousness, and Time (The University of Chicago Press, 1994),
especially chapters 5-11, although chapters 2 and 3 will also be
relevant, and it wouldn't hurt to read the entire book.
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END MATERIAL
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