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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 16 October 2002, vol. 18:6
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
16 October 2002 Stanford Vol. 18, No. 6
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 16 OCTOBER 2002 TO 26 OCTOBER 2002
WEDNESDAY, 16 OCTOBER 2002
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Ventura 17
Deciphering the Malaria Genome
Russ B. Altman
Genetics, Medicine, and Computer Science, Stanford
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Quantitative Go, And Some Other Combinatorial Games
Elwyn Berlekamp
UC Berkeley
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
5:00pm Stanford University Math Organization Talk
Bldg. 380:380C (Math corner)
From Shuffling Cards to the Roots of Randomness
Persi Diaconis
Statistics and Mathematics, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sumo/
6:00pm Syntax Workshop
for location email bzack (at) stanford.edu
How many grammars do we need?
Guido Seiler
University of Zurich
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
Abstract below
6:30pm San Francisco Chapter of ACM
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
Developing Wireless Applications using Java
Srikanth Raju
Sun Microsystems
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 17 OCTOBER 2002
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
Zero Configuration Networking
Stuart Cheshire
Apple
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
3:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
Visual and Auditory Spatial Sensing
Stan Birchfield
Quindi Corporation
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
3:30pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Frances Arrillaga Alumni Center
First Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Current Security Challenges
William Perry
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
State Abstraction for Programmable Reinforcement Learning Agents
David Andre
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
Lloyd Clustering of Gauss Mixtures
Robert M. Gray
Information Systems Lab, EE, Stanford
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
Oscillatory Circuits for Breathing Control
Jeffrey C. Smith
NINDS
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
4:15pm History of Science Colloquium
Bldg. 200:307 (History Corner)
Information is Good (and Bad) for Your Health: Utopias of
Surveillance in Modern American Public Health
Nicholas King
Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, UC San Francisco
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/colloquia.html
4:30pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
The role of self-conscious emotion in self-regulation:
Insights from orbitofrontal damage
Jenni Beer
UC Berkeley
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
5:30pm Stanford Phonology Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Model theory and the content of OT constraints
Christopher Potts & Geoffrey Pullum
Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2002
11:00am UC Berkeley CIS Seminar (note unusual time and place)
Soda Hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
Lifelong Planning: Fast Replanning with Incremental Heuristic Search
Sven Koenig
Georgia Institute of Technology
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
12 noon Logic Graduate Workshop
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
Short talks by student participants outlining their current
interests
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
Post-Desktop User Interfaces:
iStuff and the Search for the Great Unified Input Theory
Jan Borchers
Stanford Computer Science
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Margaret Jacks Hall, 460:301
The Parallel Grammar Project
Miriam Butt, Helge Dyvik, Tracy Holloway King, Hiroshi
Masuichi, and Christian Rohrer
PARC
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
MONDAY, 21 OCTOBER 2002
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 200
A Search Engine for 3D Models
Thomas Funkhouser
Computer Science, Princeton University
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2002
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
Continuous Ramsey theory and covering the plane by functions
Menahem Kojman
Mathematics, Ben Gurion University, Israel
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 23 OCTOBER 2002
10:00am Stanford Seminar
Cordura 100
A Discourse on Gandhian Economics and Double Bottom Line Ventures
Dwarko Sundrani
http://www.stanford.edu/~deepu/Dwarko/Dwarkoji_Stanford_talk.htm
Information below
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Jordan Hall 420:100
Title to be announced
Katherine Turner
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Cordura 100
The Future of Java
Kim Polese
Chairman and Co-founder, Marimba
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Symbolic Systems Film
Bldg. 420:40
Judy or What Is It *Like* To Be A Robot?
Information below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System
Richard Stallman
Free Software Foundation
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2002
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
Vision-Based Hand Gesture Tracking and Recognition
Thomas S. Huang
U. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
Exploiting Document Structure in Information Extraction and Document
Classification
William W. Cohen
Carnegie-Mellon University
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
Visualizing Desire
Brian Knutson
Psychology, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
Tile to be announced
Dorrit Billman
Psychology, Stanford
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
Molecular Mechanisms of CNS Function and Dysfunction
Nathaniel Heintz
Rockefeller University
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
5:30pm Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
The Semantic Provinces of 'have'
Tham Shiao Wei
Linguistics, Stanford
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
FRIDAY, 25 OCTOBER 2002
12 noon Logic Lunch
Bldg. 380:381T (math corner)
The infinite binomial and some applications
Menahem Kojman
Mathematics, Ben Gurion University, Israel
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
Handheld Usability
Scott Weiss
Usable Products Company
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Margaret Jacks Hall, 460:301
ParGram Project: Grammar Extension Therein
Miriam Butt, Helge Dyvik, Tracy Holloway King, Hiroshi
Masuichi, and Christian Rohrer
PARC
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
What is the Will to Power?
Bernard Reginster
Brown University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Contrast and Conflict in Phonological Representation:
Evidence from Language Change and Neurobiology
Aditi Lahiri
Universitat Konstanz
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2002
all day CSLI/SCIL Workshop
Cordura 100
Spatial Thinking in Humanities and Sciences:
From Perception to Meaning
Information below
____________
Stanford Blood Bank status: Shortage of all types. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
VOLUNTEERS WANTED
We are a group of researchers at the University of Edinburgh who are
presently conducting an experimental study of language use. As part of
this study, we're looking for people who are willing to take part in
an experiment conducted over the World Wide Web.
By taking part in this experiment, you will automatically be entered
into our prize draw. We will randomly choose three participants who
will each be sent a cheque for 25 pounds. The Draw is open to anyone
willing to receive a UK cheque.
To participate, you need to be a native speaker of English. The
experimental procedure is simple; you'll see a small number of texts
in which the order of the sentences is scrambled. Your task is to
arrange the sentences so that they form a coherent text.
The experiment will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. To
participate, you will need a web browser that supports Javascript.
The experiment is called "Sentence Ordering" and can be found at the
following web site:
http://www.language-experiments.org/
Thanks in advance for your help!
--Mirella Lapata and Alex Lascarides, ICCS/School of Informatics, U. Edinburgh
____________
REUTERS FOUNDATION DIGITAL VISION PROGRAM SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 16 October 2002, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Ventura 17
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Deciphering the Malaria Genome
Russ B. Altman
Associate Professor of Genetics, Medicine, and Computer Science
Director, Biomedical Informatics Training Program, Stanford University
Dr. Altman's primary interest is in the application of computing
technologies to basic molecular biological problems, now referred to
as bioinformatics. He is particularly interested in the analysis of
protein and RNA structure and function, both in a problem-centered
manner and on a functional genomic scale.
His current efforts are in three areas: First, he is interested in
techniques for collaborative scientific computation over the internet.
He is working on representing the contents of the literature relevant
to the bacterial ribosome, in order to support the task of modeling
the structure and function of this complex molecule. As part of this
work, he is also interested in novel user interfaces to biological
data, and computational architectures for supporting scientific
collaboration. Second, he is interested in the analysis of
microenvironments within macromolecules. In particular, he is
developing methods for statistically analyzing related structures to
infer the key conserved features that distinguish these structures
from unrelated structures. Finally, he is interested in applying the
algorithms for structure determination, the techniques for
collaborative computation, and even the analysis of microenvironments
to the structure and function of the ribosome.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 16 October 2002, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Quantitative Go, and Some Other Combinatorial Games
Elwyn Berlekamp
University of California at Berkeley
Combinatorial game theory is concerned with two-person
perfect-information games, especially those classes of positions for
which winning strategies can be stated explicitly, or at least proved
to exist. The powerful mathematical methods (often requiring only
paper and pencil, no computers) are most successful when applied to
games whose positions often decompose into "sums". The many examples
of such games include Nim, Dots and Boxes, Hackenbush (best played
with colored chalk and erasures), Domineering (played with dominoes on
a checkerboard), Konane (popular in ancient Hawaii), Amazons (invented
less than fifteen years ago, but which has attracted a substantial
following on the Internet), and Go (a popular Asian board game dating
back several thousand years, and which supports nearly 2,000 active
professionals today). The theory also applies very well to the
fascinating new game called "Clobber", invented in Nova Scotia in the
summer of 2001.
In many of these games, a mathematically defined "temperature"
provides a numerical measure of the value of the next move. The
extension of this notion to loopy positions, such as kos in Go,
appeared in "Games of No Chance" in 1996. A subsequent extension,
called "Environmental Go", includes a stack of coupons in addition to
the Go board. This has led to fruitful collaborations between game
theoreticians and professional 9-dan Go players. For the past four
years, we have been developing methods and techniques which allow us
to get rigorous analyses of the last 50 to 100 moves of some
professional games, and we not infrequently discover fatal mistakes.
We will present a broad introductory overview of this subject,
including a fascinating problem in which Go, chess, checkers, and
domineering are all played concurrently.
The time may now be ripe for new efforts to combine modern
mathematical game theory with alpha-beta pruning and other traditional
AI minimax search techniques.
About the speaker: Elwyn Berlekamp has been Professor of Mathematics
and of Electrical Engineering/Computer Science at UC Berkeley since
1971. He was associate chairman of EECS for computer science at
Berkeley in 1975-77. In the late 1980s he also served four years on
the UC President's Science Advisory Committee for Los Alamos and
Livermore National Laboratories.
In the early 1980s, Berlekamp took industrial leaves and reduced his
faculty appointment to part-time to pursue off-campus ventures. He was
founder and president of Cyclotomics, which was acquired by Eastman
Kodak in 1985 and renamed "Kodak Berkeley Research", and a cofounder
of several other successful companies, including IC Designs and
Cylink. (NASDAQ: CYLK)
Berlekamp has 12 patented inventions (now all public domain), mostly
dealing with algorithms and devices for synchronization and
error-correction. He has nearly 100 publications, including 2 books on
algebraic coding theory and 4 books on the mathematical theory of
combinatorial games, the most recent of which is "The Dots and Boxes
Game", recently published by AK Peters. This book will be featured in
Scientific American's January 2001 issue. Berlekamp is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1994-1998, he was
chairman of the board of trustees of the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute (MSRI).
Since 1991, Berlekamp's primary research interest has been extensions
of the mathematical theory of games and applications to Go. He chaired
the organizing committee of a workshop at MSRI in July 2000, about
which more information can be found at http://www.msri.org/ .
____________
SYNTAX WORKSHOP
on Wednesday, 16 October 2002, 6:00pm
for location email bzack (at) stanford.edu
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
How many grammars do we need?
Guido Seiler
University of Zurich
Variation and optionality within one grammar have been a notorious
challenge for syntactic theory. However, empirical evidence from
syntax geography suggests that in many cases variation cannot be
plausibly accounted for by the co-presence of two (or more) grammars
in a speaker's mind. In this talk I will try to distinguish (i) such
cases, where it is necessary to design (single) grammars that predict
optionality and preference directions between options, (ii) from cases
where it perhaps makes sense to trace back variation to two separate
grammars (despite the technical possibilities Stochastic Optimality
Theory gives us).
____________
SAN FRANCISCO CHAPTER OF ACM
on Wednesday, 16 October 2002, 6:30pm refreshments, 7:00pm speaker
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
jadams@cisco.com
Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only
$10/year.
Developing Wireless Applications using Java
Srikanth Raju
Sun Microsystems
The Web services of today and tomorrow must encompass delivery to a
very large number of heterogeneous computing devices. These devices
include mobile phones and PDAs, connected via various wired and
wireless networks.
The Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) and standard XML-based
markup languages enable developers to build thin client interfaces for
this vast space of ubiquitous networked consumer and embedded devices,
from smart cards, PDAs, and mobile phones, to digital TV set-top boxes
and automobile entertainment and navigation systems.
Come learn more about the underlying technologies and the various
profiles that are taking shape within the J2ME platform. This
presentation will focus on Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP)
technologies for mobile phones and other devices with wireless
connections. We will give you an under-the-hood view (including
status and roadmap) of J2ME technologies including CLDC and MIDP APIs
as well as J2ME development tools. We will also present in detail the
latest enhancement to MIDP, MIDP 2.0, which represents a major update
to this wildly successful standard. You will also hear about some of
the new and exciting major initiatives that are happening in the J2ME
Space.
We will also discuss technologies used to connect mobile devices to
consumer and enterprise services, including standard data formats
(WML, Compact HTML and XHTML/XML) and protocols (most importantly,
HTTP/HTTPS and WAP protocols).
About the speaker: Srikanth Raju is a Staff Engineer and Technology
Evangelist at Sun Microsystems. Srikanth has extensive experience in
all areas of Java Technology. As a Principal Java Wireless Technology
Evangelist, Srikanth speaks and writes about technologies such as
J2ME, Jini, JXTA, J2EE, WebServices, Sun ONE at various conferences
around the world such as Java One, Sun Technology Days, etc. and
technical publications. He also teaches Java and Wireless Programming
at the University of California Extension, Santa Cruz. Srikanth is
also a owner of Patent Pending invention using the J2ME, and JavaCard
Technology.
Prior to joining Sun in early 1999, Srikanth worked as a Software
Engineer and Software Development Manager for nearly 10 years at
Oracle Corporation and Borland/Inprise. He has a Masters degree in
Computer Science and a BS degree in Electrical Engineering. Srikanth
is also a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform.
Directions: From Highway 280 take the Wolfe Road exit toward El Camino
Real in Cupertino. Turn right onto Pruneridge; HP will be on the
left. Enter at the main gate and turn left following signs to Building
48 & Oak Room. At the stop sign, turn right to the circle and
Building 48 and use any parking available. At the main door you will
be directed to the exact location of the meeting in the Oak Room.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 17 October 2002, 12:45pm (lunch 12:15pm)
Gates 104
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Zero Configuration Networking
Stuart Cheshire
Apple
Zeroconf promises to bring true plug-and-play to the Internet Protocol
(IP), by enabling users to automatically find and connect to IP
devices using Multicast DNS and service-based lookups. This talk will
cover the technical details of Zeroconf, and Rendezvous, Apple's
implementation of Zeroconf.
About the speaker: Stuart Cheshire is currently a senior engineer at
Apple and is the architect behind Rendezvous, Apple's revolutionary
home networking technology. He is also co-chairman of the IETF
Zeroconf Working Group. He previously worked on IBM Token Ring with
Madge Networks in the UK and has published research papers in the
areas of wireless networking and Mobile IP. Dr Cheshire received
B.A. and M.A. degrees from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK. He
holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, California.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 17 October 2002, 3:00pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Visual and Auditory Spatial Sensing
Stan Birchfield
Quindi Corporation
Humans rely predominantly upon their eyes and ears to gather
information about the three-dimensional world, such as the shapes and
locations of objects. It is not surprising, then, that the two primary
types of data for automatic sensing in 3D are also video and audio. In
this talk I will discuss the two classic problems of stereo vision and
acoustic localization. We will see that both problems share much in
common, although they differ in many ways as well. For both problems,
I will describe some of the challenges involved, as well as the latest
research trends. Stereo vision experienced a significant breakthrough
a few years ago when algorithms based on graph cuts were shown to be
able to minimize functionals over the entire image. I will describe
these techniques and some extensions that have been added by myself
and others, as well as point out situations in which the graph-cut
algorithms fail. A similar breakthrough has occurred in acoustic
localization, where researchers have recently discovered that all the
signals can be taken into account in an efficient manner, thus
replacing the previous sub-optimal and time-consuming methods. I will
describe our latest work on this problem, including a unifying
framework that encompasses the recently discovered efficient method
along with the Bayesian formulation and the traditional beamforming
and time-delay-estimation methods. In addition, I will show how the
algorithms can be used to detect multiple simultaneous sound sources.
Together, this work on stereo vision and acoustic localization brings
us a little closer toward achieving the goal of robust spatial
sensing.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 17 October 2002, 4:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
State Abstraction for Programmable Reinforcement Learning Agents
David Andre
University of California Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dandre/
This talk presents my thesis research on state abstraction and
hierarchical reinforcement learning. There are three primary topics of
the talk.
First, I will present ALisp, a language for the partial specification
of agent programs that is essentially Lisp augmented with
nondeterministic constructs. The programmer can encode what they know
about a problem, the learning system underlying ALisp fills in the
rest from experience. It can be shown that the problem of optimally
completing a partial program is equivalent to solving a joint SMDP
composed of the original problem MDP and a particular formulation of
the ALisp program, called a reinforcement learning machine. I will
show that any implementation of a reinforcement learning machine
satisfies several desirable theoretical properties, including having
an equivalent joint SMDP whose solution is a optimal completion of the
partial program. Empirical results for several domains will be
presented.
Safe state abstraction in reinforcement learning allows an agent to
ignore aspects of its current state that are irrelevant to its current
decision, and therefore speeds up dynamic programming and learning. We
explore safe state abstraction for the ALisp language. Unlike previous
approaches to this problem, our methods yield significant state
abstraction while maintaining {\em hierarchical optimality}, i.e.,
optimality among all policies consistent with the partial program. We
show how to achieve this for a partial programming language that is
essentially Lisp augmented with nondeterministic constructs. We
demonstrate our methods on two variants of Dietterich's taxi domain,
showing how state abstraction and hierarchical optimality result in
faster learning of better policies and enable the transfer of learned
skills from one problem to another. We will present our theoretical
results on the convergence properties of several learning algorithms
in the state abstracted case.
Finally, we demonstrate how these techniques extend to a continuous
simulated taxi domain with realistic physics. This requires using
function approximation and shaping, and we will present methods for
utilizing these techniques with ALisp and state abstraction. For the
continuous taxi problem, the empirical results suggest that learning
with state abstraction and ALisp can make tractable problems that are
otherwise completely intractable. As one example of this, solving the
continuous taxi domain without state abstraction requires sixteen
thousand times as many parameters as when using state abstraction.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Thursday, 17 October 2002, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Lloyd Clustering of Gauss Mixtures
Robert M. Gray
Information Systems Lab, EE, Stanford
An early application of statistical clustering was Stuart Lloyd's 1959
algorithm for designing optimal quantizers, an algorithm commonly
known in communications and signal processing applications as the
"Lloyd-Max" algorithm. Quantization, or source coding with a fidelity
criterion as it is known in Shannon information theory, strongly
resembles a variety of problems that have arisen through the years in
communications, signal processing, statistics, and mathematics.
Included are several statistical clustering approaches such as
k-means, the problem of sums of moments, and the problem of
approximation of continuous probability distributions by discrete
ones. The goal of this talk will be to describe the general
quantization problem as it is typically formulated in information
theory and to survey the state of the theory and design
algorithms. Brief mention of similar problems in other fields will be
made, but the specific examples used to illustrate the ideas will be
the "worst case" role played by Gauss and Gauss mixture models and a
resulting approach to designing Gauss mixture models from learning
data via Lloyd clustering with a relative entropy distortion measure.
____________
STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 17 October 2002, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
Model theory and the content of OT constraints
Christopher Potts and Geoffrey K. Pullum
Linguistics, UC-Santa Cruz
We develop an extensible metalanguage for stating the content of
optimality-theoretic constraints in phonology, and specify a class of
structures for interpreting it. The aim is a transparent formalization
of OT constraints. Our proposal meshes well with recent work on
constraint ranking instigated by Karttunen and more fully developed by
Samek-Lodovici and Prince (SLP). We show how to state a wide range of
constraints, including markedness, input--output faithfulness,
base--reduplicant faithfulness, and paradigm uniformity. However,
output--output correspondence, sympathy, and targeted constraints are
revealed to be extremely problematic. It is unclear that any
reasonable class of structures can reconstruct their proponents'
intentions. They are also inconsistent with the developments of SLP.
For the most part, the problematic constraint types were developed to
deal with opacity, which therefore remains the most important
theoretical crux for current OT. We hope to shed new light on this
debate, by subjecting some common responses to it within OT to
critical investigation.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Friday, 18 October 2002, 11:00am
Soda Hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
**** Note Special Time And Place ****
Lifelong Planning: Fast Replanning with Incremental Heuristic Search
Sven Koenig
Georgia Institute of Technology
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Sven.Koenig/
Replanning is an important research topic in artificial intelligence
because many agents have to adapt their plans continuously to changes
in the world or changes of their models of the world. I will talk
about exciting new search algorithms that can speed up search by one
to two orders of magnitude, their analysis, and their application to
search, symbolic planning, mobile robotics, and reinforcement
learning. These algorithms are based on Lifelong Planning A*, an
incremental version of A*, that speeds up planning by combining
orthogonal ideas from algorithm theory and artificial intelligence.
Lifelong planning is a replanning paradigm that uses information
gathered during previous planning episodes to speed up planning.
Different from other replanning paradigms, it guarantees a solution
quality that is as good as the solution quality achieved by planning
from scratch.
About the speaker: Sven Koenig received his Ph.D. from CMU and
M.S. from UC Berkeley. He also received the NSF CAREER award, an IBM
Faculty Partnership Award, the Raytheon Faculty Fellowship Award from
Georgia Tech, the Tong Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Prize from the
University of California at Berkeley, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He
is on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Research (JAIR) and a special issue on Planning with Uncertainty and
Incomplete Information of the Artificial Intelligence Journal. He will
co-chair the International Conference on Automated Planning and
Scheduling (ICAPS) in 2004.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 18 October 2002, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Post-Desktop User Interfaces:
iStuff and the Search for the Great Unified Input Theory
Jan Borchers
Stanford Computer Science
http://www.stanford.edu/~borchers/
In a way, Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing has long since
become a reality: Today, most of our interaction with computers is
with embedded devices surrounding us - from car electronics, to cell
phones, to consumer devices -, and not with a desktop computer using
the now-traditional graphical user interface. However, the ubicomp
goal of calm technology disappearing into the background has not been
achieved; instead, new technologies have made life more stressful. One
reason for this dilemma is that HCI research has not as yet managed to
provide user interface metaphors and modalities for those new systems
"beyond the desktop" that have been proven effective,
domain-appropriate, and satisfying enough. Why is that?
We observed that, while tools have made GUIs easy to prototype and
experiment with, research in post-desktop UIs often gets bogged down
in technical details: Just try to add a simple physical button to your
research prototype, and you will find yourself soldering PCBs, running
wires, and writing serial device drivers before you know it.
To address this situation, we have begun to create the iStuff toolkit
of wireless physical user interface components that makes integrating
post-desktop devices into your user interface prototype as simple as
adding a line of Java code to your application. The toolkit leverages
our existing ubiquitous computing infrastructure, which allowed us to
move much of the device complexity into a proxy computer in the
environment, making the devices themselves simple, cheap, and easy to
reproduce or replace with commercial technology. A flexible software
framework that creates multiple abstraction layers of device and event
semantics, and our interactive PatchPanel event intermediary, make the
toolkit platform-independent, and allow dynamic integration of new
devices into an application without even relaunching it.
Deploying our toolkit has profoundly facilitated our exploration of
fundamental questions about human-computer interaction in post-desktop
environments: What is the relative usefulness of different modalities
to manipulate information in an interactive room? What do focus and
selection mean in a multi-user, multi-machine, multi-application,
multi-device, and multi-display environment? What, if anything, will
be the equivalent of mouse and keyboard in the world beyond the
desktop? In other words, we hope to, while maybe not find,
nevertheless at least get a little closer to the Great Unified Input
Theory of the post-desktop era that could give new meaning to the
letters of the "GUI" acronym.
About the speaker: Jan Borchers is Acting Assistant Professor of
Computer Science at Stanford University, where he works on
Human-Computer Interaction in the Interactivity Lab. His current
research interests include user interface frameworks for ubiquitous
computing, interactive environments, and interaction with
multimedia. He has also led a series of award-winning interactive
multimedia exhibit projects since 1995 that let you do fun things such
as conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. He holds a PhD in Computer Science
from Darmstadt University in Germany for his work on Design Pattern
Languages for HCI, which led to his pioneering book "A Pattern
Approach To Interaction Design". Jan has published his work in dozens
of international conference and journal papers, and enjoys playing
jazz piano, going rock climbing, and playing Bad Golf that justifies
the capitalization.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 18 October 2002, 2:15pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:301
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Tracy King and co. at PARC have kindly agreed to give a two-part
presentation of the ParGram project (part 1) and grammar extension
therein (part 2), over the next two weeks. These presentations are to
be based on papers presented by Tracy at a COLING workshop earlier
this year. Details of the first presentation are as follows:
The Parallel Grammar Project
Miriam Butt, Helge Dyvik, Tracy Holloway King,
Hiroshi Masuichi, and Christian Rohrer
PARC
Paper: http://www.parc.com/istl/groups/nltt/pargram/buttetal-coling02.pdf
Large-scale grammar development platforms are expensive and time
consuming to produce. As such, a desideratum for the platforms is a
broad utilization scope. A grammar development platform should be able
to be used to write grammars for a wide variety of languages and a broad
range of purposes. In this paper, we report on the Parallel Grammar
(ParGram) project which uses the XLE parser and grammar development
platform for six languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian,
and Urdu. All of the grammars use the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG)
formalism which produces c(onstituent)-structures (trees) and
f(unctional)-structures (AVMs) as the syntactic analysis.
LFG assumes a version of Chomsky's Universal Grammar hypothesis, namely
that all languages are structured by similar underlying principles.
Within LFG, f-structures are meant to encode a language universal level
of analysis, allowing for cross-linguistic parallelism at this level of
abstraction. The ParGram project aims to test the LFG formalism for its
universality and coverage limitations and to see how far parallelism can
be maintained across languages. Where possible, the analyses produced by
the grammars for similar constructions in each language are parallel.
This has the computational advantage that the grammars can be used in
similar applications and that machine translation can be simplified.
The results of the project to date are encouraging. Despite differences
between the languages involved and the aims and backgrounds of the
project groups, the ParGram grammars achieve a high level of parallelism.
This parallelism applies to the syntactic analyses produced, as well as
to grammar development itself: the sharing of templates and feature
declarations, the utilization of common techniques, and the transfer of
knowledge and technology from one grammar to another. The ability to
bundle grammar writing techniques, such as templates, into transferable
technology means that new grammars can be bootstrapped in a relatively
short amount of time.
This paper is organized as follows. We first provide a history of the
project. Then, we discuss how parallelism is maintained in the project.
Finally, we provide a summary and discussion.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-VISION-ROBOTICS
on Monday, 21 October 2002, 4:15pm
TCSeq 200
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
A Search Engine for 3D Models
Thomas Funkhouser
Computer Science, Princeton University
As the number of 3D models available on the Web grows, there is an
increasing need for a search engine to help people find them (e.g., a
Google for 3D models). Unfortunately, traditional text-based search
techniques are not always effective for 3D data. In this talk, we
investigate new shape-based search methods. A key challenge is to
find a computational representation of shape (a "shape descriptor")
that is concise, robust, quick to compute, efficient to match, and
discriminating between similar and dissimilar shapes.
In this talk, I will describe shape descriptors designed for computer
graphics models commonly found on the Web (i.e., they may contain
arbitrary degeneracies and alignments). We have experimented with
them in a Web-based search engine that allows users to query for 3D
models based on similarities to 3D sketches, 3D models, 2D sketches,
and/or text keywords. We find our best shape matching methods provide
better precision-recall performance than related approaches and are
fast enough to return query results from a repository of 20,000
polygonal models in under a second. You can try them out at:
http://shape.cs.princeton.edu
Joint work with Patrick Min, Michael Kazhdan, Joyce Chen, Alex
Halderman, David Dobkin, and David Jacobs.
About the speaker: Thomas Funkhouser is an assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Previously, he
was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories. His current
research interests include interactive computer graphics,
computational geometry, distributed systems, and shape analysis. He
received a B.S. in biological sciences from Stanford University in
1983, a M.S. in computer science from UCLA in 1989, and a PhD in
computer science from UC Berkeley in 1993.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 22 October 2002, 4:15pm-5:30pm
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Continuous Ramsey theory and covering the plane by functions
Menahem Kojman
Mathematics, Ben Gurion University, Israel
I will present the theory of continuous pair-colorings on Polish
spaces and its relation to the problem of covering the plane by graphs
and inverses of graphs of Lipschitz-continuous functions. I will
present in detail the classification of such coloring, and show that
there exists a minimal coloring, whose homogeneity number is equal to
the number of Lipschitz continuous functions from the Cantor set to
itself necessary to cover the square of the Cantor set; and there
exists a maximal coloring, whose homogeneity number is consistently
larger than that of the minimal one.
Among the consistency results I will survey is the following one:
there is a model of set theory in which the Euclidean plane can be
covered by $\aleph_1$ graphs and inverses of graphs of continuous real
function, but cannot be covered by any $\aleph_1$ graphs and inverses
of graphs of Lipschitz-continuous real functions.
These results were obtained with Stefan Geschke and Martin Goldstern.
____________
STANFORD SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 23 October 2002, 10:00am - 12 noon
Cordura 100
http://www.stanford.edu/~deepu/Dwarko/Dwarkoji_Stanford_talk.htm
(If possible, please RSVP in advance to Deepu Chintamaneni at
deepu@stanford.edu)
A Discourse on Gandhian Economics and Double Bottom Line Ventures
Dwarko Sundrani
The theme of discussion will be Gandhian Economics and the
implications of developing a sustainable and successful Double Bottom
Line Venture. In order to provide a range of perspectives, the
organizers of this event have structured the dialogue in the form of a
panel discussion. Robert Block, a preeminent Entrepreneur, will join
the panel and would offer the American perspective on Gandhian
Economics and Double Bottom Line Ventures. Background material on
Gandhian Economics and Double Bottom Line ventures is available at:
http://www.nd.edu/~kellogg/WPS/231.pdf
http://www.unepfi.net/venture/svcdn.pdf
http://www.benetech.org/
http://www.ashoka.org/
http://www.socialfunds.com/news/print.cgi?sfArticleId=927
About the Guest Speaker: Dwarko Sundrani is one of the last active
direct disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. He has dedicated his entire life
to working with the poorest of the poor in Bodh Gaya, Bihar,
India. Dwarko Sundrani has been leading a life of compassion, doing
social work, running schools, steeped in Gandhian tradition and
espousing Gandhian values. The network of 360 schools he has helped
start, has been visited by HH Dalai Lama, Rev. M.L King and Marlon
Brando (who went there for famine relief work.) After the Dalai Lama
visited his Ashram, he is reported to have said "Dwarko-ji, I teach
compassion; you are living it". At 80 years old, Dwarko Sundrani is
making this long journey to the US. This may be one of the rare
opportunities for us in the Bay Area to come face to face with such a
wonderful being.
Sponsers : Stanford's Global Knowledge-Design Collaboratory and the
ReVeL (Real-time Venture-design Laboratory) Team, Reuters Digital
Vision Fellowship Program, and the Public Policy Program Social
Entrepreneurship Course Series.
____________
REUTERS FOUNDATION DIGITAL VISION PROGRAM SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 23 October 2002, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
The Future of Java
Kim Polese
Chairman and Co-founder, Marimba
Ms. Polese served as president and chief executive officer of Marimba
until July 2000. Now as chairman, she focuses on strategic direction,
industry partnerships, and expansion of business opportunities for the
company.
Prior to co-founding Marimba, Ms. Polese spent more than seven years
at Sun Microsystems and was the original product manager for Java.
During her tenure at Sun, she played a pivotal role in the strategic
definition, direction, and launch of Java.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FILM SERIES
on Wednesday, 23 October 2002, 4:15pm
Bldg. 420:040
http://symsys.stanford.edu/
Recent advances in the sciences of the brain have shown us that what
have until recently been nothing more than philosophical conundra are
now poised to become practical engineering challenges. That is,
If you built a robot smart enough to do the dishes, would it
also be smart enough to find them boring?
Come see Judy the Robot and her friend Tom discuss issues like this,
play chess, sing folk songs ("John Henry's Hammer" is Judy's
favorite), argue about which one of them is *really* smart, and
generally carry on, in a show called,
"Judy or What Is It *Like* To Be A Robot?"
Wednesday, October 23 at 4:15 PM in 420-040
Free admission courtesy of the Symbolic Systems Program
"Tom Sgouros's witty play, co-starring the charming robot Judy, is an
imagination-stretcher that delights while it exercises your mind. If
you think you can't imagine a conscious robot, you're wrong--you
can, especially once you've met Judy." -Daniel Dennett, author of
"Consciousness Explained", etc etc
"I laughed a lot, the show is extremely witty... What an amazing
thing!" -Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Godel, Escher, Bach", etc.
"Judy is as much fun as a barrel of wind-up cymbal-monkeys, and lots
more entertaining." -Bill Rodriguez, Providence Phoenix
For more information, see http://sgouros.com/
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 24 October 2002, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Vision-Based Hand Gesture Tracking and Recognition
Thomas S. Huang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
We shall present some results of our research on hand tracking and
gesture recognition in the last 5 years. This research is motivated by
applications in human-computer interaction such as display control in
virtual environments and the manipulation of virtual objects. Although
we have studied both Appearance- Based and 3D Model-Based approaches,
this talk will concentrate on the latter. At any given time instant,
the hand configuration - 6 parameters for the global hand "pose" and
21 finger joint angles (the hand "posture") - is a point the the
27-dimensional configuration space. We track the trajectory of this
point over time using a 3D model-based and analysis-by-synthesis
approach. The challenge is to represent the constraints on hand
posture and finger movement in a compact way and use this
representation to speed up the search in the 21-dimensional space. The
tracking results can then be used to do gesture recognition. Some
preliminary results will be shown on constraint representation and its
use in tracking.
About the speaker: Thomas S. Huang received his B.S. Degree in
Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei,
Taiwan, China; and his M.S. and Sc.D. Degrees in Electrical
Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. In 1980, he joined the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, where he is now William L. Everitt Distinguished
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Research
Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Head of the Image
Formation and Processing Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced
Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the Institute's major research
theme Human Computer Intelligent Interaction.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 24 October 2002, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_eventsxo
Visualizing Desire
Brian Knutson
Assistant Professor, Psychology, Stanford University
Recent evidence from comparative research and human brain imaging is
converging on a coherent framework for understanding the neural
underpinnings of desire. I will highlight some of these developments
by describing original research in rats and humans that focuses on
reward anticipation. These new findings illustrate the promise of
affective neuroscience as a means of bridging brain function and
behavioral outcomes.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 25 October 2002, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:381T
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
The infinite binomial and some applications
Menahem Kojman
Mathematics, Ben Gurion University, Israel
I will present a generalization of the binomial function to infinite
cardinals and discuss some of its properties. In particular, I will
try to explain Shelah's philosophy about infinite cardinal arithmetic,
by explaining his version of the GCH inside ZFC.
I will also describe two old problems of Erdos and Hechler on maximal
almost disjoint families over singular cardinals, and present their
recent solutions with pcf techniques by Kojman, Kubis and Shelah.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 25 October 2002, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Handheld Usability
Scott Weiss
Usable Products Company
Scott Weiss, author of "Handheld Usability" (Wiley: 2002), will
present a brief look into the handheld product market. He will start
with an overview of just what distinguishes a handheld, then will
describe the market for these devices. He will give details of the
hardware, operating systems, and design strategies for phones, PDAs,
and pagers. Before taking questions from the audience, he will cover
paper prototyping and usability testing for handhelds.
About the speaker: Scott Weiss, Principal and Founder of Usable
Products Company, is an information architect, usability expert, and
author of "Handheld Usability" (John Wiley & Sons, June 2002). He held
positions in the software industry from 1989 to 1996 designing
software and managing software projects. His former employers include
Microsoft, Apple, Sybase, and Autodesk. He is the chair of the New
York City chapter of ACM SIG CHI, the Special Interest Group for
Computer Human Interaction. He also chairs the New York New Media
Association's Special Interest Group on Design.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 25 October 2002, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Contrast and Conflict in Phonological Representation:
Evidence from Language Change and Neurobiology
Aditi Lahiri
Universitat Konstanz
The research presented here is concerned with the phonological nature
of mental representations of native speakers. Following the FUL-model
(Featurally Underspecified Lexicon, Lahiri & Reetz 2002), we claim
that not all features are present in the mental representation and
that the grammar severely constrains the way in which phonological
contrasts are preserved and utilized in normal language use. Evidence
for the FUL-model comes from language changes which extend and
maintain phonological contrasts. The model is also supported by
results of our MEG and EEG studies which demonstrate different
cortical structures for acoustically equidistant but phonologically
conflicting vowels, and enhanced automatic change detection response
in the brain (mismatch negativity) in instances of feature conflict
(Obleser, Elbert, Lahiri & Eulitz 2001, Eulitz & Lahiri 2002).
____________
CSLI/SCIL INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP
on Saturday, 26 October 2002, all day
Cordura 100
Spatial Thinking in Humanities and Sciences:
From Perception to Meaning
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE/TITLES
9:30-9:50 Barbara Tversky: Brief Introduction
Mind and Brain
9:50 Mary Peterson (Psychology/Arizona):
Figures and Grounds
10:30 Lynn Nadel (Psychology/Arizona):
How the Brain Constructs Space
11:10 Lynn Robertson (Psychology/Berkeley;VA/Martinez):
Disorders of Spatial Thinking
Designing and Exploring Depictions
11:50 Pat Hanrahan (CS/Stanford):
Enhancing Depictions
12:30 Lunch (available for purchase)
1:30 Yvonne Eriksson(Art History/Gothenburg):
Communicative Depictions
2:10 Alan Prohm (Comparative Lit/Stanford):
Tracking Attention in Poetic Space
Talk about Space
2:50 Dan Slobin (Psychology/Berkeley):
Paths as Objects and Paths as Actions: Crosslinguistic Considerations
3:30 David Wilkins (VA/Martinez):
Integrating speech, gesture, and sanddrawings
4:10 Break
Diagrammatic Thinking
4:30 Reviel Netz (Classics/Stanford):
Diagrammatic Reasoning in Argument Structure
5:10 Tim Lenoir (History of Science/Stanford):
Computer Visualizations as Tools for Theories
5:50 Keith Devlin (CSLI/Math/Stanford):
Diagrammatic Reasoning in Mathematics
____________
END MATERIAL
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