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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 19 February 2003, vol. 18:21
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
19 February 2003 Stanford Vol. 18, No. 21
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 19 FEBRUARY 2003 TO 28 FEBRUARY 2003
WEDNESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2003
1:30pm SRI Biocomputation Seminar Series
Bldg. A, Conference Room A (SRI International)
HumanCyc: Human Metabolic Pathways Derived from the Human Genome
Peter Karp and Pedro Romero
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
Roundtable Discussion on Telecenters and eDevelopment
Motoo Kusakabe, World Bank
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Information below
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
Chimpanzee Social Cognition
Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:00pm Berkeley EECS Distinguished Lecture Series
306 Soda Hall, Berkeley
Reality Online
Luke Hughes
Accenture
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Computer Technology in America's Cup Yacht Racing
J. Craig Mudge
Pacific Challenge
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2003
11:00am Music 319: CCRMA Hearing Seminar
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
Self-Similarity Analysis of Audio
Matthew Cooper & Jonathan Foote
FX PAL
http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/ccrmas/ccrmas.html
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
Incentives for Cooperation in the Internet
Kevin Lai
UC Berkeley
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
Pavel Zolotsev and Cara Rice
Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
The BMW Technology Office, USA: Mission Technology Transfer
Joachim K. Stilla
Head of BMW Technology Office, USA
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
Moving by Thinking: Progress Toward a Cortical Neural Prosthetic
Joel Burdick
California Institute of Technology
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
Real-Time Statistical Learning
Stefan Schaal
University of Southern California
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
Adult Offer and Child Uptake in the Acquisition of Meaning
Eve Clark
Stanford University
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
Neurotrophin Signals: Going the Distance
William Mobley
Medicine, Stanford
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2003
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
On the thesis that human languages are infinite
Geoffrey K. Pullum
Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do: Insights into Captology
BJ Fogg
CSLI, Stanford
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm ITSS TGIF
Turing Auditorium
User-Centered Web Design
Brad Lauster
(with Megan Miller and Brian Young)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/itss-customer/ip/tgif/
Abstract below
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Math Corner, 380:383P
Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
Thorsten Brants
Google Inc.
http://infomap.stanford.edu/nlpgroup/brants-chen-tsochant-CIKM02.pdf
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Information below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
Colors, Contexts, and Unarticulated Constituents in the Story
of Jim and his Tie Shop
Jenann Ismael
University of Arizona
http://w3.arizona.edu/~phil/faculty/jismael.htm
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
Alison Preston
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Becoming a Native Listener:
A Statistical Account of Developmental Speech Perception
Jessica Maye
University of Rochester
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
ATLAS:
A Small but Complete Extension of SQL for Data Streams and Data Mining
Carlo Zaniolo
UCLA
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 24 FEBRUARY 2003
10:00am Berkeley Seminar
Wozniak Lounge, Soda 430-438, Berkeley
Using Cameras as Interactive Input Devices
Dan R. Olsen, Jr.
Brigham Young University
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
3:30pm Social Lab
Jordan Hall 420:050
Seeing Black: Race, Representation, and Visual Processing.
Jennifer Eberhardt
Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#social_lab
4:00pm Berkeley Seminar
2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor Conference Room (Berkeley)
Digital Resource Sharing for the Humanities
Shoichiro Hara
National Institute of Japanese Literature
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 201
Foundations of Assisted Cognition Systems
Henry Kautz
University of Washington
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2003
12 noon Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:426 (Terrace room)
Probabilistic and Distributional Modeling of Linguistic Knowledge:
Perspectives from Comprehension, Production, and Learning
Daniel Jurafsky
Linguistics, Computer Science, Institute of Cognitive Science,
and Center for Spoken Language Research,
University of Colorado, Boulder
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
Title to be announced
Omid Shakernia
UC Berkeley
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
4:00pm Berkeley BISC Seminar
373 Soda Hall, Berkeley
From Search Engines to Question-Answering System --
The Need for New Tools
Lotfi A. Zadeh
Berkeley
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:381T (math corner)
A Realizability Interpretation for Classical Second Order Arithmetic
Henry Towsner
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:15pm SNRC Industry Seminar
Packard 101
Wireless Sensor Networks for Industrial Applications
Falk Herrmann
Robert Bosch Corporation
http://snrc.stanford.edu/events/industry-seminar/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 2003
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
Stratton Sclavos
Verisign
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Information below
7:00pm How I Write
Margaret Jacks Hall basement (Stanford Writing Center)
Scotty McLennan
Dean of Religious Life
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/urp/HowIWrite/howiwrite.html
THURSDAY, 27 FEBRUARY 2003
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
Title to be announced
Vern Paxson
ICIR
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
Rebecca Cooney
Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
Constraint Optimization in Multiagent Systems
Pragnesh Jay Modi
Information Sciences Institute, USC
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Computer Technology in America's Cup Yacht Racing
J. Craig Mudge
Pacific Challenge
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
Title to be announced
Dennis Decoste
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
Paradigms and Dogmas in Science:
Modeling the Rise and Fall of Scientific Laws
Andrew Waterman
(M.S. Candidate), Symbolic Systems Program
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
Cytoplasmic Dynein Function in Axonal Transport and Cytoskeletal
Crosstalk
Erika Holzbaur
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 2003
9:00am Special University Oral Examination
Gates 104
Information Preservation in Networks of Autonomous Archives
Brian Frank Cooper
Computer Science
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~cooperb/
Abstract below
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
A formalization of an approach to modality suggested by C. Peacocke
Gregori Mints
Stanford University
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
Searching Spoken Word Collections
Doug Oard
University of Maryland
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm Special University Oral Examination
Gates 104
Kamesh Munagala
Computer Science
http://theory.Stanford.EDU/~kamesh/
Abstract below
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Math Corner, 380:383P
Title to be announced
Dominic Widdows
CSLI, Stanford
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
Title to be announced
Cynthia Dwork
Microsoft Research
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: shortage of O+, O-, and A-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
SRI BIOCOMPUTATION SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 19 February 2003, 1:30pm
Bldg. A, Conference Room A, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
HumanCyc: Human Metabolic Pathways Derived from the Human Genome
Peter Karp and Pedro Romero
http://www.sri.com:/news/releases/02-10-03.html
The SRI Bioinformatics Research Group has recently begun a project to
develop a database of human metabolic pathways. The database will be
computationally generated using our PathoLogic program, using the
annotated human genome as an input, and using the MetaCyc pathway
database to predict human pathways. Subsequently, a literature-based
curation effort will be undertaken to associated the computationally
predicted pathways with experimental information. This talk will
describe our approach and (a few) results to date, and solicit
feedback from the SRI community. This project is being funded as an
industry consortium.
____________
REUTERS FOUNDATION DIGITAL VISION PROGRAM SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 19 February 2003, 3:00pm-4:30pm
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Roundtable Discussion on Telecenters and eDevelopment
Motoo Kusakabe
Recent Vice-President for Resource Mobilization and Cofinancing, World Bank
Mr. Kusakabe joined the World Bank in 1997 after serving in senior
positions at the Ministry of Finance, Japanese Government mainly in
international and domestic finance and development fields. During his
30 years of service he was assigned for the International Monetary
Fund, and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development where he
worked as Director for central Asian republics and held other
financial sector operational positions there.
Before joining the World Bank, Mr. Kusakabe had a long and
distinguished career and held key positions at the Japanese Ministry
of Finance in International Finance and Development and Banking
regulations. Mr. Kusakabe has led the Bank in a number of new global
initiatives and has been instrumental in drumming up support for the
Conference on Local/Global Connectivity Dec 2000, Achieving
Connectivity for the Rural Poor in India, Baramati, May-June 2001 and
the Workshop on Empowering the Poor through Rural Information Centers,
Dec 2002. He has Master degrees in mathematics from the University of
Tokyo and Master of Philosophy in economics from Yale University.
Nagy Hanna, World Bank, eDevelopment
Additional speakers:
Gursharan Sidhu is former Apple Fellow and has done considerable
thinking on role of information technology in development. This is
also the core concern of Joy Tang in her work as Cisco Fellow. Atanu
Dey, was AcrossWorld nominee in the first batch of Reuters Digital
Vision Fellowship and his RISC (Rural Information Services Common) is
very relevant both to telecenters and eDevelopment. Sri Jaganathan was
a Principal with Softbank's Internet Fund, a joint venture with
International Finance Corporation (IFC) and developed an investment
strategy on Telecenters.
____________
BERKELEY EECS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
on Wednesday, 19 February 2003, 4:00am
306 Soda Hall (Berkeley)
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
Reality Online
Luke Hughes
Research Director, Accenture
The advent of increasingly cheap networked sensors, such as Smart
Dust, create the potential to bring a high resolution real time
digital copy of the world online. Accenture Technology Labs calls this
trend "Reality Online." We believe this trend points to a world where
businesses and consumers will go online to "surf" -- not the web so
much -- as reality for business advantage and individual value. We
will illustrate this future through a number of business and consumer
"Reality Online" demonstrations (some of which have received a
dramatic level of national business and consumer media attention).
About the speaker: Luke Hughes joined Accenture in 1993 and now
directs the firm's Research laboratory in Palo Alto, California a
unique facility which has earned an enviable reputation for innovation
and leading-edge insights into the role of new and emerging
technologies in shaping business strategy.
Hughes's researchers are charged with analyzing and applying emerging
technology solutions to the challenges posed by the current
"electronic economy" to customers, products and services, partners and
alliances, enterprises, workers, and intellectual capital. Working
closely with the world's leading providers of computing,
communication, and content technologies, the group creates visionary
application prototypes for the marketplace, extended enterprise, and
enterprise of the future.
Dr. Hughes has specialized in development of advance technology-based
business strategy throughout his career. Prior to his role as Research
Director, he was co-founder and Vice President of Product Development
for one of Accenture's start-ups. He also leads interactive sessions
for Fortune 500 senior client executives, focusing on the business
implications of technology trends and featuring research prototype
solutions, through Accenture's Executive Workshop Program.
Dr. Hughes has been extensively featured by business and technology
news and broadcast media around the world, including Forbes, ABC
Nightly News, The New York Times, Investor's Business Daily, ZDTV, The
San Francisco Chronicle, Information Week, and PC Computing. He has
been a keynote speaker at large scale conferences such as Web 2000.
Dr. Hughes earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a specialization
in Artificial Intelligence from Yale University. He lives in Palo
Alto, California with his wife, three kids, and three dogs. Sponsored
by a generous donation from Hewlett-Packard
____________
MUSIC 319: CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 20 February 2003, 11:00am
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/ccrmas/ccrmas.html
This coming Thursday, Matt Cooper and Jonathan Foote will be talking
about their work on musical similarity and segmentation. This is a
difficult problem, how do we decide that two portions of a musical
piece are similar and should be judged as the chorus? Likewise, how
do we use dissimilarity to segment an acoustic signal and understand
the signal? Matt and Jonathan have been using spectral similarity to
characterize music. They will be talking about their recent work at
the next CCRMA Hearing Seminar
How do you decide if two pieces of music are similar? What makes the
chorus? How do you use the acoustics of a musical piece to decide?
Come to CCRMA and find out more. You can see some of their work
online at http://www.fxpal.com/people/foote/musicseg/ .
Bring your ears to CCRMA.
- Malcolm
P.S. Parking is still non-existant at CCRMA. Park at Tresidder, pay at
the machine with a credit card, and enjoy the walk up to the Knoll.
Recent work in self-similarity analysis of audio
Matthew Cooper and Jonathan Foote
FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
We will present some new approaches and recent results from our work
in the analysis of audio. Starting with a similarity matrix consisting
of all pairwise measurement of spectral similarity, we review how the
matrix can be used for segmentation and rhythmic analysis of music. We
present more recent work on how this analysis can be used for
retrieving music by rhythmic similarity, and how the matrix can be
factorized to locate repeating segments, such as verses and choruses
in popular music.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 20 February 2003, 12:40pm (lunch 12:15pm)
Gates 104
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Incentives for Cooperation in the Internet
Kevin Lai
Berkeley
Many Internet systems rely on cooperation between two or more
self-interested parties. In such systems, each party has an incentive
to exploit the benefits of the system without contributing. For
example, in peer-to-peer file sharing, people can maximize their
utility by downloading from others while not allowing uploads.
Existing solutions are not effective in the large, dynamic, zero-cost
identity systems that are common in the Internet. We present
collusion-resistant techniques that encourage cooperation in such
systems and demonstrate their effectiveness using Prisoner's Dilemma
simulations.
This is joint work with Michal Feldman, John Chuang, and Ion Stoica.
About the speaker: Kevin Lai is currently a post-doctoral scholar in
both the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) and EECS
Department at U.C. Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Stanford University and his AB from U.C. Berkeley. Do not
ask him whether Cal or Stanford is better. He has worked on operating
systems benchmarking, mobility, wireless ad hoc networking, and
network bandwidth measurement.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 20 February 2003, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
The BMW Technology Office, USA: Mission Technology Transfer
Joachim K. Stilla
Head of BMW Technology Office, USA
The BMW Technology Office USA in Palo Alto has been a member of the
Silicon Valley community for almost five years now. The mission of the
office is to explore and evaluate cutting edge technologies from the
U.S. and to transfer these technologies to process partners in the BMW
group. The basic idea is to benefit from non-automotive technologies
in order to extend BMW's position as an innovative premium car
manufacturer. The talk will address our technology transfer strategy
as well as topics of interest. Finally, examples of successful
transfer will be presented.
About the Speaker: Dr. Stilla is a mechanical engineer with more than
11 years of experience in Research, Development and
Manufacturing. Before he joined BMW in Munich he worked several years
in the aerospace industry on aerodynamics and propulsion. In Munich he
was responsible for IT and CAx methods in experimental
vehicles. During that time he also focused on innovative topics like
Virtual and Augmented Reality. He is now responsible for the BMW
Technology Office USA in Palo Alto, CA.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 20 February 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Moving by Thinking: Progress Toward a Cortical Neural Prosthetic
Joel Burdick
California Institute of Technology
http://robotics.caltech.edu/~jwb/
This talk summarizes our current efforts to develop a neural
prosthetic that can drive a robotic or prosthetic arm in order to aid
the severely handicapped. A neural prosthetic is a direct brain
interface that incorporates implanted electrodes and decoding
algorithms. With such a system, brain thought patterns can be
translated into control commands. Our system's control signals are
derived from electrodes situated in the brain's Parietal Reach Region
(PRR). The PRR, whose function is briefly reviewed, encodes the plans
for intended arm reaches. Our probabilistic algorithms for decoding
the brain's intended reach plan from PRR signals are summarized. We
then describe our experimental set-up for testing this concept on
primate models. We conclude with preliminary experimental results that
demonstrate the possibility of using a neural prosthetic to control
external devices by pure though alone. We also discuss ongoing work to
develop a new class of computer controlled movable electrodes that can
autonomously and continuously adjust their gedometry so as to maintain
optimum signal quality.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Thursday, 20 February 2003, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Real-Time Statistical Learning
Stefan Schaal
University of Southern California
http://www-clmc.usc.edu/
Real-time modeling of complex nonlinear dynamic processes has become
increasingly important in various areas of information technology,
including the on-line prediction of dynamic processes observed by
visual surveillance, user modeling for advanced computer interfaces
and game playing, and the learning of value functions, policies, and
models for learning control, particularly in the context of
high-dimensional movement systems like humans or humanoid robots. To
address such problems, we have been developing special statistical
learning methods that meet the demands of on-line learning, in
particular the need for low computational complexity, rapid learning,
and scalability to high-dimensional spaces. In this talk, we introduce
a novel algorithm for regression learning that possesses all the
necessary properties. The algorithm combines the benefits of
nonparametric learning with local linear models with a new
Expectation-Maximization algorithm for finding low-dimensional
projections in high-dimensional spaces; it can be regarded as a
nonlinear and probabilistic version of partial least squares
regression, and also as a method of probabilistic backfitting.
Variational Bayesian inference allows us to derive computationally
cheap regularization against overfitting. We demonstrate the
applicability of our methods in traditional benchmark datasets,
synthetic examples that have thousands of dimensions, and in various
applications in humanoid robotics, illustrated by video presentation.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 20 February 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Adult Offer and Child Uptake in the Acquisition of Meaning
Eve Clark
Linguistics, Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~eclark/
One problem children have to 'solve' in language acquisition is what
meanings to assign to any unfamiliar words they encounter. Much of the
preliminary work on this problem is done in the course of
conversational exchanges between adults and children. Adults offer
unfamiliar 'new' words and children take them up. What does this
process look like? What evidence is there that children attend to new
words? What kinds of initial meanings could children assign to new
words they hear? In this talk, I'll present some of the work I have
been doing on the forms of adult offers, the evidence that children
attend to new words, and the kinds of pragmatic inferences, licensed
in context, children seem to be making.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 21 February 2003, 12 noon-1:15pm
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
On the thesis that human languages are infinite
Geoffrey K. Pullum
Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz
Introductory textbooks on formal linguistics lay considerable stress
on the thesis that human languages are infinite collections of
expressions. The arguments they give, however, are uniformly
unsound. This paper dissects the logic of the arguments and exposes
their failings, their hidden assumptions, and their links (or lack of
links) to issues that are really about other things, like the
abilities of speakers or the form in which grammars should be cast. It
is argued that we do not have to accept that human languages are
infinite collections, yet we also do not have to accept the (even more
indefensible) position that they are finite. Despite appearances,
there is no contradiction here.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 21 February 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Using Computers to Change What People Think and Do:
Insights into Captology
B.J. Fogg
CSLI, Stanford
The U.S. Army and Amazon.com are both using interactive technology to
change people's beliefs and behaviors. They are not alone. With each
passing month, more organizations are using the power of computing to
influence what people think and do. Whether we like it or not,
machines are becoming increasingly adept at influencing humans.
One goal in captology is creating insight into how computing products,
from websites to mobile phone software, can be designed to change
attitudes and behaviors. By understanding captology we can harness
this power for pro-social outcomes, such as promoting health,
education, empathy, and civic involvement. However, because persuasive
technology can be used for undesirable ends, an understanding of
captology can also help us protect ourselves and our children from
unwanted computer-based influence.
In this talk I will explain key concepts in captology, demonstrate
examples of persuasive technology products, and outline some
principles that give interactive experiences the ability to motivate
and persuade.
About the speaker: B.J. Fogg directs research and design at the
Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab http://captology.stanford.edu/ . An
experimental psychologist, BJ also teaches in the Computer Science
Department and the School of Education. Outside Stanford university BJ
runs Grapevine Strategy, a consulting firm that helps clients create
innovative and effective user experiences by leveraging principles
from captology. He holds seven patents, and his work has been featured
in The New York Times, Business 2.0, and The Wall Street Journal (
http://www.bjfogg.info/ ). BJ is the author of a recently published
book: "Persuasive Technology: Using Computer to Change What We Think
and Do" http://www.persuasivetech.info/
____________
ITSS TGIF
on Friday, 21 February 2003, 2:00pm-3:30pm
Turing Auditorium
http://www.stanford.edu/group/itss-customer/ip/tgif/
User-Centered Web Design
Brad Lauster
(with Megan Miller and Brian Young)
Learn proven techniques for improving the user experience of your web
sites. We'll review user research techniques, interaction design
concerns, and usability testing methods, as well as graphic design and
content layout issues, ADA compliance, and browser/operating system
compatibility problems. While these concerns are applicable to the
design of almost any interactive system, our examples and code samples
will draw primarily from web standards such as XHTML and CSS.
TGIFs are informal, interactive sessions on computer-related topics of
interest to the Stanford community. Bring your questions! Although
intended for power users, Expert Partners, and those with IT
responsibilities, these sessions are open to everyone -- faculty,
staff, and students -- no registration is required. This is your
opportunity to get updates from and ask questions of ITSS staff
experts.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 21 February 2003, 2:15pm
Math Corner, 380:383P
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
http://infomap.stanford.edu/nlpgroup/brants-chen-tsochant-CIKM02.pdf
Presented by: Thorsten Brants, Google Inc.
Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) has recently been shown
to produce superior information retrieval results. It is a
statistical technique that uses a latent class model or aspect model.
In this talk, I will present the general model, compare alternative
factorizations, point out advantages and disadvantages of the model,
and show how it is used in applications like document retrieval or
topic-based text segmentation.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 21 February 2003, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Becoming a Native Listener:
A Statistical Account of Developmental Speech Perception
Jessica Maye
University of Rochester
In order to learn a native language, one of the first things that
infants must do is assign the incoming acoustic signal to phonetic
categories (i.e. consonants and vowels). However, these categories are
different for each language. For example, English listeners must
distinguish the sounds /l/ and /r/, but Japanese listeners must
not. The paradox for the infant is how to learn which categories are
relevant for the language being learned, in the absence of other
knowledge about the language.
The hypothesis explored here is that infants hone in on native
language phonetic categories through a sensitivity to the statistical
properties of speech sounds in their environments. I will present data
showing that infants are sensitive to phonetic distributions, and that
this sensitivity results in changes in speech sound discrimination
which mirror those seen in developing infants during the course of
natural language acquisition.
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CS545: DATABASE SEMINAR
on Friday, 21 February 2003, 4:15pm - 5:15pm
Gates B12
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
ATLAS:
a Small but Complete Extension of SQL for Data Streams and Data Mining
Carlo Zaniolo
UCLA
We propose simple extensions of SQL to support (i) continuous queries
on streaming data, and (ii) complex applications on persistent data
stored in a database. The linchpin of our approach is a native
extensibility mechanism for SQL based on user-defined aggregates
(UDAs) and table functions. This makes ATLAS Turing complete---without
coding external functions or embedding queries in a procedural
language. Because of this power, and the stream-oriented computation
model of UDAs, very complex continuous queries on streams can be
supported with minimal extensions to SQL. Furthermore, the notion of
safe and non-blocking computations on infinite data streams can be
formally characterized in this context. The ATLAS prototype optimizes
response time and/or throughput on data streams taking users' input
into account.
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BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-VISION-ROBOTICS
on Monday, 24 February 2003, 4:15pm
TCSeq 201
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Foundations of Assisted Cognition Systems
Henry Kautz
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
The goal of the Assisted Cognition project at UW is to advance the
capacity of ubiquitous computing environments to augment and enhance
human capabilities, with a particular emphasis on increasing the
independence of people suffering from cognitive limitations. Assisted
cognition systems (1) sense aspects of an individual's location and
environment, both outdoors and at home, relying on a wide range of
sensors such as global positioning systems (GPS), active badges, and
motion detectors; (2) learn to interpret patterns of everyday
behavior, and recognize user errors, confusion, and distress, using
techniques from state estimation, plan recognition, and machine
learning; and (3) offer proactive help at appropriate times to users
through prompts, warnings, and other kinds of interventions.
Challenges include: algorithms and representations that connect
low-level sensor data to high-level models of movement, behaviors,
plans, and goals; error models based on theories of cognitive
function; and decision-theoretic techniques for deciding when the
system should intervene proactively.
About the Speaker: Henry Kautz is an associate professor in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of
Washington. He joined the faculty in 2000 after a career at Bell Labs
and AT&T Labs, where for a time he headed the AI Principles Research
Department. He is a Fellow of the AAAI and holds the IJCAI Computers &
Thought award. Recent research topics include predictive control of
search algorithms, proof complexity of clause learning, ubiquitous
computing, and cognitive aids.
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LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Tuesday, 25 February 2003, 12 noon
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:426 (Terrace room)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Probabilistic and Distributional Modeling of Linguistic Knowledge:
Perspectives from Comprehension, Production, and Learning
Daniel Jurafsky
Linguistics, Computer Science, Institute of Cognitive Science,
and Center for Spoken Language Research
University of Colorado, Boulder
(Note: Special Day, Time, and Place)
Human language processing is fundamentally probabilistic in nature.
Thus while it is critical for linguists to model deep, rich structural
knowledge at many linguistic levels, it is equally critical to
understand the way this knowledge is used probabilistically by human
language users.
This talk summarizes a number of results from our lab on the role of
probabilistic and statistical knowledge in human language processing
in comprehension, learning, and production of phonological,
morphological, lexical, and syntactic structure. In comprehension, we
show that humans compute the probability of an interpretation in order
to resolve lexical, syntactic, and semantic ambiguities, and I discuss
recent extensions of these results to aphasics. In production, we show
that speakers compute the probability of words in language production
to help determine the surface form the words should take, and that
this probability is reflected in both prosodic structure and segmental
form. I'll also offer some functional reasons based on speaker-hearer
interaction for why probability might matter in production. In
learning I'll talk about how rich linguistic prior structure can be
viewed as a `learning bias' and hence combined with empirical,
distributional learning, to attack the problem of learning
phonological and morphological structure. This talk describes joint
work with all sorts of really smart people.
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BERKELEY BISC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 25 February 2003, 4:00pm
373 Soda (Berkeley)
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
From Search Engines to Question-Answering System
-- The Need for New Tools
Lotfi A. Zadeh
UC Berkeley
Search engines, with Google at the top, have many remarkable
capabilities. But what is not among them is the deduction
capability, the capability to synthesize an answer to a query by
drawing on bodies of information which are resident in various parts
of the knowledge base. It is this capability that differentiates a
question-answering system, Q/A system for short, from a search engine.
Upgrading a search engine to a Q/A system is a complex,
effort-intensive, open-ended problem. Semantic Web and related systems
for upgrading quality of search may be viewed as steps in this
direction. But what may be argued, as is done in the following, is
that existing tools, based as they are on bivalent logic and
probability theory, have intrinsic limitations. The principal obstacle
is the nature of world knowledge.
The centrality of world knowledge in human cognition, and especially
in reasoning and decision-making, has long been recognized in AI. The
Cyc system of Douglas Lenat is a repository of world knowledge. The
problem is that much of world knowledge consists of perceptions. More
specifically, perceptions are f-granular in the sense that (a) the
boundaries of perceived classes are fuzzy; and (b) the perceived
values of attributes are granular, with a granule being a clump of
values drawn together by indistinguishability, similarity, proximity
or functionality. What is not widely recognized is that f-granularity
of perceptions put them well beyond the reach of computational
bivalent-logic-based theories.
Dealing with world knowledge needs new tools. A new tool which is
suggested for this purpose is the fuzzy-logic-based method of
computing with words and perceptions (CWP), with the understanding
that perceptions are described in a natural language. A concept which
plays a key role in CWP is that of Precisiated Natural Language (PNL).
It is this language that is the centerpiece of our approach to
reasoning and decision-making with world knowledge.
A concept which plays a key role in organization of world knowledge is
that of an epistemic (knowledge-directed) lexicon (EL). Basically, an
epistemic lexicon is a network of nodes and weighted links, with node
i representing an object in the world knowledge database, and a
weighted link from node i to node j representing the strength of
association between i and j. The name of an object is a word or a
composite word, e.g., car, passenger car or Ph.D. degree. An object is
described by a relation or relations whose fields are attributes of
the object. The values of an attribute may be granulated and
associated with granulated probability and possibility
distributions. For example, the values of a granular attribute may be
labeled small, medium and large, and their probabilities may be
described as low, high and low, respectively. Relations which are
associated with an object serve as PNL-based descriptions of the world
knowledge about the object. For example, a relation associated with an
object labeled Ph.D. degree may contain attributes labeled
Eligibility, Length.of.study, Granting.institution, etc. The knowledge
associated with an object may be context-dependent. What should be
stressed is that the concept of an epistemic lexicon is intended to be
employed in representation of world knowledge, which is largely
perception-based, rather than Web knowledge, which is not.
In conclusion, the main thrust of the fuzzy-logic-based approach to
question-answering which is outlined in this abstract, is that to
achieve significant question-answering capability it is necessary to
develop methods of dealing with the reality that much of world
knowledge is perception-based. Dealing with perception-based
information is more complex and more effort-intensive than dealing
with measurement-based information. In this instance, as in many
others, complexity is the price that has to be paid to achieve
superior performance.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 25 February 2003, 4:15pm-5:30pm
Math Corner 380:381T
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
A Realizability Interpretation for Classical Second Order Arithmetic
Henry Towsner
Stanford
A realizability interpretation for classical second order arithmetic
is presented. This interpretation enables the extraction of
witnessing polymorphic lambda terms from proofs of \Sigma^0_1 and
\Pi^0_2 sentences. This realizability is constructed by applying the
modified realizability for second order intuitionistic arithmetic to
the result of a simple embedding of classical logic in intuitionistic
logic, followed by the Friedman-Dragalin translation.
____________
SNRC INDUSTRY SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 25 February 2003, 4:15pm
Packard 101
http://snrc.stanford.edu/events/industry-seminar/
Wireless Sensor Networks for Industrial Applications
Falk Herrmann
Robert Bosch Corporation
The increased interest of industry and the research community in
wireless networking technology has led to many recent advances in
wireless LANs and PANs, and has also fueled research in new domains
such as sensor networks. Much of the early work on sensor networks
explored applications and challenges considering mobility, e.g., for
networking of devices mounted on vehicles or persons. The use of
sensor networks in stationary applications such as building and
industrial automation or security systems has recently gained
increased interest.
While the former scenarios are often considered to be less
power-scarce, many of the more promising stationary applications
strongly demand for independent operation from batteries or other
local power sources. Hence, the success of real-world applications
will strongly depend on further advances in RF technology and
protocols in order to meet power and cost constraints. With the desire
for longevity and reliability, i.e., maintenance-free operation of
several years, severe challenges arise for the design of both the
overall system as well as the network protocol. This presentation
introduces to an approach for networking sensors and actuators
targeting these challenges: Since for reliable long-term operation of
energy-constrained wireless networks of small embedded systems it is
crucial to select links with high packet success, schemes for link
assessment are introduced and analyzed. Moreover, experimental results
on measuring the link quality as a basis for a cost metric for
in-network link quality measurement are discussed. Finally, an
overview will be given introducing some of the envisioned applications
along with their specific requirements.
About the speaker: Falk Herrmann obtained a B.Sc. in engineering in
1994 from the University of Glasgow, UK, and the diploma (M.Sc.) and
doctoral (Ph.D.) degrees in mechanical engineering from the Technical
University of Braunschweig, Germany, in 1996 and 1999,
respectively. From 1996 to 1999, he was engaged in research on SAW
sensors for automotive liquid monitoring at the Central R&D Division
of the Robert Bosch GmbH Stuttgart, Germany. From 1999 to 2000, he was
working for the Automotive Electronics Division of the Robert Bosch
GmbH Reutlingen, Germany, in product development of micromachined
inertial sensors. In 2000, he joined the newly founded Research and
Technology Center of the Robert Bosch Corp., Palo Alto, CA, where he
is active in the field of wireless sensors and sensor networks.
____________
REUTERS FOUNDATION DIGITAL VISION PROGRAM SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 26 February 2003, 3:00pm-4:30pm
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
Stratton Sclavos
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of VeriSign, Inc., Mountain View, CA
VeriSign, Inc. is the leading provider of digital trust services.
Since joining the company in July 1995 as one of its first employees,
Mr. Sclavos has grown VeriSign into a global corporation relied upon
to provide the critical services that make trusted digital commerce
and communications possible.
Mr. Sclavos has led the company through a period of robust growth and
technology innovation. He was honored with the 2001 Morgan Stanley
Morgan Leadership Award for Global Commerce and was named to Forbes
Top 50 CEOs list for 2001. He was recognized by the Silicon Valley
Business Journal as the Entrepreneur of the Year in 1998 in the
emerging companies category.
VeriSign's portfolio of digital trust services has been recognized by
major technology publications such as Network Computing (Editor's
Choice Award for 2001 for Managed PKI Service). VeriSign's services
have helped millions of businesses and individuals build, promote, and
e-commerce-enable their Web sites. VeriSign was the recipient of the
2002 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year award by the Harvard Business
School Alumni Association of Northern California. VeriSign was the
recipient of the Information Security Magazine Excellence Award 2001
for Online Encryption. VeriSign was also recognized as one of the
Silicon Valley Fast 50 by Deloitte and Touche in the 2000 annual
survey of America's fastest-growing public companies. Prior to
joining VeriSign, Mr. Sclavos held executive management positions with
several Silicon Valley technology companies, including Taligent Inc.,
a joint venture of Apple, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard; and GO
Corporation, a mobile computing company. Mr. Sclavos holds a BS in
Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California,
Davis. Mr. Sclavos also sits on the board of directors of several
public and private companies including Intuit, Juniper Networks,
Keynote Systems, and Marimba, Inc.
A lifelong Bay Area resident and active in the community, Mr. Sclavos
and his wife Jodie formed the Sclavos Family Foundation to support
charitable efforts in education and medical research.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Constraint Optimization in Multiagent Systems
Pragnesh Jay Modi
Information Sciences Institute, USC
Optimizing over a set of alternatives that have varying degrees of
global quality is a fundamental problem in multiagent systems. A key
outstanding challenge is performing optimization in a decentralized
manner. In this talk, we formulate this problem as a Distributed
Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP). Existing methods for DCOP that
guarantee optimality are prohibitively slow, while other incomplete
methods may provide solutions of arbitrarily poor quality in the worst
case. To overcome these limitations, we present a new lower-bound
based method for DCOP, named Adopt, which uses asynchronous
communication to find either the global optimal solution or an
approximate solution within a user-specified distance from the
optimal. When finding the optimal solution, Adopt's asynchrony
provides speedups of several orders of magnitude over existing
complete methods. When finding approximate solutions, Adopt's
lower-bound search method is able to provide a theoretical bound on
worst-case solution quality. Finally, we discuss how Adopt obtains
these desirable properties via a novel Instant-Conservative
Communication Principle, which we conjecture has potential application
to many other distributed optimization problems.
About the speaker: Pragnesh Jay Modi received his B.S. with University
Honors in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1997 from
Carnegie-Mellon University. Over past five years, he has been a
graduate research assistant at the University of Southern California's
Information Sciences Institute. He is expected to defend his
dissertation titled "Distributed Constraint Optimization and its
Application to Multiagent Systems" in Spring 2003.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Paradigms or Dogmas: Modeling the Rise and Fall of Scientific Laws
Andrew Waterman
M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
Thomas Kuhn made waves in the Philosophy of Science in 1962 with his
book, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, by arguing that
scientists are fundamentally biased by the paradigms they use to
understand the world. Kuhn's ideas about "paradigm shifts" and
"scientific revolutions" are commonly accepted in academia today.
However, many philosophers doubt that scientific laws are just
"paradigms" that rise and fall, or that "scientific revolutions"
actually occur at all. Philosophers, economists, sociologists have
contributed to this debate through studying the *social* structure of
science the network of interactions between scientists, and the
economic incentives affecting scientists in the modern world. In this
spirit, I have created a computer simulation of how scientists'
beliefs evolve as they learn new evidence and influence each other's
beliefs. This simulation, along with other simulations like it, can
help determine whether scientists must be fundamentally biased in
order for paradigm shifts to occur, and whether social and economic
factors accelerate or impede the progress of science.
____________
SPECIAL UNIVERSITY ORAL EXAMINATION
on Friday, 28 February 2003, 9:00am-10:00am
Gates 104
(Refreshments will be served at 8:45 am)
Information Preservation in Networks of Autonomous Archives
Brian Frank Cooper
Computer Science Department
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~cooperb/
An ever increasing amount of information is being stored digitally,
and people are becoming more and more dependent on it. However, very
little is understood about how to preserve digital information for
long time periods. Media failures, natural disasters and bankruptcy
all conspire to cause information loss over decades or centuries. Such
failures rob future generations of vital scientific and cultural
artifacts.
To deal with these problems, we have developed a distributed digital
archive that is based on the concept of multiple autonomous archives
cooperating to provide preservation. For such a system to effectively
preserve data for the long term, it must be as self-supervising as
possible. Moreover, the system should be structured so that autonomous
archives have an incentive to collaborate and share resources.
Replication in our system is based on archives trading data under the
principle of "I'll preserve your data if you preserve mine." These
trades result in an archive network that self-organizes into a
reliable system, self-tunes to improve efficiency, and self-heals
after a failure. I'll discuss the architecture of the system, and
techniques for making trades to achieve the highest reliability. Once
data is replicated, there must be an efficient and robust mechanism to
allow users to find important documents. Using a simple model of
peer-to-peer search networks, we have discovered new and interesting
network topologies, and also developed techniques for ad hoc networks,
where a network can self-organize and self-tune to produce an
efficient topology without external supervision.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 28 February 2003, 12 noon-1:15pm
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
A formalization of an approach to modality suggested by C. Peacocke
Gregori Mints
Stanford University
C. Peacocke suggested in Being Known, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1999,
a "principle based" approach to modality where the roles of actual
world and other possible world are drastically different. The talk
describes one of possible formalizations of this approach allowing to
make precise some of the suggestions.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 28 February 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Searching Spoken Word Collections
Douglas W. Oard
University of Maryland
Spoken word collections promise access to unique and compelling
content, and most of the needed technology to realize that promise is
now in place. Decreasing storage costs, increasing network capacity,
and easy availability of software to exchange digital audio make
possible physical access to spoken word collections at a previously
unimaginable scale. Effective support for intellectual access -- the
problem of finding what you are looking for -- is much more
challenging, however. In this talk I will review the work that has
been done on this problem at the Text Retrieval Conferences and the
Topic Detection and Tracking evaluations, and I will present some
results from a user study comparing present manual and automated
approaches to indexing spoken word collections. I will then describe a
unique resource, a collection of 116,000 hours of oral history
interviews recorded in 32 languages in 67 countries, and explain how
we are leveraging an unprecedented manual indexing effort to develop
the ability to index similar materials automatically.
About the speaker: Doug Oard is an Associate Professor at the
University of Maryland, College Park, with a joint appointment in the
College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer
Studies. He is presently on sabbatical with the Natural Language Group
at University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute in
Marina Del Rey.
He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of
Maryland, and his research interests center around the use of emerging
technologies to support information seeking by end users. Dr. Oard's
recent work has focused on cross-language information retrieval,
retrieval from audio, data mining from text, and the exchange of
ratings by networked users.
____________
SPECIAL UNIVERSITY ORAL EXAMINATION
on Friday, 28 February 2003, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Gates 104
(Refreshments will be served at 1:45 pm)
Approximation Algorithms for Concave Cost Flow Problems
Kamesh Munagala
Computer Science, Stanford
http://theory.Stanford.EDU/~kamesh/
The cost structures for resource allocation in many network design
problems obey economies of scale, meaning that the cost per unit
resource becomes cheaper as the amount of resources allocated
increases. For instance, if we are purchasing cables to route data in
a network, the cost per unit bandwidth reduces as the bandwidth we
need to route increases. Another feature of resource allocation is
granularity, meaning that the resource can only be purchased in
multiples of a certain minimum quantity. Again, in the context of
purchasing cables in a network, the minimum capacity cable available
might be a T1 line with capacity around 1 Mbps.
We consider various problems involving allocating resources to serve
user demand in a network, where the goal is to optimize the cost of
allocation. These resources could be cables to route bandwidth or web
caches to serve content, among other possibilities. The issues of
granularity and economies of scale in the cost structure make these
problems NP-Hard, which means it is unlikely that the optimal solution
can be found efficiently.
These cost functions can be modeled as non-decreasing concave
functions of the user demand. The resource allocation problems are
therefore concave cost flow problems. As mentioned above, these
problems are NP-Hard.
We first discuss various network design problems that fall in the
concave cost flow framework. We then present efficient polynomial time
algorithms for finding solutions whose cost is provably close to the
cost of the optimal solution. We consider various general and special
cases of concave functions and obtain combinatorial algorithms with
good performance guarantees. For the general concave function case, we
obtain a logarithmic approximation ratio, meaning that the cost of the
solution we find is always within a logarithmic factor of the optimal
solution. For the special case where the cost function is defined over
a metric space, we obtain a constant factor approximation ratio. These
algorithms, in addition to having good performance guarantees, are
simple to implement and efficient in practice.
____________
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