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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 26 February 2003, vol. 18:22
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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26 February 2003 Stanford Vol. 18, No. 22
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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 26 FEBRUARY 2003 TO 7 MARCH 2003
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
3:00pm UC Davis Linguistics Colloquium
912 Sproul (UC Davis)
"The Acquisition of Mental State Verbs"
Anna Papafragou
University of Pennsylvania
http://linguistics.ucdavis.edu/colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Information Integration and XML: creation of the next generation
database systems"
Hamid Pirahesh
IBM Corporation
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
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
11:00am Music 319: CCRMA Hearing Seminar
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
"Hard Disk Drive Noise"
Eric Baugh
Hitachi
http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/ccrmas/ccrmas.html
Abstract below
12 noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"When theories of cognitive development go to school"
Dan Schwartz
Education, Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
"Some Not-So-Pretty Admissions About Dealing with Internet
Measurements"
Vern Paxson
ICIR
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
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
"The Science of Sailing"
J. Craig Mudge
Pacific Challenge
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
"What Is New With Kinetic Data Structures?"
Leonidas J. Guibas
Computer Science, Stanford University
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~guibas/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
"Improving the Query-Time 'Bang Per Buck' of Support Vector Machines:
Towards Robust Nonlinear Models for the (Amortized) Price of
Linear Ones"
Dennis DeCoste
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Abstract below
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
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"From transient patterns to persistent structures: Episodic memory
formation via cortico - hippocampal interactions"
Lokendra Shastri
International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
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
"Approximation Algorithms for Concave Cost Flow Problems"
Kamesh Munagala
Computer Science
http://theory.Stanford.EDU/~kamesh/
Abstract below
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Math Corner, 380:383P
"Semantic Annotation for Concept-Based Cross-Language Medical
Information Retrieval"
Dominic Widdows
CSLI, Stanford
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
"Link Evolution: Analysis and Algorithms"
Cynthia Dwork
Microsoft Research
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 3 MARCH 2003
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 201
Title to be announced
Dan Roth
Illinois
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
TUESDAY, 4 MARCH 2003
7:00pm Networks and Network Science Film Series
Wallenberg 160:330
"'Social Networks': A Panel Discussion at the 75th Anniversary
Celebration, Stanford Business School"
(2000, 90 minutes)
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/75years/75thAgenda.html
http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/
WEDNESDAY, 5 MARCH 2003
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Using PC clusters to render real-time rendering"
Bob Jacobson
ModViz, Inc.
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 6 MARCH 2003
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
"Touch-Based Personal Area Networks"
Kurt Partridge
University of Washington
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Sustaining Success in a Challenging Economy: It's All About Results"
Eric Schmidt
Chairman and CEO, Google, Inc.
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
"Being There:
Capturing and Rendering the Realistic Appearance of the Visual World"
Richard Szeliski
Microsoft Research
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley BISC Seminar
320 Soda Hall, Berkeley
"From Search Engines to Question-Answering System --
The Need for New Tools"
Lotfi A. Zadeh
BISC, CS Division, EECS Dept. UC Berkeley
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
Title to be announced
Tina Eliassi-Rad
Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Knowing Your Own Mind"
Krista Lawlor
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/~klawlor/
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Growth Factor Modulation of Neuronal Survival and Function in the
Adult CNS"
Mark Tuszynski
UC San Diego
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
5:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Against Iconicity and Markedness"
Martin Haspelmath
Max-Planck-Institut fur evolutionare Anthropologie, Leipzig
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 7 MARCH 2003
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Joan Bybee
Linguistics, University of New Mexico
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
"A User-Friendly Decision Procedure for the Probability Calculus,
with Some Applications to Bayesian Philosophy of Science"
Branden Fitelson
Philosophy, SJSU
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
"Art Therapy and Tele-Mediated Communication in Behavioral Telehealth"
Kate Collie
University of British Columbia
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Math Corner, 380:383P
"The Limits of N-Gram Translation Evaluation Metrics"
Presented by: Susanne Riehemann and Chris Culy, SRI
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Carnap, Completeness, and Logical Consequence"
Erich Reck
University of California, Riverside
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
"Internal Architectures for Object-Relational DBMS Engines"
Paul Brown
IBM Research (Almaden)
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: critical shortage of O+ and O-; shortage
of A-, A+, and B+. For an appointment:
http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes
an hour of your time.
____________
EDITORIAL COMMENT
As most of you know I can't include everything in the CSLI Calendar;
I try to concentrate on Stanford cognitive sciences type events and
work my way out from there. Over the years, I've developed a web page
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/bayarea.shtml
with many links to various event listings that some of you might want
to peruse either for Stanford events that aren't cognitive science or
for events elsewhere that are cognitive science.
____________
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.
____________
MUSIC 319: CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 11:00am
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/ccrmas/ccrmas.html
We all use these noisy machines for our daily work. How do we talk about
the noise and what can manufacturers do to reduce the noise? Can we mask
the noise, or move the noise to frequencies we can't hear or are masked?
Perhaps most importantly, what makes a sound annoying? This is a not
a typical topic for the Hearing Seminar, but it is something that
affects us all.
I think this is a really interesting topic, that we all tend to
ignore. Eric is a good speaker, with a wealth of knowledge in this area
and some good data.
Bring your ears to CCRMA and we'll do what we can do to keep the noise
down. -- Malcolm
Hard Disk Drive Noise
Eric Baugh
San Jose Research Center, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Hard disk drives (HDDs) and cooling fans are the major sources of
noise associated with information technology (IT) equipment. This talk
will review the current acoustic specification for IT equipment based
on sound power, as measured in anechoic or reverberant conditions, and
the mechanical sources of HDD noise. Sound power, however, does not
capture user annoyance with HDD noise. Sound quality is a better
approach, but several questions must be answered in order to apply it:
Which metrics to use? How are they calculated? How can they be
combined into a single sound quality score? What about the effects of
the system in which the drive is installed? All of these will at least
be touched on, with an emphasis on loudness (stationary and
time-varying), sharpness, roughness, and prominence ratio and their
application to HDD noise. The role of standards, and the lack of them
in the sound quality arena, will also be discussed.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 12 noon-1:30pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
When theories of cognitive development go to school
Dan Schwartz
School of Education, Stanford
There are a variety of theories that propose people develop
understanding by building up from concrete experience - these might
include theories of embodied cognition, theories that propose a
concrete to abstract shift, and theories that propose children should
have hands-on activities. Despite my best efforts, I have yet to
witness a child inducing a higher order structure from
perceptual-motor activity alone. This talk considers some of the
limitations of embodied theories of development, and tests an
alternative that emphasizes the significance of cultural symbol
systems in development and learning. (If you saw my talk at the
developmental brown bag, this will be too similar to enjoy.)
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 12:40pm (lunch 12:15pm)
Gates 104
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Some Not-So-Pretty Admissions About Dealing with Internet Measurements
Vern Paxson
ICSI Center for Internet Research (ICIR) at Berkeley
If we look "under the hood" of any large Internet measurement study,
the view isn't pretty: we find everything from inconsistencies to
systematic errors to lost analysis chains to intractable data
navigation to absent calibration to misconceptions about what's being
measured to irreproducible results. The net result is that as an
empirical science, Internet measurement is sorely lacking. We discuss
three fundamental ways to strengthen the field's discipline: working
towards a culture of calibration, creating an emphasis on reproducible
results, and fostering the availability of high-quality datasets
within the community.
About the speaker: Vern Paxson is a senior scientist with the ICSI
Center for Internet Research (ICIR) at the International Computer
Science Institute, a non-profit research institute in Berkeley,
Calif. He is also a staff computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (LBNL). His research focuses on network intrusion
detection, Internet attacks, and Internet measurement. He serves on
the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and as
chair of the Internet Research Task Force, as well as program co-chair
of ACM SIGCOMM 2002, program chair of USENIX Security 2003, and on the
steering committee of the Internet Measurement Workshop. He received
his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
____________
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.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
What Is New With Kinetic Data Structures?
Leonidas J. Guibas
Computer Science, Stanford University
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~guibas/
Kinetic Data Structures (KDS) have now been around for about five
years and have given rise to both theoretical and practical
developments. This talk will provide a short introduction to KDS,
illustrate the concept with a number of examples, and then focus on
the more recent work in the field.
A KDS is an algorithmic tool for problems where the goal is to track
an attribute of a continuously moving or deforming physical system
over time. A KDS succinctly summarizes the important aspects of the
state of the system in a set of spatial relationships, called
certificates, that facilitate or trivialize the computation of the
attribute of interest. As the system evolves and certificates fail, a
KDS repair mechanism is invoked to update the certificate set and the
associated attribute computation. Good KDS design means selecting a
certificate set that facilitates the attribute computation, yet is
relatively stable and robust under object motion. KDSs have rigorous
associated measures of performance and their design shares many
qualities with that of classical data structures.
Originally the KDS framework led to new and promising algorithms in
virtual reality applications, including collision detection and
visibility computations. This talk will survey this work and then
focus on some of the newer developments, including applications to ad
hoc communication and sensor networks. Unlike the virtual reality
setting, in these applications the certificate relationships have to
be verified by sensors and uncertainty must be dealt with.
About the speaker: Leonidas J. Guibas works on algorithms for sensing,
modeling, reasoning, rendering, and acting on the physical world. His
interests span computational geometry, geometric modeling, computer
graphics, computer vision, robotics, and discrete algorithms. His
current activities focus on physical modeling, shape matching,
geometric approximations, and ad hoc mobile and sensor networks. He
heads the Geometric Computation group at Stanford University, where he
is Professor of Computer Science.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Thursday, 27 February 2003, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Improving the Query-Time "Bang Per Buck" of Support Vector Machines:
Towards Robust Nonlinear Models
for the (Amortized) Price of Linear Ones
Dennis DeCoste
Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Caltech
http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/home/decoste/
Support vector machines (and other kernel machines) have recently
become very popular in machine learning research, especially for
high-dimensional classification tasks, due to their ability to
robustly find good nonlinear models. However, a key tradeoff is much
(e.g. 10-1000 fold) higher query times, relative to other common
machine learning methods, such as simple linear methods (e.g. Fischer
discriminants), decision trees, and neural networks. Given that
improvements over such alternatives are often only a few percentages
in classification accuracy, this raises serious "bang per buck"
questions concerning the practical utility of kernel machines,
especially in embedded (e.g.resource-limited spacecraft) or real-time
(e.g. robotic control) applications. In this talk, I will present new
methods that address this dilemma by "compiling" a kernel machine into
a query-time form which enables "easier" queries to be incrementally
handled by fast subsets of the full kernel machine -- invoking the
full machine only on the hardest queries for which it is truly needed
to retain its high classication rate.
____________
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.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 28 February 2003, 2:15pm
Math Corner, 380:383P
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Semantic Annotation
for Concept-Based Cross-Language Medical Information Retrieval
Presented by: Dominic Widdows, Stanford University
http://muchmore.dfki.de/pubs/Journ_Med_Inf_V4.pdf
This paper presents a framework for concept-based cross-language
information retrieval in the medical domain, developed in the MUCHMORE
project (http://muchmore.dfki.de/). The approach is based on using the
Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) as the primary source of
semantic information. Linguistic processing includes part-of-speech
tagging, morphological analysis, phrase recognition and the
identification of medical terms and the semantic relations between
them.
The paper describes experiments in monolingual and cross-lingual
document retrieval, performed on a corpus of medical
abstracts. Results show that linguistic processing, especially
lemmatization and compound analysis for German, is a crucial step to
achieving a good baseline performance. On the other hand they show
that semantic information, specifically the combined use of concepts
and relations, increases the performance in monolingual and
cross-lingual retrieval.
I chose this paper because I hope the linguistic aspects will be of
special interest the NLP group - it has often been claimed (based
almost entirely on work with English) that syntactic and morphological
analysis doesn't really help information retrieval, but more recent
work with other languages demonstrates that linguistic sophistication
is invaluable. This paper also shows that in a multilingual setting,
using a rich semantic resource as an interlingua (such as the Unified
Medical Language System) gives an improvement over matching just
tokens or lemmas.
____________
CS545: DATABASE SEMINAR
on Friday, 28 February 2003, 4:15pm - 5:15pm
Gates B12
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
Link Evolution: Analysis and Algorithms
Cynthia Dwork
Microsoft Research (Mountain View)
(Joint work with Steve Chien, Ravi Kumar, Daniel Simon, and D. Sivakumar)
As the web grows, its link structure (and content) evolves rapidly.
Consequently, large-scale static hyperlink-based ranking computations
become too expensive to be performed frequently.
We present an efficient algorithm to incrementally compute good
approximations to PageRank, as links evolve. Theoretical analysis of
our algorithm suggests it should work well, and preliminary
experiments reveal that this algorithm is both fast and yields
excellent approximations to PageRank, even in light of large changes
to the link structure.
Analysis of the algorithm lead us to two monotonicity results for
Markov Chains. For PageRank our results imply that (1) adding a link
to a page cannot cause the PageRank of the target page to decrease and
(2) adding a link to a page cannot cause the ordinal ranking of the
target page to decrease.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 March 2003, 12:40pm (lunch 12:15pm)
Gates 104
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Touch-Based Personal Area Networks
Kurt Partridge
University of Washington
Personal Area Networks (PANs) are useful for many new mobile computing
applications including object identification, context awareness, and
appliance customization. But the several-meter range of today's local
wireless technologies, such as 802.11 and Bluetooth, leads to
ambiguities when connecting wearable devices with ubiquitous devices
in multi-user and multi-object environments. Intrabody communication,
a technology that uses low-frequency, low-power electric fields and
the conductive nature of the human body, could solve this problem by
only allowing communication between two simultaneously touched
devices. I will describe the implementation and performance of our
Intrabody Communication system and its applicability to ubiquitous
computing applications. This is joint work with Gaetano Borriello and
Sarah Newman.
About the speaker: Kurt Partridge is a PhD candidate in the University
of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department. His
research interests include technology to support novel user
interaction mechanisms for wearable and ubiquitous computing
devices. He received a BS in computer science from the University of
California at Berkeley and an MS in computer science from the
University of Washington.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 March 2003, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Being There:
Capturing and Rendering the Realistic Appearance of the Visual World
Richard Szeliski
Microsoft Research
The struggle to capture the lifelike appearance of the visual world
has long preoccupied artist, photographers, cinematographers, and
special effects supervisors. The advent of computers has made it
possible to create interactive experiences that give an even greater
sense of "being there" through the use of navigation, viewpoint
control, and interaction with animated objects. Image-based modeling
and rendering are now commonly used tools to facilitate the creation
and display of photorealistic models, but are commonly limited to
static scenes. The ability to process video to create dynamic visual
experiences, i.e., video-based rendering is the next frontier. In
this talk, I review a number of image-based modeling and rendering
systems and discuss some of the representations and estimation
algorithms that they use. I also present our work in video-based
rendering, in which we synthesize novel video from short sample clips
by discovering the hidden (quasi-repetitive) temporal structure.
Image-based and video-based rendering can be combined to create
compelling interactive photorealistic experiences. I demonstrate some
of these experiences with a particular focus on visiting remote sites
of interest, i.e., Virtual Tourism.
About the Speaker Richard Szeliski is a Senior Researcher in the
Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, where he is pursuing
research in 3-D computer vision, video scene analysis, and image-based
rendering. His current focus is on constructing photorealistic 3D
scene models from multiple images and video. He received a
Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, in 1988. He joined Microsoft Research in 1995. Prior to
Microsoft, he worked at Bell-Northern Research, Schlumberger Palo Alto
Research, the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, and
the Cambridge Research Lab of Digital Equipment Corporation.
Dr. Szeliski has published over 100 research papers in computer
vision, computer graphics, medical imaging, and neural nets, as well
as the book Bayesian Modeling of Uncertainty in Low-Level Vision. He
was a Program Committee Chair for ICCV'2001, and is on the Editorial
Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision. He has served
as co-chair of the SPIE Conferences on Geometric Methods in Computer
Vision, the 1999 Vision Algorithms Workshop, and as an Associate
Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence.
____________
BERKELEY BISC SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 March 2003, 4:00pm-5:30pm
320 Soda Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
From Search Engines to Question-Answering System --
The Need for New Tools
Lotfi A. Zadeh
BISC, CS Division, EECS Dept. 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.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 6 March 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Knowing Your Own Mind"
Krista Lawlor
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/~klawlor/
It can seem that knowing your own mind is the easiest thing in the
world to do. Are you hungry or not? Do you want to go to class this
afternoon, or does something else seem more appealing to you? These
questions are easily answered. Even when such questions are not easily
answered, it seems that you're the one to do the answering. Who else
could? You have a kind of authority when you report your attitudes,
emotions, pains and cravings, that others just cannot have, no matter
how good they are at knowing you. First-person authority is a robust
phenomenon, and it survives the recognition that we are fallible.
What is the source of first-person authority? How far does it really
extend? Just how much fallibility does it survive? I'll discuss one
recent philosophical theory of the source of first-person authority,
and some psychological evidence that casts doubt on the theory.
About the speaker: Professor Lawlor got her Ph.D. from the University
of Michigan in 1999, with a thesis on philosophical semantics. She
likes to think about issues in the philosophy of mind, like how mental
representations get their content, and how we know that content. She
also has a side-interest in epistemology, especially skepticism and
the epistemology of inference.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 7 March 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Challenging the Videoconferencing Gold Standard:
Art Therapy and Tele-Mediated Communication in Behavioral Telehealth
Kate Collie
University of British Columbia
In the world of behavioral telehealth, high-quality video-conferencing
is usually assumed to be the best way for a psychiatrist or therapist
in one location to communicate with a patient or client in another
location. This assumption is being challenged by work being done at
the University of British Columbia (UBC) by an interdisciplinary team
of researchers, led by Kate Collie, who are looking at
Internet-supported art therapy as a form of psychotherapy that may be
particularly well suited for distance delivery when the modes of
communication are speech and hand-drawn images.
Art therapy is psychotherapy that employs non-verbal communication and
creative expression. Among other things, it is used with both children
and adults to treat the effects of trauma, including trauma associated
with life-threatening illness. The UBC team's research is aimed at
using the Internet to make art therapy services more available to
people with mobility limitations due to illness or disability. The
research has included the creation of customized audiographic software
for distance art therapy and the development of communication
protocols for online therapy. Although the modes of distance
communication (speech and hand-drawn images) were originally chosen
because of their low bandwidth requirements and the possibility of
reaching people in their homes this way, the research has highlighted
additional advantages (over video-conferencing) of using audiographic
systems for distance psychotherapy.
In this presentation, Kate will give an overview of the work being
done at UBC as a starting point for discussing research from a wide
range of fields in which modes of mediated and non-mediated
communication have been compared on measures related to task
completion and relationship formation. She will highlight key
differences between visual and verbal, written and spoken, and
synchronous and asynchronous communication that have been identified,
and examine why video-conferencing is often preferred, in spite of the
demonstrated superiority of audio-only communication for most types of
distance interpersonal interactions.
About the speaker: Kate Collie is doctoral candidate at the Institute
of Health Promotion Research at the University of British
Columbia. She is an artist who has exhibited nationally and
internationally and an art therapist with a specialty in trauma and
major physical illness. For the last five years, she has been
conducting research about Internet art therapy-for the purpose of
expanding access to this kind of service, particularly to people with
mobility limitations due to illness or disability. This telehealth
research has included examinations of strengths and weaknesses of
different forms of tele-mediated communication.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Thursday, 6 March 2003, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Against iconicity and markedness
Martin Haspelmath
Max-Planck-Institut fur evolutionare Anthropologie, Leipzig
The notions of iconicity and markedness have played important roles in
a diverse range of theoretical approaches, and as a result, the terms
have become multiply polysemous, in a way that is not often
acknowledged by theoretical linguists. While iconicity has most often
been appealed to by functionalists, the term markedness is employed
very widely.
In this talk, I argue that the two most commonly invoked kinds of
iconicity (iconicity as correspondence of complexity/markedness, e.g.
Givon 1995, Aissen 2003+, and iconicity of cohesion, e.g. Haiman 1983)
are unnecessary, because where they make right predictions, these
predictions also follow from the predictions made by the preference
for usage economy. But in many cases, these iconicity principles make
wrong predictions while economy makes right predictions, so that it is
clear that economy should replace iconicity.
For the term "markedness", I distinguish seven different senses, which
are related by family resemblances: markedness (i) as overt coding,
(ii) as specification for a feature (e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939), (iii) as
restricted cross-linguistic distribution, (iv) as a cluster of
correlating properties of meaningful categories ("typological
markedness", Greenberg 1966), (v) as dispreference for difficult
structures ("unnaturalness", Wurzel 1998), (vi) as rarity or
unexpectedness, (vii) as deviation from the default parameter setting.
I argue that apart from (i), none of these notions is required for an
explanatory approach to the structure of human languages. To replace
them, all that is needed are general processing preferences (economy,
distinctiveness, parsability) as well as general conceptual-pragmatic
preferences which give rise to frequency asymmetries. Finally, I
examine the use of the term "markedness" in the recent
optimality-theoretic literature (e.g. Aissen 1999, Bermudez-Otero &
Borjars 2003+), and I conclude that OT approaches simply adopt earlier
observations about "typological markedness" and "unnaturalness",
without offering a genuinely new perspective.
References
Aissen, Judith. 1999. "Markedness and subject choice in Optimality
Theory." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17: 673-711.
Aissen, Judith. 2003+. "Differential object marking: Iconicity vs.
economy." To appear in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
Bermudez-Otero, Ricardo & Borjars, Kersti. 2003+. "Markedness in
phonology and in syntax: the problem of grounding." To appear in:
Honeybone, Patrick & Bermudez-Otero, Ricardo (eds.), Linguistic
knowledge: perspectives from phonology and form syntax. (Special
issue of Lingua)
Givon, T. 1995. "Markedness as meta-iconicity: distributional and
cognitive correlates of syntactic structure." In: Functionalism and
grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 25-69.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1966. Language universals, with special reference
to feature hierarchies. (Janua Linguarum, Series Minor, 59.) The
Hague: Mouton.
Haiman, John. 1983. "Iconic and economic motivation." Language 59:781-819.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj. 1939. Grundzage der Phonologie. Guttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Wurzel, Wolfgang Ullrich. 1998. "On markedness." Theoretical
Linguistics 24.1: 53-71.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 7 March 2003, 12 noon-1:15pm
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
A User-Friendly Decision Procedure for the Probability Calculus,
with Some Applications to Bayesian Philosophy of Science
Branden Fitelson
Philosophy Department, SJSU
I will present a simple, Mathematica-based decision procedure for a
rather broad class of arguments in the probability calculus. Some
background on the decision procedure will be presented, and then some
applications of the procedure to Bayesian philosophy of science will
be presented. The relevant background about Bayesianism will be
provided as well. The procedure in question has already been used to
solve dozens of problems in contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory
(these applications were reported in the author's dissertation, and in
several recent publications of the author as well).
____________
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