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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 2 April 2003, vol. 18:27
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
2 April 2003 Stanford Vol. 18, No. 27
______________________________________________________________________
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 2 APRIL 2003 TO 11 APRIL 2003
WEDNESDAY, 2 APRIL 2003
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
Dewayne Hendricks
CEO of the Dandin Group
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Avatar-centric Communication in There"
Chuck Clanton and Jeffrey Ventrella
There
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
See abstract for same talk under CS547
THURSDAY, 3 APRIL 2003
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
"Reverse Priming in Automatic Evaluation: Implications for
Nonconscious Motivation and the (Un)conditionality of
Automatic Processes"
Jack Glasser
UC Berkeley
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 373 (UC Berkeley)
"The Personal Rover Project"
Illah Nourbakhsh
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley CS Seminar
306 Soda Hall, Berkeley
"Innovation for the New Era"
Nicholas M. Donofrio
Senior Vice President, IBM
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Socially Conscious Decision-Making"
Alyssa Glass
PARC
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Human Embryonic Stem Cells: Progress and Promise"
Tom Okarma
President and CEO, Genron
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"The Rise of Silicon Valley and Evolving Images of Technology,
Globalization, and the Information Age"
Chuck Carlson
History, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 4 APRIL 2003
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Stan Klein
Vision Sciences, UC Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
"A Logical Measure of Progress for Planning"
Aarati Parmar
Formal Reasoning Group, CS, Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
"Avatar-centric Communication in There"
Chuck Clanton and Jeffrey Ventrella
There
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
1:15pm Vision Talk
Jordan 420:100
"Functional imaging of syntactic processing: neural correlates
of syntactic movement"
Michal Ben-Shachar
Psychology, Tel Aviv University
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"An Ontological Account of Intention"
Luca Ferrero
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~ferrero/
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Emergence of Structure in Malayalee English"
Tara Mohanan and K P Mohanan
National University of Singapore
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 420:041 (Jordan Hall)
"Open Networks in the Digital Information Age:
The Economic, Legal and Political Importance of Access"
Mark N. Cooper
Director of Research, Consumer Federation of America, Washington, D.C.
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2003
all day Access: Broadband and the Digital Future Who Is In Control?
one day conference
http://www.linefeed.org/~mic/labortech/index.php
Information below
SUNDAY, 6 APRIL 2003
all day Stanford Community Day
http://neighbors.stanford.edu/communityday/
MONDAY, 7 APRIL 2003
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 201
"Animating Dynamics"
Ronen Barzel
Caltech/Pixar
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
7:00pm Stanford Presidential Lecture
Law School, room 290
"Why has critical spirit run out of steam? About Iconoclash
and beyond"
Bruno Latour
Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole nationale
superieure des mines, Paris
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/latour/
TUESDAY, 8 APRIL 2003
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:381T (math corner)
"Latest results in applications of proof-theoretic techniques to
problems in mathematics"
Gregori Mints
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
4:15pm Engineering 200: Research Universities: Stanford, A Case Study
Jordan 420:040
"Appointments and Promotions/Faculty Affairs"
Gail Mahood/Pat Jones
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/DoR/101.html
7:00pm Emerging Technology Group
Cubberley Community Center, A-3, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
"Grid Computing - A Rebuttal"
Richard Taylor
Chair BI SIG
"Telematics - the road ahead"
Jeffrey Zank
http://www.sdforum.org/
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2003
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Jordan Hall 420:100
"Words, Concepts, and Object Individuation in Infancy"
Fei Xu
Northeastern University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
Edward H. Frank
Senior Director, Engineering, Broadcom Corporation
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Free software and hardware for software radios"
Eric Blossom
Blossom Research
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 10 APRIL 2003
12 noon RNI/Stanford Seminar on Theoretical Neuroscience
Arrillaga Alumni Center/Fisher, 326 Galvez St.
"Learning Requires Binding"
Christoph von der Malsburg
Ruhr-University Bochum and USC
http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
http://organic.usc.edu:8376/~dyweb/index.html
http://www.rni.org/events.html
Abstract below
12:15pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"Understanding the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory
(What's language got to do with it?)"
Lokendra Shastri
International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
Title to be announced
Phillippe Goldin
Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
"Active Learning with Multiple Views"
Ion Muslea
USC/ISI
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Challenges in the Computational Discovery of Scientific Knowledge"
Pat Langley
CSLI
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 11 APRIL 2003
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Words, Kinds and Object Individuation in Infancy"
Fei Xu
Psychology, Northeastern U
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
"From Counterculture To Cyberculture:
How The Whole Earth Catalog Brought Us 'Virtual Community'"
Fred Turner
Communication, Stanford
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:30pm Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Scalar Phenomena and Polarity: at the Interface of Grammar
and Pragmatics"
Gennaro Chierchia
Milan
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O- and O+. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 3 April 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 373 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
"The Personal Rover Project"
Illah Nourbakhsh
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/
The Personal Rover Project is a comprehensive effort to develop and
deploy a low-cost rover platform for diverse environments, including
the home. This rover serves as an exploration-centered, creative
outlet for children as they shape the rover's daily and weekly
activities. We argue that such a personal rover will excite and
inspire users about math, science and engineering.
Early project results span low-cost enabling technologies such as
CMUcam, prototype mechanisms capable of climbing steps greatly
exceeding wheel diameter, and educational study results following a
30-student test course, Robotic Autonomy, that we taught at NASA/Ames
this summer.
In this talk, I will describe project activities, including
interaction design, platform research, user testing and educational
evaluation. This project is part of the Toy Robots Initiative, which
I will introduce briefly. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/EDUTOY/
About the speaker: Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Assistant Professor of
Robotics in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He
received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in
1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics
Institute. His current research projects include electric wheelchair
sensing devices, robot learning, theoretical robot architecture,
believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot
locomotion. His past research has included protein structure
prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving
planning and execution and planning and scheduling algorithms. At the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millenium Rapid
Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is a
founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc.
____________
BERKELEY CS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 3 April 2003, 4:00pm
Soda Hall 306 (Berkeley)
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
"Innovation for the New Era"
Nicholas M. Donofrio
Senior Vice President, IBM
*Reception to follow in the Wozniak Lounge*
Advances in physics and chemistry are having a profound impact on the
information technology industry. Quantum computing, nanotechnology and
atomic-scale manipulation of materials are just some of the
advancements that will define the future of computing. The IT industry
will continue to deliver several orders-of-magnitude improvements in
the speed, density and price/performance of the core elements of
computing, including storage, networking, memory, processors and
visualization. Computing will span from massive petaflop-scale systems
to inexpensive devices.
But technology today means far more than materials science. It is, in
fact, transcending all elements of science. And the business models
for IT also are undergoing a paradigm shift. For example, IT today is
being deployed as a service that enables an On Demand computing
environment-- one in which an enterprise can integrate all of its
business processes across the company and with its key partners,
suppliers, and customers. On Demand computing enables enterprises to
respond with agility and speed to any customer demand, market
opportunity, or external threat.
Nick Donofrio, IBM's senior vice president for Technology and
Manufacturing, will outline those emerging technology initiatives and
will detail IBM's unique capability to innovate, invent, integrate and
capitalize on new marketplace trends to arm its customers with
competitive advantage.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 3 April 2003, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Socially Conscious Decision-Making"
Alyssa Glass
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
For individually motivated agents to work collaboratively to satisfy
shared goals, they must make decisions about actions and intentions
that take into account their commitments to group activities. In this
talk, I will examine the role of social consciousness in the process
of reconciling intentions to do group-related actions with other,
conflicting intentions. I will operationalize the notion of social
consciousness and provide a first attempt to formally add social
consciousness to a cooperative decision-making model. I will define a
measure of social consciousness; describe its incorporation into the
SPIRE experimental system, a simulation environment that allows the
process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be studied;
and present results of several experiments that investigate the
interaction in decision-making of measures of group and individual
good.
About the Speaker: Alyssa Glass is a research scientist at the Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC). Her research interests include autonomous
agents, game theory, and economic modeling. At PARC, she has focused
on getting real-world value out of software research, working in areas
such as distributed computing, robotics, Bayesian reasoning,
usability, and cryptography systems. She holds a B.A. in Computer
Science and Economics from Harvard University.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 3 April 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"The Rise of Silicon Valley and Evolving Images of Technology,
Globalization, and the Information Age"
Chuck Carlson
History Department
The popularizing of the term "Silicon Valley" in a series of 1971 Don
Hoefler articles in Electronic News is a well-known story recounted in
nearly every Valley history. Hoefler laid out the basics of how every
subsequent history has approached the rise of the high tech industry
here, emphasizing the innovation and entrepreneurialism of Silicon
Valley engineers/executives, and the remarkable, rapid development of
the region's technology. In the last eight years, representations of
Silicon Valley have frequently been coupled with the idea that the
Valley's technology has fomented a seismic historical shift from one
era in a human history - the industrial revolution - to the dawn of an
"information age." The widespread acceptance of this proposition
played more than a small part in bringing about the meteoric rise and
fall of the dot-com sector and financial crash of 2000-2001. The talk
today will focus on the evolution of Silicon Valley's and technology's
evolving images over the past quarter century and how those images
relate to or clash with the high tech industry's leading role in
establishing global production networks that often stand in stark
contradiction to popular and academic perceptions of Silicon Valley.
The issues and ideas presented in this talk substantially reflect the
core material of the Symbolic Systems 151 "Digital Divides" I will be
teaching this spring.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 4 April 2003, 12 noon-1:15pm
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"A Logical Measure of Progress for Planning"
Aarati Parmar
Formal Reasoning Group, CS, Stanford
Planning is the task of finding a sequence of actions to achieve a
goal state from an initial one. It is a central problem of AI. The
most successful kinds of planners to date are those that employ
heuristic search. In this paradigm, the problem of planning is
reduced to a search over sequences of actions, where the search is
guided by a numerical function which estimates the distance to the
goal state.
We argue that this numerical function is a poor candidate for guiding
the construction of some plans. Specifically, generating plans for
everyday tasks (such as running errands or doing housework) require
little heuristic search; there is usually an obvious measure of
progress that indicates the next logical action that will get one
closer to achieving one's goals. Furthermore, this measure of
progress is not a number indicating the number of steps left to the
goal. Instead, it is some concept indicating which subgoals need to
be completed next.
In this talk, we present a logical formalization of this measure of
progress, and show how it can be used to solve planning problems,
entirely without search. There are different flavors of measures of
progress, and we present these different kinds as well.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 4 April 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
(also same talk is at 2 April 2003, 4:15pm in Gates B03)
"Avatar-centric Communication in There"
Chuck Clanton and Jeffrey Ventrella
There
http://www.there.com/
There is a virtual world, not a game. Virtual worlds offer a grand
bait and switch. People are attracted by activities, games, shopping,
exploring. They stay because they have made friends and become
involved in the community. There are many ways to satisfy these needs
on the internet that do not require a 3d virtual world and an
avatar. How does an avatar add to communication? The EE380 talk on 2
April describes facial and body expressions, gaze, chat, and how these
are all integrated in There's avatar-centric communication. The CS547
talk on 4 April describes the cinematographer and chatprop design in
There.
About the speakers: Chuck Clanton and Jeffrey Ventrella are principle
designers at There. They were the lead designers of avatar-centric
communication in There. Chuck Clanton worked in user interface design
of "serious" software for many years before crossing over to games. He
worked on Populous the Beginning, Dungeon Keeper 2, Sim Theme Park,
and the first Harry Potter games, all at Bullfrog in the UK, before
joining There. He has taught at Stanford, and promoted the sharing of
design knowledge between the HCI and game design
communities. chac@aratar.com
Jeffrey Ventrella has a MS degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a MFA
from Syracuse University. He has held faculty positions at UCSD,
Tufts, and Syracuse. He is an internationally known writer on
Artificial Life. He worked at Rocket Science Games prior to founding
There with Will Harvey.
____________
VISION TALK
on Friday, 4 April 2003, 1:15pm
Jordan 420:100
"Functional imaging of syntactic processing:
neural correlates of syntactic movement"
Michal Ben-Shachar
Psychology, Tel Aviv University
The neural substrate underlying syntactic processing has been
frequently studied using functional neuroimaging, by comparing syntax
with other levels of analysis such as semantic processing. Many new
brain regions involved in each level were identified in this line of
research. However, across studies, it is hard to find consistent
patterns of activation related to a given level. In this talk I will
take a different approach, by isolating a specific, linguistically
defined syntactic process and examining its neural correlates. I will
present evidence from three fMRI experiments conducted with healthy
Hebrew speakers. Syntactic movement, a central concept in linguistic
theory, was manipulated in three Hebrew constructions (object relative
clauses, topicalization and wh-questions) using two different tasks
(comprehension and grammaticality judgment). We show that syntactic
movement activates a consistent set of brain regions across
construction and task. Activated regions include left inferior frontal
gyrus, left ventral precentral sulcus, and bilateral posterior
superior temporal sulcus. These regions were not activated by other
syntactic contrasts, demonstrating the specificity of the movement
effect. The results are integrated with lesion studies, and suggest
that syntactic movement constitutes a neurally relevant linguistic
generalization.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 4 April 2003, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Emergence of Structure in Malayalee English"
Tara Mohanan and K P Mohanan
National University of Singapore
Instances of a target language contrast being lost in a second language system
are well known (e.g. loss of contrast between [r] and [l] in the English of
many Japanese and Chinese speakers). The converse of this phenomenon, however,
is unexpected (e.g. a hypothetical case of American speakers of Japanese with a
contrast between [r] and [l] in their Japanese). Yet, precisely such a
phenomenon is found in M(alayalee) E(nglish) (henceforth ME), which exhibits a
contrast between alveolar (n, l, r) and retroflex (N, L, R) consonants:
a. slowness [sloonas]
bonus [booNas]
b. lawless [lOOlas]
folly [fOOLi]
c. very [weri]
merry [meRi]
While the ME contrast between retroflex and alveolar consonants is
rooted in the parallel contrast in Malayalam, the patterns of
distribution and alternation intertwined with the contrast in ME are
not found in Malayalam. For instance, the contrast in (a) and (b) is
crucially tied up with morphology: in ME, nasals and laterals are
never retroflex morpheme-initially, and they are never alveolar after
front vowels within the same morpheme. The latter restriction is not
found in Malayalam. Alveolars and retroflexes in ME also exhibit
patterns of alternation not found in Malayalam, as illustrated by the
pair take [Teek] and intake [inteek].
In this talk, we will lay out the facts of some of the patterns in ME
that illustrate 'persistence' and 'emergence' in a second language
system. We will focus particularly on the patterns of the
alveolar-retroflex contrast in ME, and provide an analysis for the
facts within a version of Optimality Theory that, in addition to the
ranking of universal constraints and stipulations on individual
morphemes, permits language particular statements that (i) specify the
domains, loci, and triggers in universally underspecified constraints,
(ii) select from universally specified options in a constraint, and
(iii) (de)active universal constraints.
The facts and analysis of the patterns of distribution and alternation
of the alveolar-retroflex contrast are of special interest to the
theory of language contact. We will show that the patterns under
consideration cannot be explained in terms of a theory that views
patterns of a second language system (the offspring) as a mere
combination of the patterns of the target language (superstrate), the
first language (substrate), and universals. Instead, we will argue for
an analysis in which the unique properties of an offspring system that
distinguish it from its parents evolve as a response to the
conflicting pulls from the parent languages, within a universal
grammar space.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Friday, 4 April 2003, 3:15pm
Bldg. 420:041 (Jordan Hall)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
(note unusual time, date, and location)
"Open Networks in the Digital Information Age:
The Economic, Legal and Political Importance of Access"
Mark N. Cooper, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Consumer Federation of America, Washington, D.C.
The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) is the nation's largest consumer
advocacy organization. Among many other issues, CFA has been heavily
involved in political and legal debates concerning the regulation of the
Internet and telecommunications industries. The CFA's director of
research, Mark Cooper, argues that network industries tend toward
monopolization, and has written and lectured widely on the need to protect
open access to the Internet and freedom from monopoly power. He will
discuss CFA's and other organizations' pending lawsuit against the FCC
challenging its decision last year to classify cable broadband as an
"information service" instead of a "telecommunication service". This case
has far-reaching implications for the future of the Internet, which was
built on the premise that service providers must give their customers
equal access to all content. The ruling opens the way for the Internet to
become more like cable television: a proprietary, filtered service in
which providers can discriminate against or block access to some content
and favor their own, and it may be extended to DSL and other Internet
providers in the future. Dr. Cooper's presentation will introduce these
issues, and will be followed up on Saturday by a day-long conference at
Stanford on related issues, entitled "Access: Broadband and the Digital
Future"
http://www.labortech.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=3
____________
ACCESS: BROADBAND AND THE DIGITAL FUTURE
WHO IS IN CONTROL?
on Saturday, 5 April 2003, 9:00am - 6:00pm
Jordan Hall, Lower Level
http://www.linefeed.org/~mic/labortech/index.php
Representatives of non-governmental organizations, labor unions,
grassroots citizen groups, and universities are gathering at Stanford
this weekend to discuss the growing curtailment of public access to
broadband technologies due to changes in law, policy, and business
practices, as well as potential responses that can empower concerned
citizens. Keynote speakers will include Mark N. Cooper of the Consumer
Federation of America and Peter B. Collins of the American Federation
of Television and Radio Artists. Workshop topics include
Privatization and Municipalization of Telecommunications; Privacy,
Spying, and Censorship; Public Access Cable Channels and
Interconnects; "Digital Divides" and Discrimination; Workers' Rights
in New Technology Industries; Wireless Networks (Wi-Fi) and
Micro-Radio; Defending Access to Alternative Media; Global Internet
Governance; Cable Internet Regulation; and Labor Video and a Labor
Channel. Registration is $15-25 (sliding scale), $10 for students,
with no one turned away for lack of funds. More information is
available at the conference website:
http://www.linefeed.org/~mic/labortech/index.php .
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-VISION-ROBOTICS
on Monday, 7 April 2003, 4:15pm
TCSeq 201
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
"Animating Dynamics"
Ronen Barzel
Caltech/Pixar
Dynamic simulation can generate complex and realistic motion
automatically, freeing the modeler or animator from worrying about the
details. But what if you care about the details? For Pixar's
meticulously choreographed animations, pure dynamics simulation alone
doesn't necessarily deliver what the director wants. This talk will
discuss three different approaches to provide the controls we need for
dynamic (or dynamic-seeming) behavior to satisfy production
aesthetics. First, "Faking Dynamics" -- a non-dynamic technique we
used to animate the Slinky Dog and other Toy Story models. Next,
"Pseudo Dynamics", a partially-dynamic technique used to animate the
rain drops in "A Bug's Life". Finally, "Plausible Motion", a new
approach that is just beginning to be researched in the computer
graphics community.
About the Speaker: Ronen Barzel joined Pixar in 1993 to work on Toy
Story in various roles, in particular as a modeler with an emphasis on
ropes, cords & the Slinky Dog, and as a member of the lighting team
and engineer of lighting methodology and software. He has since worked
on R&D of modeling, lighting and animation tools, and in technical
development for the upcoming film Finding Nemo. Other stints include
Lucasfilm (back in the pre-Pixar days), SGI (design team for Inventor
2.0), a visiting position at the University of Washington, and
currently wrapping up as a professeur invit at Ecole Polytechnique in
France. He has an ScB in math/physics & ScM in Computer Science. from
Brown, and a PhD in Computer Science from Caltech, where he worked on
"dynamic constraints" and physically-based modeling. He is the
editor-in-chief of the Journal of Graphics Tools.
____________
RNI/STANFORD SEMINAR SERIES IN THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE
on Thursday, 10 April 2003, 12 noon - 1pm
Arrillaga Alumni Center/Fisher, 326 Galvez St.
http://www.rni.org/events.html
"Learning Requires Binding"
Christoph von der Malsburg
Institute for Neuroinformatics, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
and
Computer Science Department and Program in Neuroscience
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
http://organic.usc.edu:8376/~dyweb/
A major problem of neuroscience is our difficulty to understand the
ability of animals to learn from experience. The difficulty becomes
apparent when we try to reproduce the process in silicon. Learning in
artificial neural networks, for instance, is restricted to input
domains of no more than about 100 bits per input pattern, whereas our
senses deliver millions of bits per pattern. I will argue, on the
basis of in-silicon experiments, that the problem is due to a
deadlock: signal statistics is context-dependent, so that learning is
not possible without prior recognition of context, while recognition
of context, in turn, seems to require prior learning. I will show in
computer experiments that the deadlock can be broken by neural graph
matching, assigning a central role to a potent signal-binding
mechanism and rapid reversible synaptic plasticity. I will conclude
by discussing issues raised (at Stanford and elsewhere) to call
temporal signal binding in question.
About the Speaker: Dr. Malsburg received his Ph.D. in Physics from the
University of Heidelberg in 1970. From 1974 to 1987, he was a Senior
Member of the Scientific Staff of the Department of Neurobiology at
the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. He heads the
Institute for Neuroinformatics (together with Prof. Gregor Scheoner)
at Ruhr-University Bochum and the Computational Vision Lab at the USC
in Los Angeles. His research interests involve: (1) computational
studies of the formation of maps and feature detectors in the nervous
system; (2) development, application and experimental verification,
both neurobiological and computational, of the dynamic link
architecture, which uses changes in synaptic connectivity to conduct
pattern processing as well as long-term storage; (3) problems in
vision including invariant representation and recognition of objects,
implementation of low-level vision problems in dynamic link
architecture, and presentation of scenes in hierarchical nets. Other
problems in neural networks include spatial coordinate representation,
adaptive coordination between different (e.g., visual-motor)
coordinate systems, and the representation and generation of motor
patterns in neural nets.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 10 April 2003, 12:15pm-1:30pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Understanding the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory
(What's language got to do with it?)"
Lokendra Shastri
International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri/
We readily remember events and situations in our daily lives and
acquire memories of specific facts by watching a telecast, reading a
newspaper, or participating in a dialogue. This remarkable "one-shot"
mnemonic ability poses a challenge for cognitive and computational
neuroscience.
It is reasonable to assume that the construal of an experience (or
utterance) in terms of an event is initially expressed as a pattern of
activity over distributed neural circuits in the brain. This
expression, however, is per force transient, since it must change
continually as we interact with the environment. Hence, the transient,
activity-based expression of a memorable event must be transformed
rapidly into a persistent structural encoding, or else it would be
lost. How does the brain perform this rapid transformation?
Events and situations are relational instances and not mere feature
vectors. What is the transient, activity-based representation of a
relational instance? What is the persistent, structure-based encoding
of a relational instance?
How do memories of specific events respond to partial cues, yet
exhibit strong pattern separation? How do such memories interact with
representations of general semantic knowledge during memory retrieval
and inference?
I will review ongoing work on biologically grounded computational
modeling of memory and reasoning that attempts to address these
questions, present some results, and discuss some predictions about
the representation and processing of relational information in the
brain. Some of the predictions are supported by recent empirical
findings, some others point the way to interesting experimental
studies.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 10 April 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
"Active Learning with Multiple Views"
Ion Muslea
University of Southern California
Despite the practical success of machine learning in many real world
domains, labeling the training data is time consuming, tedious, and
error prone. In this talk, I focus on reducing the need for labeled
data in multi-view learning tasks. The key characteristic of
multi-view tasks is that the target concept can be independently
learned within different views (i.e., disjoint sets of features that
are sufficient to learn a concept). For instance, a robot can avoid
obstacles based on sonar, laser, or vision sensors; similarly, a Web
page can be classified either based on the words in the document or
based on the words in the HTML hyperlinks pointing to it.
In order to reduce the need for labeled data, I use active learning
algorithms that detect and ask the user to label only the most
informative examples in a domain. I introduce a family of multi-view
active learners that are based on the idea of learning from mistakes.
More precisely, they query examples on which the views predict a
different label: if two views disagree, one of them is guaranteed to
make a mistake. I also show that existing multi-view learners perform
unreliably if the views are inadequate. To cope with this problem, I
introduce two complementary solutions. First, by interleaving
bootstrapping and active learning, I obtain a novel multi-view learner
that has a robust behavior over a wide spectrum of domains that have
inadequate views. Second, I introduce a meta-learning algorithm that
is first trained on several solved learning tasks and then predicts
whether or not the views are "sufficiently adequate" for solving a
new, unseen learning task. I evaluate these three novel algorithms on
a variety of real-world domains, from information extraction and text
classification to advertisement removal and discourse tree parsing.
The empirical results show that my algorithms consistently outperform
existing state-of-the-art learners.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 10 April 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Challenges in the Computational Discovery
of Scientific Knowledge"
Pat Langley
Computational Learning Laboratory, CSLI
http://cll.stanford.edu/~langley/
The growing amount of scientific data has led to the increased use of
computational discovery methods to understand and interpret them.
However, most work has relied on knowledge-lean techniques like
clustering and classification learning, which produce descriptive
rather than explanatory models, and it has utilized formalisms
developed in AI or statistics, so that results seldom make contact
with current theories or scientific notations. In this talk, I present
a new approach to computational discovery that encodes explanatory
scientific models as sets of quantitative processes, simulates these
models' behavior over time, incorporates background knowledge to
constrain model construction, and induces these models from
time-series data in a robust manner. I illustrate this framework on
data and models from Earth science and microbiology, two domains in
which explanatory process accounts occur frequently. In closing, I
describe our progress toward an interactive software environment for
the construction, evaluation, and revision of such explanatory
scientific models.
This talk describes joint work with Kevin Arrigo, Stephen Bay, Lonnie
Chrisman, Dileep George, Andrew Pohorille, Javier Sanchez, Dan
Shapiro, and Jeff Shrager.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 11 April 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"From Counterculture To Cyberculture:
How The Whole Earth Catalog Brought Us 'Virtual Community'"
Fred Turner
Communication, Stanford
In 1993, just as the Internet was emerging into public consciousness,
journalist Howard Rheingold brought a new phrase to public discussions
of computer-mediated communication: "virtual community." Within
months, the phrase had been taken up by researchers, programmers, and
corporate CEO's. For a time, virtual communities seemed poised to
become one of the defining social formations - and business plans --
of the Internet age. Yet, the notion of "virtual communities"
substantially predates the public emergence of computer
networking. This presentation traces the origins of the concept in the
Whole Earth network of publications and people. Drawing on archival
research and extensive interviews, the presentation will show how the
notion of virtual community first emerged as a day-to-day "contact
language" on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL). It will then
show how both the communities who used the early WELL system and the
system itself represented networks and networking habits of mind first
developed around the Whole Earth Catalog some twenty years earlier.
By tracing the migration of countercultural ideas and practices into
the digital realm, I hope to raise questions about the role culture
plays in shaping our perceptions of emerging digital technologies.
There will be lots of time for discussion.
About the Speaker: Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor in Stanford's
Department of Communication whose teaching and research focus on the
cultural contexts of computing. A cultural historian, he is the author
of Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (1996 & 2001).
He is currently researching the impact of Stewart Brand and the Whole
Earth network on contemporary visions of cyberculture and the "new"
economy.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 11 April 2003, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Scalar Phenomena and Polarity:
at the Interface of Grammar and Pragmatics"
Gennaro Chierchia
Milan
Over the recent past, there has been substantive progress in our
understanding of the semantics of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs); i.e.
rather convincing hypotheses have been put forth that make us readily
see why they have the peculiar distribution they have (e.g. Kadmon and
Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998). There have also been, even
more recently, important breakthroughs in our understanding of Free
Choice Items (e.g. Dayal 1998, Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). It is well
known that there is a robust link between NPIs and FCIs, as extensive
typological studies reveal that roughly one half of the languages use
the very same morphemes for the two type of items (while the other
half resorts to separate series - cf. e.g. Haspelmath 1996). The
questions that we will address against this background are the
following:
i. How far along are we in getting an integrated view of FC vs. NP
phenomena?
ii. Many approaches appeal to implicatures in connection with
polarity items. What role do they play?
iii. How does pragmatics interact with "core" grammar?
____________
END MATERIAL
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