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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 29 October 2003, vol. 19:9
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
29 October 2003 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 9
______________________________________________________________________
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 29 OCTOBER 2003 TO 7 NOVEMBER 2003
WEDNESDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2003
12 noon Brain Lunch-Seminar
Bldg. 380:383N
"On general architecture of Universal Learning Neurocomputers-II:
hierarchical representation of associations"
Victor Eliashberg
Universal Learning Systems
http://math.stanford.edu/seminars.htm
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Bldg. 380:381U
"How children infer unobserved causes"
Alison Gopnik
UC Berkeley
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
"Auditory perception and auditory-visual interactions"
Gregg Recanzone
UC Davis
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ291, SRI International
"Graphics, Vision and HCI Research at MERL"
Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL)
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley EECS Distinguished Colloquium
306 Soda Hall (Berkeley)
"Beyond Smart Dust - Tinkerbell and Pixie Dust"
Norman Tien
UC Davis
http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/Seminars/
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"What's New in Python: Not your usual list of new features"
Guido van Rossum
Elemental Security and python.org
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 30 OCTOBER 2003
12 noon Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
"The Agent Focus voice in Mayan languages"
Judith Tonhauser
Stanford
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
12:15pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"The Functional Organization of the Human Ventral Stream and
its Relation to Face and Object Recognition"
Kalanit Grill-Spector
Psychology, Stanford University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Cordura 100
"IP Communications"
Andrew Keen, Thomas Wu
VidiTel, Santa Cruz Networks
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"What is 'De Re' Thought?"
Jim Pryor
Princeton University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/html/events/deptevents.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Music Controllers: does the hardware of interaction affect the style"
Bill Verplank
Music, Stanford University
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 101
"Distributed Compression: Applications To Distributed Sensor
Networks And A New Video-Over-Wireless Paradigm"
Kannan Ramchandran
UC Berkeley
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Synaptic Circuits Serving Smell"
Jeffry Isaacson
Neuroscience, UC San Diego
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 31 OCTOBER 2003
11:00am Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
"Sustainable Alternatives"
Amory Lovins
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
11:00am SRI STAR-Lab Seminars
EJ 124 (SRI International)
"Structured Language Models"
Ciprian Chelba
Microsoft
http://www.speech.sri.com/cgi-bin/run-cpp?private/seminars.html.cpp
Abstract below
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Where the Action Is. Neural and Functional Considerations"
Anjan Chatterjee
Neurology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, U. of Pennsylvania
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12 noon Ethics@Noon
Bldg. 100:101k
"Cyberlibertarianism in the Wake of the Dot-Com Collapse"
Eric Roberts
School of Engineering
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/noon.htm
12 noon UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"A relation between memory and auditory and visual attention"
Erv Hafter
http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/ucbso/oxyopia/oxy_current.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
"Graphics, Vision and HCI Research at MERL"
Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi (MERL)
http://www.merl.com/people/raskar/raskar.html
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
2003 Undergraduate Summer Research Report
Anna Cueni
Project Title: "Predicting the Dative Alternation"
Under the supervision of Professor Joan Bresnan
Nadiya Figueroa
Project Title: "English" and "Creole" Variables in Caribbean Speech"
Under the supervision of Professor John Rickford
Satoko Kakihara
Project Title: "The Language of Advertising"
Under the supervision of Professors Will Leben and Peter Sells
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER 2003
3:30pm Social Lab
Jordan Hall 420:050
"The Self And Self-Monitoring in Stereotype-To-Behavior Effects"
Christian Wheeler
Marketing, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#social_lab
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 200
"A Small Biped Entertainment Robot Exploring Attractive Applications"
Yoshihiro Kuroki
Entertainment Robot Company, Sony
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER 2003
3:00pm CSLI Tea
Cordura Greenhouse
3:30pm UC Berkeley Computer Vision Seminar
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
"Video analysis: methods and applications"
Vittorio Murino
University of Verona
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/vision/schedule.html
4:00pm Berkeley International Computer Science Institute
ICSI, Rm 607 (UC Berkeley)
"Visible Language Programming: Advanced User-Interface and
Information-Visualization Design Issues"
Aaron Marcus
Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc.
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/talks/
Abstract below
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:380F (math corner)
"Decision methods for arithmetical universal-existential
sentences in detail"
Jesse Alama and Patrick Girard
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
5:30pm Syntax Workshop
Margaret Jacks 460:126
"Logical and typological arguments for Radical Construction Grammar"
William Croft
University of Manchester
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER 2003
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Bldg. 380:381U
"The brain bases of dyslexia"
John Gabrieli
Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
3:00pm History of Science Colloquium
Bldg. 200:105
"Ways of Knowing:
Reconfiguring the Relations of Science, Art and Museums"
John Pickstone
Wellcome Unit, and Centre for the History of Science,
Technology & Medicine, University of Manchester
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/colloquia.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Computer Forensics:
Corporate Fraud and the Discovery of Electronic Evidence"
Joseph S. ("Joe") Anastasi
Deloitte Toche Tohmatsu
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2003
3:30pm UC Berkeley Cognition, Brain, and Behavior Colloquium
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"Functional Properties of Neural Circuits for Vision"
Marty Usrey
UC Davis
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/admin/colloquia.html
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"The Interiority of Mind and the Publicity of Meaning"
Barry Smith
Birkbeck School of Philosophy
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/html/events/deptevents.html
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
Title to be announced
Dan Klein
Computer Science, Stanford
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Simulating motion in language and thought"
Teenie Matlock
Psychology, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 101
"Log-penalized Linear Regression"
Joshua Sweekind-Singer
Stanford University
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"'Interactions between Glutamate Transporters and Metabotropic
Glutamate'
Receptors at Excitatory Synapses in the Cerebellar Cortex"
Thomas Otis
UCLA Medical School, Neurobiology Department
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2003
10:00am SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ291, SRI International
"Turning Probabilistic Reasoning into Programming"
Avi Pfeffer
Harvard University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
12 noon Ethics@Noon
Bldg. 100:101k
"Who Owns Life?"
David Magnus
Center for Biomedical Ethics
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/noon.htm
12 noon Diversity in Language Seminar
Bldg. 260:252 German Studies Library
"A Typological Perspective of the Chinese Serial Verb Constructions"
Chaofen Sun
Asian Languages, Stanford
http://dlcl.stanford.edu/research/workgroups/diversity.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
Title to be announced
Tom Zimmerman
IBM Almaden Research
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/zimmerman/tzim.html
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
3:00pm Logical Methods in the Humanities
Baker Room, Stanford Humanities Center
"Convergence in the Philosophy of Mathematics"
Ed Zalta
CSLI/Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Drift in Evolutionary Phonology: Patterns of Austronesian Syncope"
Juliette Blevins
University of California, Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: critical shortage of O+ and AB+.
shortage of O- and A+. For an appointment:
http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes
an hour of your time.
As you may be aware Chloe Chang, the 21 month old daughter of
Prof. Gordan Chang and Vicki Sandin, is suffering from leukemia and in
need of a bone marrow transplant. On Thursday and Friday, 30 and 31
October 2003 from 11am to 5pm at White Plaza there is a bone marrow
donor registration drive. It takes only a few minutes. If interested
see
http://www.stanford.edu/group/lambdas/aadp/images/Emails/CampusEmail.html
to find out more and sign up for a time slot. Note this drive is only
collecting blood samples for typing for the national bone marrow
registry. Though the drive is aimed at people of Asian ancestry all
are welcome. Your marrow might save the life of Chloe or it might
save the life of someone else.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 29 October 2003, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ291, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Graphics, Vision and HCI Research at MERL"
Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL)
http://www.merl.com/people/raskar/
As computing has moved off the desktop, research in interaction,
computer graphics, computer vision and usability has become more
interdisciplinary and requires teams of very diverse composition. I
will illustrate this point with a brief description of selected
projects at MERL. They include algorithms for smart elevators,
quantifying presence and flow of people, multi-user touch screens, LED
based communication and chemical sensing. I will also describe my own
work in intelligent locale-aware mobile projectors for interaction,
display and augmentation. (The projects above represent the research
efforts of many members of the MERL staff. For appropriate credits,
please visit the MERL web site, http://www.merl.com .)
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 30 October 2003, 12 noon
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"The 'Agent Focus' voice in Mayan languages"
Judith Tonhauser
Stanford University
Mayan languages have a rich voice system which includes the active,
passive, middle and antipassive voice. More than half of the 29 Mayan
languages realize an additional voice, the so-called 'Agent Focus'
voice, in content questions, focus constructions, and relative
clauses. My aim in this talk is to provide an explanation for why an
additional voice occurs in this particular set of constructions, and
what the function of this voice is.
My explanation for Yucatec Maya is based on the particular way in
which voice and argument realization interact with the discourse
status of event participants in Yucatec Maya. In particular, my
proposal is based on the following two (independent) findings: (i) a
transitive verb can only be realized in the transitive active voice if
the agent is the current discourse topic, and, (ii) the constructions
in which the 'Agent Focus' voice occurs realize a 'focus' event
participant. Since a 'focus' event participant cannot be the discourse
topic in Yucatec Maya, a consequence of (i) and (ii) is that the
transitive active voice cannot be used to realize a 'focus' event
participant that is the agent of a transitive verb. Hence, I argue
that the Yucatec Mayan 'Agent Focus' voice (which serves to realize
'focus' event participants that are agents of transitive predications)
'fills a gap' in the voice system of this language.
In the remainder of the talk I discuss the wider implications of this
analysis. I examine the extent to which my analysis of the 'Agent
Focus' voice can account for the 'Agent Focus' voice of other Mayan
languages, and to what extent it helps understand the historical
development of the Proto-Mayan 'Agent Focus' voice to the individual
Mayan languages (including those Mayan languages which don't have an
'Agent Focus' voice anymore).
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 30 October 2003, 12:15pm-1:30pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
with burritos at 12
"The Functional Organization of the Human Ventral Stream
and its Relation to Face and Object Recognition"
Kalanit Grill-Spector
Psychology, Stanford
Humans recognize objects and faces at an astonishing speed and with
remarkable ease. However, the functional organization of the system
that enables this remarkable human ability is not well understood. I
will describe a series of imaging (fMRI) and psychophysical
experiments that we have done that investigate the nature of object
representations in higher level visual areas and the perceptual
processes (or algorithms) that are carried out on these
representations. Overall, our data provide important insights and
constraints on theoretical and computational models of human object
and face recognition.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 30 October 2003, 4:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
"Distributed Compression: Applications To Distributed Sensor
Networks And A New Video-Over-Wireless Paradigm"
Kannan Ramchandran
UC Berkeley
Emerging applications like large-scale wireless sensor and ad hoc
networks, and wireless multimedia telephony are driving the confluence
of computing, communicating, and networking. Distributed signal
processing plays a key role in this revolution, not in isolation, but
rather as an interdisciplinary systems component, integrated with
communications, information theory, coding theory, and networking
protocols.
In this talk, we will focus on the problem of distributed compression,
or so-called side-information coding, highlighting the foundational
role of multi-user information theory. We will highlight the theory,
practice, and intuition behind this framework, and address some of our
recent work in this area in the context of distributed sensor
networks. We will also describe a new video coding paradigm dubbed
PRISM (Power-efficient, Robust, high-compression, Syndrome-based
Multimedia coding), whose architecture, in stark contrast to that
driving current standards-based video codes (like MPEG), allows for a
nearly arbitrary shift of computational complexity from the encoder to
the decoder, making it ideally suited to the emerging class of
"uplink" video transmission scenarios in wireless multimedia and
surveillance systems. The theoretical foundation for PRISM is based on
an extension of side-information coding under an "unknown state of
nature" (sort of a "universal" Wyner-Ziv coding framework), which we
will describe, together with a practical video codec built on these
principles, with very promising preliminary results. Time permitting,
we will show "snippets" of our work on the important supporting role
of distributed compression in other distributed sensor network signal
processing tasks including distributed sampling, distributed
estimation, and robust transmission.
About the Speaker: Kannan Ramchandran is an Associate Professor in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he joined in 1999. He received his
Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1993, and was an Assistant Professor
in the ECE Department at the University of Illinois from 1993 to
1999. He was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs from
1984 to 1990. His awards include two Best Paper Awards from the IEEE
Signal Processing Society, the Okawa Foundation Prize at Berkeley in
2001, the Hank Magnusky Scholar award at Illinois in 1998, the Eli
Jury best thesis award at Columbia University in 1993, and numerous
research awards including the NSF CAREER award. His research interests
include distributed signal processing, multiuser information and
communication theory, image processing, wavelets and multiresolution
signal processing, and unified algorithms for signal processing,
communications, and networking.
____________
SRI STAR-LAB SEMINAR
on Friday, 31 October 2003, 11:00am
EJ 124 (SRI International)
http://www.speech.sri.com/cgi-bin/run-cpp?private/seminars.html.cpp
"Structured Language Models"
Ciprian Chelba
Microsoft
The talk presents an attempt at using the syntactic structure in
natural language for improved language models for large vocabulary
speech recognition. The structured language model merges techniques in
automatic parsing and language modeling using an original
probabilistic parameterization of a shift-reduce parser. A maximum
likelihood re-estimation procedure belonging to the class of
expectation-maximization algorithms is employed for training the
model. Experiments on the Wall Street Journal, Switchboard and
Broadcast News corpora show improvement in both perplexity and word
error rate --- word lattice re-scoring --- over the standard 3-gram
language model. Further experiments investigate the portability of
syntactic structure across domains --- Wall Street Journal to Air
Travel Information Systems --- as well as the use of the structured
language model for information extraction from text. This work
investigates the use of frequency-localized temporal patterns of the
speech signal for developing robust front-end for Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR).
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 31 October 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Graphics, Vision and HCI Research at MERL"
Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi (MERL)
http://www.merl.com/people/raskar/raskar.html
As computing has moved off the desktop, research in interaction,
computer graphics, computer vision and usability has become more
interdisciplinary and requires teams of very diverse composition.
I will illustrate this point with a brief description of selected
projects at MERL. They include algorithms for smart elevators,
quantifying presence and flow of people, multi-user touch screens, LED
based communication and chemical sensing. I will also describe my own
work in intelligent locale-aware mobile projectors for interaction,
display and augmentation.
About the Speaker: Ramesh Raskar joined MERL as a Research Scientist
in 2000. Prior to that, he was at the Office of the Future group at
UNC's Computer Graphics lab. As part of his dissertation, he developed
a framework for projector based 3D graphics by treating a projector as
the dual of a camera. Current work includes topics from
non-photorealistic rendering, computer vision and intelligent user
interfaces. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.
____________
CS528: BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-VISION-ROBOTICS
on Monday, 3 November 2003, 4:15pm
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
"A Small Biped Entertainment Robot Exploring Attractive Applications"
Yoshihiro Kuroki
Entertainment Robot Company, Sony Corporation
We have been developing a small biped entertainment robot SDR (Sony
Dream Robot) since 1997. In November 2000 we proposed the first
prototype SDR-3X. It made demonstrative dynamic and attractive motion
performances using the key technologies such as the advanced and
integrated robot actuator ISA (Intelligent Servo Actuator) and the
Whole Body Cooperative Dynamic Motion Control. QRIO (SDR-4X II) is the
latest and most advanced model and has important new capabilities such
as a safe design and functions for safe physical interaction with
human. An advanced motion control system, Real-time Integrated
Adaptive Motion Control using the enhanced ISA and sensors has been
developed. It enables real-time adaptive motion control against
external force, real-time adaptive and controlled falling over, and
standing up on a floor. In addition, we have also developed a motion
creating software system that allows non-specialists to design and
create attractive motion performances including biped walking in
synchrony with music. Also, Real-world Space Perception Technology and
Multi-modal Human Interaction Technology have been developed to
utilize the functions of 3D visual recognition and detection of
individuals by face and speech recognition. In addition, speech
synthesis and singing voice production are also developed for
enhancement of entertainment applications. Some attractive motion
performances are introduced as possible applications by real QRIOs.
About the Speaker: Yoshihiro Kuroki received the B. S. and
M. S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Waseda University, Japan,
in 1975 and 1977, respectively. He joined Sony Corporation from 1977
and was engaged in development of the high-speed assembly robot and
intelligent robot systems. In 1997 he started a research project on a
small biped entertainment robot, SDR in Sony. Now he is a general
manager of Sony's Entertainment Robot Company. He is a member of the
Society of Biomechanisms Japan and the Robotics Society of Japan.
____________
BERKELEY INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
on Tuesday, 4 November 2003, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Main Lecture Hall, ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/talks/
"Visible Language Programming: Advanced User-Interface and
Information-Visualization Design Issues"
Aaron Marcus
Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc.
User-Interface (UI) and knowledge visualization development may be
described as "visible language programming". Important and
significant challenges in this decade for user-interface design
include baby-face (small UI); design, and mass media metadata
management by the masses. Examples will be shown of attempts to
optimize and innovate regarding effective visual communication of
metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance
under these challenges.
About the Speaker: Aaron Marcus was educated in physics at Princeton
University and in graphic design at Yale University. He taught at
Princeton University for nine years. In 1982 he founded Aaron Marcus
and Associates, Inc., a leading user-interface and
information-visualization design firm, whose first project was a
research grant from DARPA to improve the visualization of the C
programming language.
____________
SYNTAX WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 4 November 2003, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
"Logical and typological arguments for Radical Construction Grammar"
William Croft
University of Manchester/Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Radical Construction Grammar is a model of construction grammar. I
will take as a starting point the hypotheses of "vanilla construction
grammar" and briefly outline the differences between it and RCG.
Vanilla construction grammar makes the following hypotheses about the
nature of syntactic representation: (i) a uniform representation of
grammatical structures - constructions - as symbolic units of varying
degrees of schematicity and complexity; (ii) organization of
constructions into taxonomic networks (a third hypothesis shared by
some but not all models is a usage-based approach to grammatical
organization). RCG proposes three further hypotheses about grammatical
representation: (a) constructions are the basic units of
representation; grammatical categories are defined in terms of the
constructions in which they occur and in terms of semantic maps on
conceptual space; (b) syntactic relations between elements of a
construction are unnecessary given the presence of symbolic relations
between the elements and the components of the construction's semantic
structure; (c) syntactic constructions do not form discrete
language-independent structural types, but vary across languages along
dimensions of syntactic space. For each hypothesis of RCG, logical
arguments and (a tiny sample of) typological arguments in favor will
be presented.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 5 November 2003, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"The New Forensics --
Corporate Fraud and the Discovery of Electronic Evidence"
Joe Anastasi
Deloitte -- Forensics Investigations and Disputes Global Practice Leader
Corporate Fraud is alive and well -- and so is the business of
investigating it.
Joe Anastasi, author of The New Forensics: Investigating Corporate
Fraud and the Theft of Intellectual Property, will share his insights
into his investigations of white-collar crime and cybercrime. Via
business forensics, vignettes, and actual crime reports, Anastasi will
describe how digital detectives use sophisticated tools, such as
"adaptive pattern-recognition software" (spawned from NSA and CIA
predecessor applications), to shine the light on such shady dealings
as the theft of trade secrets and money laundering. Anastasi will also
cover the use of data mining as an investigative tool, and the use of
sophisticated anomaly-detection software to ferret out fraud.
About the speaker: Joe Anastasi serves as the Global Leader of
Deloitte's Forensics Investigation practice, which operates several
cybercrime computer forensics labs located around the world. He is a
member of the High Tech Crime Investigation Association, the
Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, and is a Diplomate Member of
the American College of Forensic Examiners.
He has testified as an expert witness in over fifty matters, one of
which involved a breach of contract involving over $4 billion in
mortgage-backed securities, and in another involving the aborted
acquisition of a telecom operation in a transaction believed valued in
excess of $4 billion. He has testified in trials involving corporate
securities fraud; international corporate asset-stripping and
money-laundering schemes (including alleged penny stock
'pump-and-dump' scams); fraudulent conveyances; the development of
alter ego theories (i.e., piercing of the 'corporate veil'); and cases
involving the alleged theft of trade secrets and other intellectual
property matters. His trial testimony has covered investigation of
alleged improper revenue recognition schemes, international
check-kiting schemes and other forensic investigations.
He is the author of numerous works, including "The New Forensics:
Investigating Corporate Fraud and the Theft of Intellectual Property",
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 6 November 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Simulating motion in language and thought"
Teenie Matlock
Psychology, Stanford
In everyday talk, people use motion language, such as go, run, or
move, when they are describing things that have little or nothing to
do with motion. They say, "The mountain range goes from Canada to
Mexico," or "The table runs along the wall," when neither the mountain
range nor the table moves. Or they say, "The meeting has been moved
forward two days," or "The session runs until 8," when there is no
observable motion. My presentation addresses the following questions:
Why do people use motion language to describe static scenes and
abstract domains? What's going on during processing?
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INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 November 2003, 4:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
"Log-penalized Linear Regression"
Joshua Sweekind-Singer
Stanford University
This talk explores the properties and performance characteristics of a
linear regression method that employs a log-like function as a
regularization penalty, and compares the log-penalty to the more
commonly used L1 and L2 penalties known as "The Lasso" and as "Ridge
Regression". The log-penalty is motivated by MDL principles and by
principles in algorithmic complexity. It has similar mathematical
properties to the lasso. Both tend to yield sparse solutions, though
the log-penalty has a stronger drive towards sparsity. A very
efficient algorithm for calculating lasso solutions, called LARS, can
be modified to yield an efficient algorithm for calculating
log-penalized solutions.
A Note About Regularization
So-called "regularization" penalties are commonly used in linear
regression to reduce overfitting. "Overfitting" is a general problem
that occurs when an overly complex function is chosen to fit the
training data. Although the function may be well-matched to the
training data, it is found to perform poorly as a predictor of future
data. Instead, a lower-complexity function that does not fit the
training data quite so well is seen to be better at modeling the true
structure in the data and to be a better predictor of future data.
Regularization penalties force the regression method to strike some
balance between goodness-of-fit and solution-complexity.
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SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 7 November 2003, 10:00am
EJ291, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Turning Probabilistic Reasoning into Programming"
Avi Pfeffer
Harvard University
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~avi/
Uncertainty is ubiquitous in the real world, and probability provides
a sound way to reason under uncertainty. This fact has led to a
plethora of probabilistic representation languages such as Bayesian
networks, hidden Markov models and stochastic context-free grammars.
More recently, we have developed new probabilistic languages that
reason at the level of object, such as object-oriented Bayesian
networks and probabilistic relational models. The wide variety of
languages leads to the question of whether a general purpose
probabilistic modeling language can be developed that encompasses all
of them. This talk will describe IBAL, an attempt at developing such a
language. After presenting the IBAL language, motivating
considerations for the inference algorithm will be discussed, and the
mechanism for IBAL inference will be described.
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LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 7 November 2003, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Baker Room, Stanford Humanities Center
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Convergence in the Philosophy of Mathematics"
Ed Zalta
CSLI/Stanford
The Platonist answer to the question, "What is mathematical language
about?", is that it is about abstract individuals (such as zero, the
null set, omega, etc.) and abstract relations (successor, membership,
group addition, etc.). One way to make this answer precise is to
provide a formal, background theory of abstract individuals and
abstract relations. I review one such formal theory and explain the
special way in which the language and theorems of arbitrary
mathematical theories can be interpreted in this formalism. (A full
analysis is developed in my paper "Neologicism? An Ontological
Reduction of Mathematics to Metaphysics", Erkenntnis, vol. 53, nos.
1-2 (2000), 219-265.)
However, it turns out that the background formalism for abstracta
itself is subject to interpretation. The Platonistic interpretation is
just one of (at least) four ways of interpreting the theory. I'll
explain how one can develop fictionalist, structuralist, and
inferentialist interpretations of the formalism. Since each
interpretation offers us a clear, but different, answer to our initial
question, the resulting analysis not only offers a way to make these
philosophies of mathematics more precise, but also unifies them in a
new and unsuspected way. (It also has the consequence that no matter
how the mathematicians decide to extend mathematics with new axioms or
mathematical foundations, the philosopher will have something to say
about the mathematical language used in the extension.)
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LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 7 November 2003, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Drift in Evolutionary Phonology:
Patterns of Austronesian Syncope"
Juliette Blevins
University of California, Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jblevins/
Recurrent changes in related languages which can not be attributed to
chance, universals or diffusion, have been categorized as instances of
drift. In this talk two robust cases of drift in the Austronesian
language family are identified. In the first case, general syncope of
short unstressed vowels in VC_CV contexts is common in certain
subgroups, but absent in others. In the second case, syncope of
unstressed vowels between identical consonants is common where general
syncope is absent, and rare where general syncope is found. I argue
that the most significant structural feature in predicting general
syncope is the pre-existence of closed syllables. This analysis
follows from a more general hypothesis regarding the role of sound
patterns in determining sound change at the level of the individual
language learner. The same general hypothesis may also be able to
account for the distribution of geminate-producing syncope, once
pre-existing segmental length contrasts are taken into consideration.
The general model makes predictions which go beyond drift: general
structure-preservation effects in sound change like that seen for
syncope in Austronesian are associated with cases where ambiguity in
phonological analysis of phonetic tokens is not subject to innate
perceptual biases. To the extent that these predictions are upheld,
this account of drift contributes to a general and restrictive theory
of sound change.
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END MATERIAL
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