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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 11 February 2004, vol. 19:22
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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11 February 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 22
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 11 FEBRUARY 2004 TO 20 FEBRUARY 2004
WEDNESDAY, 11 FEBRUARY 2004
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
"How do the languages we speak shape the way we think?"
Lera Boroditsky
MIT
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Wireless in Really Remote Areas"
Dave Hughes
http://www.oldcolo.com/
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
5:00pm Jonathan King Lecture
Fairchild Auditorium
"The Science of Curing and The Art of Healing: A Poet's Experience"
Eavan Boland
Humanities, Stanford University
http://scbe.stanford.edu//events/jking_lecture.html
THURSDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2004
12 noon UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"The role of experience in complex form processing"
Ione Fine
Doheny Retina Institute Keck School of Medicine, USC
http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/ucbso/oxyopia/oxy_current.html
Abstract below
12:15pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"The Language of Constructions"
Adele Goldberg
Linguistics, University of Illinois and CASBS fellow
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Packard 202
"Preserving Peer Replicas by Rate-Limited Sampled Voting"
Petros Maniatis
Intel Research
http://berkeley.intel-research.net/maniatis/
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
3:00pm Stanford Algorithms Seminar (AFLB)
Gates 498
"Quasi-Ramanujan 2-lifts and a converse to the Expander Mixing Lemma"
Yonatan Bilu
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aflb/
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
"A Talk That is Not Really on Personality or Emotion Directly,
But Will Cover the General Topic of Pleasure and Pain, So
Hopefully Will Not Be Completely Boring"
Jennifer Aaker
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"View from the Podium: One Woman's Perspective"
Sara Jobin
Staff Conductor, San Francisco Opera
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"Analysis and Control of flapping flight:
from biological to robotic insects"
Luca Schenato
EECS Berkeley
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ywteh/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"What Does the Aristotelian Phronimos Know?"
Rosalind Hursthouse
University of Auckland
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/html/events/deptevents.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Where Norms Come From: A Naturalistic Approach"
Ken Taylor
Philosophy, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 101
"Efficient Variable Length Channel Coding for Unknown Discrete
Memoryless Channels"
Stark Draper
University of Toronto
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2004
12 noon Ethics@Noon
Bldg. 100:101K
"Does the Concept of Home Have Ethical Aspects"
Julius Moravcsik
Philosophy
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12 noon Award Winning Teachers Speaker Series
Hartley Conference Rm, Mitchell Earth Sciences
"Teaching in a Digital Age"
John Rick
Anthropological Sciences, Stanford
http://ctl.stanford.edu/Awt/awt_current.html#2
http://ctl.stanford.edu/Events/
12 noon UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium
Life Sciences Addition 101 (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Stuart Zola
Yerkes Primate Institute
Co-sponsored by HWNI
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
"What remains to be done with Virtual Reality"
Jaron Lanier
National Tele-immersion Initiative
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
1:45pm NLP Reading Group
Ventura 17
"Improving Dictionary Accessibility by Maximizing Use of
Available Knowledge"
Presented by: Timothy Baldwin
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Logical Methods in the Humanities
Bldg. 90:92Q (Philosophy)
"Knots and Representation"
Ken Manders
Pittsburgh
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:041
"From perception to language and back again"
Lera Boroditsky
MIT
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
"HiFi Systems ---
Network-centric query processing in the physical world"
Michael Franklin
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 2004 - University Holiday
TUESDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2004
9:30am UC Berkeley Special Linguistics Talk
46 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"The Acquisition of Abstract Phoneme Categories"
Sharon Peperkamp
Universite de Paris 8 & Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et
Psycholinguistique
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/Colloquia/
Abstract below
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:380F (math corner)
"The algebraic interpretation of classical and intuitionistic
quantifiers"
Dana S. Scott
Carnegie Mellon University, Retired
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:15pm EE392: Sensor Networks Seminar
Jordan Hall 041
"Human factors in Sensor Networks"
Boris De Ruyter
Philips Research/Eindhoven
http://border.dyndns.org:1380/boris/cv.html
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee392s/
WEDNESDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2004
12 noon SCBE Brown Bay
Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics conference room
701 Welch Road, A1113
"Shaping Minds, Shaping Societies: Social and Ethical
Implications of Increasing Therapeutic Intervention in Mental Illness"
Georgina Clark
University of Sydney, Australia
http://scbe.stanford.edu//events/brownbag.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
"The Essential Child:
Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought"
Susan Gelman
University of Michigan
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Karine Chemla
CNRS, HPLMS
http://www.cnrs.fr/DEP/prg/Hist.Savoirs.html
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/html/events/deptevents.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Things CPU Architects Need To Think About"
Bob Colwell
R.E. Colwell & Assoc.
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
7:00pm SCIL Futures of Learning Lecture Series
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160)
Title to be announced
Lee Shulman
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/president/biography.htm
http://scil.stanford.edu/
THURSDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2004
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Packard 202
"Tools for Problem Determination and Program Understanding
for Framework-Intensive Applications"
Darrell Reimer, Nick Mitchell
IBM Research
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
Title to be announced
Iris Mauss
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Regulation of Thoughts, Feelings, and Memories in the Human Brain"
John Gabrieli
Psychology, Stanford University
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Benjamin Weiss
Hebrew University
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
5:15pm Archaeology Research Workshop
Bldg 60:61H
"Beyond the facade: reading libraries in the ancient world"
David Platt
Stanford University:
http://archaeology.stanford.edu/workshop.html
FRIDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2004
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Lera Boroditsky
ICBS Fellow MIT, Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12 noon Ethics@Noon
Bldg. 100:101K
"Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development"
James Ferguson
Cultural and Social Anthropology
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
"The Business of User Experience"
Jeffrey Herman and Suja Raju
eBay
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm NLP Reading Group
Ventura 17
"Montage: Markup for Ontological Annotation and Grammar Engineering"
Dan Flickinger
CSLI
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"What Could Animals Do With Nonconceptual Content?"
Colin Allen
Texas A&M University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
"The Stanford Data Stream Management System"
Jennifer Widom
Stanford University
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2004
1:00pm Continuing Studies Talk
Human Mind: Emotions
http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/course/EVT64.asp
Information 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.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
2004-CLRF MEETING
16-17 April 2004
CONSTRUCTIONS IN ACQUISITION
Friday 16 April -- Cordura Hall, CSLI
6.45 - Registration
7.30 - Opening Panel on Constructions
"How are constructions defined, and identified? What are the
implications"
of a construction-based syntax for the process of acquisition?"
-- Peter Culicover (Ohio State University)
-- Adele Goldberg (University of Illinois & CASBS)
-- Ivan Sag (Stanford University)
Moderator: Arnold Zwicky
9.30 - Reception in Cordura Hall
Saturday 17 April -- Cordura Hall, CSLI
8.00-9.00 - Registration
9.00 - "The role of frequency in the acquisition of word order"
Danielle Matthews (University of Manchester),
Elena Lieven (University of Manchester & MPI for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig),
Anna Theakston (University of Manchester),
Michael Tomasello (MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig)
9.30 - "The development of constructions through gesture use"
Barbara Kelly (Stanford University)
10.00 - "Multi-word combinations in early trilingual development:
One or separate syntactic systems?"
Simona Montanari (University of Southern California)
10.30-11.00 break
11.00 - "The acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese"
Hiromi Ozeki (University of Tokyo) & Yasuhiro Shirai (Cornell
University)
11.30 - "The acquisition of complement clause constructions:
A sentence repetition study"
Evan Kidd (Max Planck Child Study Centre, University of Manchester)
12.00 - "Unexpected differences in the acquisition of non-sentential
utterances"
Jonathan Ginzburg (King's College London)
Dimitra Kolliakou (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
12.30-2.00 lunch
2.00 - "24-month-olds' sensitivity to the syntactic role of function
words in English sentences: Noun phrase determiners"
Yarden Kedar, Marianella Casasola, & Barbara Lust (Cornell University)
2.30 - "Acquisition of the English Transitive Construction: analysis
of a dense naturalistic corpus"
Robert Maslen (Max Planck Child Study Centre, University of Manchester)
3.00 - "Children's mastery of the transitive construction"
Nitya Sethuraman (Indiana University)
Judith C. Goodman (University of Missouri)
3.30-4.00 break
4.00 - "The acquisition of verb compounding by Mandarin-speaking children"
Jidong Chen (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
4.30 - "Construction paradigms and argument alternation errors"
Jean-Philippe Marcotte (Stanford University)
5.00 - "Learning to generalize verbs to new syntactic environments"
Nitya Sethuraman (Indiana University)
Judith C. Goodman (University of Missouri)
Poster Session (10.30-2.00)
"Two-year-olds' comprehension of pronouns and word order in
grammatical and ungrammatical sentences"
Casandra Foursha, Gretchen van de Walle, & Jennifer Austin (Rutgers
University)
"The transition from holophrases to abstract grammatical
constructions: Insights from simulation studies"
Peter Ford Dominey (Institut des Sciences Cognitives)
"The role of discourse context in determining the argument structure
of novel verbs with omitted arguments"
Theeraporn Ratitamkul (University of Illinois),
Adele Goldberg (University of Illinois & CASBS),
Cynthia Fisher (University of Illinois)
"The impact of language specificities in early verb usage"
Florence Chenu & Harriet Jisa (Dynamique du langage & Universite de
Lyon-2)
"The discourse basis of constructions: Some evidence from Korean"
Patricia M. Clancy (University of California at Santa Barbara)
"Learning to express three-participant events in Tzeltal"
Penelope Brown (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
"A computational model of comprehension-based construction acquisition"
Nancy Chang (U.C. Berkeley & International Computer Science Institute)
"Learning how to encode events of 'cutting and breaking': A
crosslinguistic study of semantic development"
Melissa Bowerman (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen),
Asifa Majid (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen),
M. Erkelens (University of Amsterdam),
Bhuvana Narasimhan (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen),
Jidong Chen (MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
"The acquisition of the English inflectional system: A case study"
Joseph Galasso (California State University, Northridge)
____________
PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 11 February 2004, 3:45pm
Jordan Hall, Room 420:041
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
"How do the languages we speak shape the way we think?"
Lera Boroditsky
MIT
Do people who speak different languages think differently about the
world? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do
polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? I will
present several lines of cross-linguistic experiments illustrating how
the languages we speak shape the way we attend to, represent, and
remember our experiences in the world. The results suggest that the
private mental lives of people who speak different languages differ
much more than previously thought.
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Thursday, 12 February 2004, 12 noon
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/ucbso/oxyopia/oxy_current.html
"The role of experience in complex form processing"
Ione Fine
Doheny Retina Institute Keck School of Medicine, USC
I will describe two sets of experiments examining the role of visual
experience in complex form processing:
To examine how visual deprivation affects complex form processing we
characterized visual processing in a patient (MM) whose sight was
restored after suffering visual deprivation between the ages of 3 and
43. Deprivation resulted in severe losses in resolution, 3D shape
perception, and object and face recognition. In contrast, MM's
performance on color and motion tasks was relatively normal. FMRI
activity in MM's motion processing areas was as great and covered as
large an area as control observers, while images of faces and objects
did not produce activity in areas near fusiform and lingual gyri
associated with face and object processing. Long-term interruptions
in visual experience seem to have particularly severe consequences for
face and object processing, consistent with a continuing role for
visual experience beyond early childhood in these areas.
To examine the role of visual experience in face selective tuning in
visually normal adults we used a conjunction of analogous fMRI and
psychophysical adaptation paradigms to examine whether mechanisms
mediating face perception are jointly selective for both ethnicity and
gender or selective for only one of these properties (e.g., tuned for
ethnicity and unselective for gender). Consistent with a significant
proportion of neurons being selective for both ethnicity and gender,
we saw a release of adaptation for faces that differed in either
ethnicity or gender from the adapting faces. These adaptation effects
occurred selectively in the fusiform gyrus in areas overlapping with
face selective areas defined using typical fusiform face area
localizer scans. We did not find adaptation effects in V1 suggesting
that selectivity for high level properties such as ethnicity and
gender is driven by visual experience, rather than by low level visual
properties.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 12 February 2004, 12:15pm-1:30pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"The Language of Constructions"
Adele Goldberg
Linguistics, University of Illinois and CASBS fellow
Observations about particular grammatical constructions have long
shaped our understanding of both particular languages and the nature
of Language itself. But only recently has a new theoretical approach
emerged that allows observations about constructions to be stated
directly, providing long-standing traditions with a framework that
allows both broad generalizations and more limited patterns to be
analyzed and accounted for fully. Many linguists with varying
backgrounds have converged on several key insights that have given
rise to a family of constructionist approaches.
Constructionist approaches share certain foundational ideas with the
mainstream generative approach that has held sway for the past several
decades (Chomsky 1957; 1965; 1981). Both approaches agree that it is
essential to consider language as a cognitive (mental) system; both
approaches acknowledge that there must be a way to combine structures
to create novel utterances, and both approaches recognize that a
non-trivial theory of language learning is needed.
In other ways, constructionist approaches contrast sharply with the
mainstream generative approach. Constructional approaches hold that
the nature of language can best be revealed by studying formal
structures as they relate to semantic or discourse functions.
Functional differences between formal patterns are emphasized.
Semi-regular patterns and cross-linguistically unusual patterns are
accounted for. Language is argued to be learned inductively by
general cognitive mechanisms and therefore learners need not be
hard-wired with knowledge that is specific to language (`universal
grammar').
A set of recent experimental studies on language acquisition,
production and comprehension will be reported that illustrate and lend
support to a constructional approach.
About the Speaker: Adele E. Goldberg is Associate Professor in the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois, and is
visiting Stanford this year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced
Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 12 February 2004, 12:40pm (lunch 12:15pm)
Packard 202
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
"Preserving Peer Replicas by Rate-Limited Sampled Voting"
Petros Maniatis
Intel Research, Berkeley
The LOCKSS project has developed and deployed in a world-wide test a
peer-to-peer system for preserving access to journals and other
archival information published on the Web. It consists of a large
number of independent, low-cost, persistent web caches that cooperate
to detect and repair damage to their content by voting in "opinion
polls." Based on this experience, we present a design for and
simulations of a novel protocol for voting in systems of this kind.
It incorporates rate limitation and intrusion detection to ensure that
even some very powerful adversaries attacking over many years have
only a small probability of causing irrecoverable damage before being
detected.
About the speaker: Petros Maniatis received his Ph.D. and
M.Sc. degrees from Stanford University, and a B.Sc. degree in
Informatics from the University of Athens, Greece. His research
interests focus on distributed systems security, fault tolerance, and
mobile computing.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 12 February 2004, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ywteh/cis-seminar
"Analysis and Control of flapping flight:
from biological to robotic insects"
Luca Schenato
EECS Berkeley
In this dissertation talk I will analyze flapping flight in biological
insects in order to develop a methodology for designing a flight
control unit for robotic insects. This work is part of the
Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI) project, whose goal is to
fabricate a centimeter-size robotic flying vehicle with flapping wings
that can replicate at least in part the extraordinary performance of
flies.
This talk is tailored for a wide audience including engineers as well
as biologists interested in insect flight from a control theory
perspective.
After giving a review of current understanding of insect flapping
flight, including aerodynamics and control mechanisms, I will propose
biologically inspired architecture for a flight control unit for
robotic insects. A simplified mathematical model of insect flight is
considered to highlight the differences with helicopter flight, and it
will be shown how flapping flight is an economical form of locomotion,
in the sense that two single wings allow the insect to control 5 out
of 6 degrees of freedom independently, as suggested by many
biologists. Moreover, despite the complexity of aerodynamics and body
dynamics, the controller design proposed for flight stabilization is a
simple time-periodic proportional
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 12 February 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Where Norms Come From: A Naturalistic Approach"
Ken Taylor
Philosophy, Stanford
I offer a naturalistic account of the source and nature of
normativity. My account has four main features. First, I offer a
purely psychologistic account of what I call the capacity for
normativity. Second I argue that this psychological capacity for
normativity is in all likelihood an evolved capacity, designed by
natural selection to make possible the existence of normative
communities among human beings. Third I argue that, even if the
capacity for normativity is not the result of selection, we can still
see that it is through, and only through, the exercise of the
psychological capacity that human beings constitute normative
communities of varying scope and duration. Finally, I argue that this
psychologistic naturalistic account of the capacity for normativity
explains the contingent and typically merely partial character of
normative communities. Moreover, it opens the way for a more
systematic exploration of the causal factors governing the growth and
decay of normative community over historical rather than evolutionary
time.
About the Speaker: Ken Taylor is a longtime professor and current
chair of the Stanford philosophy department. His work lies at the
intersection of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind,
with an occasional foray into the history of philosophy. He also
co-hosts the syndicated public radio show Philosophy Talk.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 12 February 2004, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
"Efficient Variable Length Channel Coding for
Unknown Discrete Memoryless Channels"
Stark Draper
University of Toronto
In this talk we present a coding strategy for the reliable
communication of a message selected from a codebook of fixed size, in
a variable number of channel uses, over an unknown discrete memoryless
channel. At each time the decoder tests the received sequence and
decides if it can decode. If it can, it sends an acknowledgment to the
transmitter, which then stops transmitting. By choosing the size of
the codebook large enough, with high probability the rate that is
realized by the strategy can be made to approach arbitrarily closely
the mutual information between the user-chosen input distribution and
the induced channel output distribution. Without additional knowledge,
the input distribution cannot be guaranteed to be set equal to the
capacity-achieving input distribution.
The strategy presented can be considered as a generalization to
arbitrary unknown discrete memoryless channels of earlier variable
length coding schemes, such as digital fountain codes for erasure
channels, and a coding strategy for binary symmetric channels
presented by Tchamkerten and Telatar.
Given time, we will comment on work on building practical encoders and
decoders, as well as the application of the basic ideas to other
communication problems.
Based on joint work with Frank Kschischang and Brendan Frey.
About the Speaker: Stark Draper holds the Information Processing
Laboratory Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto. He
did his graduate work at MIT and undergraduate work at Stanford. He
has held industrial positions at a variety of places, including
Arraycomm and Draper Laboratory. Among several awards, he has received
the MIT Carlton E. Tucker Teaching Award, an Intel Graduate
Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. His research interests and
activities span several aspects of signal processing, communications,
estimation, information theory, queuing, and networking.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 13 February 2004, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"What remains to be done with Virtual Reality"
Jaron Lanier
National Tele-immersion Initiative
http://www.well.com/user/jaron/
VR by definition presents the ultimate user interface design
challenge. Past decades of VR research have yielded a plentitude of
useful results, both positive and negative, but much remains to be
discovered. The last five years have seen an acceleration of research
into collaboration in VR, and in particular the case in which users
are represented with a degree of realism to one another. This type of
configuration is often called "Tele-immersion." As is to be expected,
many questions that have existed for decades can now be re-asked in a
more practical way, for instance: When should an already-functioning
user interface design be changed so that another person observing it
can better understand what is going on? How much effort do people
typically want to put into controlling their own appearance in a
shared world? Should a user interface designer attempt to influence
that user preference? What can be done to reduce the huge space of
interaction possibilities so that users retain sufficient focus to
accomplish a given task?
About the Speaker: Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer,
visual artist, and author. Currently, Lanier serves as the Lead
Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of
research universities studying advanced applications for Internet
2. His current tele-immersion-related research interests include real
time, remote, terascale processing, autostereo methods, haptics, and
software simulation component integration and reusability. Lanier is
probably best known for his work in Virtual Reality. He coined the
term `Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research,
the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he lead the
team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual
worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area
networks, as well as the first "avatars", or representations of users
within such systems. While at VPL, he co-developed the first
implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical
simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television
production, and assorted other areas
He tends to collect adjunct appointments, and is currently a visiting
faculty member of one sort or another at the Thayer School of
Engineering at Dartmouth, the Wharton School of Business of the
University of Pennsylvania, the Interactive Telecommunications Program
of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (where he is a
visiting artist), and at the Columbia University Computer Science
Department. He is also the Chief Scientist of Eyematic Interfaces,
which researches computer vision. He serves on numerous advisory
boards, including the Board of Councilors of the University of
Southern California, Medical Media Systems (a medical visualization
spin-off company associated with Dartmouth University), Microdisplay
Corporation (makers of LCOS displays), and NY3D (developers of
autostereo displays).
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 13 February 2004, 1:45pm - 3:15pm
Ventura 17
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
"Improving Dictionary Accessibility
by Maximizing Use of Available Knowledge"
http://lingo.stanford.edu/pubs/tbaldwin/tal2003.pdf
Presented by: Timothy Baldwin
The dictionary lookup of unknown words is particularly difficult in
Japanese due to the requirement of knowing the correct word reading.
We propose a system which supplements partial knowledge of word
readings by allowing learners of Japanese to look up words according
to their expected, but not necessarily correct, reading. This is an
improvement from previous systems which provide no handling of
incorrect readings. In preprocessing, we calculate the possible
readings each kanji character can take and different types of
phonological alternations and reading errors that can occur, and
associate a probability with each. Using these probabilities and
corpus-based frequencies we calculate a plausibility measure for each
generated reading given a dictionary entry, based on the naive Bayes
model. In response to a user-entered reading, the system displays a
list of candidate dictionary entries for the user to choose from. The
system is implemented in a web-based environment and available for
general use. In the evaluation on Japanese Proficiency Test data and
naturally occurring misreading data, the system significantly reduced
the number of unsuccessful dictionary queries when queried with
incorrect readings.
Slaven Bilac, Timothy Baldwin and Hozumi Tanaka (2003) Traitement
automatique des langues Vol. 44 No. 2.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 13 February 2004, 3:15pm-5:15pm
Philosophy 90:92Q
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Knots and Representation"
Ken Manders
Pittsburgh
Central to the traditional mathematical inquiry about knots is its
intellectual motivating theme: a spatial sense of what matters, and
does not matter, about knottedness: what makes this knottedness
different from that; what different knottednesses there are.
The mathematical challenges in getting a precise understanding of
these knottedness matters start at a "representational" level that
conceptually precedes precise definitions, proposition and proof. The
mathematical challenge is primarily 'articulative': finding ways of
expressing knottedness types, ways that allow one to connect these
types to given knots. Even proof, though necessary, plays only a
secondary role; the ontology one might attribute based on the precise
form of definitions, only a tertiary one.
____________
FRIDAY COGNITIVE SEMINAR
on Friday, 13 February 2004, 3:15pm,
Jordan Hall 420:041
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
"From perception to language and back again"
Lera Boroditsky
MIT
The awesome complexity and sophistication of adult human cognition
requires intricate collaboration and integration of information
between different modalities and domains of knowledge. I will present
a series of studies showing how the human mind recycles perceptual
representations in the service of higher level cognition (e.g., in the
service of imagination, or even representing things that one could
never have seen or touched), but also how higher-level aspects of
cognition (e.g., categorization and language) constrain and interact
with early perceptual processing (e.g., color and motion).
Understanding how different faculties of the mind collaborate may help
us understand how physical organisms who collect photons through their
eyes, respond to physical pressure in their ears, and bend their knees
and flex their toes in just the right amount to defy gravity are able
to invent sophisticated notions of number and time, theorize about
atoms and invisible forces, and worry about love, justice, ideas,
goals, and principles.
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CS545: DATABASE SEMINAR
on Friday, 13 February 2004, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B12
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
"HiFi Systems ---
Network-centric query processing in the physical world"
Michael J. Franklin
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/
Recent advancements in wireless sensors, RFID technology, and mobile
devices have enabled the development of information systems that
monitor and react to events in the real world. When deployed on a
large (e.g., national) scale, these systems assume a high fan-in (or
HiFi) architecture, in which large numbers of events measured at the
edges of the network are continually refined, summarized, augmented,
and aggregated as they flow towards the interior. HiFi systems present
a wealth of new research problems reflecting the different concerns
and priorities at each level of the system as well as the interactions
among the levels. The solutions will require insights from recent
efforts in data stream processing, sensor databases, event systems,
data warehousing, and spatio-temporal data management. In this talk I
will discuss some of the foundational work we have done in the
Telegraph and TinyDB projects at Berkeley, and then speculate on how
these and related efforts can serve as building blocks in the
development of HiFi systems.
About the Speaker: Michael Franklin is an Associate Professor of
Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley where his
research focuses on the architecture and performance of distributed
databases and information systems. At Berkeley he co-leads the
Telegraph project on adaptive data stream processing and works on
projects spanning the range from sensor networks to grid computing. He
worked several years developing database systems in industry prior to
receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in
1993. More recently, he spent part of last year as an
Executive-in-Residence at the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in
Menlo Park, CA, where he focused on emerging opportunities in sensor
networks, RFID, and related technologies.
____________
UC BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SPECIAL TALK
on Tuesday, 17 February 2004, 9:30am-11:00am
46 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/Colloquia/
Special Talk in Sharon Inkelas' Linguistics 211b (all invited)
"The Acquisition of Abstract Phoneme Categories"
Sharon Peperkamp
Universite de Paris 8 & Laboratoire
de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique
During the first year of life, infants acquire the segmental
categories of their language (Werker & Tees 1984, Polka & Werker
1994), and recent work has shown that they might do this on the basis
of statistical information concerning the phonetic distribution of
segments (Maye et al. 2002). In a language's phonological system, not
all segments have the same status. Specifically, different segments
can be realizations either of different phonemes or of the same
phoneme. How could infants create abstract phoneme categories on the
basis of concrete segmental categories? One possibility is that they
use word meanings. Alternatively, they might rely on distributional
information, since segments that are realizations of the same phoneme
have complementary distributions.
In this talk, I will first show that allophonic contrasts are
processed differently from phonemic contrasts. I will then consider
the respective contributions of word meaning and distributional
information for the acquisition of phoneme categories. In a series of
artificial language-learning experiments, I show that French adults
can learn to encompass voiced and voiceless stops or fricatives in
abstract phoneme categories, whereas in their native language voicing
is phonemic in all obstruents.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 17 February 2004, 4:15pm-5:30pm
Math Corner 380:380F
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"The algebraic interpretation of
classical and intuitionistic quantifiers"
Dana S. Scott
Carnegie Mellon University, Retired
In their 1963 book, "The Mathematics of Metamathematics", Rasiowa and
Sikorski present an approach to completeness theorems of various
logics using algebraic methods. This idea can of course be traced back
to Boole, but it was revived and generalized by Stone and Tarski in
the 1930s; however, the most direct influence on their work came from
their well-known colleague, Andrzej Mostowski, after WW II.
Mostowski's interpretation of quantification can as well be given for
intutionistic as classical logic. The talk will briefly review the
history and content of these ideas and raise the question of why there
was at that time no generalization made to higher-order logic and set
theory. Entirely new light on this kind of algebraic semantics has
more recently been thrown by the development of topos theory in
category theory. Reasons for pursuing this generalization will also be
discussed.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 19 February 2004, 12:40pm (lunch 12:15pm)
Room to be announced
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
"Tools for Problem Determination and Program Understanding for
Framework-Intensive Applications"
Darrell Reimer, Nick Mitchell
IBM Research
Team: Bowen Alpern, Vas Bala, Herb Derby, Nick Mitchell, Todd Mummert,
Darrell Reimer, Edith Schonberg, Gary Sevitsky, Kavitha Srinivas,
Harini Srinivasan
Over the past several years, our group has been involved directly with
problems in large IBM customer applications. Increasingly, these
applications are primarily composed of a collection of heterogeneous,
reuseable frameworks. We call this class of applications
"framework-intensive". We'd like to share with you the customer-driven
research we've been involved in, and in particular, to share the
excitement we have in developing tools that meet the particularly
stringent requirements of these applications: the tools must be
useable in the field, constraints on time and space on the analysis is
extremely tight, the perturbation of the data collection on the
running application must be minimal, and the tools must handle the
high degree complexity we're seeing in these applications.
We'll show two examples of tools that are driven by our experience
debugging problems in these applications. One is called Saber, a tool
that analyzes code for common errors and violations of best practices.
An Eclipse plugin, Saber combines a static analysis deep enough to
uncover semantic errors with a rules engine that detects those errors.
For example, customers have used Saber to detect race conditions,
improperly managed resources, and a variety of other nasty problems
that can cause outages in deployments of these kind of applications.
The second is Leakbot, a tool that analyzes, and then tracks, the
evolution of object reference graphs within running programs. One very
common bug that shows up in these systems that Leakbot addresses is
Java memory leaks. Both of these tools will be integrated into IBM
products within the next year, and both scale to very large
applications. Leakbot, for example, can analyze graphs with 50 million
objects, and can track the actual evolution of large reference graphs
with only 1-2% slowdown.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 19 February 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Regulation of Thoughts, Feelings, and Memories in the Human Brain"
John Gabrieli
Psychology, Stanford University
A fundamental human ability is the voluntarily control or regulation
of mental states. I will talk about recent functional neuroimaging
studies that elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying such
regulation for thinking, for the reappraisal of negative emotions, and
for the repression of unwanted memories. I will also talk about the
ability of people to regulate focal brain activation itself through
real-time feedback from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
About the Speaker: John Gabrieli is a Professor of Psychology in the
Neurosciences Program. His area of research is human cognitive
neuroscience in which he studies the brain basis of memory, language,
and thought. His research examines both normal brain functions and
diseases of those functions that occur in Alzheimer's disease,
Parkinson's disease, stroke, epilepsy, dyslexia, and attention deficit
disorder.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 February 2004, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"The Business of User Experience"
Jeff Herman and Suja Raju
eBay
When proposing user experience improvements, design groups often face
resistance within their company. The eBay UI Design group has had
significant success getting user experience improvements prioritized
and launched by conducting rigorous cost-benefit analysis and by
participating in the company product planning process.
The group does the cost-benefit analysis based on:
* the estimated benefit of the user experience improvement.
Estimates are based on site usage statistics (e.g. current
completion rates on key flows plus projections based on the
improvement) and standard values for key metrics (e.g. the value of
each registered user);
* the estimated cost for various resources (including the cost to
design, specify, build, and test the improvement) as well as any
impact on operations.
Once the project is launched, the team uses these same metrics and
updated site usage statistics to determine the ROI of the project.
Based on the success of projects the two years, this has led to
increased credibility for the group and increased acceptance of the
projects we propose.
About the Speakers: Jeff Herman is a design manager at eBay, where he
focuses on current projects, overall design guidelines, and long-term
strategies. Prior to joining eBay in 2001, Jeff was a designer at
Yahoo!, where he worked on Yahoo! Mail, and Apple, where he worked on
Apple Guide and HyperCard. He received his M.S. from the MIT Media
Lab, where he designed and developed an adaptive, personalized audio
news guide. He holds nine patents, which include design work on
software and consumer electronics.
Suja Raju is a UI Designer at eBay, where she concentrates on designs
for improving the selling process. Prior to joining eBay, Suja was a
designer at Yahoo!, where she worked on Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Yellow
Pages, Yahoo! City Guides, and Ad Manager. She also worked as a
designer at the consulting firm, Scient Corp. where she worked on
projects for Morgan Stanley and BenefitPoint. She received her M.S. in
Computer Science from Stanford and her B.A. in Environmental Science
from U.C. Berkeley.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 20 February 2004, 2:00pm - 3:20pm
Ventura 17
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
"Montage: Markup for Ontological Annotation and Grammar Engineering"
Dan Flickinger
CSLI
In 1992, Michael Krauss ("The World's Languages in Crisis") predicted
that within the next century, more than half of the world's
approximately 6000 languages would become extinct. The Ethnologue
(SIL, 2003) estimates that 417 of these languages are already spoken
exclusively by the elderly. Although communities live on and can
maintain distinctive identities even after assimilating to a dominant
language, as the eminent linguist Ken Hale observed, "When you lose a
language you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's
like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre."
Although many digital tools for field linguists are under development,
there are still critical gaps. The most problematic is the lack of
tools for producing structured grammatical annotation of texts. The
proposed Montage project aims to build those tools, enabling field
linguists to associate words in texts to dictionary entries, and
annotate words, phrases and sentences with the linguistic phenomena
they represent. We call this process "markup for ontological
annotation", and it produces a database from which linguists can
extract examples of phenomena they wish to study, reflecting ongoing
standardization efforts for linguistic description. The suite of
tools we build will also make available to linguists recent advances
in grammar engineering, supporting the development of electronic
grammars (both prose descriptions and implemented formal systems) from
the foundation of annotated texts. Using existing parsing software,
linguists will be able to have their newly created electronic grammars
automatically assign syntactic and semantic structures to new
sentences. This automatic processing will assist linguists in
searching for examples of phenomena to annotate or use in the
development of their grammars. The Montage toolkit should support
field linguists in creating resources that are useful and accessible
at any stage in their development.
____________
CS545: DATABASE SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 February 2004, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B12
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
"The Stanford Data Stream Management System"
Jennifer Widom
Joint work with the entire STREAM group at Stanford:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/stream/
This talk will describe our ongoing work developing the Stanford
Stream Data Manager (STREAM), a system for executing complex
continuous queries over multiple continuous data streams. The STREAM
system supports a declarative query language, it copes with high data
rates and query workloads by providing approximate answers when
resources are limited, and it adapts its execution strategies
automatically as conditions change. We will provide an overview of
the system and our research plans, highlight several specific
contributions to date, and show a brief demo.
____________
CONTINUING STUDIES TALK
on Saturday, 21 February 2004, 1:00pm-4:00pm
Bldg. 320:105
Human Mind: Emotions
http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/course/EVT64.asp
Registration is not required, but is appreciated.
The Human Mind: A Year-Long Series. Winter Quarter: Emotions (EVT 64)
This year, Continuing Studies highlights outstanding Stanford faculty,
and gives you a unique opportunity to hear them discuss their most
recent thought and research. Each quarter we focus on one aspect of
research on the human mind. In the fall, we heard from psychologists
and educators about studies in cognition; for the winter, the focus
will be on the relationship of the mind to the emotions; and in the
spring we will look at memory and learning.
Winter Quarter: Emotions
Nationally and internationally-known Stanford scholars in psychology
are conducting exciting research that expands the frontiers of current
knowledge on our emotions. Their work ranges from the neural basis of
emotion, to how depressed people process emotional information, to the
effects of culture on the emotional responses of individuals. Join
Continuing Studies as we spend a Saturday afternoon with three
outstanding thinkers on emotion as they describe their current work
studying the human mind.
Ian Gotlib
Professor, Department of Psychology
Ian H. Gotlib has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of
Waterloo. He directs the Stanford Mood and Anxiety Disorders Lab,
where he and his colleagues conduct research examining the cognitive
functioning of depressed persons, the neurobiology and
psychophysiology of depression, and family risk factors for
depression. Two major funded projects focus on examining patterns of
brain activation as depressed individuals process emotional
information, and on assessing risk factors for depression in young
adolescent daughters of depressed mothers.
Brian Knutson
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Brian Knutson has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Stanford. He
conducts research on the neural basis of emotion, specifically on a
class of neurotransmitters that powerfully modulate emotional
experience at specific brain locations. His work aims to find the
mechanisms responsible for emotional experience and to explore the
implications of these findings for the assessment and treatment of
clinical disorders of affect and addiction.
Jeanne Tsai
Assistant Professor, Department 0f Psychology
Jeanne Tsai has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from UC Berkeley. She
heads the Culture and Emotion Lab, where research focuses on the
cultural influences of various emotional phenomena, including the
expression of emotion, the impact of depression on emotional
functioning, and the physiological basis of subjective emotional
experience. Current studies focus on the emotional responses of
European-Americans, Chinese Americans, and individuals living in
Beijing and Hong Kong.
____________
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____________