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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 24 March 2004, vol. 19:28
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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24 March 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 28
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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/
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ACTIVITIES FROM 24 MARCH 2004 TO 2 APRIL 2004
THURSDAY, 25 MARCH 2004
10:00am SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Semantic Data Sharing with a Peer Data Management System"
Igor Tatarinov
University of Washington at Seattle
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/igor/myweb/
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"A New Plan Recognition Algorithm For Real World Applications"
Christopher W. Geib
Principal Research Scientist, Honeywell Labs
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"High-Pressure Microfluidic Systems for Protein and Cell Analysis"
Brian J. Kirby
Sandia National Laboratories
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 202
"Randomization and Heavy Traffic Theory:
New Approaches to the Design and Analysis of Switch Algorithms"
Devavrat Shah
Stanford University
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
THURSDAY, 1 APRIL 2004
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"On the Choice of Regions for Generalized Belief Propagation"
Max Welling
UC Irvine
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ywteh/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"All Questions Answered"
Donald Knuth
Computer Science, Stanford University
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Information below
4:30pm Carlos McClatchy Memorial Colloquium
Learning Theater, Wallenberg Hall (Bldg. 160)
"Talking Age & Aging Talk: Cross Cultural Parameters"
Howard Giles
Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/communication/
FRIDAY, 2 APRIL 2004
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Functional Properties of Neural Circuits for Vision"
Martin Usrey
Center for Neuroscience, UC Davis
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/admin/colloquia.html
12 noon Logic Lunch
room to be announced
"Mathematical Objects and Fictional Characters"
Ottavio Bueno, Philosophy, University of South Carolina
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
SUNDAY, 4 APRIL 2004
all day Stanford Community Day
bring the kids
http://communityday.stanford.edu/
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Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O-. For an appointment:
http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes
an hour of your time.
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ANNOUNCEMENT
This week is Stanford Spring break so events are a bit sparse. Enjoy
the weather.
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COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT
User Research Methods Practicum (CS377B)
Diane J. Schiano (CSLI)
Thursdays 3:00-6:00, Gates 200 (subject to change)
This course is an intensive practicum on designing, conducting,
analyzing and communicating the findings of "user experience"
research. Ethnographic methods--and the convergent use of both
qualitative and quantitative measures--will be emphasized. The course
will be held in graduate seminar format, limited to a very small
number of students. We will collectively design and implement an
in-depth field study on some specific aspect of technology usefulness
and use, and we will use the data to write at least one joint paper
for publication. After an initial series of lectures on methods,
course meetings will be devoted to discussing data collection and
analysis. All students will be expected to participate fully,
conducting field research and sharing their data and experiences
regularly with the class. We will seek to focus the research on a
specific topic within the general domain of computer-mediated
communication (e.g., blogging, email & IM use, online
courseware). This course provides students with training in user
research methods and the opportunity to participate in writing a
scientific paper for publication. See
http://home.comcast.net/~diane.schiano/ for papers from last year's
class on blogging.
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SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 25 March 2004, 10:00am
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Semantic Data Sharing with a Peer Data Management System"
Igor Tatarinov
University of Washington at Seattle
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/igor/myweb/
Data sharing is a ubiquitous problem. Large enterprises, governments,
research communities, and people with common interests are interested
in making their data available as well as accessing others' data. The
World Wide Web (WWW) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been quite
successful in providing an easy way for users to share their data. A
serious limitation of these approaches is that they support keyword
queries only, rather than much richer database-style queries that are
important for many kinds of data sharing applications. Database-style
queries require that data have structure (semantics) whereas Web and
P2P data is essentially text. Data Integration and Data Warehousing
are known database technologies that enable semantic data sharing.
These technologies are rather heavyweight, however. They impose a
centralized mediator schema, which impedes schema evolution and
complicates the data sharing process. In this talk, I will describe
Peer Data Management, a novel approach to semantic data sharing. In a
Peer Data Management System (PDMS), a peer is associated with a schema
that represents the peer's "view of the world". Every peer defines
semantic mappings to a few other peers. The resulting semantic network
enables querying over the entire shared data using the user's local
schema. The PDMS takes care of reformulating (translating) the user
query over the query peer into queries over other peers. I will
describe an algorithm for query reformulation in a PDMS and a number
of optimization techniques that significantly improve the scalability
of the algorithm.
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SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 25 March 2004, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"A New Plan Recognition Algorithm For Real World Applications"
Christopher W. Geib
Principal Research Scientist, Honeywell Labs
This talk will present a new efficient algorithm for probabilistic
plan recognition, based on a model of plan execution. This algorithm
is capable of handling a large class of domains including partially
observable domains and domains where the agent abandons goals.
About the Speaker: Dr. Geib is a Senior Research Scientist in the
Automated Reasoning group at Honeywell Labs. He is the principle
author of the Probabilistic Hostile Agent Task Tracker (PHATT)
Software and theory, and has published papers on the theory and
application of this work. Dr. Geib's current research interests also
include Artificial Intelligence(AI) planning methods and the handling
of uncertainty in AI planning methods. His Ph.D. thesis work concerned
the use of hierarchical incremental planning for uncertain
domains. Since then, Dr. Geib has worked on a number of research
projects involving action under uncertainty. He has continued to look
at the issues presented by uncertain domains using decision theoretic
methods to extend hierarchical planning and general AI methods of
abstraction for problems formulated using standard decision
theory. Dr. Geib has been at Honeywell Labs since 1997. Prior to this,
he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.
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UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 1 April 2004, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ywteh/cis-seminar
"On the Choice of Regions for Generalized Belief Propagation"
Max Welling
UC Irvine
Generalized belief propagation (GBP) has proven to be a promising
technique for approximate inference tasks in AI and machine
learning. However, the choice of a good set of clusters to be used in
GBP has remained more of an art then a science until this day. This
paper proposes a sequential approach to adding new clusters of nodes
and their interactions (i.e. "regions") to the approximation. We first
review and analyze the recently introduced region graphs and find that
three kinds of operations ("split", "merge" and "death") leave the
free energy and (under some conditions) the fixed points of GBP
invariant. This leads to the notion of "weakly irreducible" regions as
the natural candidates to be added to the approximation. Computational
complexity of the GBP algorithm is controlled by restricting attention
to regions with small "region-width". Combining the above with an
efficient (i.e. local in the graph) measure to predict the improved
accuracy of GBP leads to the sequential "region pursuit" algorithm for
adding new regions bottom-up to the region graph. Experiments show
that this algorithm can indeed perform close to optimally.
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SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 1 April 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"All Questions Answered"
Donald Knuth
Computer Science, Stanford University
Professor Knuth will kick off this quarter's SSP 10 schedule by
answering questions from all takers.
About the Speaker: Donald E. Knuth is Professor Emeritus of The Art of
Computer Programming at Stanford University. He is the author of
numerous books, including three volumes of The Art of Computer
Programming, five volumes of Computers & Typesetting, and a
non-technical book entitled 3:16 - Bible Texts Illuminated. His
software systems TeX and MF are extensively used for book publishing
throughout the world. He holds honorary doctorates from several
institutions, including Oxford University, the University of Paris,
the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and fourteen colleges
and universities in America.
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LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 2 April 2004, 12 noon
Room to be announced
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Mathematical Objects and Fictional Characters"
Ottavio Bueno
Philosophy, University of South Carolina
In this paper, I highlight some desiderata that an account of
mathematics should meet to make sense of mathematical practice. After
briefly indicating that current versions of platonism and nominalism
fail to satisfy all of the desiderata, I sketch two versions of
mathematical fictionalism that meet them. One version is based on an
empiricist view of science, and has the additional benefit of
providing a unified account of both mathematics and science. The
other version of fictionalism is based on the metaphysics of fiction,
and articulates a truly fictionalist account of mathematics. After
indicating why both versions of fictionalism satisfy all of the
desiderata, I argue that they are best developed if taken together.
As a result, mathematical fictionalism is alive and well.
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