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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 21 April 2004, vol. 19:32
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
21 April 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 32
______________________________________________________________________
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 21 April 2004 TO 30 APRIL 2004
WEDNESDAY, 21 APRIL 2004
12 noon Philosophy Department Seminar
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Non-standard tools in exact reasoning: the next step"
Grisha Mints
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Bldg. 420:050
"Boys' sensitivity to social structure"
Joyce Benenson
University of Plymouth
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Patti Reuter-Lorenz
University of Michigan
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"The Threat of Internet Worms"
Vern Paxson
International Computer Science Institute
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
5:15pm CCRMA Colloquium
CCRMA Ballroom, The Knoll
"Bayesian Detection of Perceived and Imagined Rhythm from
Event Related Potential (ERP) measurements"
Peter Desain.
'Music, Mind, Machine' group NICI, Nijmegen University
and CCRMA/CSLI, Stanford University
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 22 APRIL 2004
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Reuters lounge, Cordura Hall
"Technology-Enhanced Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:
Represent, Share and Build Pedagogical Knowledge Online"
Toru Iiyoshi
Carnegie Foundation
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/reuters/cgi-bin/calendar/index.cgi
Abstract below
4:00pm Personality Lab
Jordan Hall 420:419
"I feel good: A differentiated approach to dispositional positive
affect, or why James Brown should have been more specific"
Michelle Shiota
UC Berkeley
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Centibots: The last experiment"
Regis Vincent
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Single-Track Autonomous Ground Vehicles:
Opening a New Degree of Freedom in Mobility"
Anthony Levandowski
Robotic Infantry, Inc.
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Looking To Understand: The Coupling Between Speakers' and Listeners'
Eye Movements during Discourse"
Daniel Richardson
Psychology, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 23 APRIL 2004
12 noon Ethics@Noon
Bldg. 100:101K
"Ethics in the Professions: Connecting Principles to Practice"
Deborah Rhode
School of Law and Stanford Center on Ethics
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
"Adventures in Time and Space:
Leveraging Geo-Referenced Digital Photographs"
Mor Naaman
Computer Science, Stanford
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm NLP Reading Group
Ventura 17
"Advances in Discourse Parsing"
Livia Polanyi with Martin van den Berg, Chris Culy and Lorenzo Thione
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Andrei Cimpian
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Formal Causality"
John Boler
University of Washington
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2004
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 200
"A Location Infrastructure for
Direct Human and Robotic Interaction with the World"
Seth Teller
MIT
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 27 APRIL 2004
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:380F (math corner)
"Topological logics on product spaces"
Darko Sarenac
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
5:00pm Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Series
Kresge Auditorium, Law School
Daniel Kahneman
Psychology, Princeton University
http://symsys.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
5:30pm Syntax Workshop
Margaret Jacks 460:126
"Scalar competition and variables in Hmong anaphora"
David Mortensen
UC Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL 2004
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Flexible Number Representations for Computing with FPGAs"
Oskar Mencer
Imperial College and Maxeler Technologies
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2004
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Bldg. 420:050
"On-line processing of grammatically correct and anomalous
sentences in toddlers
Renate Zangl
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
12 noon RNI/Stanford Seminar Series on Theoretical Neuroscience
BioX/Clark Center, Room S360
"Inferential Processes and the Architecture of Visual Cortex"
Malcolm Young
University of Newcastle
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/biol/staff/profile/m.p.young
http://www.rni.org/seminar2.html
Abstract below
4:00pm Personality Lab
Jordan Hall 420:419
"The body stripped down: An existential account of ambivalence
toward the physical body"
Jamie Goldenberg
UC Davis
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Towards an Interoperability Framework for Collaborative Tools"
Eugene Eric Kim
Blue Oxen Associates
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"How Real Is the Future?"
John Perry
Philosophy, Stanford University
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
5:15pm Archaeology Research Workshop
Bldg 60:61H
"Genes vs agents:
a discussion of the widening theoretical gap in archaeology"
Kristian Kristiansen
Gothenburg University and the Stanford Archaeology Center
http://archaeology.stanford.edu/workshop.html
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2004
2:00pm NLP Reading Group
Ventura 17
"Speed and Accuracy in Shallow and Deep Stochastic Parsing"
Ron Kaplan, Stefan Riezler, Tracy Holloway King, John T. Maxwell III,
Alexander Vassermann, and Richard Crouch (PARC)
http://www.parc.com/istl/members/riezler/PAPERS/NAACL04.pdf
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
3:15pm The Mathematical Representation of Nature
Location to be announced
"Beauty doth of itself persuade:
Quantization, mathematical beauty, and scientific understanding"
Michael Dickson
Indiana University
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/philosophyworkshop.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Ching Kao
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Title to be announced
Susan Gal
University of Chicago
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
SATURDAY, 1 MAY 2004
10:00am The Mathematical Representation of Nature
Terrace Room, 4th floor, Margaret Jacks Hall
"A case of mathematical uncooperativeness:
Classical field theories and the classical ideal of theories"
Mathias Frisch
University of Maryland
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/philosophyworkshop.html
2:00pm The Mathematical Representation of Nature
Terrace Room, 4th floor, Margaret Jacks Hall
"Hume and mechanics' complexities"
Mark Wilson
University of Pittsburgh
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/philosophyworkshop.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of A+ and B-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 21 April 2004, 12 noon
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Non-standard tools in exact reasoning: the next step"
Grisha Mints
Philosophy, Stanford
Exact argumentation is traditionally difficult for students with a
restricted background in mathematics. A preliminary stage including
propositional logic, formalized natural deduction and rudimentary
set-theoretic language is well supported, for example by a textbook by
J. Barwise and J. Etchemendy together with a package of computer
programs using diagrammatic reasoning. More advanced part
indispensable for real understanding of modern philosophy had very
little computer support.
This talk describes the progress achieved recently and outlines
directions of further work, both in theory and in practice.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 21 April 2004, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"The Threat of Internet Worms"
Vern Paxson
ICSI & LBNL
Recent years have seen repeated releases of Internet-scale "worms" -
programs that self-propagate across the network by exploiting security
vulnerabilities in open Internet servers. The speed and size of the
infections pose great challenges for defending against them. We will
look at measured behavior of worms, likely evolution of "better" worms
as attackers incorporate additional techniques, and possibilities for
defenses.
About the Speaker: Vern Paxson is a senior scientist at the
International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley,
California, as well as a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. His main active research projects are network
intrusion detection in the context of Bro, a high-performance network
intrusion detection system he developed; large-scale network
measurement and analysis; and Internet-scale attacks, particularly
rapidly-propagating network "worms". His other professional activities
include: chair of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF); vice-chair
of ACM SIGCOMM; Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Networking; program chair of the 2004 ACM CCS Workshop on Rapid
Malcode (WORM); co-founder and steering committee member of the
Internet Measurement Conference; co-chair of Invited Talks for the
2004 USENIX Security Symposium; and organizer of the 2003 DIMACS
Workshop on Large-Scale Internet Attacks.
____________
CCRMA COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 21 April 2004, 5:15pm
CCRMA Ballroom, The Knoll
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/
"Bayesian Detection of Perceived and Imagined Rhythm
from Event Related Potential (ERP) measurements"
Peter Desain
'Music, Mind, Machine' group NICI, Nijmegen University
and CCRMA/CSLI, Stanford University
Listening to music implies an ongoing process of confirmation and
violation of temporal expectancies. The ERP signal contains traces
thereof. These rhythmic signatures can be extracted from the
background-noise by appropriate signal processing methods and allow
for a direct detection. A Bayesian analysis of the likelihood of trials
is based on the distribution of the signals, not only on their means,
which is more common in ERP work. The stochastic framework
enables an easy combination of information over time, over frequency
bands and channels. This resulted in classification results, identifying
which temporal pattern was perceived or imagined from a
small set of short musical rhythms which were significantly above chance
level.
____________
REUTERS FOUNDATION DIGITAL VISION PROGRAM SEMINAR
on Thursday, 22 April 2004, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Reuters lounge, Cordura Hall
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/reuters/cgi-bin/calendar/index.cgi
"Technology-Enhanced Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:
Represent, Share and Build Pedagogical Knowledge Online"
Toru Iiyoshi
Carnegie Foundation
The Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching is working to take advantage of emerging technologies and
new media to transform the knowledge implicit in effective teaching
practice into ideas, theories, and resources that can be shared widely
to advance teaching and student learning at multiple levels. These
efforts are focused in three ways. Firstly, the KML devises new means
of helping faculty document and share their teaching practice and
knowledge online by exploring new genres and models for
multimedia-enhanced teaching portfolios. Secondly, the KML develops
tools and resources that enable faculty and institutions to engage in
this work more easily and effectively. Examples include web-based
knowledge representation and management tools and collaborative online
workspaces. Lastly, the KML fosters the collective knowledge building
of a community of practice and reflection. For instance, innovative
ways of creating and using well-represented pedagogical knowledge in a
variety of contexts and settings, from faculty development to
knowledge community building, are being explored with some of the KML
partner scholars, programs, and institutions.
This presentation will address some of the critical issues around the
work of KML as well as the implications for the ongoing major
educational initiatives taking advantage of technology, such as the
Open CourseWare Project, the Open Knowledge Initiative, and MERLOT.
About the Speaker: Dr. Toru Iiyoshi is Senior Scholar at the Carnegie
Foundation and Director of its Knowledge Media Laboratory
(KML). Iiyoshi is also active with several national and international
initiatives and partners such as the Open Source Portfolio Initiative
where he serves as a Board member as well as an Advisor to the
Council. In this capacity, he provides his vision and leadership in
the development and diffusion of innovative educational
technology. Iiyoshi, a learning scientist and educational
technologist, has been awarded the Outstanding Practice Award in
Instructional Development and the Robert M. Gagne Award for Research
in Instructional Design from the Association for Educational
Communications and Technology. His research focuses on design and
evaluation of cognitive tools and interactive learning environments
both for individual and collective knowledge acquisition and building.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 22 April 2004, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Centibots: The last experiment"
Regis Vincent
Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International
Last January, the Centibot project was independently evaluated by a
DARPA team. The challenge was the following: In an unknown (never seen
and tested before) building, we had to build a map, search for one or
more object of value and then track any intruders. This talk will
present the story behind the test of 100 robots as well as the
technology developed during this project.
About the Speaker: Dr. Vincent received his Ph.D. from the University
of Nice and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France in 1997. His research
interests are real-time artificial intelligence, from scheduling,
planning to negotiation.
Currently he is working on the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) and
the Autonomous Negotiation Team (ANTS) projects.
He has worked for 4 years at the University of Massachusetts as Senior
Research Fellow at the Multi Agent System Lab with Professor Victor
Lesser.
Dr. Vincent has been a reviewer for the following journals: IEEE
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Autonomous Agents
and multi-agent systems Journal and the Journal of Robotics and
Autonomous Systems.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 22 April 2004, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Single-Track Autonomous Ground Vehicles:
Opening a New Degree of Freedom in Mobility"
Anthony Levandowski
Robotic Infantry, Inc.
The combination of exceptional terrain handling characteristics,
narrow width, outstanding payload to vehicle weight ratio and low cost
have made single track vehicles the second most common means of
transportation for humans, second only to walking. These advantages,
which Unmanned Ground Vehicles currently lack, do not come from the
human rider but from the added degree of freedom bicycles and
motorcycles have over cars. This talk will provide an overview of the
added challenges and solutions, advantages, new applications and
markets, and future use of single track UGV technology, as well as a
brief overview of the DARPA's Grand Challenge, an autonomous vehicle
race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
DARPA Grand Challenge
Recently, Congress passed a mandate requiring 1/3 of all ground armed
forces to be autonomous by 2015. To stimulate the development of UGV
technology needed to fulfill this mandate DARPA organized an event
called the "Grand Challenge" in which vehicles would need to
autonomously navigate from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
About the Speaker: Anthony Levandowski is the founder of Robotic
Infantry, Inc. and the team leader of the Berkeley-based "blue team"
which created the world's first autonomous motorcycle "ghostrider" to
compete in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. Anthony earned his BS in
2002 and MS degree in 2003 in Industrial Engineering and Operations
Research from the University of California, Berkeley. He also
received a Management of Technology certificate from the Haas Business
School in 2003. Anthony served as president of the Alpha Pi Mu
Industrial Engineering Honors Society and is a member of the Institute
of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Tau Beta Pi
Engineering Honors societies.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 22 April 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Looking To Understand: The Coupling Between
Speakers' and Listeners' Eye Movements during Discourse"
Daniel Richardson
Psychology, Stanford
Imagine standing in front of a painting, discussing it with a friend.
As you talk, your eyes will scan across the image, moving
approximately three times a second. They will be drawn by
characteristics of the image itself, areas of contrast or detail, as
well as features of the objects or people portrayed. Eye movements are
driven both by properties of the visual world and processes in a
person's mind. Your gaze might also be influenced by what your
friend is saying, what you say in reply, what is thought but not said,
and where you agree and disagree. If this is so, what is the
relationship between your eye movements and those of your friend? How
is that relationship related to the flow of conversation between you?
I will describe an experiment in which participants had their eye
movements recorded while they spoke extemporaneously about a TV show
whose cast members they were viewing. Later, other participants
listened to these speeches while their eyes were tracked. Within this
naturalistic paradigm using spontaneous speech, a number of results
linking eye movements to speech comprehension, speech production and
memory were replicated. More importantly, it was demonstrated that
speaker and listener eye movements were coupled, and that the strength
of this relationship positively correlated with listeners'
comprehension. Just as the mental state of a single person can be
reflected in patterns of eye movements, the commonality of mental
states that is brought about by successful communication is mirrored
in a similarity between speaker and listener's eye movements.
About the Speaker: Daniel Richardson is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in
the Stanford Psychology Department. He is also one of the instructors
for SSP100 this quarter.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 23 April 2004, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Adventures in Time and Space:
Leveraging Geo-Referenced Digital Photographs"
Mor Naaman
Computer Science, Stanford
Lately, technology advancements made it feasible to add location
information to digital photographs, namely the exact coordinates where
each photo was taken. The location information can be extremely
helpful in organizing and presenting image collections. In this talk,
I will demonstrate some scenarios in which location may be helpful: in
a single user's personal collection; in a "social" setting as a basis
for sharing information; and in global collection(s) of photos as a
clue for image search.
About the Speaker: Mor Naaman is a 4th year PhD candidate in the
Computer Science Department at Stanford. Working in the Digital
Libraries project, his research focuses on management of digital
photographs. In previous careers, Naaman was a professional basketball
player as well as a software developer. Naaman received his
undergraduate degree from Tel Aviv University.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 23 April 2004, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Ventura 17
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
"Advances in Discourse Parsing"
Livia Polanyi
with Martin van den Berg, Chris Culy and Lorenzo Thione
In this talk, we describe the FXPAL Linguistic Discourse Analysis
System (LIDAS), a novel approach to symbolic discourse parsing based
on a limited set of robust syntactic, semantic and lexical
rules. Unlike systems based on Rhetorical Structure Theory which was
designed to account for discourse "coherence" by labeling the
rhetorical relations among text segments (Mann and Thompson, 1984;
Marc 2000) or systems based on Grosz and Sidner's 1984 psychological
Discourse Structures Theory which describes the attentional focus of a
text in terms of the intentions of the text producers, the Unified
Linguistic Model (U-LDM) implemented in LIDAS is designed to account
for discourse anaphora and reference resolution in terms of linguistic
relationships obtaining among discourse segments.
In the presentation, we will discuss how the output of the Xerox
Linguistic Engine (XLE), a Lexical Functional Grammar sentential
parser built at Xerox PARC, is used in the to provide information used
in segmenting sentences into Basic Discourse Units, and in building up
a discourse-tree for each sentence. LIDAS uses information in the
f-structures returned by the XLE together with lexical ontological
information and specific rules of discourse formation to identify
possible attachment points and attachment relations for each Basic
Discourse Unit. To demonstrate the utility of the system in a real
application, we will give a brief demo of the PALSUMM hybrid sentence
extraction summarization system under development at FX Palo Alto
Laboratory. PALSUMM produces highly readable summaries that preserve
the style and tone of the original document as well as assuring that
reference and anaphoric information is properly deployed. PALSUMM
operates on an XML representation of the discourse parse trees output
by LIDAS and uses statistical summarization methods to improve the
focus of and reduce the size of the summaries produced.
____________
CS528: BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-VISION-ROBOTICS
on Monday, 26 April 2004, 4:15pm
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
"A Location Infrastructure for
Direct Human and Robotic Interaction with the World"
Seth Teller
EECS Department and CS & AI Laboratory, MIT
For humans, knowledge of our own location is a basic kind of
empowering information: as part of our mental model of the world, it
enables us to navigate to desired places, to find resources, and to
plan our movements more effectively. Until recently, people had to
rely on experience and continuity to locate themselves. However, in
the past decade, position information from the Global Positioning
System (GPS) infrastructure has wrought tremendous change in human and
robotic activities outdoors, ranging from military operations
(including autonomous aircraft), civilian navigation and surveying, to
shipping and supply-chain management, resource exploration, and
precision agriculture.
We envision an analogous indoor infrastructure to provide fine-grained
location and orientation ("pose") information to human-held devices,
autonomous robots, and even ordinary objects. This infrastructure has
the potential to bring about a revolution in indoor human and robotic
activity. For people, pose-awareness facilitates direct interaction
with things in the world and their metadata. For robots,
pose-awareness makes feasible tasks that are currently out of reach,
such as complex household chores beyond pool-cleaning and vacuuming.
After motivating the infrastructure, we'll show some early deployments
and proof-of-concept applications, and briefly discuss privacy
concerns. We'll also show some early efforts toward making the
infrastructure deploy itself autonomously.
About the Speaker: Seth Teller is a member of the EECS Department and
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at
MIT. His research combines computer graphics, machine vision,
computational geometry, robotics, sensor networks and pervasive
computing.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 27 April 2004, 4:15pm-5:30pm
Math Corner 380:380F
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Topological logics on product spaces"
Darko Sarenac
Stanford
This is a joint work with G. Bezhanishvili and J. van Benthem
The most basic logic for spatial reasoning we looked at in the seminar
is S4 interpreted over a topological space. In this study we look at
several slightly stronger spatial logics. The logics are stronger in
both that their languages have slightly more expressive power, and in
that their intended interpretation has some additional spatial
structure. We will study several multi-modal languages interpreted in
various topologies of the direct product space. On the side of
interpretation, we are interested in grids and topologies on grids. If
we are starting with two spaces X and Y equipped with respective
topologies tau_X and tau_Y, the product space obtained as a Cartesian
product of X and Y contains several topologies interesting from the
point of view of modal reasoning about space. There is of course the
product topology obtained as a product of topologies tau_X and tau_Y;
there is the vertical topology tau_V and the corresponding horizontal
one tau_H which are obtained as transfer of tau_X and tau_Y onto the
products space. There is also something like a common knowledge
topology.
We will look at modal interpretation of these topologies and their
interaction on products of some standard topological spaces.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES
on Tuesday, 27 April 2004, 5:00pm
Kresge Auditorium, Law School
http://symsys.stanford.edu/
"Perception, Intuition, and Reason"
Daniel Kahneman
Psychology, Princeton University
Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2002
The distinction between perception and reasoning is familiar. A third
family of intuitive cognitive processes resemble reasoning in their
ability to deal with abstract information, but resemble perception in
their operating characteristics. Most thinking is intuitive and most
actions are guided by intuitive beliefs and preferences. The outputs
of intuitive thought depart from the extensional logic of belief and
choice in predictable ways. Many of these violations of logic can be
traced to familiar principles of perception.
About the Speaker: Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in
2002. He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton
University and Professor of Public Affairs at its Woodrow Wilson
School. Kahneman is only the second psychologist to win the Nobel
Prize, and the first with a pure psychology background. He was a
professor at Hebrew University, the University of British Columbia and
the University of California- Berkeley before joining Princeton in
1993. Kahneman has received all the most prestigious awards in the
psychology field, including the Hilgard Award for Lifetime
Contribution to General Psychology, the Warren Medal of the Society of
Experimental Psychologists, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution
Award from the APA and the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Kahneman
earned his Ph.D. at the University of California- Berkeley.
____________
SYNTAX WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 27 April 2004, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
"Scalar competition and variables in Hmong anaphora"
David Mortensen
UC Berkeley
This talk focuses on "copy" reflexives as found in Hmong (Mong Leng),
and the relation of bound copies to other types of variables in Hmong
syntax. I argue that bound r-expressions and pronouns in Hmong are
best seen as instances of an anaphoric lexical item that is spelled
out as a copy of its antecedent. Further, I propose that the
distribution of variables in Hmong can, contrary to surface
expectation, be modelled in terms of a scalar competition.
Hmong is like Thai, Vietnamese, Quiegolani Zapotec and San Luis
QuiavinC- Zapotec in that it apparently allows pronouns and
R-expressions to be bound with reflexive readings:
1. a. Nwg_i yeej qhuas nwg_i.
3sg always praise 3sg
`He always praises himself.'
b. Puab_i tsuas yog xaav txug puab_i.
3pl only is think about 3pl
`They only think about themselves.'
2. Pov_i yeej qhuas Pov_i.
Pao always praise Pao
`Pao always praises himself.'
These bound pronouns and r-expressions are always identical to their
antecedents. Variables of this type, which are always bound from A
positions, may be contrasted with A'-bound variables. Whether
potential A'-bar variables can receive variable interpretations
appears to be a function of the presence or absence of competing
potential variables within the binding domain:
3. a. [Tug twg]_i los nwg_i yeej nyam yawg.
CLF which TOP 3sg always like mister
`Anybody would surely like that guy.'
b. [Tug twg]_i los yawg yeej nyam nwg_i.
CLF which TOP mister always like 3sg
`That guy would surely like anybody.'
4. a. [Tug twg]_i los yawg_i yeej nyam Pov.
CLF which TOP mister always like 3sg
`Anybody would surely like Pao.'
b. [Tug twg]_i los Pov yeej nyam yawg_i.
CLF which TOP 3sg always like mister
`Pao would surely like anybody.'
These effects are evidence for positing a scale of "dependence" or
"referentiality" (by which I mean, relative ability to be bound as a
variable), with anaphors as the most dependent type and r-expressions
as the least dependent type. A potential variable may be bound from an
A'-position at LF if there is no more dependent form available to
function as a variable. I argue that these data are best reconciled
with the facts of copy anaphora (that an r-expression can apparently
bind an r-expression but not a pronoun, for example) if bound copies
are treated not as r-expressions and pronouns, but as instances of an
anaphoric lexical item that, lacking its own phonological form, is
spelled out as a copy of its antecedent. I also present alternative
analyses of these patterns, such as Lee's (2002, 2003) treatment of
bound r-expressions as base-generated copies and a movement-based
analysis based on work by Hornstein (2001), but argue against these
accounts.
____________
RNI/STANFORD SEMINAR SERIES IN THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE
on Thursday, 29 April 2004, 12 noon - 1pm
BioX/Clark Center, Room S360
http://www.rni.org/seminar2.html
"Inferential Processes and the Architecture of Visual Cortex"
Malcolm Young
University of Newcastle
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/biol/staff/profile/m.p.young
A striking aspect of vision is that observers do not see what their
eyes tell their brains (e.g. Young 1994). This mismatch is clearly
evident in the fact that apparently detailed coloured texture is
seen in extra-foveal vision, where such information is very modest
or absent in the input from the retina, and in other cases, where
information at one location and time influences the likelihood that
information will be present at a different location, and at a later
time. These considerations, and detailed observations of what
neuroanatomy can tell us of the processing architecture in visual
cortex, suggest that the visual system may undertake an inferential
style of computation, rather than analysing bottom-up information
from the eyes, which latter model is in the ascendant in visual
neurophysiology.
We have been exploring the different predictions that the inference
and traditional models make, when the prior probabilities of stimuli
are manipulated, as they are during normal vision. In one paradigm,
we use spatiotemporal sequences of oriented bars to provide the visual
system with "reason to believe" that a bar of particular orientation
will be presented at a particular time. We then vary the congruence,
incongruence and presence of the bar in the RF in relation to these
prior expectations. The results so far are striking: V1 neurons are
often more modulated by these prior and distant events - in many cases
more than 400ms, and 6-10 degrees away from their classical RF - than
they are by events within their RF. Similar results relate to an
experimental paradigm that tests whether V1 neurons really suffer from
the "aperture problem." The interaction between priors and likelihood
functions is well fitted by a Bayesian model, and only poorly fitted
by the traditional view that V1 cells are local filters of one kind or
another. Similarly, Bayesian models fit better than mismatch models,
such as that of Rao and Ballard. These results suggest that V1
neurons are signaling the posterior probability of visual stimuli,
on the basis both of prior knowledge about the world and information
from the eye, effectively imputing feature constellations to the
visual world, rather than simply analysing local contours.
About the Speaker: Professor Malcolm Young is a Provost of Science,
Agriculture and Engineering at the University of Newcastle in England.
His research addresses the question of how the brain works by
investigating how the brain is organized anatomically; what processes
go on inside it; how these processes interact to cause behaviour,
particularly visual behaviour; and what biological constraints must
be met by the brain. His laboratory was instrumental in developing
the neuroinformatics approach - computer-based collation, management,
and analysis of neuroscience data.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 29 April 2004, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Towards an Interoperability Framework for Collaborative Tools"
Eugene Eric Kim
Blue Oxen Associates
Almost 40 years ago, Doug Engelbart demonstrated the first
collaborative software tools at a conference in San Francisco. The
demonstration stunned the audience, who gave Engelbart a standing
ovation. In many ways, today's collaborative tools aren't
significantly better than the software demonstrated that day. One of
the biggest problems is that these tools do not interoperate well with
each other. Kim will discuss the need for a shared conceptual
framework for collaborative tools, which will help reveal new
possibilities for interoperability and improvement.
About the Speaker: Eugene is Executive Director and cofounder of Blue
Oxen Associates, a socially-conscious think tank devoted to improving
collaboration and knowledge management. Previously, he worked as an
independent consultant, specializing in software development, project
management, and strategic planning, and before that, he was Senior
Technical Editor at Dr. Dobb's Journal. He worked closely with Doug
Engelbart on the Open Hyperdocument System, and served on the Core
Planning Committee of Engelbart's Bootstrap Alliance. Eugene has
written for a variety of publications, and is currently writing a book
on the history of free software. Eugene received his A.B. in History
and Science from Harvard University.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 29 April 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"How Real Is the Future?"
John Perry
Philosophy, Stanford University
John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart argued that time is not real. He thought
that the concept of time requires that events have, successively, the
properties of being future, being present, and being past; this is the
source of temporal change, the essence of time. These are A-properties.
The 2000 election was once in the future, then it was present, and
now it is in the past. But our concept of time also requires that all
temporal properties derive from the order of events in time; the 2000
election was after the 1996 election and before the 2004 election.
But these order properties, the B-properties, never change, and so
cannot be the source of the changing properties A-properties. So the
whole thing is a unreconcilable mess, and the concept of time makes no
sense, so there is no time.
Contemporary philosophers of time tend to agree that time is real, but
don't agree on what to do about the properties of being future,
present, and past. Some argue that these are indexical or
token-reflexive properties. When I say now "The 2004 election is in
the future," the condition of truth on my remark is that the 2004
election is later than my remark. The relation between the 2004 and
my remark never change. So there is no problem finding the fact that
makes my statement true in the B-series. Others argue that this
analysis leaves the nature of time utterly mysterious, since temporal
change, the essence of time, is left out. We find the A-series within
the B-series at the cost of losing the essence of time. Moreover, it
seems that on this analysis there would be no past, present, or future
without utterances, or at least thoughts, for events to be before,
simultaneous with, or later than.
I'll argue that the indexical analysis of the properties of being
present, past, and future is not right. There are no future events,
for events are not real, do not exist, until they happen. If there is
no event later than an event E, E is present. If there are events
later than it, E is past. Events go from being present to being past
in virtue of new events coming into existence. The B-series facts
change just as the A-series facts do, and are the basis for them.
Time is real, temporal change is unique, and it does not require
utterances or thoughts. Confusion on these matters is due, among
other things, to not distinguishing representations, models, and
reality, and to the overly facile way we talk about propositions being
true at times.
This talk covers work I am doing with Thomas Hofweber.
About the Speaker: John Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of
Philosophy at Stanford University.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 30 April 2004, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Ventura 17
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
"Speed and Accuracy in Shallow and Deep Stochastic Parsing"
Ron Kaplan, Stefan Riezler, Tracy Holloway King, John T. Maxwell III,
Alexander Vassermann, and Richard Crouch (PARC)
http://www.parc.com/istl/members/riezler/PAPERS/NAACL04.pdf
This paper reports some experiments that compare the accuracy and
performance of two stochastic parsing systems. The currently popular
Collin s parser is a shallow parser whose output contains more
detailed semantically-relevant information than other such parsers.
The XLE parser is a deep-parsing system that couples a Lexical
Functional Grammar to a log-linear disambiguation component and
provides much richer representations. We measured the accuracy of both
systems against a gold standard of the PARC 700 dependency bank, and
also measured their processing times. We found the deep-parsing system
to be more accurate than the Collins parser with only a slight
reduction in parsing speed.
____________
END MATERIAL
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