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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 5 May 2004, vol. 19:34
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
5 May 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 34
______________________________________________________________________
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 5 MAY 2004 TO 14 MAY 2004
WEDNESDAY, 5 MAY 2004
12 noon UC Berkeley Anthropology Talks
Seminar Room, 2251 College, ARF (Berkeley)
"Learning and stone tool production in Paleolithic France"
Kathy Sterling
http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/news.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Ken Kendler
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Scalable Visual Comparison of Biological Trees and Sequences"
Tamara Munzner
University of British Columbia
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
5:15pm CCRMA Colloquium
CCRMA Ballroom, The Knoll
"Object Modeling, Distributed Real-time Systems,
and Signal Processing -- R&D in the UCSB Music Department
(Siren, CSL, and CRAM)"
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 6 MAY 2004
12 noon Learning Sciences and Technology Design Proseminar
Wallenberg Theater, bldg. 100
"Media Mixes and Japanese Technoculture"
Mizuko Ito
Anthropology, USC
http://itofisher.com/mito/
12:15pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"Cross-language universals in color naming:
Some recent facts and a non-explanation"
Paul Kay
Linguistics, UC Berkeley
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Reuters lounge, Cordura Hall
"Designing a Sea Change"
Lauralee Alben
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/reuters/cgi-bin/calendar/index.cgi
4:00pm Personality Lab
Jordan Hall 420:419
"'I just can't stop thinking about it...': Information-processing
biases, cognitive inhibition, and rumination in depression"
Jutta Joormann,
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"AROMA revisited - providing activity information without
attention overload and privacy violation"
Elin Ronby Pedersen
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Hierarchical State Machines:
a Fundamentally Important Way of Software Design"
Miro Samek
Quantum-Leaps
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"Probabilistic Non-linear Component Analysis through Gaussian
Process Latent Variable Models"
Neil Lawrence
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ywteh/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Engineering Deep Grammars"
Tracy King
Palo Alto Research Center
Consulting Associate Professor, Symbolic Systems Program
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 101
"Time Synchronization and Distributed Modulation in Large
Sensor Networks (or 'How to Make a Large Random Field by
Stitching Together Very Many Small Ones')"
Sergio D. Servetto
Cornell University
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
Abstract below
6:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"A French Dialect Continuum Across North America"
Luc Baronian
Stanford University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
Abstract below
(note time change from last week's calendar)
FRIDAY, 7 MAY 2004
12 noon Ethics@Noon
Bldg. 100:101K
"The Duty to Believe According to the Evidence"
Allen Wood
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
"Understanding the Requirements for Developing and Designing
Free/Open Source Software"
Walt Scacchi
UC Irvine
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm NLP Reading Group
Ventura 17
"Unsupervised multilingual sentence boundary disambiguation"
Jan Strunk
Linguistics, Stanford
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Citizenship in Aristotle's Politics"
Dorothea Frede
University of Hamburg/Stanford CASBS
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Michelle Gumbrecht
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
3:30pm Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives: Their Universal Grammar"
Mark Baker
Rutgers
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 10 MAY 2004
9:00am Second Language Acquisition Reading Group
CERAS 204
"The Underlying Beliefs and Values of Japanese Learners of Low
Language Proficiency"
Soo Im Lee
Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
and Ryukoku University
http://www.stanford.edu/~kenro/SLA-RG/
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCSeq 200
"Microsoft Research: Bridging the Analog and Digital Worlds"
Jack Breese (
Microsoft Research
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 11 MAY 2004
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Reuters lounge, Cordura Hall
Michael C. Dorsey
JPMorgan
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/reuters/cgi-bin/calendar/index.cgi
4:15pm Logic Seminar
Bldg. 380:380F (math corner)
"Provability algebras and combinatorial independence results"
Lev D. Beklemishev
Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow, and
Onderzoeker, University of Utrecht
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"A Survey of Cryptographically Verifiable Election Methods"
Josh Benaloh
Microsoft Research
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
5:30pm Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Causative Alternation Errors and Innate Knowledge:
Consequences of the 'No Negative Evidence' Fallacy"
Jean-Philippe Marcotte
Stanford
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
7:00pm Emerging Technology Group
Cubberley Community Center, H-1, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
"Digital Living 2010. How the living room is going digital and
the strategic forces involved"
Gary Sasaki
http://www.sdforum.org/
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 12 MAY 2004
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags
Bldg. 420:050
"Development of face recognition in school-aged children"
Golijeh Golarai
Psychology
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#dev_brownbag
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Barbara Rogoff
University of California, Santa Cruz
http://psych.ucsc.edu/Faculty/bRogoff.shtml
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
"A Novel Approach to Novelty Detection"
Jeff Scargle
NASA Ames Research Center
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Controlling Digital Cloth"
Ari Rapkin
Industrial Light and Magic
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 13 MAY 2004
12 noon RNI/Stanford Seminar Series on Theoretical Neuroscience
BioX/Clark Center, Room S360
"The Ersatz Brain Project:
Brain-Like Computer Design for Cognitive Applications"
James Anderson
Brown University
http://www.brainscience.brown.edu/departments/faculty/anderson.html
http://www.rni.org/seminar2.html
Abstract below
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
Reuters lounge, Cordura Hall
Rick Smolan
Against All Odds Productions
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/reuters/cgi-bin/calendar/index.cgi
4:00pm Personality Lab
Jordan Hall 420:419
"The effects of early life stress on socioemotional behavior,
cognition, and the HPA axis"
Karen Parke
Stanford, Psychiatry
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Software for Embedded Systems"
Edward Lee
University of California, Berkeley
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"How people coordinate with each other with and without language"
Herbert H. Clark
Psychology, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar
Packard 202
"Linear Time Universal Coding in the Class of Tree Models via
FSM Closure"
Marcelo Weinberger
HP Labs
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
4:30pm Medicine and the Muse: An Arts, Humanities and Medicine Symposium
Cantor Arts Center Auditorium
Rafael Campo
Author of The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry
Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
(Exhibit opens at 4:00pm)
http://scbe.stanford.edu/events/muse.html
FRIDAY, 14 MAY 2004
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B01
"Collaboration, Tool Use, and Work Practice of Mars Mission Scientists"
Roxana Wales and Alonso Vera
NASA Ames
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
2:00pm NLP Reading Group
Ventura 17
Title to be announced
Dominic Widdows
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Racial Virtues"
Lawrence Blum
University of Massachusetts-Boston
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Nick Davidenko
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#frisem
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of A+, O-, and O+. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
MEDIA-X REQUESTS FOR PROPOSALS
Media X at Stanford University announces availability of funding for
research about mobile device centric interactive technology used in
collaboration in the context of multimedia. Relevant technologies
include both synchronous and asynchronous, as well as online and
offline creation, editing, re-purposing of text, pictures, audio,
video, and other forms of media. Connectivity methods include, but are
not limited to, high-speed cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, and wireline.
Examples of research activities include mobile applications for
organizing and finding content (including, for example, pattern
matching), multimedia editing, automatic multimedia annotation,
non-textual searches of multimedia content, and advanced mobile UIs
for collaboration around multimedia.
Example scenarios of technology use include mobile media blogging,
multi-player games, knowledge worker collaboration, collaborative
applications for audience in an event (sports, entertainment, etc.),
and use of mobile devices in education, learning, or coaching.
Possible constraints on the technological solution space arise from
the limitations of mobile devices, e.g. need for low power
consumption, available bandwidth, and special needs for user
interface.
A researcher from a Media X partner company with expertise in mobile
technologies is available for cost-free consulting on the project if
desired.
Proposals may be for funding of up to $75,000 for one year.
Multi-year projects will be considered, but funding will be allocated
only one year at a time.
Proposals of no more than five pages (including any vita information)
should be submitted electronically in PDF format by 6:00 PM on May 23,
2004, and sent to Keith Devlin at: devlin@csli.stanford.edu.
Proposals should include a description of the proposed project, vita
for faculty and/or senior research staff who will work on the project.
A detailed budget should be submitted at the same time on a single
sheet, as a separate PDF file. Expenses may include (but are not
limited to) research assistants and post docs, travel, equipment, data
collection expenses, and faculty and research staff salaries.
Media X has adopted a standard format ("Quadchart") for describing
funded projects on its website. See
http://mediax.stanford.edu/projects/fidget.html for an example. The
proposal cover page should provide four short paragraphs that could
form the basis of a Quadchart for your proposal, if funded.
(Quadchart formatting is not required; in fact, straight text is
preferred.)
Selection will be based on the scientific merit of the proposed
project as judged by a committee of faculty, and on any current or
possible applications of the research that may be of interest to
industrial sponsors of Media X research. One project member must be a
Stanford employee with Stanford PI status. Awards will be announced
by June 1, with research to start on June 14.
For information about Media X see: http://mediax.stanford.edu.
Address inquiries about budget arrangements by electronic mail to
Christina Doering at cdoering@csli.stanford.edu. Address all other
inquiries by electronic mail to Keith Devlin at
devlin@csli.stanford.edu.
Please note: In order to process applications within our tight time
frame, only proposals submitted electronically in PDF format can be
accepted.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 5 May 2004, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Scalable Visual Comparison of Biological Trees and Sequences"
Tamara Munzner
University of British Columbia
We present several visualization systems for comparing and browsing
evolutionary trees and genomic sequences. These systems use the
Focus+Context navigational metaphor of allowing users to fluidly
stretch and shrink parts of the view, as if manipulating a rubber
sheet with the borders tacked down. We introduce cognitive scalability
to this approach by guaranteeing the visibility of landmarks at all
times, so that users can stay oriented as they explore complex
datasets. In our systems, landmarks can be regions of difference
between datasets, or the results of a search, or user-chosen regions.
This technique, which we call "accordion drawing", supports smooth
realtime transitions between a big-picture overview and a drilled-down
views that show details in context.
TreeJuxtaposer is a system that allows users to compare large trees of
several hundred thousand nodes. We propose a new methodology for
detailed structural comparison between two trees and provide a new
nearly-linear algorithm for computing the best corresponding node from
one tree to another. SequenceJuxtaposer is a sequence visualization
tool for the exploration and comparison of biomolecular sequences.
SequenceJuxtaposer supports interaction at 20 frames per second when
browsing a single sequence of over 1.2 million base pairs, or large
collections of sequences up to 2 million total base pairs. In both
systems, all runtime rendering algorithms are sublinear in the total
number of tree nodes or base pairs in the dataset, and all
preprocessing is subquadratic in those variables. Our rendering
algorithms accommodate high-resolution displays as well as standard
screen sizes. With these systems, we are able to quickly observe many
features that had previously required significant analysis to
discover.
We also present the TJC and TJC-Q systems, which allow users to browse
extremely large trees using the accordion drawing technique. TJC is a
system that supports browsing trees up to 15 million nodes by
exploiting leading-edge graphics hardware while TJC-Q allows browsing
trees up to 5 million node on commodity platforms. Both of these
systems use a fast new algorithm for drawing and culling and benefit
from a complete redesign of all data structures for more efficient
memory usage and reduced preprocessing time. In addition to browsing
evolutionary trees, these tools are also useful in many other
application domains where there is a demand for large-scale tree
browsing, including network management, software engineering, database
integration, and genealogy.
About the speaker: Tamara Munzner has been an assistant professor in
the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science
since 2002. Her current research interests are information
visualization, graph drawing, dimensionality reduction, and
interactive computer graphics. She was a research scientist from 2000
to 2002 at the Compaq Systems Research Center in California, and
earned her PhD from Stanford between 1995 and 2000. She was on the
technical staff of The Geometry Center, a mathematical visualization
research group at the University of Minnesota, from 1991 to 1995.
____________
CCRMA COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 5 May 2004, 5:15pm
CCRMA Ballroom, The Knoll
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/
"Object Modeling, Distributed Real-time Systems, and Signal Processing
-- R&D in the UCSB Music Department (Siren, CSL, and CRAM)"
This presentation will introduce three development projects that have
been under-way in the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology
(CREATE) in the UC Santa Barbara Dept. of Music: Siren, CSL, and CRAM.
The Siren system is the result of over 20 years of continuous
development in platform-independent object-oriented software for music
and sound processing in the Smalltalk programming language; it
incorporates an abstract music representation language, interfaces for
real-time I/O in several media, a user interface framework, and
connections to object databases. As Siren is exhaustively documented
elsewhere, I'll give a brief system overview, and then discuss Siren's
integration with new sound synthesis frameworks.
The CREATE Signal Library (CSL, pronounced "sizzle") is a portable
general-purpose software framework for sound synthesis and digital
audio signal processing. It is implemented as a C++ class library to be
used as a stand-alone synthesis server, or embedded as a library into
other programs. This presentation will describe the overall design of
CSL version 3 and introduce CSL's facilities for network I/O of control
and sample streams.
The CREATE Real-time Applications Manager (CRAM) is a framework for
developing, deploying, and managing distributed real-time software. It
has evolved through three implementations over the space of six years
at UCSB. The background of CRAM is the work done since the early 1990s
on distributed processing environments (DPEs), which started in the
telecommunications industry. CRAM is unusual among DPEs in that it is
very light-weight, but also fault-tolerant, and that it supports both
planning-time and run-time load balancing as required by real-time
applications. Its anticipated application area is large-scale music
performance systems.
The presentation will include system demonstrations and musical
examples.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 12:15pm-1:30pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Cross-language universals in color naming:
Some recent facts and a non-explanation"
Paul Kay
Linguistics, UC Berkeley
There have been challenges to the claim that there exist universals in
color naming, based on (1) apparent counterexamples from unwritten
languages, (2) the fact that the original experimental data (Berlin
and Kay. Basic Color Terms. 1969) were heavily weighted toward written
languages and tainted by bilingualism and (3) the fact that the
universal claims were based primarily on visual inspection of data
rather than objective statistical study. Part of the research reported
here establishes the claims of semantic universals in color naming on
the basis of statistical analysis of data from 110 unwritten languages
with a modal number of 24 speakers/language, insofar as possible
monolingual (The World Color Survey, WCS).
Universals established, structured variation has long been observed.
For example, the majority of unwritten languages do not have separate
terms for green and blue. This phenomenon has recently been claimed
to result from premature darkening of the optical lens (i.e., early
cataract formation), due to excessive exposure to ultra-violet B
radiation in the tropical locales where such languages are mostly
spoken (Lindsey and Brown, Psych. Sci. 13, 506-512). Research
reported here casts doubt on this "lens brunescence" hypothesis, based
on (1) the WCS cross-language data on "focal" colors and (2)
psychophysical experiment.
About the Speaker: Paul Kay is Professor Emeritus at the Graduate
School at UC Berkeley. He was previously chair of the Department of
Linguistics.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"AROMA revisited - providing activity information without attention
overload and privacy violation"
Elin Ronby Pedersen
In this talk I will briefly describe this research behind the AROMA
system, including an application of AROMA technology in personal
relationship maintenance and security/safety. I will try to call out
the results that seem relevant in today's technology environment . The
AROMA system helped people maintain peripheral awareness of remote or
virtual activity, i.e., activity taking place beyond the immediate
reach of their senses. Maintaining peripheral awareness of remote
activity can help people better organize their work and life. Using
abstract representations solves some otherwise tricky problems about
attention overload and privacy threats. AROMA (Abstract Representation
Of Mediated information for Awareness) was among the first handful of
prototypes to address the challenge of peripheral awareness; alerts,
or focal awareness, had been design objects for some time, but
peripheral awareness presented a whole set of different challenges.
Peripheral awareness is a form of perception where people are able to
(re-)create coherence from few and scattered data with no or little
"cost of attention". The trick of feeding the peripheral awareness may
be to keep the information flow sufficiently subdued so it will not
unduly capture the focus of attention, while also making the flow
dynamic enough to prevent it from being ignored. Our primary
hypothesis was that simple abstract representations, better than
naturalistic ones, would do the trick. The research project provided
basic proof-of-concept of an animated abstract representation
interface, as well as initial assessment of the utility of such
technology. The assessment pointed to findings of interest far beyond
the design of technology for peripheral awareness, for instance, the
fact that people have a great faculty for living with and acting on
ambiguity; this kind of ambiguity handling is not a likely candidate
for formalization and would hence need to stay in the domain of human
interpretation.
About the Speaker: Elin Ronby Pedersen has a PhD in Computer Science
from Copenhagen University and a B.A in Nordic Literature and Language
from Aarhus University. Her initial research was in language,
notations and human understanding of formal and informal
structures. Over the years more focus has been on human computer
interaction (HCI), human communication and collaboration while she
maintains the interest in language. She has repeatedly demonstrated a
rare talent for combining a user centered approach with innovative
design. She is also inventor and co-inventor of 7 issued patents and 5
pending patents, and author/co-author of numerous scientific papers in
peer reviewed publications. In 2001 she founded Kraka (
http://www.kraka.com/ ), a consulting firm creating novel technology
that fits people and do not get in their way. Kraka has advised
clients on innovation processes; designed, organized and conducted
studies of people and technology; organized usability assessment;
built prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity, from paper mock-ups
to robust prototypes for actual trial deployment. Before founding
Kraka, she worked at leading research centers, Xerox PARC, Interval
Research Corporation (a Paul Allen company), and FX Palo Alto
Laboratory (a Fuji Xerox company), as well as leading companies like
Cisco Systems.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Hierarchical State Machines:
a Fundamentally Important Way of Software Design"
Miro Samek
Quantum-Leaps
State Machines provide perhaps the best way of specifying and
implementing the omnipresent event-driven (reactive) systems. Unlike
the traditional finite state automata, however, the modern
Hierarchical State Machines (HSMs) allow sharing of behavior among
many states and therefore no longer "explode" with the increasing
complexity of the systems they describe. This talk summarizes the key
ideas behind HSMs, how they relate to other trends in programming and
other disciplines (physics), and what impact HSMs might have in the
future. The attendees will learn that HSMs are a powerful way of
software design, no less fundamental than object oriented programming.
About the Speaker: Miro Samek is the author of "Practical Statecharts
in C/C++: Quantum Programming for Embedded Systems" (CMP Books, 2002),
a contributing editor to C/C++ Users Journal, and an Embedded Systems
Conference instructor. He is the Software Architect at Global Locate
(San Jose, CA). He previously worked at IntegriNautics Corporation
(Menlo Park, CA) and before that at GE Medical Systems. Miro earned
his Ph.D. in nuclear physics at GSI (Darmstadt, Germany) where he
conducted heavy-ion experiments. Miro welcomes contact at
miro@quantum-leaps.com.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ywteh/cis-seminar
"Probabilistic Non-linear Component Analysis through Gaussian
Process Latent Variable Models"
Neil Lawrence
It is known that Principal Component Analysis has an underlying
probabilistic representation based on a latent variable model. PCA
is recovered when the latent variables are integrated out and the
parameters of the model are optimised by maximum likelihood. It is less
well known that the dual approach of integrating out the parameters
and optimising with respect to the latent variables also leads to PCA.
The marginalised likelihood in this case takes the form of Gaussian
process mappings, with linear Covariance functions, from a latent space
to an observed space, which we refer to as a Gaussian Process Latent
Variable Model (GPLVM). It is straightforward to `non-linearise' this
model by substituting the linear covariance function for a non-linear
one. The result is a non-linear probabilistic PCA model.
In this talk we will present a practical algorithm for optimising the
latent variables in a non-linear GPLVM and discuss some relations with
other models. Finally we will present results from a SIGGRAPH paper
which uses the GPLVM to learn styles in an inverse kinematics problem.
References:
K. Grochow, S. L. Martin, A. Hertzmann, Z. Popoviae (2004) "Style-Based
Inverse Kinematics" ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2004). To
appear
N. D. Lawrence (2004) "Gaussian process models for visualisation of high
dimensional data" in S. Thrun, L. Saul and B. Schoelkopf (eds)
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA. In press
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Engineering Deep Grammars"
Tracy King
Researcher, Palo Alto Research Center
Consulting Associate Professor, Symbolic Systems Program
Parsing systems based on deep grammars mark explicitly a variety of
syntactic and semantic dependencies and should therefore provide
crucial support for meaning-sensitive NLP applications. However,
common wisdom has it that parsing systems based on deep linguistic
grammars are too difficult to produce, lack coverage and robustness,
are massively ambiguous, and have poor run-time performance. In this
talk, I will discuss ways in which deep grammars can be engineered to
overcome these problems, focusing on techniques used in the
implementation of the broad-coverage LFG-based grammars produced by
the ParGram project.
About the Speaker: Tracy Holloway King is a member of the research
staff at the Palo Alto Research Center and a consulting associate
professor with the Symbolic Systems Program.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/seminar/
"Time Synchronization and Distributed Modulation
in Large Sensor Networks
(or 'How to Make a Large Random Field by
Stitching Together Very Many Small Ones')"
Sergio D. Servetto
Cornell University
Joint work with An-swol Hu
We study limit properties of random processes obtained as a properly
scaled sum of a large number of randomly shifted pulses. Such
processes arise naturally in a sensor networking application, where a
large number of power-constrained radio transmitters coordinate their
access to a Gaussian multiple access channel, to cooperate in
generating a strong information-bearing waveform. In this talk we will
see how, under very mild technical assumptions easily met in practice,
the resulting limit waveform has some useful deterministic properties:
it is continuous, with known roots and polarity. We will also see how
these properties lead to efficient and practical implementations of
two essential primitive sensor networking functions: global time
synchronization, and reachback communication. Time permitting, we will
discuss connections with some old problems in network information
theory (and some new ones too), and we will overview experimental work
on these topics currently under way.
____________
STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 6 May 2004, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
"A French Dialect Continuum Across North America"
Luc Baronian
Stanford University
Besides presenting interesting grammatical phenomena, the study of the
French dialects and creoles of the Americas involves complex contact
situations between Africans, (Native) Americans and Europeans, and poses a
significant challenge for language change and classification. Therefore
sociolinguists, historical linguists and even theoretical linguists have
much to learn from their study.
Based on striking resemblances, Hull (1968) first proposed that the French
dialects and creoles of the colonies were all descendent from a maritime
jargon used in the ports of Western France. While linguists who have
concentrated on the genesis of Quebec French (Barbaud, Asselin &
McLaughlin, Morin, Poirier) have all rejected this strong hypothesis at
least for Quebec, a satisfactory global account of the genesis of these
languages and their relation to one another as well as to 17th century
dialects of French is still lacking.
I propose a traditional answer to part of this larger question, based
on recent fieldwork in Louisiana and research at the Library of
Congress on old recordings of former Missouri and Indiana varieties of
French. I show that a former dialect continuum emerges from Canada to
Louisiana, along the St Lawrence and Mississippi rivers.
The results are similar to Andrew Garrett's account of the origin of
Greek, where he proposes that closely related Indo-European dialects
gradually moved closer together by undergoing the same phonological
changes. In the case of the North American French dialects, the
evidence suggests that distinct dialects underwent regional changes
that gradually brought them closer to neighboring dialects, while
distancing them from dialects from which they were originally closer.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 7 May 2004, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Understanding the Requirements for
Developing and Designing Free/Open Source Software"
Walt Scacchi
Institute for Software Research, UC Irvine
In this talk, I present findings from an ongoing empirical study of
social processes, technical system configurations, organizational
contexts, and interrelationships that give rise to free/open source
software. The focus is directed at understanding what the requirements
for designing F/OSS may be. Multiple kinds of software development
informalisms are found to play a critical role in the elicitation,
analysis, specification, validation, and management of the
requirements and design of F/OSS systems, artifacts, processes,
project portals, and communities. Subsequently, understanding the
roles these informalisms take in the development process for F/OSS is
the focus of this presentation.
Research publications and related information at:
http://www.isr.uci.edu/research-open-source.html
About the Speaker: Walt Scacchi is senior research computer scientist
and research faculty member at the Institute for Software Research,
and director of research for the Laboratory for Game Culture and
Technology, at the University of California Irvine. He received his
Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine in 1981. He
joined ISR in 1999 after serving on the faculty at the University of
Southern California for 18 years. From 1981 to 1991 he founded and
directed the USC System Factory, and from 1993 to 1998 he directed the
USC ATRIUM Laboratory. His interests include open source software
development, software process engineering, software acquisition and
electronic commerce, and organizational studies of system
development. He is an active researcher with more than 100 research
papers, and consults widely to clients in industry and government
agencies.
____________
NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 7 May 2004, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Ventura 17
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
"Unsupervised multilingual sentence boundary disambiguation"
Jan Strunk
Linguistics, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/~jstrunk/pubeng.html
The detection of sentence boundaries constitutes a preliminary, yet
important step in electronic text processing. A majority of linguistic
analyses and methods in computational linguistics posit the sentence
as a crucial unit. What is more, sentence boundary detection itself
can be seen as a typical instance of one of the major problems in
computational linguistics: ambiguity resolution. In many languages of
the world, the marker for the sentence boundary, the period is not
used unequivocally. In particular, it is also used to mark
abbreviations. To make this ambiguity even more problematic the period
can as well be used to mark an abbreviation at the end of a sentence.
Although being a comparatively minor task in language processing,
sentence boundary detection has received some attention in the past
decade, as can be witnessed by approaches such as Palmer/Hearst
(1997), Grefenstette (1999), Schmid (2000) and Mikheev (2002). It is a
common property of these approaches that the developed methods have
been applied to a small range of languages only, usually covering one
to three languages. In such a setting, it remains unclear how well the
suggested methods operate if more languages or different types of
corpora are considered.
I will present an approach to sentence boundary detection that I
developed together with Tibor Kiss at the University of Bochum which
is supposed to be language and corpus independent and determines
sentence boundaries with high accuracy. We assume that the
determination of abbreviations is an easier task than the detection of
sentence boundaries, and base our approach on the detection of
abbreviations as a first step. This approach does not make use of
additional annotations, POS tagging, or precompiled lists to support
sentence boundary detection. Also, it does not use orthographical
information as primary evidence and is thus also suited to process
single-case text. It focuses on robustness and flexibility in that it
can be applied to a variety of languages without any adjustment. The
basic algorithm has been determined experimentally on the basis of
large unannotated corpora from German and English. We have applied the
results to further corpora from German and English as well as to
corpora from nine other languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch,
Estonian, French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish).
In the evaluations reported, the mean accuracy of sentence boundary
detection is 98.47 %, the mean accuracy for abbreviation detection is
99.05%.
I will give an introduction into our general approach to abbreviation
detection and the additional heuristics we use to detect abbreviations
at the end of sentences and some more special cases. I will also
report on the results we have obtained when we tested our algorithm on
eleven different languages.
Grefenstette, Gregory. (1999). Tokenization.. In van Halteren, H.
(Ed.) Syntactic Wordclass Tagging. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, pp. 117-133.
Mikheev, Andrei (2002). Periods, Capitalized Words, etc. Computation
Linguistics 28(3), pages 289-318.
Palmer, David D. and Matti A. Hearst (1997). Adaptive multilingual
sentence boundary disambiguation. Computational Linguistics 23(3),
pages 241-267.
Schmid, Helmut (2000). Unsupervised Learning of Period Disambiguation
for Tokenisation. Internal Report, IMS, University of Stuttgart.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 7 May 2004, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives: Their Universal Grammar"
Mark C. Baker
Rutgers University
The notion that there are different "parts of speech" has been central
to theories of language from ancient times until today. Yet formal
generative grammar has never had much to contribute to the
understanding of these distinctions. Serious questions remain about
whether these distinctions are fundamentally morphological, syntactic,
or semantic in character, whether they admit of precise and discrete
formal definitions, and whether they are found in all natural human
languages. I discuss my reasonably new view that attempts to answer
these questions. I claim that there are discrete formal syntactic
definitions that characterize what it is to be a noun or a verb or an
adjective. In brief, verbs are lexical categories that take a
specifier, nouns are lexical categories that (are associated with a
Criterion of Identity and hence) bear a referential index, and
adjectives are lexical categories that have neither a specifier nor a
referential index. These definitions (together with auxiliary
assumptions) can be used to explain the clusters of morphological,
syntactic, and semantic properties that we usually associate with
nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Furthermore, with these definitions in
hand, one can see that all known human languages have essentially the
same three-way distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives-a fact
that emerges more clearly once the interfering influence of functional
categories is controlled for. As time permits, I will go on to give
an overview of how the axioms of this theory can also be used to shed
light on the nature of certain problematic 'mixed' cases, such as the
structure of gerund constructions like "Pat's answering the question
first surprised me" in English, Mapudungun, and Lokaa.
____________
CS528: BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-VISION-ROBOTICS
on Monday, 10 May 2004, 4:15pm
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
"Microsoft Research: Bridging the Analog and Digital Worlds"
Jack Breese
Microsoft Research
Increasingly computers are being used in applications where voice,
audio, and scanned images are important data types. In this talk I
will describe a series of projects at Microsoft Research that address
gaining structured information from these real world (analog) signal
sources. Speech recognition is a classic signal interpretation
problem, and we will describe recent research in microphones and
sensors for robust recognition. Next, we will discuss audio
fingerprinting, a technique for recognizing songs in online streams or
on a PC that can be used in a variety of personal entertainment
scenarios. Finally, we will discuss issues in document interpretation:
extraction of structural, semantic information from scanned documents
such as faxes or printed documents. All these projects require a
combination of signal processing/machine learning techniques and large
datasets; we will discuss the associated methodological challenges and
practical applications.
About the Speaker: Jack Breese is a Director of Microsoft Research in
Redmond, WA, where he oversees work on intelligent systems including
data management, machine learning, communications, collaboration,
natural language processing, communities, document understanding, and
adaptive systems. Previously he was a founding member of the Decision
Theory and Adaptive Systems research group at Microsoft Research,
where he developed basic technologies and tools for user modeling,
intelligent diagnostics, adaptive systems, recommender systems,
e-ecommerce, and datamining. Breese received a doctorate from Stanford
University in 1987 in Engineering-Economic Systems (now Management
Science and Engineering) and joined Microsoft Research in 1993.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 11 May 2004, 4:15pm-5:30pm
Math Corner 380:380F
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Provability algebras and combinatorial independence results"
Lev D. Beklemishev
Leading Researcher, Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow, and
Onderzoeker, University of Utrecht
We suggest an approach to proof-theoretic analysis based on the notion
of graded provability algebra, that is, Lindenbaum boolean algebra of
a theory enriched by additional modal "provability" operators. We use
this structure to analyze Peano arithmetic (PA) and show that an
ordinal notation system up to $\epsilon_0$ can be recovered from the
corresponding algebra in a canonical way. This method naturally leads
to some interesting statements of combinatorial nature independent
from PA. We also formulate a simple theorem in the area of
propositional modal logic that cannot be proved in (a conservative
extension of) PA.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 11 May 2004, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Causative Alternation Errors and Innate Knowledge:
Consequences of the 'No Negative Evidence' Fallacy"
Jean-Philippe Marcotte
Stanford
Pinker (1989) argues that children's causative alternation errors
("Don't fall me down", "The ball didn't throw in") must be a
manifestation of innate grammatical knowledge if there is to be an
explanation for the fact that children eventually attain correct
knowledge despite the absence of negative evidence. I argue in my
dissertation that negative evidence is no more or less prevalent in
children's environment than positive evidence, and that the knowledge
Pinker claims must be innate can in fact be attained through the
interaction of the nature of the target knowledge and the nature of
child/adult interactions.
Children's ability to detect shared meanings between their own
utterances and adult ones is an unspoken but crucial precondition to
obtaining even positive evidence. Both positive and negative evidence
are the outcome of a process of comparison between the child's parse
of an adult utterance in its context, and a child-generated
representation expressing the same meaning in that context. Matches
yield positive evidence, mismatches yield negative evidence. A
construction paradigm approach, in which linkages between verbs and
the constructions in which they can enter are determined by the
meanings of verbs, accounts for both the semantics of argument
alternation errors and their bidirectionality, whereas Lord (1979)
fails in the former respect and Bowerman (1974, 1982) in the latter. I
provide a theory of language use in which linguistic representations
of meaning are divorced from, and refer to, conceptual representations
of events (Talmy 2000). It emerges from this that children acquire
erroneous verb meanings (Behrend 1990) in just such a way that they
hypothesize incorrect construction paradigms, yielding a possibility
of error. A verb is likely to be used erroneously in a construction
when properties of the event to be denoted favor the use of that
construction (Wolff 1999, 2003).
Preliminary results are consistent with this approach: naturally
occurring causative alternation errors (n=222), gathered from
published and unpublished diaries, are restricted to verbs for which
it is predicted that erroneous meanings are acquired, and arise when
the construction with which the error is made is favored by the
context.
____________
EMERGING TECHNOLOGY GROUP
on Tuesday, 11 May 2004, 6:30pm
Cubberley Community Center, H-1, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
http://www.sdforum.org/
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
"Digital Living 2010:
How the living room is going digital and the strategic forces involved"
Gary Sasaki
http://www.digdia.com/
We begin with some forces of change that are shaking up the consumer
electronics industry. We then survey the industry today, viewed from
the recent 2004 Consumer Electronics Show. Then we travel to the
living room circa 2010 to see some elements consumers will find. Of
course, we must mention some challenges that remain before we get
there. Finally, we take a strategic look at some of the major
competing industries and companies.
About the Speaker: Gary Sasaki enjoys finding growth through a
creative look at markets and technology. He was in HP Labs as a
Strategic Business Development Manager for over 10 years where he
found and helped initiate billion dollar businesses. Previously, Gary
was an HP division R&D Manager leading over 100 professionals. The
lab had three separate product lines, each #1 in their market
worldwide.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 12 May 2004, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
"A Novel Approach to Novelty Detection"
Jeff Scargle
Space Science Division, NASA Ames Research Division
In this talk, I present a brief overview of the problem of detecting
novel events, outliers, and anomalies, then discuss the effectiveness
of Voronoi tessellations of multiparametric data spaces and their
relevance to this problem. After this, I describe a new, simple
algorithm for identifying outliers that takes advantages of these
structures. I demonstrate results on tasks taken from the literature,
including medical diagnosis and ball-bearing fault detection. But the
application that inspired this work is the prompt detection of
anomalies in water distribution systems, which has applications in
maintaining water quality and recognizing bioterrorism events, so I
discuss its use there as well.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 12 May 2004, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
NEC Auditorium (B03), Gates Computer Science Building
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Controlling Digital Cloth"
Ari Rapkin
Industrial Light + Magic
Over the last few years, cloth simulation has become a major tool for
creating believable visual effects. Computer generated characters wear
complex clothing, sports arenas are draped with banners and flags, and
non-cloth items like hair, wings, and plastic bags can be simulated
with the same numerical methods. The physics behind these simulations
is improving every year, and it's possible to achieve superb fidelity.
However, when making a film, it's not enough to get the physics right.
Sometimes getting the physics right is the wrong thing entirely! The
artists need to be able to override the physics, making the cloth
behave as needed to convey the story they're trying to tell. A key
feature of ILM's cloth simulation system is the user's ability to
balance physical correctness with artistic and directorial control.
I'll present examples of digital cloth from several recent films, and
provide a closer look at some of the ways ILM's visual effects artists
control simulated cloth to achieve their desired results.
About the speaker: Ari Rapkin began working at Industrial Light +
Magic in 1998 as a member of the Production Software team, providing
support and development for a variety of graphics software systems. In
2000, she joined the Software R&D department's simulation group. Her
contributions to ILM's software include fluid & smoke simulation for
films including Pearl Harbor and The Mummy Returns. Since early 2002,
she has been the head of the cloth simulation project, working on
cloth simulation for films such as Jurassic Park III, Star Wars:
Episodes II and III, Hulk, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and
Van Helsing.
Ari was born in Los Angeles, but soon moved to Texas and then to
Wilmington, Delaware. She attended The Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, where she received a B.A. in mathematics. Her graduate
education began with a program in gifted education at the University
of Virginia, where she also earned a master's degree in computer
science. Later she went on to obtain an M.S. in computer science at
Carnegie Mellon University, graduating in 1997. While in graduate
school, she was a math instructor at the Johns Hopkins Center for
Talented Youth, and a research intern at Xerox PARC and DEC SRC.
____________
RNI/STANFORD SEMINAR SERIES IN THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE
on Thursday, 13 May 2004, 12 noon - 1pm
BioX/Clark Center, Room S360
http://www.rni.org/seminar2.html
"The Ersatz Brain Project:
Brain-Like Computer Design for Cognitive Applications"
James Anderson
Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University
http://www.brainscience.brown.edu/departments/faculty/anderson.html
The Ersatz Brain Project is an attempt to design a suitable computer
for the efficient execution of the software now being developed that
will display human-like cognitive abilities. Examples of these
software applications would be natural language understanding, text
processing, conceptually based internet search, natural human-computer
interfaces, cognitively based data mining, sensor fusion, and image
understanding. Requirements of the proposed software are primary in
shaping our hardware design. We suggest a "cortex-power" massively
parallel computer is technically feasible, requiring on the order of a
million simple CPUs and a terabyte of memory for connections between
CPUs. This approach might build a shoddy and second-rate cortex, but
still perhaps interesting. We will discuss initial "back of the
envelope" ideas about architectures and three possible very early
examples of the unusual software suitable for problems that might run
on such a machine: sensor fusion, simple arithmetic operations, and
one kind of contextual disambiguation.
About the Speaker: Dr. Anderson has been a member of the faculty of
Brown University since September 1973. He is now Professor in the
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. He was Chair of the
Department from 1993 to 1998 and in 2000-2001. Dr. Anderson has
published extensively in the area of computational models for
cognition and memory and computational neuroscience. Dr. Anderson is
the author of numerous books and journal articles, including "Talking
Nets," "Introduction to Neural Networks" and "Neurocomputing," Volumes
1 and 2, all from MIT Press. Dr. Anderson has a B.S. in physics
(1962) and a Ph.D. in physiology (1967) from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and had postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA
(1967-1971) and Rockefeller University (1971-1973).
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 13 May 2004, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"How people coordinate with each other with and without language"
Herbert H. Clark
Psychology, Stanford
When people engage in joint activities--waltzing, playing tennis,
planning parties, negotiating contracts, or merely conversing--they
have to coordinate on what each of them is to do when and where. They
achieve that coordination not only by means of language, but by means
of what I will call material signals, signals in which they deploy
material objects around them. These actions include pointing at,
placing, and exhibiting objects, but also other actions on and with
objects. I will describe when and how people use both linguistic and
material signals to coordinate in several joint activities.
____________
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