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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 7 July 2004, vol. 19:43
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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7 July 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 43
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
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ACTIVITIES FROM 7 JULY 2004 TO 16 JULY 2004
THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004
3:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Go! agents go to the dance:
a multi-paradigm symbolic language for multi-agent systems"
Frank McCabe
Fujitsu Laboratories
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"From Interplanetary Cruise to the Surface of Mars
The Challenges of infusing AI in Space"
Kanna Rajan
NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 9 JULY 2004
7:00pm Long Now Foundation Talk
Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco
"Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence -
A Necessarily Long-Term Strategy"
Jill Tarter
SETI Institute
http://www.seti.org/about_us/leadership/staff/jill_t.html
http://www.longnow.org/
TUESDAY, 13 JULY 2004
7:00pm Emerging Technology Group
Cubberley Community Center, H-1, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
"Querying the Physical World: TinyDB and TASK"
Wei Hong, Intel Research
Joseph Hellerstein, Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Sam Madden, MIT
http://www.sdforum.org/
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
Abstract below
7:30pm BayCHI
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The Future Ain't What It Used To Be:
The Silent Revolution in Usability Practice"
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstract below
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Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O+, B+, and AB-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
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SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 8 July 2004, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Go! agents go to the dance:
a multi-paradigm symbolic language for multi-agent systems"
Frank McCabe
Fujitsu Laboratories
Go! is a logic programming based language with distinct syntactic
features that directly support functional and object oriented
programming the latter based on Logic and Objects style of classes. It
is targeted at high integrity systems and at building agent systems.
We have used Go! to elaborate an agent architecture which is based on
the BDI principles but which supports concurrency internally and
externally: beliefs are updated and accessed asynchronously within the
agent by different modules with specific responsibilities such as
negotiation and world perception. In this talk I will introduce some
of the key features of Go!, focusing on the newer aspects of its class
notation. I will also show how an agent architecture such as outlined
above can be easily built; in the context of a multi-agent
demonstrator that uses agents negotiating over dances and drinks at a
ball.
About the Speaker: Frank McCabe is a Research Fellow at Fujitsu
Laboratories of America. His focus in multi-agent systems has been on
designing programming systems and tools to simplify the task of
building agent systems. He has also been active in recent years in
various standardization efforts, including the W3C Web Services
Architecture and the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents.
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PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 8 July 2004, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"From Interplanetary Cruise to the Surface of Mars
The Challenges of infusing AI in Space"
Kanna Rajan
Autonomy & Robotics Area, Computational Sciences Division
NASA Ames Research Center
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov
In 1999, NASA flew the first AI based closed-loop control system in
space, the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX), on the New Millennium Deep
Space One (DS1) spacecraft. This deployment fundamentally changed the
perception of AI research within (and without) the agency, and helped
institute a robust funding program for Autonomy and Robotics research
for NASA. While the promise of more applied AI and Robotics systems
within the space domain has yet to be fully realized, the agency is
taking small and incremental steps towards realizing the ambitions of
scores of researchers in the field. This talk is the story of why
progress has been incremental and what it took to get to deploy a
mission-critical AI application on a NASA science mission.
The Mixed-initiative Activity Plan GENerator (MAPGEN) is a system that
combines a rich formalism of a flexible temporal constraint network
with a familiar front end used by mission operations personnel at JPL
for mission planning. It provides a ground-based decision-support
system in the critical part of the uplink command cycle for the 2003
Mars Exploration Rovers (see http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov &
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/story.php?sid=106&sec=space ).
Mission operators with the help of science personnel, have continued
to use MAPGEN, twice daily to build a complex conflict free plan that
is packaged and uplinked to command the Spirit and Opportunity rovers
on the surface of Mars. This generative planner, automatically
enforces mission and flight rules encased in a declarative model, as
well as constraints imposed to encode the scientific intent of
observations for that Sol (Martian day) to be executed onboard the two
rovers.
I will briefly discuss the results of the deployment so far (which
have far exceeded our own expectations) and will take you along on the
wild ride we went thru to get to be a critical part of NASA's most
complex scientific mission to date.
About the Speaker: Kanna is a Senior Research Scientist and a member
of the management team of the the Autonomy and Robotics Area at NASA
Ames Research Center Moffett Field, California. He is one of the
principals of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX) which designed, built,
tested and flew the first AI based closed-loop control system on a
spacecraft. The RA was the co-winner of NASA's 1999 Software of the
Year, the agency's highest technical award
(http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/remote-agent/ ).
His interests are in Planning/Scheduling, modeling and representation
for real world planners and agent architectures for Distributed
Control applications. Prior to joining Ames, he was in the doctoral
program at the Courant Institute of Math Sciences at New York
Univ. Prior to that he was at the Knowledge Systems group at American
Airlines, helping build a Maintenance Routing scheduler (MOCA) which
continues to be used by the airline 365 days of the year. The MAPGEN
team at Ames and JPL has been awarded the 2004 Turning Goals into
Reality award under the Administrators Award category. He is currently
the Principal Investigator for MAPGEN and is looking forward to
returning to leading a normal human existence soon.
He is the recipient of the 2002 NASA Public Service Medal and the
First NASA Ames Information Directorate Infusion Award also in
2002. He is the Co-chair of the 2005 Intnl. Conference on Automated
Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), to be held in Monterey California (
http://icaps05.icaps-conference.org/ ) and the chair of the Executive
Board of the International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for
Space ( http://www.congrex.nl/04c06/ ).
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EMERGING TECHNOLOGY GROUP
on Tuesday, 13 July 2004, 7:00pm
Cubberley Community Center, H-1, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
http://www.sdforum.org/
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
Talk begins ast 7:20pm
"Querying the Physical World: TinyDB and TASK"
Wei Hong, Intel Research
Joseph Hellerstein, Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Sam Madden, MIT
Wireless,low-power sensor networks promise to open the physical world
to inexpensive, large-scale, real-time analysis. This holds promise
for a new generation of applications in areas that include
environmental monitoring, physical plant management, traffic
monitoring and asset tracking. Recent years have seen the development
of viable, inexpensive sensornet technologies that provide sensing,
modest computation, and radio communication. On top of these
platforms, new embedded operating systems and ad-hoc networking stacks
are coming of age.
Early adopters of sensornet technology have been stymied by the
challenges of writing distributed algorithms on these embedded,
power-starved platforms. TinyDB is a system developed jointly at Intel
Research and UC Berkeley to overcome this hurdle. TinyDB is an
embedded, distributed query processor that runs inside a sensor
network. It allows application programmers to interact with an entire
sensornet much as they interact with a database: submitting
declarative SQL-like queries that collect and aggregate real-time
information from a set of deployed sensors. Given a query, TinyDB
automatically manages the communication, computation, and power
consumption in the network, analogous to the way that a traditional
database manages disk access and query execution. Recently, TinyDB has
become the cornerstone of the Tiny Sensor Kit (TASK): a turnkey
"sensornet in a box" from Intel Research that provides end users with
a useful subset of the TinyDB functionality in a minimal-configuration
package.
In this talk, we will discuss the system and data management
challenges in sensor networks, and the ways that database and network
technologies interrelate in this new design space. We will present
some of our solutions in TinyDB/TASK, and share experiences deploying
sensor networks in a variety of settings. We will also provide a
sense of where the research in this arena is headed, in our effort to
make it easy to gather ever more accurate information with ever
reduced energy consumption.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Wei Hong is a senior researcher and principal investigator at
Intel Research, Berkeley. His current research focuses on data
management issues in sensor networks. He leads the Tiny Application
Sensor Kit (TASK) project at Intel Research and co-designed/developed
TinyDB, an open-source, in-network sensor database system. Prior to
joining Intel Research, Dr. Hong co-founded and architected two
startup companies: Illustra Information Technology Inc. and Cohera
Corp. Illustra developed the first successful commercial
Object-Relational database system. It was acquired by Informix, now
part of IBM. Cohera provided electronic catalog management solutions
based on a novel federated database system that it developed. Its
technology was acquired by PeopleSoft. Dr. Hong earned a Ph.D. in
computer science from UC Berkeley and holds a master and two bachelor
degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Joseph M. Hellerstein is a Professor of Computer Science at the
University of California, Berkeley, and is the Director of Intel
Research, Berkeley. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and a
recipient of multiple awards, including ACM-SIGMOD's "Test of Time"
award for his first published paper, NSF CAREER, NASA New
Investigator, Okawa Foundation Fellowship, and IBM's Best Paper in
Computer Science. In 1999, MIT's Technology Review named him one of
the top 100 young technology innovators worldwide in their inaugural
"TR100" list.
Hellerstein's research focuses on data management and movement,
including database systems, sensor networks, peer-to-peer and
distributed systems.
Prior to his position at Intel Research, Hellerstein was a co-founder
of Cohera Corporation (now part of PeopleSoft), where he served as
Chief Scientist from 1998-2001. Key ideas from his research have been
incorporated into commercial and open-source database systems
including IBM's DB2 and Informix, PeopleSoft's Catalog Management, and
the open-source PostgreSQL system. Hellerstein currently serves on
the technical advisory boards of a number of software companies, and
has served as a member of the advisory boards of ACM SIGMOD and Ars
Digita University.
Hellerstein received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, a masters degree from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree
from Harvard College. He spent a pre-doctoral internship at IBM
Almaden Research Center, and a post-doctoral internship at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem.
Dr. Sam Madden's primary research interests are in the areas of
distributed databases, sensor networks, and wide area networking. He
is an author of the TinyDB system for data collection in sensor
networks, and is leading the database group at the MIT Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to joining MIT,
Dr. Madden was a post-doctoral researcher at Intel Research, Berkeley,
where he was involved in a number of real world deployments of sensor
network technology, including deployments of sensors in the Berkeley
Botanical Garden and on Great Duck Island off the coast of
Maine. Dr. Madden received his B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1999. He received his
Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2003.
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BayCHI
on Tuesday, 13 July 2004, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
(socializing starts at 7:00pm)
"The Future Ain't What It Used To Be:
The Silent Revolution in Usability Practice"
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
There's dramatic change underfoot. Radical new ideas are replacing
traditional ideology. Our companies and organizations need help to
meet their growth objectives and are demanding a fundamental change in
our skill sets. And most usability practitioners are completely
unaware of the change.
What we thought was the core truths of our practice turn out to be
little more than parlor tricks. Our current usability practices just
don't scale. While usability practice today has localized effects in
small doses, when applied to today's normal-sized business problems,
it has virtually no positive effects (and far too many negative ones).
Jared will present an entertaining, informative, and (not
surprisingly) controversial look at the current state of usability
practice and the revolution he believes is underway. He'll describe
UIE's research into large-scale usability practices and outline the
best practices for meeting the changing design environment.
About the Speaker: Jared M. Spool is founding principal of User
Interface Engineering. If you've ever seen Jared speak about
usability, you know that he's probably the most effective,
knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He has guided the
research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest
research organization of its kind in the world. He's been working in
the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term
"usability" was ever associated with computers. He is also the
conference chair and keynote speaker at the twice-annual User
Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon
Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.
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