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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 18 August 2004, vol. 19:49
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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18 August 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 49
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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 18 AUGUST 2004 TO 27 AUGUST 2004
WEDNESDAY, 18 AUGUST 2004
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
"The bias-variance tradeoff in active learning"
Hinrich Schuetze
Enkata Technologies
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
THURSDAY, 19 AUGUST 2004
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"What's up with the Dish"
Michael Cousins
SRI International
http://www.parc.com/forum/
WEDNESDAY, 25 AUGUST 2004
12:30pm UC Berkeley Dissertation Defense
310 Soda Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Exploiting Locality in Probabilistic Inference"
Mark Paskin
Computer Science, UC Berkeley
http://coe.berkeley.edu/events/
7:00pm Computer History Museum Movie
Computer History Museum (1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View)
"Desk Set (1957)"
with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
reception, movie, and Museum collection
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/
($15 general admission, $10 for Museum and CINEQUEST members)
THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 2004
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Gene Therapy - The Brave New World"
Michele Calos
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
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Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O+ and O-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
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SIDE NOTE
Stanford people might want to check out this week's Tech Express, "My
computer is driving me crazy" led by Mark Branom. He will be giving
tips and tricks on dealing with spam, unwanted popup boxes, adware,
and spyware (it is amazing how many windows boxes have adware/spyware
on them and are slower because of this).
Thursday, August 19
12:00 - 1:00 P.M.
Pigott Hall, Room 113 (aka the Language corner)
http://techexpress.stanford.edu/
Also Stanford people might want to investigate the University's
calendar service (Sundial) at http://calendar.stanford.edu/. It may
help you schedule meetings with other Stanford people. People already
familiar with it but who want to become power users should go to this
week's Tech Briefing, "Sundial for Power Users" which covers such
topics as group calendaring, managing and using Sundial groups,
advanced access rights, search tips and tricks, sharing an address
book, and tracking project deliverables using daily notes (but not,
this time, how use it with a PDA)
Friday, August 20
2:00 - 3:30 P.M.
Turing Auditorium
http://techbriefings.stanford.edu/
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UC BERKELEY DISSERTATION DEFENSE
on Wednesday, 25 August 2004, 12:30pm
310 Soda Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://coe.berkeley.edu/events/
"Exploiting Locality in Probabilistic Inference"
Mark Paskin
Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
Graphical models have become indispensable tools for exploiting
independence structure in probabilistic reasoning. However, there are
important problems where independence structure alone is insufficient
to guarantee practical inference algorithms; in addition we require a
representation with locality structure. In this talk I will argue
that decomposable models, which are a special class of graphical
models, have the locality structure required for practical solutions
to these problems.
The talk focuses on two important and challenging inference problems.
The first is filtering in dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN). Even when
a DBN has significant independence structure, the belief state can
collapse to a representation without any independencies, making
filtering intractable. I will present a novel technique for
approximate filtering, called thin junction tree filtering (TJTF),
which represents the belief state as a decomposable model. By
exploiting locality in the belief state representation, TJTF can
automatically and efficiently identify the weakest dependencies in the
belief state and prune them to control the complexity of filtering.
TJTF is illustrated by an extended application to simultaneous
localization and mapping, a fundamental problem in mobile robotics.
The second problem is distributed inference, where the nodes of a
network must collaborate to solve a probabilistic inference problem.
I will present a robust architecture for distributed inference in
which the nodes assemble themselves into a junction tree and solve the
inference problem by message passing. In settings with unreliable
communication and node failures, nodes may not have access to the
complete probability model; this can make traditional message passing
algorithms fail badly. I will present a new message passing algorithm
which exploits the locality of decomposable representations to
guarantee that each node can make inferences using whatever parts of
the model are available to it. The algorithm is exact at convergence,
and when parts of the model are inaccessible to a node, its estimate
is a principled approximation to the true posterior. The approach is
demonstrated on the problem of automatic sensor calibration in
wireless sensor networks.
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END MATERIAL
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