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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 25 August 2004, vol. 19:50
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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25 August 2004 Stanford Vol. 19, No. 50
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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 25 AUGUST 2004 TO 3 SEPTEMBER 2004
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/
Abstract below
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)
7:00pm SNAFU Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Monthly meeting
http://www.snafunet.org/
Information below
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/
FRIDAY, 27 AUGUST 2004
1:30pm CSLI Talk
Cordura 104
"Statistical Natural Language Generation for Navigation Instructions"
Jeff Russell
undergraduate, Mathematics, Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/semlab/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 30 AUGUST 2004
4:00pm AI Seminar
Gates 104
"Computer Chess, state of the art"
Shay Bushinsky
Computer Science, Haifa University
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2004
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Using Powerful FEC Codes for File and Streaming Delivery to
Mobile Receivers"
Michael Luby
Digital Fountain
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 2004
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Introduction to the Seminar"
Clifford Lynch
"Report on SIGIR"
Fredric Gey and Ray Larson
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is296a-1/f04/
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Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O+, O-, and A+. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
SIDE NOTE
Stanford Art Spaces
http://cis.stanford.edu/~marigros/
Are you aware that the CIS (Center for Integrated Systems) building
also doubles as an art gallery, Stanford Art Spaces? The exhibits
last for about 2 months each and have between two to five artists.
For more information see http://cis.stanford.edu/~marigros/ or just
saunter through CIS on your way from the Quad to CSLI (or vice versa).
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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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SENSOR NETWORK APPLICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES FORUM (SNAFU)
on Wednesday, 25 August 2004, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.snafunet.org/
The fourth meeting of SNAFU will be held at PARC in Palo Alto on
Wednesday, August 25th at 7 PM.
RSVPing is NOT required, but we'd appreciate if you could help us get
a headcount by emailing snafu-organizers@snafunet.org.
The agenda is as follows:
7:00-7:45P Snacks and Networking
7:45-8:00P Welcome and Announcements
8:00-9:00P Presentations: 3-4 introductory talks (10 min each+5 min Q&A)
Our preliminary speaker lineup:
* Moteiv
* HP
* Sun Microsystems
We currently plan for the first few meetings to be devoted to getting
to know each other. At each meeting, 4 volunteers will give 10 minute
talks summarizing the work going on at their company or research
group, followed by 5 minutes Q&A. If you'd like to present at this or
a future meeting, please email the organizers at
snafu-organizers@snafunet.org.
The Sensor Network Applications and technologies ForUm (SNAFU) is a
monthly Palo Alto-based forum for the emerging San Francisco Bay Area
Sensor Network community. SNAFU exists to build a local community of
companies, research labs, and focused academic groups implementing,
integrating or developing Sensor Network Systems and components. We
want to foster connections, partnerships and technical discussion
among these groups and promote the Bay Area as the center of the
Sensor Network Universe.
Our meetings will generally be held on the 4th Wednesday of every
month. Meetings will include presentations on technologies and
applications, panel discussions, announcements of new hardware or
software products, and time for networking.
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CSLI TALK
on Friday, 27 August 2004, 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Cordura 104
"Statistical Natural Language Generation for Navigation Instructions"
Jeff Russell
undergraduate, Mathematics, Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/semlab/
I'll be discussing my work for NIST on statistical natural language
generation for navigation instructions. I'll present an in-progress
surface realization system that uses a corpus-induced language model to
generate sentences that express given HALogen-style semantic
structures. The approach is essentially a search through the space of
possible parse trees, optimizing the likelihood of the parse conditioned on
the semantic structure.
About the Speaker: Jeff Russell has been working with the CSLI
Computational Semantics Lab this summer.
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AI SEMINAR
on Monday, 30 August 2004, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Gates 104
"Computer Chess, state of the art"
Shay Bushinsky
Computer Science, Haifa University
Shay Bushinsky, the co-author of Deep Junior, the Worlds Reigning
Computer Chess Champion, will deliver a lecture about Deep Junior's
recent match versus Garry Kasparov. The match was the climax of the
10 year Junior Project during which it won the world title four
times. The recent results between Deep Junior and Kasparov as well as
between Deep Fritz and Kasparov & Vladimir Kramnik will be
examined. These matches shed further light on the current strengths
and weaknesses of the best computer programs. In particular, the
lecture will amplify classical anti-computer chess, a theory that
evolved over recent years out of human experience gained against AI
and the counter methods employed by the programmers
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PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 2 September 2004, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Using Powerful FEC Codes for
File and Streaming Delivery to Mobile Receivers"
Michael Luby
Digital Fountain, Inc
We describe Raptor codes, the most flexible and powerful FEC codes
available for delivery of data over packet-based networks. We
demonstrate that Raptor codes are crucial for both efficient delivery
of files and for high-quality video streaming over emerging broadcast
and multicast wireless networks. Example applications include delivery
of navigational updates and point-of-interest data to automobiles and
delivery of multimedia files and H.263 streaming video to 3G
telephones and PDAs. Standardization of the general approach of using
FEC codes for file and streaming delivery within the IETF and 3GPP
will also be outlined.
About the Speaker: Dr. Michael Luby cofounded Digital Fountain,
Inc. in 1998, where he currently holds the position of Chief
Technology Officer. Michael is a world-renowned Theoretical Computer
Scientist, and has made breakthrough research contributions in the
areas of coding theory, randomized algorithm design and analysis,
transport protocols and cryptography. He is actively leading the
development of several transport standards within the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). After receiving his Ph.D. in
Theoretical Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1983 he was a
Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. In 1988
Michael joined the International Computer Science Institute in
Berkeley to become the Leader of the Theory Group and concurrently an
Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. Michael is a recipient of the 2002
Information Theory Society Paper Award for some of his coding theory
research and the 2003 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for some of his
cryptography research.
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END MATERIAL
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