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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 1 February 2006, vol. 21:20
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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1 February 2006 Stanford Vol. 21, No. 20
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 1 FEBRUARY 2006 TO 10 FEBRUARY 2006
WEDNESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2006
3:00pm UC Berkeley Psychology Job Talk [1-Feb-2006]
Beach Room, Tolman (Berkeley)
"Experiential, Neurocognitive, Physiological and Genetic Correlates"
Naomi Eisenberger
UCLA
(Candidate, Cross-Area Search)
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [1-Feb-2006]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"Episodic memory and theory-of-mind: The role of direct
experience and mental imagery in development"
Josef Perner
University of Salzburg (currently at CASBS)
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [1-Feb-2006]
Gates B01
"Search at Microsoft"
Christopher Payne
Search, Microsoft Corporation
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 2 FEBRUARY 2006
11:00am CCRMA Hearing Seminar [2-Feb-2006]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"Multisensory Communications of Music and Space"
Wieslaw Woszczky
McGill University
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
12:45pm Stanford Networking Seminar [2-Feb-2006]
Gates 104
"Design and Analysis of a Peer-to-peer Replication Protocol
for Windows"
Doug Terry
Microsoft Research
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
3:00pm Information Systems Seminar [2-Feb-2006]
Packard 101
"Signal Processing and Energy Efficiency in Wireless Networks"
H. Vincent Poor
Princeton University
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
(this is the first of two talks on this day)
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [2-Feb-2006]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Advertising is Flirtation"
James H. Morris
Dean, Carnegie Mellon West
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [2-Feb-2006]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Intention: Individual and Shared"
Michael Bratman
Philosophy, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [2-Feb-2006]
Packard 101
"Combinatorial Optimization: New Approaches and Proofs of Conjectures"
Chandra Nair
Microsoft
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2006
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [3-Feb-2006]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"The Attention System of Language -- Work in Progress"
Len Talmy
Linguistics, SUNY Buffalo
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12 noon Neuro Economics Workshop [3-Feb-2006]
Clark Center S361
Title to be announced
Joshua Gold
Neurology, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.med.upenn.edu/ins/faculty/joshgold.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/group/neuroeconomics/workshop.htm
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [3-Feb-2006]
Gates B03
"Rhythm Awareness in Collaborative Applications"
Bo Begole
PARC
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley Psychology Job Talk [3-Feb-2006]
101 LSA (Berkeley)
"Mechanisms of Nervous System Wiring"
Yimin Zou
University of Chicago
(Neuroscience-MCB Candidate)
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
2:00pm Stanford Tech Briefing [3-Feb-2006]
Turing Auditorium, Polya Hall
"What's New From Apple"
Wyn Davis
Stanford Apple Rep
http://www.stanford.edu/group/itss-customer/ip/techbriefings
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [3-Feb-2006]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Marc Davis
Founding Director, Yahoo! Research Berkeley
http://research.yahoo.com/berkeley/
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is296a-1/s06/
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [3-Feb-2006]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Extracting referential information during on-line processing"
Elsi Kaiser
USC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Group in Logic and Methodology of Science [3-Feb-2006]
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"Epistemic Modals Are Assessment-Sensitive"
John MacFarlane
UC Berkeley
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: InfoSeminar [3-Feb-2006]
Gates B12
"Sketching Streams through the Net:
Distributed Approximate Query Tracking"
Minos Garofalakis
Intel Research Berkeley
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
5:00pm Ethnographic Field Methods and Ethics Seminar [3-Feb-2006]
Bldg. 360:361
"Is What People Say Enough? On Truth and Lies, Sincerity and
Convention, Deep Structure and Behaviors"
Robert P. Weller
Boston University
MONDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2006
12 noon China Brown Bag [6-Feb-2006]
Philippines Conf., 3rd floor, Encina Hall
"Analyticization and Grammar Change"
C.-T. James Huang
Linguistics, Harvard University
http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/analyticization_and_grammar_change/
12:30pm Center for Internet and Society Talk [6-Feb-2006]
Law School 280B
"Online Dispute Resolution, Democracy and the EBay Experience"
Colin Rule
eBay
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
2:00pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [6-Feb-2006]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Rethinking Autosegmental Phonology"
William Leben
Stanford
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
Abstract below
3:30pm Social Lab [6-Feb-2006]
Wallenberg Hall 124
"What do People Value When they Negotiate?
Mapping the Domain of 'Subjective Value' in Negotiation"
Jared Curhan
Organization Studies, MIT
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_social.html
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium [6-Feb-2006]
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Proposals for the use of social theory in variationist
sociolinguistics"
Robin Dodsworth
Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [6-Feb-2006]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"The Phenomenology of Efficacy"
Susanna Siegel
Harvard University
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ssiegel/
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
7:00pm Stanford Presidential Lecture [6-Feb-2006]
Cubberley Auditorium, School of Education
"Analogy as the Core of Cognition"
Douglas Hoftstadter
Indiana University
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/
TUESDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2006
4:15pm Logic Seminar [7-Feb-2006]
Bldg. 380:380F (math corner)
"Attributes as Dual Types"
Vaughan Pratt
Computer Science, Stanford University
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2006
4:00pm UC Berkeley Philosophy of Mind Workgroup [8-Feb-2006]
2129 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Category Perception"
Stephen Palmer
Visual Perception Lab, UC Berkeley
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~plab/
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm NLaSP Colloquium [8-Feb-2006]
Room to be announced
"Linguistic Analysis for Question Answering"
Ron Kaplan
PARC Natural Language Theory and Technology Group
http://nlp.stanford.edu/events.shtml
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [8-Feb-2006]
Gates B01
"Is it a Baby or a Bathtub? and How Many Fish?
Two Case Studies in Applied Computing"
Rose M. Ray
Exponent- Failure Analysis
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2006
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [9-Feb-2006]
EJ228, SRI International
Title to be announced
Mark Paskin
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Cognition, Brain, and Behavior [9-Feb-2006]
Beach room, Tolman (Berkeley)
"Beyond imitative learning: Human 'pedagogy' as a mechanism of
cultural transmission"
Gyuri Gergely
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [9-Feb-2006]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Pockets: Visualizing Campaign Finance"
Geoff Morris
M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program,
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [9-Feb-2006]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Elitza Maneva
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~elitza/
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2006
all day CodeCon 2006 [10-Feb-2006]
StudioZ, 314 11th Street (San Franciso)
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html
(registration fee)
Information below
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [10-Feb-2006]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Cognitive Neuroscience Studies of Relational (Declarative) Memory"
Neal Cohen
Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12 noon Logic Lunch [10-Feb-2006]
Bldg. 380:383F (math corner)
"Parametric Sets and Virtual Classes"
Dana S. Scott
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [10-Feb-2006]
Gates B03
"Subvocalization as a computer input"
Chuck Jorgensen
NASA
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [10-Feb-2006]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Clifford Lynch
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is296a-1/s06/
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [10-Feb-2006]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Understanding Coincidence"
Laurie Paul
University of Arizona
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [10-Feb-2006]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Carol Seger
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
4:15pm CS545: InfoSeminar [10-Feb-2006]
Gates B12
"User-Centric Web Crawling"
Christopher Olston
CMU and Yahoo! Research
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 11 FEBRUARY 2006
all day CodeCon 2006 [11-Feb-2006]
StudioZ, 314 11th Street (San Franciso)
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html
(registration fee)
Information below
SUNDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2006
all day CodeCon 2006 [12-Feb-2006]
StudioZ, 314 11th Street (San Franciso)
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html
(registration fee)
Information below
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: Shortage of O+, O-, A-, B+, and AB-.
For an appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call
650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free
cookies.
____________
NOTE
Just want to bring to people's attention the wide range of events
(only some of cognitive sciences interest) to be found at
http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/ the Stanford Center for East Asian
Studies.
____________
REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS
Wallenberg Global Learning Network
http://wgln.stanford.edu/2006/
The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and Stanford University have
developed a joint project to support research collaborations between
Swedish and Stanford faculty who are committed to improving teaching
and learning. The objectives of WGLN II are to produce new knowledge
for best learning practices and to develop pedagogic and technical
solutions for use in a wide variety of university and pre-college
settings. To reach these goals, the WGLN II competitive faculty grants
program seeks projects that bring together teaching faculty who are
the content experts, technology experts, and experts in the learning
sciences. All projects are required to be research collaborations
between Swedish and Stanford University faculty. There also is a
strong emphasis placed on the implementation and testing of innovative
ICT and pedagogic methods in courses at the college and pre-college
levels. Successful projects will be expected to submit a scientific
report describing the products and outcomes of their research and a
financial report on all project expenditures to the WGLN Board and the
KAW Foundation. Completed applications must be submitted to WGLN by
April 4, 2006, 1700 PDT. http://wgln.stanford.edu/2006/
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Search at Microsoft"
Christopher Payne
Corporate VP of Search, Microsoft Corporation
The Search industry is growing at a very rapid rate. The industry is
expected to generate hundreds of billions of queries a year from
hundreds of millions of users, with a revenue potential of more than
$10 billion a year by 2008.
Even at this very fast growth rate, the industry is in its infancy and
is faced with technological challenges. It is commonly accepted that a
good proportion of users' questions go unanswered on most search
engines today, and searches often take a long time to finally produce
an answer. Though the majority of the freely available information on
the internet is indexed by search engines, the bulk of trusted
information contained in books, magazines, databases, TV programs and
other media sources are not a common part of the index. The relevancy
of search results also has a long way to go. Natural language
processing is yet to make a major impact in this area; human beings
don't pose questions to others using less than two words, but that is
the average length of a search query.
The issues outlined above are just a sample of the major challenges
that are yet to be overcome in the Search industry. Christopher Payne,
Corporate Vice President of MSN Search for Microsoft Corporation, will
talk about the Search industry, the challenges it faces and
Microsoft's approach to solving some of those challenges.
About the speaker: Christopher Payne focuses on delivering the best
search experience for its customers and helping them find the
information that is important to them whether it is online or on their
PC. His previous role was vice president of MSN.com, where his team
consisted of MSNR Search, the MSN.com home page, MSN Autos, MSN
Entertainment, MSNBC, Slate and the MSN Channels properties.
Payne rejoined Microsoft in 2001 after spending three years with
Amazon.com, where he led the building of a number of groups within
Amazon that focused on video, electronics, software and wireless.
Before his stint at Amazon.com, Payne worked for eight years at
Microsoft marketing four versions of Microsoft Access.
Payne earned a bachelor of arts degree in history from Dartmouth
College in 1990. Originally from Kentucky, he lives in Seattle with
his wife and two children.
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 2 February 2006, 11:00am
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
I'm really pleased to introduce Wieslaw Woszczyk to the CCRMA
community. He's an expert in multichannel recording and perception
and he is visiting from McGill, where he is a professor in the music
department.
Wieslaw is leading this week's discussion at the CCRMA Hearing
Seminar. He'll be talking about how to create a multi-sensory
experience; How do you keep the perceptual system happy even though
the experience is being transmitted from far away?
Bring all your favorite vibro-sensory channels to CCRMA on Thursday.
- Malcolm
"Design of an immersive presence environment
for multisensory communication of music and space"
Wieslaw Woszczky
McGill University
Convincing delivery of music to a remote site (via transmission or
recording) involves careful reconstruction of acoustic, visual, and
haptic cues reflecting a musical performance. These cues should be
detailed and well articulated (and free from noise, distortion, and
artifacts) but they also need to be well coordinated with each other
to create flawless multisensory continuum. Work conducted in CIRMMT to
achieve a greater sense of presence in and with virtual musical
performance will be described, focusing especially on the
contributions from vibro-sensory channels. The vibro-sensory
enhancement may become the new frontier of musical communication using
virtual reality.
About the Speaker: Wieslaw Woszczyk, a Visiting Scholar at CCRMA,
holds James McGill Professorship in Sound Recording at McGill
University's Schulich School of Music, and is the Founding Director
of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and
Technology at McGill University (CIRMMT). CIRMMT brings together
researchers from engineering, computer science, psychology,
neuroscience, and music technology. In 1979, Wieslaw established the
Graduate Program in Sound Recording at McGill where he regularly
teaches and conducts research. He is currently on a sabbatical leave
from McGill.
Wieslaw is the current President-Elect of the Audio Engineering
Society and former Chair of its Technical Council. He received the AES
Board of Governors Award, Fellowship Award, and the Citation Award
from the Board of Governors for "pioneering the technology enabling
collaborative multichannel performance over the broadband
Internet". His research, conducted in partnership with prestigious
industrial research and development companies, is supported by
government and industrial grants and concentrates on developing
high-resolution multisensory environments for enhanced music
collaboration, teaching, and experience.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 2 February 2006, 3:00pm-4:0pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Signal Processing and Energy Efficiency in Wireless Networks"
H. Vincent Poor
Princeton University
A major issue in today's wireless world is the dramatic increase in
demand for new capacity and higher performance of wireless
networks. The development of these capabilities is limited severely by
the scarcity of two of the principal resources in wireless networks,
namely energy and bandwidth. Consequently, the community has turned to
a third principal resource, the addition of intelligence throughout
the network, in order to exploit increases in processing power
afforded by Moore's Law type improvements in microelectronics. This
talk will consider a major aspect of this phenomenon - the role of
signal processing in improving the energy efficiency of wireless
networks. The talk will focus on two facets of this problem: the
effects of advanced node-level signal processing on the energy
efficiency of wireless communication networks, where
quality-of-service is a primary concern; and the use of advanced
signal processing principles, such as collaborative beam-forming,
sensor scheduling, and distributed learning, to enhance the energy
efficiency of wireless sensor networks, where inferential performance
is paramount.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 2 February 2006, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Advertising is Flirtation"
James H. Morris
Dean, Carnegie Mellon West
http://west.cmu.edu/
The success of advertising-funded Google and expectations of great
turmoil in the media business make me curious about how advertising
really works. There doesn't seem to be much economic theory. Guided by
Herbert Simon's remark that "We suffer from a plenty of information
and a deficit of attention," some have proposed models in which
information exchange is treated as a value transaction. I believe this
is wrong and that advertising should be analyzed as a flirtation
device like the peacock's tail. Ways of substantiating this belief,
notably a study of the magazine industry are considered.
About the Speaker: Dr. James H. Morris is a Professor of Computer
Science and Dean of the Carnegie Mellon's West Coast campus. He is a
native of Pittsburgh and received a Bachelor's degree from Carnegie
Mellon, an MS in Management from MIT and Ph.D. in Computer Science
from MIT. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley where
he developed some important underlying principles of programming
languages: inter-module protection and lazy evaluation. He was a
co-discoverer of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string-searching
algorithm. For ten years he worked at Xerox PARC where he was part of
the team that developed the Alto System. He also directed the Cedar
programming environment project. From 1983 to 1988 he directed the
Information Technology Center at CMU, a joint project with IBM which
developed a prototype university computing system, Andrew. He has been
the principal investigator on NSF projects aimed at computer-mediated
communication. He was a founder of the MAYA Design Group, a consulting
firm specializing in interactive product design.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 2 February 2006, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Intention: Individual and Shared"
Michael Bratman
Philosophy, Stanford
My aim in this talk is to sketch the outlines of an approach to the
phenomenon of intention, an approach I have called the planning theory
of intention. My concern is with both individual agency and central
cases of shared agency.
The first step is a sufficiently developed model of the intentions of
individual agents. Here I start with the idea that we (unlike many
other goal-directed agents) are planning agents: we settle in advance
on partial plans of action and these structure our practical thought
and action over time in ways that conduce to important and extremely
useful forms of cross-temporal organization. Intentions (in contrast
with other kinds of desiring) are attitudes that are embedded in these
planning structures, and whose characteristic forms of functioning and
associated norms (e.g., norms of consistency) are tied to the
organizing roles of these structures.
To get from individual activity that is guided and explained by
individual intentions, to shared intentional and shared cooperative
activities that are guided and explained by shared intentions, we need
to understand how the intentions of the participants connect up in
relevant ways. Basic ideas here include: the possibility of my
intending our shared activity; interlocking intentions (we each intend
that the shared activity go by way of the intentions of both);
commitments to meshing sub-plans (we each intend that the shared
activity go by way of sub-plans of each that mesh with each other);
interdependence; commitments to mutual support; and mutual
responsiveness in intention and in action. We also need the idea that
these phenomena are out in the open, though the links between the
agents in such shared activities are practical and are not merely the
cognitive links that are the target of accounts of common knowledge.
Finally, these ideas help provide a model of important forms of shared
valuing.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 2 February 2006, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Combinatorial Optimization:
New Approaches and Proofs of Conjectures"
Chandra Nair
Microsoft
The area of optimization seeks, broadly, to minimize a cost function
subject to constraints on the solution set. More concretely, it also
concerns the design of efficient algorithms for finding optimal or
near-optimal solutions. Over the past few years new approaches from
Spin Glass Theory, a branch of statistical physics, have been used to
propose solutions and efficient algorithms for hard optimization
problems in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
This talk will overview this interplay and focus on two examples: (i)
The Random Assignment Problem (RAP), which arises in a variety of
practical scenarios; notably in crossbar switch scheduling. (ii) The
Number Partitioning Problem (NPP), which models load balancing and
multiprocessor scheduling. I will trace the history of these problems
and state some conjectures regarding the cost and the structure of the
optimal solutions obtained by the powerful (but non-rigorous) methods
of physics. I will then sketch our resolution of the Parisi and
Coppersmith-Sorkin Conjectures for the RAP, and of the local Random
Energy Model(REM) Conjecture for the NPP. Finally, I will explain how
the methods of physics have yielded remarkably efficient algorithms
for image reconstruction, constraint satisfaction, and other problems.
____________
UC BERKELEY ICBS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 3 February 2006, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"The Attention System of Language -- Work in Progress"
Len Talmy
Linguistics, SUNY Buffalo
This talk reports on work in progress to outline the fundamental
attentional system of language. In a speech situation, a hearer may
attend to the linguistic expression produced by a speaker, to the
conceptual content represented by that expression, and to the context
at hand. But not all of this material appears uniformly in the
foreground of the hearer's attention. Rather, various portions or
aspects of the expression, content, and context have different degrees
of salience. Such differences are only partly due to any intrinsically
greater interest of certain elements over others. More fundamentally,
language has an extensive system that assigns different degrees of
salience to the parts of an expression or of its reference or of the
context. In terms of the speech participants, the speaker employs this
system in formulating an expression; the hearer, largely on the basis
of such formulations, allocates her attention in a particular way over
the material of these domains. This attentional system includes some
fifty basic factors, the "building blocks" of the system. Each factor
involves a particular linguistic mechanism that increases or decreases
attention on a certain type of linguistic entity. Although able to act
alone, the basic factors also regularly combine and interact to
produce further attentional effects. This attentional system shows
commonalities and differences across individual languages, across
modalities (spoken vs. signed language), and apparently across
cognitive systems (e.g., between language and visual perception). This
research on attention in language using the methodologies of
linguistics joins research involving other areas and methods toward an
overall understanding of attention in cognition.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 3 February 2006, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Rhythm Awareness and Unavailability Inferencing"
Bo Begole
PARC
Timing is everything. In humor, in music, in dance, and also in
everyday group activities, the best results require tight coordination
with others. We develop a sense of timing by observing patterns over
time, which is a particular challenge for members of distributed
groups who have limited awareness of each other's comings and goings.
This talk describes technologies aimed to help geographically
distributed groups develop a sense of timing and also to introduce a
sense of timing to computer applications. I will show examples of
recurring temporal patterns in visualizations of people's online
presence in a location-aware instant messaging system. I will describe
the construction of a statistical model that extracts and describes
significant recurring periods of non-presence using expectation
maximization and clustering. The computational model was compared
against users' perceptions of their own patterns with mixed
results. The visualizations and computational model were used to
augment a communication application to predict when others will be
reachable.
I will also describe Lilsys, a sensor-based system for inferring when
remote office colleagues are "unavailable", which is an attempt to
counter the potential downside of increased accuracy of predictions of
reachability. I will describe user reactions from a small-scale
deployment.
Joint work with John Tang, Rosco Hill and Nick Matsakis, conducted at
Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
About the Speaker: Bo Begole is the manager of the Ubiquitous
Computing area at the Palo Alto Research Center where his current
research spans media device interoperability, sensor network
middleware, activity detection and other technologies. His research
motivation is to create technologies that enable people to do things
they couldn't do before. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from
Virginia Tech in 1998. Prior to his studies, Bo served in the US Army
as an Arabic language interpreter.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 3 February 2006, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Extracting Referential Information During On-Line Processing"
Elsi Kaiser
University of Southern California
Different languages encode information structure -- in particular,
whether a certain referent is given or new information -- with
different devices, e.g. articles, word order and intonation. This
raises the question of how these different types of encoding are
interpreted during real-time language comprehension, and what the
consequences are for subsequent processing. In the first part of the
talk, I focus on Finnish word order variation. I present experimental
results showing that (a) referential information encoded in word order
variation is processed rapidly and can even be used to make
predictions about upcoming referents, and (b) different word orders
create different expectations about what will be mentioned next in the
larger discourse and also have an important impact on subsequent
anaphor resolution. In the second part of the talk, I discuss
collaborative work with researchers at the University of Potsdam
investigating whether an arguably more subtle type of
information-structural marking, intonation, also causes anticipatory
effects. Results from two eyetracking experiments on German reveal
early sensitivity to both word order and intonation. Strikingly, the
magnitudes of the effects are very similar in the two experiments. As
a whole, these results suggest that different word orders have
crucially different impacts on processing, and that the human sentence
processor makes quick and efficient use of the information encoded not
only in word order variation but also in different intonational
contours. This seems to point towards a very efficient interaction
between different aspects of language.
____________
UC BERKELEY GROUP IN LOGIC AND METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE
on Friday, 3 February 2006, 4:10pm
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
"Epistemic Modals Are Assessment-Sensitive"
John MacFarlane
UC Berkeley
The truth of claims made using epistemic modals (like "Joe might be in
Boston" or "The victim probably died within seconds") depends on what
is known: that is what makes them "epistemic." But known by whom? It
is standardly assumed by philosophers and linguists that the relevant
body of knowledge is determined by features of the context in which
the claim is made (the "context of use"). I argue that no account
along these lines makes sense of the way we actually use epistemic
modals. Though it may be tempting to conclude that the meanings of
epistemic modals must be understood non-truth-conditionally, I suggest
that there is a truth-conditional alternative. On the view I
recommend, the relevant body of knowledge is determined in part by
features of the context in which the claim is being assessed (the
"context of assessment"). This view accounts elegantly for our sense
that, while the claims we make using epistemic modals depend for their
truth on "what is known," they are not equivalent to claims about the
knowledge of any particular person or group.
____________
CS545: InfoSeminar
on Friday, 3 February 2006, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B12
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"Sketching Streams through the Net:
Distributed Approximate Query Tracking"
Minos Garofalakis
Intel Research Berkeley
While traditional database systems optimize for performance on
one-shot query processing, emerging large-scale monitoring
applications require continuous tracking of complex data-analysis
queries over collections of physically-distributed streams. Thus,
effective solutions have to be simultaneously space/time efficient (at
each remote monitor site), communication efficient (across the
underlying communication network), and provide continuous,
guaranteed-quality approximate query answers. We discuss novel
algorithmic solutions for the problem of continuously tracking a broad
class of complex aggregate queries in such a distributed-streams
setting. Our tracking schemes maintain approximate query answers with
provable error guarantees, while simultaneously optimizing the storage
space and processing time at each remote site, as well as the
communication cost across the network. In a nutshell, our algorithms
rely on tracking general-purpose randomized sketch summaries of local
streams at remote sites along with concise prediction models of local
site behavior in order to produce highly communication- and
space/time-efficient solutions. The end result is a powerful
approximate query tracking framework that readily incorporates several
complex analysis queries (including distributed join and multi-join
aggregates, and approximate wavelet representations), thus giving the
first known low-overhead tracking solution for such queries in the
distributed-streams model.
About the Speaker: Minos Garofalakis is a Senior Research Scientist
with Intel Research Berkeley. He obtained his PhD from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998, and joined Intel Research in July 2005,
after spending 6.5 years as a Member of Technical Staff with Bell Labs
in Murray Hill, NJ. His current research interests include data
streaming, approximate query processing, and XML databases. In
addition to serving on a number of program committees for conferences
in the data-management area, Minos also currently serves as an
associate editor for the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, and will be
the Core Database Technology PC Chair for the upcoming VLDB'2007
Conference in Vienna, Austria.
____________
CHINA BROWN BAG
on Monday, 6 February 2006, 12 noon - 1:15pm
Philippines Conf., 3rd floor, Encina Hall
http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/analyticization_and_grammar_change/
"Analyticization and Grammar Change"
C.-T. James Huang
Linguistics, Harvard University
Modern Chinese is known for (a) its extensive use of light verbs and
complex predicates, (b) the general lack of simplex telic predicates
(c) the requirement of nominal classifiers, (d) non-existence of
wh-movement, (e) non-existence of negative quantifiers (e.g., nobody),
(f) the "Kaynean word order" par excellence (i.e.,
Subject-Adjunct-Verb-Complement), and so on. Old Chinese, however,
typically lacked these properties. It is argued that these properties
cluster because they are manifestations of a general typological
property of high analyticity, whereas their absence reflects
significant synthesis. Thus the development of Modern Chinese from Old
Chinese is one of analyticization. A number of constructions in
Modern Chinese (e.g., classifiers, unaccusative sentences,
resultatives, passives, wh-in-situ) will be discussed and their
development from Old Chinese shown to provide good examples of
linguistic change as grammar change.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and
the Department of Asian Languages.
____________
CENTER FOR INTERNET AND SOCIETY TALK
on Monday, 6 January 2006, 12:30pm
Law School 280B
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
"Online Dispute Resolution, Democracy and the EBay Experience"
Colin Rule
eBay
As people around the world increasingly interact with each other in
cyberspace it is inevitable that disputes will arise. If the internet
is to become a trusted environment for both commerce and content,
individuals and organizations must have access to redress systems to
resolve their online disputes. In the face-to-face world we rely on
the courts to address disagreements, but courts are not well designed
to handle online disputes because judicial systems are usually too
tied to geography and jurisdiction. Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) is
a better solution for many online conflicts because it is effective,
efficient, and trans-boundary by nature. As an organization pioneering
the creation of online marketplaces eBay has long acknowledged the
need for effective online redress, and that is why eBay and PayPal
have invested heavily in ODR processes and partnerships. The work done
by eBay in this area offers a blueprint for how other institutions,
especially public institutions, can provide redress systems as they
steadily move their operations online.
About the Speaker: Colin Rule is eBay and PayPal's first Director of
Online Dispute Resolution. Prior to joining eBay Colin co-founded and
led Online Resolution, one of the first online dispute resolution
(ODR) providers. Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for
Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002, and he has
contributed more than 40 articles to prestigious publications in the
dispute resolution field. He holds a Master's degree from Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government in conflict resolution and
technology, a B.A. in Peace Studies from Haverford College, and he is
currently Co-Chair of the Online Dispute Resolution Committee of the
American Bar Association's Dispute Resolution Section.
____________
STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Monday, 6 February 2006, 2:00pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
"Rethinking Autosegmental Phonology"
William R. Leben
Stanford
For nearly three decades, autosegmental phonology has provided elegant
and natural way of describing phenomena typical of tone. The problem
is that this simple approach is too simple. The innocuous character of
this framework has made it easy to find parallels between tone and
segmental features like voicing, nasality, and so on--though without
revealing any deep similarity between them. As an alternative, this
paper examines the Optimal Domains Theory (ODT) of Cassimjee and
Kisseberth, which is tailored to capture generalizations in a variety
of Bantu cases including Swati, Zulu, and Ngoni. These generalizations
elude a standard autosegmental approach.
This won't help the theory of tone much unless we can show that ODT
can handle cases different from the Bantu ones it was designed for. In
this talk I expand the set of languages to include West African ones,
including Hausa and Baule. These cases yield new support for certain
aspects of ODT, while suggesting an alternative to the tenet that a
tonal domain can refer at the same time to underlying and surface
tones.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 7 February 2006, 4:15pm-5:30pm
Math Corner 380:380F
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Attributes as Dual Types"
Vaughan Pratt
Computer Science, Stanford University
Whereas a homogeneous algebra has a single carrier, a heterogeneous
algebra has multiple carriers, one per type, such as integer, real,
cat, dog, animal, etc. We develop a natural dual of this notion in
which types become attributes, such as parity, weight, color, etc.
Whereas types are inhabited by individuals of that type, attributes
are dually inhabited by states (Kripke possible worlds) of that
attribute. We formalize C.I. Lewis' notion of quale as an entity that
is both an individual and a state, e.g. 1 as the parity of an integer
is both an integer and a state of parity, while blue as the color of a
cat is both a cat and a state of color. Qualia band together to form
a bimodule furnishing a syntax for ontology. The corresponding
semantics takes the form of universes we call communes consisting of
individuals and states. We give a symmetric Yoneda embedding lemma
for bimodules that represents types and attributes as communes and
qualia as morphisms from types to attributes so represented. This
naturally arising structure provides a plausible mechanism by which a
species could evolve to organize the perception of their environment
in terms of the interplay of types and attributes.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 8 February 2006, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Is it a Baby or a Bathtub? and How Many Fish?
Two Case Studies in Applied Computing"
Rose M. Ray
Exponent- Failure Analysis
Two case studies are used to illustrate the wide range of practical
problems for which statistical computation is required.
Case 1: Is it a Baby or a Bathtub?
Safety related complaints have been received about a newly marketed
product. Should the product be recalled? Methodology for answering
this question will be discussed.
Case 2: How Much Fish is Consumed by Anglers on the Passaic River?
A multiday survey of anglers on the Passaic River has been conducted.
We are asked to estimate the amount of fish consumed by the anglers.
Statistical methods for estimating the number of anglers and the
amount of fish consumed are presented. Computational methods for
dealing with sparse information are discussed.
About the speaker: Dr. Rose Ray is a Principal Scientist at
Exponent-Failure Analysis Associates with extensive experience in data
analysis and the application of statistical epidemiological methods to
business environments. Her work covers issues related to the
evaluation of passenger vehicle field performance, demographic
analysis of labor markets, analysis of survey data, development of
stochastic models, multivariate analysis, survival analysis,
nonparametric statistics, design of experiments, and risk assessment.
Dr. Ray has an extensive background in academics, research, and
consulting. She has been on staff at the University of California at
Berkeley, the University of Florida, and Northwestern University and
has performed analyses for a variety of industrial and commercial
companies.
____________
CODECON 2006
on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 10-12 February 2006, all day
StudioZ, 314 11th Street (San Franciso)
http://www.codecon.org/2006/
(early registration ends February 1)
CodeCon is the premier showcase of cutting edge software development.
It is an excellent opportunity for programmers to demonstrate their
work and keep abreast of what's going on in their community.
[On Sunday, Todd Davies, Benjamin Newman, Brendan O'Connor, Aaron Tam
from Stanford's Symbolic Systems will talk about their project 'Deme')
Friday, February 10
11:30 Registration, Meet & Greet
12:00 Opening Remarks
12:30 Daylight Fraud Prevention - Anti-Phishing prevention, tracking
and detection through real-time web-based forensics.
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#dfp
13:00 Q&A
13:15 SiteAdvisor - Pioneering Web safety by testing and rating every
site, download, and form on the Internet.
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#siteadvisor
13:45 Q&A
14:00 Break
15:00 Seating
15:15 VidTorrent/Peers - A scalable real-time p2p streaming protocol.
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#vidtorrent
15:45 Q&A
16:00 Localhost - A popularity-based P2P file sharing system based on
BitTorrent
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#localhost
16:30 Q&A
16:45 Truman - An open-source behavioral malware analysis sandnet
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#truman
17:15 Q&A
17:30 Closing Remarks
19:00 Reception
Saturday, February 11
11:45 Doors Open
12:00 Opening Remarks
12:30 delta - Minimizing "interesting" files subject to a test of
their interestingness.
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#delta
13:00 Q&A
13:15 Djinni - Approximating Solutions to Nigh-Unsolvable Problems--Fast!
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#djinni
13:45 Q&A
14:00 Break
15:00 Seating
15:15 iGlance - Open source push-to-talk videoconferencing and
screen-sharing
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#iglance
15:45 Q&A
16:00 OASIS - Anycast for Any Service
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#oasis
16:30 Q&A
16:45 Query By Example - Data mining operations within PostgreSQL
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#qbe
17:15 Q&A
17:30 Closing Remarks
Sunday, February 12
11:45 Doors Open
12:00 Opening Remarks
12:30 Dido - A platform for writing dynamic voice menu systems, in Perl
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#dido
13:00 Q&A
13:15 Deme - A free/open-source platform for online group deliberation
and dialogue
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#deme
13:45 Q&A
14:00 Break
15:00 Seating
15:15 Monotone - Low stress, high functionality version control.
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#monotone
15:45 Q&A
16:00 Rhizome - An application stack enabling the rapid development of
collaborative, Semantic-Web enabled applications.
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#rhizome
16:30 Q&A
16:45 Elsa/Oink/Cqual++ - A static-time whole-program dataflow
analysis for C and C++
http://www.codecon.org/2006/program.html#elsa
17:15 Q&A
17:30 Closing Remarks
____________
UC BERKELEY ICBS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 10 February 2006, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Cognitive Neuroscience Studies of Relational (Declarative) Memory"
Neal Cohen
Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Using converging cognitive neuroscience evidence, data will be
presented in support of the idea that the hippocampus is centrally
involved in (and amnesia is essentially a deficit of) a fundamentally
relational form of memory. This form of (declarative) memory, and more
specifically the processes of relational memory binding and
activation, supports memory for relations among perceptually distinct
items. This system mediates the creation and use of flexible,
long-term memory representations of the relations among the
constituent elements of the events, situations, or scenes encountered
in daily life (or in the laboratory), supporting explicit remembering,
conscious recollection, and also implicit memory performances that
rely upon relational representations.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 10 February 2006, 12 noon
Math Corner 380:383F
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Parametric Sets and Virtual Classes"
Dana S. Scott
Carnegie Mellon University
In an axiomatic development of geometry, there is much convenience to
be found in treating various loci as sets. Thus, a line corresponds
to the set of all points lying on the line; a circle, to the set of
all points on the circumference. Moreover, sets of sets are natural,
say in considering pencils of lines or circles or conics. And
families of pencils are used as well. Does geometry need a full set
theory, therefore? In giving a negative answer, we shall consider
higher-type sets introduced by parametric definitions with just finite
lists of points as parameters. We will show how to formulate a simple
axiomatization for such sets together with a notation for virtual
classes. The objective is to have the USE of set-theoretical
notations without the ONTOLOGY of higher-type logic or Zermelo-
Fraenkel set theory.
____________
CS545: InfoSeminar
on Friday, 10 February 2006, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B12
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"User-Centric Web Crawling"
Christopher Olston
CMU and Yahoo! Research
Given the considerable size, dynamicity, and degree of autonomy of the
Web, it is not feasible for a search engine to maintain its local
repository exactly synchronized with the Web. As a result, answers to
search queries may be inaccurate. This problem can be especially
pronounced for topic-specific search engines such as science portals,
which do not always wield considerable computing and networking power.
We consider how to schedule Web pages for selective (re)downloading
into a search engine repository. Our scheduling objective is to
maximize the quality of the user experience for those who query the
search engine. We begin with a quantitative characterization of the
way in which the discrepancy between the content of the repository and
the current content of the live Web impacts the quality of the user
experience. This characterization leads to a user-centric metric of
the quality of a search engine's local repository. We use this metric
to derive a policy for scheduling Web page (re)downloading that is
driven by search engine usage and free of exterior tuning parameters.
We provide empirical comparisons of our user-centric method against
prior Web page refresh strategies, using real Web data. Our results
demonstrate that our method requires far fewer resources to maintain
same search engine quality level for users, leaving substantially more
resources available for incorporating new Web pages into the search
repository.
____________
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____________