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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 26 July 2006, vol. 21:45
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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26 July 2006 Stanford Vol. 21, No. 45
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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/
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ACTIVITIES FROM 26 JULY 2006 TO 4 AUGUST 2006
WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2006
2:00pm UC Berkeley SIMS Seminar [26-Jul-2006]
202 South Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Search Engines Considered Harmful:
In Search of an Unbiased Web Ranking"
Junghoo Cho
UCLA
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/about/events/
Abstract below
(correction, gave wrong date last week)
THURSDAY, 27 JULY 2006
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Biology's Brave New World: Straight talk about stem cells"
Christopher Thomas Scott
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
TUESDAY, 1 AUGUST 2006
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience [1-Aug-2006]
5101 Tolman (Berkeley)
"What can Visual Word Recognition Tell us about Visual Object
Recognition?"
Carol Whitney
U Maryland
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [1-Aug-2006]
EJ291, SRI International
"Logical Spreadsheets"
Mike Kassoff
Stanford University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 3 AUGUST 2006
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [1-Aug-2006]
EJ291, SRI International
"Answering Approximate Queries Efficiently"
Chen Li
University of California, Irvine
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 4 AUGUST 2006
3:30pm SRI CSL Seminar Series [4-Aug-2006]
EK255, SRI International
"Blank Spots in Ontology Engineering"
York Sure
Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods
University of Karlsruhe, Germany
contact nora ... @csl.sri.com and see also
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/ for directions.
Abstract below
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Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O+, O-, A+, A-, AB-, 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.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
ZeroOne San Jose and the 13th International Symposium of Electronic
Arts. 7-13 August 2006. The 13th International Symposium for
Electronic Arts (ISEA2006) will be held in San Jose, California in
conjunction with the premiere of ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival
of Art on the Edge, an innovative biennial festival for San Jose and
the Greater Bay Area. Four interrelated themes define ISEA2006:
Transvergence, Interactive City, Community Domain and Pacific Rim. See
http://www.01sj.org/ for more information.
CSB2006 (Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference) 14-18 August
2006, Stanford University. Of special interest might be the
associated workshop on "Symbolic Systems Biology". Advance
registration ends 21 July 2006.
http://www.lifesciencessociety.org/CSB2006/
Linux World 14-17 August 2006, Moscone Center, San Francisco.
Registration for exhibits and keynote speeches is free if done before
August 13. http://linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12SFO06A
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UC BERKELEY SIMS SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 26 July 2006, 2:00pm-3:30pm
202 South Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/about/events/
"Search Engines Considered Harmful:
In Search of an Unbiased Web Ranking"
Junghoo Cho
UCLA
In this talk, we discuss the widespread use of Web search engines and
its potential impact on the ecology of the Web. Recent studies show
that a significant portion of Web accesses are referred by search
engines. Furthermore, the Web-search market is increasingly dominated
by a few number of key players. What are the implications of this
heavy reliance of Web users on search engines in their pursuit of
information? For example, given that search engines return currently
``popular'' pages at the top of search results, are we somehow
penalizing newly-created pages that are not very well known yet? Are
popular pages getting even more popular while new pages are being
completely ignored? We first show that this unfortunate trend indeed
exists on the Web through an experimental study based on real Web
data. We then analytically estimate how much longer it takes for a
new page to attract a large number of Web users when search engines
return only popular pages at the top of search results. Finally, we
develop new ways of ranking Web pages that can significantly reduce
the potential bias of existing ranking metrics. We believe that our
proposed ranking metric has the potential to alleviate the
"rich-get-richer" phenomenon and help new and high-quality pages get
the attention that they deserve.
About the Speaker: Junghoo Cho is an assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science at University of California, Los
Angeles. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford
University in 2002 and a B.S. degree in physics from Seoul National
University in 1996. His main research interests are in the study of
the evolution, management, retrieval and mining of information on the
World-Wide Web. He publishes research papers in major international
journals and conference proceedings. He is an editor of IEEE Internet
Computing and serves on program committees of top international
conferences, including SIGMOD, VLDB and WWW. He is a recipient of the
NSF CAREER Award and IBM Faculty Award.
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BERKELEY REDWOOD CENTER FOR THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 1 August 2006, 12 noon
5101 Tolman (Berkeley)
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
"What can Visual Word Recognition Tell us
about Visual Object Recognition?"
Carol Whitney
U Maryland
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~shankar/cwhitney/
The SERIOL model addresses the problem of how the brain encodes the
sequence of letters in a written word. It provides a neurobiologically
plausible account of how the initial retinotopic representation of a
string is progressively converted into an abstract, location-invariant
encoding of letter order, and has led to new accounts of visual
half-field asymmetries in lexical decision, which have been
experimentally confirmed. In the model, location-invariance is
achieved by mapping space into time. That is, the retinotopic encoding
is converted into a temporal encoding. Relative timing of firing of
letter pairs is then used to activate bigram representations. If
indeed the brain uses such mechanisms in visual word recognition, they
would have to be derived from the mechanisms normally used in visual
object recognition. I will discuss how this approach could be extended
to object recognition in general, and touch upon some data from the
literature that are consistent with this proposal.
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SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 1 August 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ291, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Logical Spreadsheets"
Mike Kassoff
Stanford University
http://logic.stanford.edu/~mkassoff/
A Logical Spreadsheet is a spreadsheet whose formula language consists
of logical formuale. In this talk, I will describe PrediCalc, a
logical spreadsheet system that allows for many-to-many constraints
and propagation in all directions. To deal with inconsistency,
PrediCalc uses a new paraconsistent notion called Existential
Omega-entailment. I will also talk about our current work on Web-based
logical spreadsheets, or Websheets.
About the Speaker: Michael Kassoff is a PhD candidate in the Computer
Science Department of Stanford University. His advisor is Michael
Genesereth. He has a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford
University and a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University, where he
majored in (you guessed it) Computer Science.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 3 August 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ291, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Answering Approximate Queries Efficiently"
Chen Li
University of California, Irvine
Many database applications have the emerging need to answer
approximate queries efficiently. Such a query can ask for strings that
are similar to a given string, such as "names similar to
Schwarzenegger" and "telephone numbers similar to 412-0964," where
"similar to" uses a predefined, domain-specific function to specify
the similarity between strings, such as edit distance. There are many
reasons to support such queries. To name a few: (1) The user might not
remember exactly the name or the telephone number when issuing the
query. (2) There could be typos in the query. (3) There could be
errors or inconsistencies even in the database, especially in
applications such as data cleaning. In this talk we will present some
of our recent results on answering approximate queries efficiently.
One problem related to optimizing such queries is to estimate the
selectivity of a fuzzy string predicate, i.e., estimating how many
strings in the database satisfy the predicate. We develop a novel
technique, called SEPIA, to solve the problem. We will present the
details of this technique using the edit distance function. We study
challenges in adopting this technique, including how to construct its
histogram structures, how to use them to do selectivity estimation,
and how to alleviate the effect of non-uniform errors in the
estimation. We discuss how to extend the techniques to other
similarity functions. We show the results of our extensive
experiments. Time permitting, we will also briefly report our other
related results. One is on supporting fuzzy queries with both
predicates on numeric attributes (e.g., salary > 50K) and predicates
on string attributes (e.g., telephone numbers similar to 412-0964).
Another one is on how to relax conditions in an SQL query that returns
an empty answer. These results are based on three recent papers in
VLDB2005 and VLDB2006.
About the Speaker: Chen Li is an assistant professor in the Department
of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He
received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford
University in 2001, and his M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from
Tsinghua University, China, in 1996 and 1994, respectively. He
received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2003. He is
currently a part-time Visiting Research Scientist at Google, Santa
Monica. His research interests are in the fields of database and
information systems, including data integration and sharing, data
cleansing, data warehousing, and data privacy.
____________
SRI CSL SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 4 August 2006, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
EK255, SRI International
contact nora ... @csl.sri.com and see also
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Blank Spots in Ontology Engineering"
York Sure
Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods
University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany
http://www.york-sure.de/
In the early days of research on ontologies a frequently asked
question was "What is an ontology?" Nowadays many websites provide an
answer to the question. Methodologies as well as technologies to build
and maintain ontologies, usually referred to as semantic web
technologies, have matured. Potential users, let's think of them as
customers, have a basic understanding and often appreciate potential
benefits -- only to come up with more tricky questions. E.g.,
manager start with "How much does it cost (to develop ontologies)?"
followed by "How can the costs be reduced?" Technical staff continues
with "How do I evaluate the created ontology?" Until recently, no good
answers were in place, indicating blank spots to be explored to push
further the adoption of semantic web technologies, especially by
industry.
This presentation includes for completeness (and for fun) an answer to
the very first question. Giving answers to the latter ones constitute
the main building blocks of the presentation, spanning from economical
to technical aspects. In the economic part major cost drivers for the
development of ontologies are revealed and combined in a framework
which allows for prediction of costs. Results and findings from field
studies to validate and apply the framework in real projects are
shown, such as that advance in the area of ontology evaluation, an
often neglected area, may result in significant cost reductions. As
revealed in the technical part of the presentation, applying the most
well-known ontology evaluation methodology, OntoClean, is rather
difficult and costly. It requires many different skills at the same
time (such as deep philosophical understanding) and involves high
manual efforts. To leverage ontology evaluation for a wider audience
and to make ontology evaluation more cost effective, an approach for
automatizing OntoClean is shown which is based on the employment of
lexico-syntactic patterns on the Web.
About the Speaker: York Sure is an assistant professor at the
Institute AIFB of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany where he
lectures master and bachelor courses on semantic web and computer
science. After graduating in December 1999 in industrial engineering
he has received in May 2003 his PhD in computer science from
University of Karlsruhe. York co-authored over 60 refereed research
papers mainly in the areas of semantic web and knowledge
management. He is currently leading the work of the AIFB in the EU IST
integrated project Semantic Knowledge Technologies (SEKT) and the EU
IST network of excellence Knowledge Web where he is also appointed as
research area manager. York has been Programme Chair of the European
Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2006 and he co-organized over 20
scientific events including the Dagstuhl Seminar 05271 on Semantic
Grid in 2005. He is co-inventor and co-organizer of the German
national conference series on knowledge management "Wissensmanagement
- Erfahrungen und Visionen" (2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007), inventor and
co-organizer of the series of international EON workshops on
Evaluation of Ontologies and Ontology based Tools (2002, 2003, 2004,
and 2006). Frequently he serves as reviewer for international
journals such as TKDE, IJHCS and IEEE IS, conferences, and
workshops. Recently York has been awarded with the IBM UIMA Innovation
Award 2006.
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