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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 13 September 2006, vol. 22:2
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
13 September 2006 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 2
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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 13 SEPTEMBER 2006 TO 22 SEPTEMBER 2006
WEDNESDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER 2006
12 noon UC Berkeley CITRIS Research Exchange [13-Sep-06]
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
"The Future of Healthcare and the role of technology and services"
Ravi Nemana
CITRIS Executive Director
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [13-Sep-06]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Monitoring Massive Streams Simultaneously: A Holistic Approach"
Deepak Agarwal
Sr. Research Scientist, Yahoo Research Labs
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
Abstract below
7:00pm SDForum: Emerging Technology Group [13-Sep-06]
Cubberley Community Center, H-1, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
"Web 3.0: mashing virtual worlds and the web"
Cory Ondrejka
Linden Labs
http://www.sdforum.org/sigs/emerging
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2006
1:00pm Math Conference [14-Sep-06]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Analysis, Logic, and Number Theory: Honoring Paul Cohen on
his 72nd Birthday"
http://math.stanford.edu/cohen72/
Information below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Working Group in the Philosophy of Mind [14-Sep-06]
234 Moses Hall (Berkeley)
"first meeting of the year"
Allison Gopnik
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.htm
FRIDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2006
all day Math Conference [15-Sep-06]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Analysis, Logic, and Number Theory: Honoring Paul Cohen on
his 72nd Birthday"
http://math.stanford.edu/cohen72/
Information below
12:30pm UC Berkeley Special Talk [15-Sep-06]
101 LSA (Berkeley)
"Genetic Mechanisms of Human Temperament"
Daniel Weinberger
National Institute of Mental Health
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [15-Sep-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Search Quality & User Happiness: What Do People Do When They
Use Search Engines? Three Methods To Understand It, And Some
Observations"
Daniel M. Russell
Google
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2006
all day Math Conference [16-Sep-06]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Analysis, Logic, and Number Theory: Honoring Paul Cohen on
his 72nd Birthday"
http://math.stanford.edu/cohen72/
Information below
SUNDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2006
all day Math Conference [17-Sep-06]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Analysis, Logic, and Number Theory: Honoring Paul Cohen on
his 72nd Birthday"
http://math.stanford.edu/cohen72/
Information below
MONDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2006
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium [18-Sep-06]
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Paradigmatic heterogeneity"
Andrew Garrett
UC Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [18-Sep-06]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"The Epistemology of Counterfactuals"
Timothy Williamson
University of Oxford
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/resource/file/19/TW-counterfactuals.pdf
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [18-Sep-06]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Badvertisements: Stealthy Click-Fraud with Unwitting Accessories"
Markus Jakobsson
IUB
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2006
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience [19-Sep-06]
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science"
Jerry Feldman
ICSI/UC Berkeley
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [19-Sep-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Ontologies Growing Up: Tools for Ontology Management"
Natasha Noy
Stanford University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [19-Sep-06]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Counterfactuals and the Epistemology of Modality"
Timothy Williamson
University of Oxford
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/resource/file/19/TW-counterfactuals.pdf
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
WEDNESDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 2006
12 noon UC Berkeley CITRIS Research Exchange [20-Sep-06]
540 Cory Hall (Berkeley)
"Early Experience Prototyping a Science Data Service for
Environmental Data"
Deb Agarwal
Berkeley Water Center
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
2:00pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [20-Sep-06]
3335 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"The 'Mathematisation' of 'Physics' in Comparative Perspective:
Greece and China"
Geoffrey Lloyd
Needham Research Institute
http://www.nri.org.uk/lloyd.html
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
THURSDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 2006
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [21-Sep-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Bayesian Topic Models
Thomas Griffiths
University of California, Berkeley
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [21-Sep-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The Role of Digital Electronics in Providing A Window into
the World of Top Marine Predators"
Daniel Costa
UC Santa Cruz
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Lecture [21-Sep-06]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Analyticity"
Timothy Williamson
University of Oxford
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
5:00pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [21-Sep-06]
370 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Cognitive Variations: On the Psychic Unity of Humans"
Geoffrey Lloyd
Needham Research Institute
http://www.nri.org.uk/lloyd.html
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
FRIDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2006
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [22-Sep-06]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Thinking about a Culture-Inclusive Cognitive Science"
Michael Cole
Communication, Psychology, and Human Development, UC San Diego
http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_cole.html
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12 noon UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [22-Sep-06]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"A Neural Mechanism for Decision-Making"
Michael Shadlen
National Primate Research Center, University of Washington
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [22-Sep-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Second Life as a Virtual Environment for Collaboration and Teaching"
Peter Brantley
California Digital Library
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of all types. 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. Remember most Stanford
students are away so aren't donating.
____________
UC BERKELEY CITRIS RESEARCH EXCHANGE
on Wednesday, 13 September 2006, 12 noon
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
"The Future of Healthcare and the role of technology and services"
Ravi Nemana
Executive Director of Services: Science, Management & Engineering program
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have already had a
significant impact on health care and the delivery of health
services. From Telemedicine to electronic health records to RFID to
embedded sensors, a variety of health ICTs have been shown to improve
operational and administrative efficiencies, clinical outcomes,
documentation and information flow in a variety of global settings,
from the home to rural health centers to large urban hospitals.
However, adoption and benefits have not been uniformly distributed and
replicability of successes has been difficult. What does the future
hold for ICT in health care? Where are the trends leading us? What
can ICT do to improve the quality, cost, efficiency and capacity of
the healthcare service? This presentation will cover these topics and
the research areas that may lead us to radically novel ways of using
ICT for health care and in our daily lives, and it will focus
particularly on the capacity issues in healthcare and the role of
adoption of ICT.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 13 September 2006, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
"Monitoring Massive Streams Simultaneously: A Holistic Approach"
Deepak Agarwal
Sr. Research Scientist, Yahoo Research Labs
A holistic approach to prospective anomaly detection for massive
number of streams is proposed. The method works by building a baseline
model to capture normal behavior. Any baseline model that provides a
p-value for the observed, relative to the predicted can be used.
Anomalies are detected by tracking normal scores derived from
p-values. A flexible and fast five-parameter Bayesian model adjusts
for multiple testing at each time point. Methods to delete
uninformative streams from the monitoring process are also discussed.
The method is illustrated on a real application where our baseline
model is built using a state space approach.
About the Speaker: Deepak Agarwal is a senior research scientist at
Yahoo! Research Labs. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was senior
technical staff member in the statistics department at AT&T Research
Labs. Deepak obtained his PhD in statistics from University of
Connecticut under the guidance of Professor Alan Gelfand. His thesis
focused on building multi-level hierarchical Bayesian models for
large, misaligned spatial data that are part of most GIS systems. At
AT&T, Deepak worked on methods for mining massive graphs, anomaly
detection using a time series approach and computational approaches
for spatial scan statistic. Deepak won the best applications paper
award at Siam Data Mining 2004 and the best student paper award at the
Joint Statistical Meetings, 2001. He has served on a couple of NSF
panels and several program committees in data mining and statistics.
____________
SDFORUM: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY GROUP
on Wednesday, 13 September 2006, 7:00pm
Cubberley Community Center, H-1, 4000 Middlefield, Palo Alto
http://www.sdforum.org/sigs/emerging
(there is a fee for non-SDForum members, see web page)
"Web 3.0: mashing virtual worlds and the web"
Cory Ondrejka
Linden Labs
What happens when the 2D, asynchronous Web collides with 3D,
collaborative digital worlds? As the power of rich web applications,
aggregation, and filtering are proven on the Web, how will these
technologies be connected to interactive, 3D virtual worlds?
Conversely, how will 3D worlds be used to better manage data, convey
information, and enable new forms of communications?
The user-created online world Second Life provides a unique insight
into these issues. By granting broad intellectual property rights to
its residents and embedding the tools needed to build almost anything,
SL has enabled large scale creativity that bridges the 3D and web
worlds.
Projects ranging from games and shopping malls to medical research and
education have been built on top of Second Life's core technology and
then linked to companion web sites, blogs, and wikis. This is only the
beginning, however. Currently, Firefox is being embedded within Second
Life so that web content can act as a fundamental building block of
the world as animations, textures, or audio.
This talk will cover the cutting-edge ways in which the Second Life
community has embraced both 3D world and web technology in order to
achieve the complementary goals of creating the worlds of their dreams
and solving real-world problems. Beyond that, it will also discuss
ways in which virtual worlds can better connect to - and participate
in - the web as a whole.
About the Speaker: Cory Ondrejka is the Chief Technology Officer of
Linden Labs. As CTO, he leads the team developing "Second Life,"
Linden Lab's award-winning, user-created digital world. His team has
created the revolutionary technologies required to enable
collaborative, atomistic creation, including distributed physical
simulation, 3D streaming, completely customizable avatars and
real-time, in-world editors. He also spearheaded the decision to allow
users to retain the IP rights to their creations and helped craft
Linden's virtual real estate policy.
Prior to joining Linden Lab in November, 2000, Ondrejka served as
Project Leader and Lead Programmer for Pacific Coast Power and Light.
At PCP&L, he brought the "Road Rash" franchise to the Nintendo for the
first time with "Road Rash 64" and built the core technology teams
that completed multiple products for Nintendo and Sony consoles.
Previous experience includes Lead Programmer for Acclaim Coin-Operated
Entertainment's first internal coin-op title and work on Department of
Defense electronic warfare software projects for Lockheed Sanders.
While an officer in the United States Navy, he worked at the National
Security Agency and graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power School.
Ondrejka is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, where he
was a Presidential "Thousand Points of Light" recipient and became the
first person to earn Bachelors of Science degrees in two technical
majors: Weapons and Systems Engineering and Computer Science.
____________
MATH CONFERENCE
Thursday-Sunday, 14-17 September 2006, all day
Bldg. 380:380C
http://math.stanford.edu/cohen72/
"Analysis, Logic, and Number Theory:
Honoring Paul Cohen on his 72nd Birthday"
Schedule
Thursday, September 14
1:00-2:00 John Thompson-University of Cambridge & University of Florida
Title: TBA
2:00-2:30 Break
2:30-3:30 Alexander Kechris-California Institute of Technology
Title: Trigonometric Series and Set Theory
3:30-4:00 Break
4:00-5:00 Mihail Kolountzakis-University of Crete
Title: Translational Tiling in Fourier Space
Friday, September 15
10:00-11:00 Angus MacIntyre-Queen Mary University of London
Title: Paul Cohen's Contributions to the Model Theory of
Valued Fields
11:00-11:30 Break
11:30-12:30 Harold G. Diamond-University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Title: Recent Progress in Beurling Generalized Numbers
12:30-2:30 Lunch break
2:30-3:30 Saharon Shelah-Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Title: On Forcing and on Ext
3:30-4:00 Break
4:00-5:00 Akshay Venkatesh-Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
Title: Dynamics on the Space of Lattices and Periodic Torus Orbits
6:30-10:00 Banquet (Reservations required)
Saturday, September 16
10:00-11:00 Yitzhak Katznelson-Stanford University
Title: TBA
11:00-11:30 Break
11:30-12:30 Hugh Woodin-University of California at Berkeley
Title: The Continuum Hypothesis, the Generic Multiverse,
and the Conjecture
12:30-2:30 Lunch break
2:30-3:30 Kannan Soundararajan-Stanford University
Title: Additive Problems for Multiplicative Sets
3:30-4:00 Break
4:00-5:00 Theodore Slaman-University of California at Berkeley
Title: TBA
Sunday, September 17
9:30-10:30 Ehud Hrushovski-Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Title: From Set Theory to Geometry
10:30-11:00 Break
11:00-12:00 Jean Bourgain-Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
Title: Harmonic Analysis and Invariant Measure on Tori
____________
UC BERKELEY SPECIAL TALK
Friday, 15 September 2006, 12:30pm
101 LSA (Berkeley)
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
"Genetic Mechanisms of Human Temperament"
Daniel Weinberger
National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Weinberger is a seminal contributor to a variety of topics, with
particular expertise in the genetic and neurobiological underpinnings
of schizophrenia (and other disorders) and in the linkage between (a)
basic processes in human cognition and (b) psychopathology. This is a
rare opportunity to hear from a crucial figure who straddles
psychological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific perspectives.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 15 September 2006, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
"Search Quality & User Happiness:
What Do People Do When They Use Search Engines?
Three Methods To Understand It, And Some Observations"
Daniel M. Russell
Google
Web search engines have a huge interest in understanding what our
users are trying to do. To a certain degree, this means discerning the
intent of a search in the queries and patterns of behavior. In this
talk I'll say a little bit about what we do to understand what our
users have in mind, giving examples of queries, user sessions. To make
this tangible, I'll discuss some of the techniques we use to analyze
the data and outline the size and scope of the problem. In particular,
I'll focus on the problem of combining data in the small (field
studies, usability studies) with data in the large (log data analysis
of millions of interactions), illustrating how we can improve our
understanding of users by combining the best insights from both ends
of the spectrum.
About the Speaker: Daniel M. Russell is a senior research scientist at
Google in the area of search quality and user experience.
____________
UC BERKELEY LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 18 September 2006, 4:00pm
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
"Paradigmatic heterogeneity"
Andrew Garrett
UC Berkeley
Three main problems organize the analysis of analogical change in
morphology: (1) the relation between leveling and extension; (2)
directionality; and (3) selectivity. The selectivity problem arises in
cases where an analogical change such as paradigm leveling affects
some but not other seemingly equally eligible items: What factors
determine this analogical selectivity? More specifically, what sorts
of items resist otherwise expected analogical change? At least three
specific types of analogy-resistant item have been identified in the
literature: relatively frequent items; items whose alternations are in
stressed syllables; and items with multiple morphophonological
alternations. The last pattern has been called "Paul's Principle"
(Paul 1880); all three patterns concern properties of the
analogy-resistant item itself. Based on evidence from English and
Latin, I will identify a new and somewhat different pattern of
resistance to analogy, which I call "paradigmatic heterogeneity":
items in morphophonologically more heterogeneous paradigms may resist
analogical change, even if the locus of heterogeneity lies outside the
area targeted by the change. I will suggest that Paul's Principle may
be a special case of this more general pattern, that it may provide
evidence for paradigms as objects in morphological analysis, and that
it may cast light on the overall cause of analogical change in
morphology.
____________
STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
on Monday, 18 September 2006, 4:30pm
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
"Badvertisements: Stealthy Click-Fraud with Unwitting Accessories"
Markus Jakobsson
IUB
We describe a new type of threat to the Internet infrastructure, in
the shape of a highly efficient but very well camouflaged click-fraud
attack on the advertising infrastructure, not using any type of
malware. The attack, which we refer to as a "badvertisement", is
described and experimentally verified on several prominent
advertisement schemes. This stealthy attack can be thought of as a
threatening mutation of spam and phishing attacks, with which it has
many commonalities, except for the fact that it is not the targeted
individual who is the victim in the attack, but the advertiser.
Joint work with Mona Gandhi and Jacob Ratkiewicz. A copy of the paper
can be found at http://www.indiana.edu/~phishing/papers/gandhim.pdf
____________
BERKELEY REDWOOD CENTER FOR THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 19 September 2006, 12 noon
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
"From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science"
Jerry Feldman
ICSI, UC Berkeley
The neural revolution in cognitive science, which was always
inevitable, is well under way. Rapid advances on the neural correlates
of intelligent behavior have transformed cognitive experiment and
theory. There is already enough known about how our brains process
information to render many traditional theories obsolete and a unified
neurally-based cognitive science is arising. Linguistics and
Philosophy have, for both historical and technical reasons, been slow
to integrate even the most basic neuroscience. Much of fundamental
neuroscience is done with animals and, since only people use language,
there is no easy way to extend animal findings to human thought and
language.
The talk is based on a new book ( http://www.m2mbook.org/ ) that is a
systematic attempt to show how human language and thought arise as an
extension of the physiology and experiences that people share with
other animals. Integrating findings from all the cognitive sciences
yields a foundation for an explicitly neural theory of language that
is an integral part of contemporary science.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 19 September 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Ontologies Growing Up: Tools for Ontology Management"
Natasha Noy
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~natalya/
The study of ontologies and their use is no longer just one of the
topics in the Artificial Intelligence literature. Ontologies are now
ubiquitous in many information-systems enterprises: they constitute
the backbone for the Semantic Web, they are used in e- commerce, and
in various application fields such as bioinformatics and medicine. As
a result, developers are designing a large number of ontologies using
different tools and different languages. These ontologies cover
unrelated or overlapping domains, at different levels of detail and
granularity. Such wide-spread use of ontologies inevitably produces an
ontology-management problem: the need to find and compare existing
ontologies, to merge them together, to reuse complete ontologies or
their parts, to maintain and compare different versions, and to create
custom-tailored views of ontologies.
In this talk, I will describe our algorithms and tools for performing
these ontology-management tasks. This suite of tools, which we
developed as a component of the Protege ontology- development
environment, partially automates many of the tasks, requiring only
minimal input and feedback from users. I will discuss how we can make
ontology development and maintenance easier and more accessible to
users outside Artificial Intelligence labs. Such uptake is essential
for the use of knowledge-based systems on a wide scale.
____________
UC BERKELEY CITRIS RESEARCH EXCHANGE
on Wednesday, 20 September 2006, 12 noon
540 Cory Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
"Early Experience Prototyping a Science
Data Service for Environmental Data"
Deb Agarwal
Berkeley Water Center
Recognition of the importance of data access as a necessary
pre-requisite to scientific analysis has sparked development of data
archives incorporating data from a variety of sources. This trend has
dramatically improved the availability of data and completeness of
data sets in many scientific disciplines. This data when combined with
locally collected field observations including sensor data and model
results has the potential to enable new science analyses. At the same
time, there is an increasing desire to do science at scales larger
than a single site or watershed and over times measured in years
rather than seasons.
At the Berkeley Water Center, we are using data from the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory Ameriflux carbon flux measurement towers to
develop and prototype a new server for use by a collaborating group to
/jointly analyze /data /across sites./ Working with data and metadata
from the Ameriflux data repository, we are developing a /scientific
data server/. This prototype server provides a framework to allow easy
data download, quality checking, cleaning, and storage. The server
also includes scientifically important metadata such as site biome or
climate along with the actual data. The prototype is designed to allow
data from other related data sets to be included as needed.
Our goal is to facilitate scientific investigations and enable
serendipitous science: a carbon researcher should be able to very
simply mine the data to explore temporal or spatial data correlation
between measurements and across sites. We expect to integrate at some
of the routine data processing steps and calculations that are often
done repeatedly and manually by each investigator using the same data
set. We expect to connect the results to visualization tools that are
already commonly used by this community. Our intent is to reduce the
barrier currently faced by these scientists when analyzing AmeriFlux
data, without forcing familiar desktop analysis tools to be abandoned.
This work has been funded by the Microsoft TCI project at the Berkeley
Water Center.
About the Speaker: Deb Agarwal is a researcher with the Berkeley Water
Center and is Distributed Systems Department Head at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, where she has worked since 1994. Her
current projects involve research, development and deployment of
computing technologies to support collaborative scientific research in
a variety of domains, including providing appropriate controls for
securing and sharing access to information and computational
resources. Dr. Agarwal holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer
engineering from UC Santa Barbara and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering
from Purdue. Further details available at < http://dsd.lbl.gov/~deba/
>.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 21 September 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Bayesian Topic Models"
Thomas Griffiths
University of California, Berkeley
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/tgriffiths.html
Electronic documents provide vast amounts of information, but need to
be organized in a way that lets people use that information. Topic
models provide one way of approaching this problem, automatically
identifying the "topics" that appear in a collection of documents, and
indicating the extent to which each document reflects each topic. I
will summarize the basic ideas behind one such model, Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003), and use this model to describe
how tools from Bayesian statistics can be useful in statistical
natural language processing. In particular, I will introduce a simple
algorithm for identifying topics from documents, based on Markov chain
Monte Carlo, and show how this approach makes it easy to extend the
basic topic model to incorporate syntax, model the interests of
authors, infer topic hierarchies, and pick out topically coherent
segments of dialogue.
About the Speaker: Tom Griffiths is an Assistant Professor of
Psychology and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley, having just joined
the faculty this summer. His research explores connections between
human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial
intelligence to try to understand how people solve the challenging
computational problems they encounter in everyday life. He received
his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 2005, and taught in
the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown
University before moving to UC Berkeley.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 22 September 2006, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"The Role of Digital Electronics in Providing A Window
into the World of Top Marine Predators"
Daniel Costa
UC Santa Cruz
Electronic tags are providing new insights into the behavior of marine
top predators. The Tagging of Pacific Pelagic (TOPP) is a 10-year
program within the Census of Marine Life using electronic tagging
technologies to document the movements and behaviors of marine
predators in the North Pacific. The overarching goal is to advance
electronic tagging technologies and scientific methods to meet the
challenges of the 21st century for marine resource management and
ocean modeling. TOPP's objectives include 1) developing new tags that
measure physical and biological parameters, 2) employing tagged
animals as oceanographic samplers to collect surface and subsurface
data for global ocean databases, 3) developing the infrastructure for
web-based distribution of tagging data, 4) collecting sufficient
information on species movements and their preferred environments to
develop models of abundance and distribution for management and
conservation. To date, 40 researchers from 78 countries have deployed
over 2,000 tags on species ranging from albatross, to elephant seals,
to bluefin tuna.
About the Speaker: Daniel Costa is a Professor of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He
completed his Ph.D. working with sea otters at UCSC in 1978 and then
went to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography were he completed
postdoctoral research. He returned to UCSC in 1983. His research
focuses on physiological and ecological adaptations that enable
mammals and birds to survive in the ocean. His research as taken him
to the far reaches for the globe from the Arctic to the Antarctic,
from Australia to the Galapagos. He was a chief scientist for the two
winter cruises in the Western Antarctic Peninsula. He has been
involved in the development of tagging and tracking technologies since
1978. As a scientific officer at the Office of Naval Research he
initiated ONRs program on marine mammal biology and administered
projects focusing on electronic tag development and satellite tracking
methodologies. He is currently a co-principal investigator of TOPP
(Tagging of Pacific Pelagics) a multidisciplinary program to tag and
track 22 different species of apex pelagic predators in the North
Pacific Ocean.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 September 2006, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Thinking about a Culture-Inclusive Cognitive Science"
Michael Cole
Communication, Psychology, and Human Development, UC San Diego
http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_cole.html
This talk begins with a brief historical overview of Cognitive Science
with a special emphasis on the role that the concept of culture played
in the founding and early decades of the discipline. This history will
be linked to the earlier, and partly constituitive role of psychology
in Cognitive Science and the role that culture has played in that
discipline. The argument will then be made that for a developmental
approach to cognitive science that sees human nature as the emergent
outcome of four "streams of history" or "genetic domains": phylogeny,
cultural history, ontogeny, and microgenesis. Current research seeking
to develop this approach will be given.
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UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 22 September 2006, 12 noon
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"A Neural Mechanism for Decision-Making"
Michael Shadlen
National Primate Research Center, University of Washington
With little sophistication, the spike rates from sensory neurons can
be used to approximate useful statistics for decision-making. In the
context of deciding between two sensory hypotheses, a simple
difference in spike rate between sensory neurons with opposite
selectivity is proportional to the logarithm of a likelihood ratio in
favor of one sensory interpretation over another. I will describe
neural recording and stimulation experiments from the alert monkey
that demonstrate that the brain uses such a difference to make
decisions about the direction of motion in a 2-alternative direction
discrimination task. The accumulation of this difference to threshold
explains the speed and accuracy of simple decisions. Interestingly,
the neural computations that underlie such decision process were
anticipated during WWII by Alan Turing and Abraham Wald. Turing
applied this tool to break the German navy's Enigma cipher, while Wald
invented the field of sequential analysis. In addition to mathematical
elegance and winning wars, our experiments suggest that this
computational strategy may lie at the core of higher brain function.
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END MATERIAL
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