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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 20 September 2006, vol. 22:3
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
20 September 2006 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 3
______________________________________________________________________
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 20 SEPTEMBER 2006 TO 29 SEPTEMBER 2006
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/
6:00pm Silicon Valley Web Guild [20-Sep-06]
Google Inc, 900 Alta Avenue, Mountain View
"Social Search"
Kevin Rose, Digg
Michael Tanne, Wink
Joshua Schachter, Del.icio.us
Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon
http://www.webguild.org/
Abstract below
(fee, $7 members, $15 non-members, ($10 and $20 at the door))
6:30pm SF Bay ACM [20-Sep-06]
Oak Room, Bldg. 48, Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
"How do Google searchers behave? Improving search by divining intent"
Daniel M. Russell
Google
http://sfbayacm.org/
Abstract below
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
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [21-Sep-06]
Soda Hall 320 (UC Berkeley)
"Concurrent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning"
Bhaskara Marthi
UC Berkeley (dissertation talk)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bhaskara/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~taskar/cis-seminar
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
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Logic and the Methodology of Science [22-Sep-06]
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"Some Results on Internal Approachability"
John Krueger
Mathematics, UC Berkeley
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
MONDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2006
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience [25-Sep-06]
124-128 Barker (Berkeley)
"Requiem for the spike"
Peter Latham,
University College London
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Department Colloquium [25-Sep-06]
182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
"Prominence-driven epenthesis: evidence from Alguerese Catalan"
Maria-Rosa Lloret
Universitat de Barcelona
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CITRIS Distinguished Speaker [25-Sep-06]
HP Auditorium, Soda Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Theorizing from data: avoiding the capital mistake"
Peter Norvig
Google
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
7:30pm UC Berkeley Art, Technology, and Cultural Colloquium [25-Sep-06]
105 Northgate Hall (Berkeley)
"Mediatic Performance: New Technologies for Old Theater"
Marianne Weems
Director, The Builders Association, NY
http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER 2006
4:15pm CS309a: Software as a Service [26-Sep-06]
Skilling Auditorium
Subrah Iyar
Webex
http://www.webex.com/webex/management-bio.html#65685
http://cs309a.stanford.edu/
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [26-Sep-06]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Metamorphic Software for Good and Evil"
Mark Stamp
San Jose State University
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER 2006
12 noon UC Berkeley CITRIS Research Exchange [27-Sep-06]
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
"Enabling Scientific Workflows in Virtual Reality"
Oliver Staadt and Oliver Kreylos
UC Davis
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
12 noon UC Berkeley IPSR colloquium [27-Sep-06]
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Future Direction for Intergroup Contact Theory and Research"
Thomas Pettigrew
Social Psychology, University of Santa Cruz
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/ipsr/colloquium.htm
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [27-Sep-06]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
Title to be announced
Anoop Gupta
Microsoft
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
6:00pm Berkeley History and Philosophy of Logic Mathematics, and Science
234 Moses, (Berkeley) [27-Sep-06]
"Hilbert, Logicism, and Mathematical Existence"
Jose Ferreiros
University of Sevilla
http://hplms.berkeley.edu/
THURSDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2006
12:30pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall 100 [28-Sep-06]
"Detachment, Freedom, and Rationality: Should we Accept
McDowell's claim that we are essentially Rational Animals?"
Hubert L. Dreyfus
UC Berkeley
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
3:00pm Computer Forum talk [28-Sep-06]
Packard 101
"NSF: Speaking of the Next Big Thing Come and learn how the
National Science Foundation can help you get started"
Errol Arkilic, Ian Bennett
NSF
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/abstract.php?eventId=1856
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [28-Sep-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Efficiently Ordering Subgoals with Access Constraints"
Guizhen Yang
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Cognition, Brain, and Behavior [28-Sep-06]
Beach Room Tolman (Berkeley)
"Data Blitz"
Knight Lab
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:00pm Berkeley Working Group in the Philosophy of Mind [28-Sep-06]
234 Moses, (Berkeley)
"Why babies are more conscious than we are"
Allison Gopnik
Psychology, UC Berkeley
http://ihd.berkeley.edu/gopnik.htm
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.htm
5:00pm UC Santa Cruz Philosophy Colloquium [28-Sep-06]
Cowell Conference room, Cowell College (UC Santa Cruz)
"Hume's Attack on Newton"
Eric Schliesser
Syracuse University
http://humwww.ucsc.edu/phil/colloquia.html
FRIDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2006
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [29-Sep-06]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work"
Wanda Orlikowski
MIT Sloan School
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [29-Sep-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Discourse effects of lexical specification:
The case of the Mandarin aspectual particle -LE"
Shiaowei Tham
Defense Language Institute
Hooi Ling Soh
University of Minnesota/National University of Singapore
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [29-Sep-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Interface Development for What, Where, When and Who Searching"
Kim Carl, Ray Larson, Vivien Petras & Jeanette Zerneke
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [29-Sep-06]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Preschool children's interpretation of generic sentences"
Andrei Cimpian
Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/~acimpian/
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O+, O-, A+, A-, B-, 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. Remember most Stanford students are away so aren't donating.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Stanford Fall quarter starts next week and with it the CSLI
CogLunches. The list for this quarter so far is
September 28 - Hubert L. Dreyfus, UC Berkeley,
"Detachment, Freedom, and Rationality: Should we Accept McDowell's
claim that we are essentially Rational Animals?"
October 5 - Amy Perfors, MIT,
"Poverty of the Stimulus: A Rational Approach"
December 7 - Johannes Brandl, University of Salzburg,
"The Distinction Between Consciousness and Self-Consciousness"
As usual, the lunch takes place in Cordura Hall 100 at noon, food
provided on a first come first serve basis. EXCEPT the September 28
talk which will take place at a special time, 12:30.
***
A new lecture series
CS309A: Software as a Service
on Tuesdays, 4:15pm - 5:15pm
Skilling Auditorium
http://cs309a.stanford.edu/
The software industry is undergoing a transition from the traditional
model of disconnected development and deployment on a CD-ROM to
software being engineered and delivered on the Internet as a service.
Topics include fundamental shifts in software development technology,
systems, network and application management, application design and
deployment as well as evolving business models. Industry leaders will
be featured as lecturers presenting their real world experiences and
ideas for the future.
Leading the seminar series will be Timothy Chou. He was most recently
the President of Oracle On Demand. He authored the book "The End of
Software" and has lectured at Stanford off and on for over fifteen
year.
***
Reminder that the seventh annual Biomedical Computation at Stanford
(BCATS) Symposium takes place on 21 October 2006 and that the deadline
for submission of abstracts is 1 October 2006. See
http://bcats.stanford.edu/html/bcats-home.html for more information.
Now in its seventh year, the Biomedical Computation at Stanford
symposium provides an open, interdisciplinary forum for Stanford
students and post-docs to share their latest work in computational
biology and medicine with others from Stanford and beyond.
BCATS was originally organized to bring together and integrate the
diverse work done across Stanford in all fields related to biomedical
computation; after six years, BCATS has become an important part of
the Stanford biomedical computation community.
BCATS welcomes presentations from all domains of computerized and
computer-aided biology and medicine, broadly conceived. Topics will
include:
* Informatics, Data Modeling and Statistics
* Biomechanical Simulation and Modeling
* Structural Biology and Genetics
* Biomedical Image Acquisition and Processing
* Computer Assisted Interventions and Robotics
* Network and Computing Technology in Education
Check it out and register now to get the discount for early
registration.
____________
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/
>.
____________
SILICON VALLEY WEB GUILD
on Wednesday, 20 September 2006, 6:00pm
Google Inc, 900 Alta Avenue, Mountain View
http://www.webguild.org/
"Social Search"
Kevin Rose, Digg
Michael Tanne, Wink
Joshua Schachter, Del.icio.us
Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon
Social Search is using the collective power of the community to find
results and recommendations. Social search involves human judgment in
the recommendation process. There are many types of social searches
ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with
descriptive labels to a combination of human intelligence with
computer algorithms.
One of the first and most popular social search services is
Del.ici.ous which leverages the power of shared bookmarks. When users
save a particular page as a bookmark or favorite, they're effectively
voting for the page. This is similar to the idea behind Google's
PageRank; however, the difference is users vote versus webmasters and
Google.
* This event will explore the power of recommendations based upon
community versus algorithms and the implications for search
marketers.
* The growth of user generated content and the challenge it presents
to the major search engines - is the present search box too
limiting?
* The challenges and opportunities for content creators, publishers,
and advertisers.
About the Speakers: Kevin Rose is the founder and chief architect of
digg, where he oversees all aspects of the management and development
of the digg web site. He is also a co-host of Diggnation, a weekly
video podcast based on digg.com news stories and content that
consistently ranks as one of the top podcast downloads from the Apple
iTunes Music Store. Kevin started digg in September 2004 as social
experiment in how masses of users could control and promote news and
other content on the Web, without external editorial control. Prior to
founding digg, Kevin was a co-host of the popular technology
television programs Attack of the Show on the G4 Network and The
Screen Savers on TechTV. During Kevin's tenure at The Screen Savers, a
live TV program focusing on computers and technology, it was the
highest rated show on TechTV, reaching 55 million households.
Michael Tanne is founder and CEO of Wink, a Social Search Engine that
delivers relevant results as discovered by people. Previously Michael
was founder of AdForce, a publicly-traded Internet ad serving company
acquired by CMGi in 2000. Michael then founded XDegrees which was
acquired by Microsoft in 2002. Previously Michael ran products at
Verity, the leader in enterprise search. Michael serves on the board
of Cloudmark, a leading anti-spam provider, and is an investor/advisor
to start-ups including LinkedIn, SimplyHired, Flock, Dogster,
RealTravel and Edgeio. Michael is also Founder and Board Member of
Full Circle Fund, a Bay Area non-profit that engages emerging business
leaders in philanthropy through grants and hands-on assistance to
promising organizations. Michael holds an MBA from Stanford University
and a Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Alberta.
Joshua Schachter is the creator of del.icio.us, creator of geoURL and
co-creator of Memepool. Joshua's popular del.icio.us website helped to
popularize the use of tags on the web, particularly within the
blogging community. In 2005, del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo!, Inc.
Joshua has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie
Mellon University and created GeoURL in 2002 and ran it until 2004.
Garrett Camp is Chief Architect, StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a web
discovery service that allows people to discover great websites
recommended by people with similar interests. With one click, users
are taken to relevant, peer-endorsed websites they wouldn't have
thought to search for. Garrett is StumbleUpon's Co-Founder and Chief
Architect, where he focuses on high-level design of the recommendation
engine.
Online registration for members $7 and non-members $15. On-site
registration for members $10 and non-members $20.
____________
SF BAY ACM
on Wednesday, 20 September 2006, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Oak Room, Bldg. 48, Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
http://sfbayacm.org/
"How do Google searchers behave? Improving search by divining intent"
Daniel M. Russell
Senior Research Scientist, 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. Most
recently, Dan was a senior scientist and senior manager at the IBM
Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He is best known for
his work on IBM's Blueboard system (a large groupware display system)
and for establishing the basis of sensemaking theory while at Xerox
PARC. In addition to IBM and PARC, Dan has also worked in Apple's
Advanced Technology Group, and taught at both Stanford and Santa Clara
Universities. He enjoys word play, music, and long distance running,
becoming disgruntled when all three can't be in one day.
About the ACM: In our high-powered executive council sessions we at
the SF bay Local Chapter of the ACM are planning our next public
seminars. Since this is what keeps our organization financially afloat
(your yearly $10 pay for the newsletter and meetings) we are very
interested in them being successful. Reminder: these seminars cost
about $100 for a whole day lecture. We would be very interested in
your feedback.
1) Would you like to see a class on setting up your home network? This
would go into networking setup, hardware, security, etc.
2) Ruby on Rails: intro to Ruby, intro to Rails
3) Ajax: how to build highly dynamic web pages using JavaScript, XML
and HTML.
Just reply to humphrey@sfbayacm.org
____________
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, 21 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.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 21 September 2006, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 320 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~taskar/cis-seminar
"Concurrent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning"
Bhaskara Marthi
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bhaskara/
Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a field that combines
reinforcement learning techniques together with human prior knowledge,
in an effort to scale up to problems that would be intractable for
methods that begin with a "blank slate". Existing hierarchical RL
methods are not, however, very well suited for control problems
involving large numbers of effectors to be controlled, which are
involved in a variety of concurrent tasks. Examples of such problems
are motor control, multirobot coordination, and real-time strategy
games for computers. I will discuss an extension to standard
hierarchical RL that allows such problems to be tackled. The talk
will cover
- A language for writing multithreaded "partial" programs that
express a human's prior knowledge about how to act.
- A variety of reinforcement learning algorithms that "complete" such
a partial program optimally.
- Empirical results on subdomains of a real-time strategy game based
on Warcraft(tm).
____________
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 constitutive 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.
____________
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.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 September 2006, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
"Second Life as a Virtual Environment for Collaboration and Teaching."
Peter Brantley
California Digital Library
This talk will discuss the growing use of virtual environments such as
Second Life in immersive education and collaborative research.
organizational and challenges will be discussed, and there will be
speculation about future trajectories in the use of these distributed
environments, including the growing availability of VR middleware such
as croquet and multiverse.
____________
UC BERKELEY LOGIC AND THE METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE
on Friday, 22 September 2006, 4:10pm - 5:30pm
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
"Results on Internal Approachability"
John Krueger
Mathematics, UC Berkeley
An internally approachable set is a model which can be approximated by
an increasing sequence of models, whose initial segments appear in the
original model. This idea is basic to many combinatorial and forcing
arguments in classical set theory. A related idea is that of an
internally club set, which is a model which can be approximated by a
sequence whose elements appear in the model. We will discuss the
recent proof that these two notions are consistently distinct.
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BERKELEY REDWOOD CENTER FOR THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE SEMINAR
on Monday, 25 September 2006, 12 noon
Barker 124-126 (Berkeley)
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
"Requiem for the spike"
Peter Latham
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London
A major open question in neuroscience is: "what's the neural code?".
The standard approach to answering this, pioneered by Richmond and
Optican almost two decades ago [1], is to record spike trains and
compute information under different coding models. Unfortunately, this
approach requires huge amounts of data and thus, despite considerable
efforts and some success, it is still not clear to what extent the
neural code, in mammalian cortex, relies on precise spike timing, and
in particular on spike patterns.
An alternative approach follows from the observation that if spike
patterns are to carry information, they must be precisely repeatable.
We may thus ask the question: does the massively recurrent
connectivity that is a salient feature of cortical networks place
intrinsic limits on precise repeatability, and thus on the extent to
which spike patterns can carry information?
We show here that one can answer this question by measuring the mean
increase in the firing rate of an average neuron in response to a
single synaptic input. If the mean increase is sufficiently large,
then the network must be chaotic at the microscopic level, which in
turn precludes precisely repeatable spike trains. To address this
experimentally, we use in-vivo patch-clamp recordings from cortical
pyramidal neurons in barrel cortex of anesthetized rats, and we find
that these networks are highly chaotic. We then perform single neuron
simulations with models of biophysically realistic neurons and large
network simulations with conductance-based neurons. Consistent with
our experiments and with previous studies [2,3], we find the same
result: highly chaotic dynamics. Finally, we connect quantitatively
the mean increase in firing rate with a lower bound on the precision
at which spike timing can carry information.
1. B.J. Richmond and L.M. Optican, J. Neurophysiol. 57:132-46;57:147-61 (1987).
2. C. van Vreeswijk and H. Sompolinsky, Neural Comput. 10:1321-1371 (1998).
3. A. Banerjee, Neural Comput. 13:161-193; 13:195-225 (2001);
J. Comput. Neurosci. 20:321-48 (2006).
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UC BERKELEY CITRIS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
on Monday, 25 September 2006, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Soda Hall HP Auditorium (UC Berkeley)
http://www.citris.berkeley.edu/
"Theorizing from data: avoiding the capital mistake"
Peter Norvig
Google
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle's words from 1891 remain true today. Researchers in
computational linguistics and information retrieval now have a million
times more data than was available 30 years ago. This talk explores
what this data can do for problems in language understanding,
translation, information extraction, and inference, and extrapolates
to what more data may bring in the future.
About the Speaker: Peter Norvig has been at Google Inc since 2001 as
the Director of Machine Learning, Search Quality, and Research. He is
a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and
co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading
textbook in the field.
Previously he was the senior computer scientist at NASA and head of
the 200-person Computational Sciences Division at Ames Research
Center. Before that he was Chief Scientist at Junglee, Chief designer
at Harlequin Inc, and Senior Scientist at Sun Microsystems
Laboratories.
Dr. Norvig received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown
University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of
California at Berkeley. He has been a Professor at the University of
Southern California and a Research Faculty Member at Berkeley. He has
over fifty publications in various areas of Computer Science,
concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing
and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI
Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp; Verbmobil: A Translation
System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.
This event will be webcast live mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast
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UC BERKELEY ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND CULTURAL COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 25 September 2006, 7:30pm - 9:00pm
105 Northgate (Berkeley)
http://atc.berkeley.edu/
"Mediatic Performance: New Technologies for Old Theater"
Marianne Weems
NYC's Builders Association
Given the 'liveness' of performance, how can theater be an arena for
exploring the frictive relationship between 'live' performance and
'live' technologies? How can one stage the impact of technology on
human presence? And how can we use technology to talk about
technology's embrace? In this lecture for the Art, Technology, and
Culture Colloquium series, titled "Mediatic Performance: New
Technologies for Old Theater," Marianne Weems, the artistic director
of the Builders Association, will discuss how technology and its
stories can be staged as an instrument of control, transgression, and
narrative.
The Builders Association is an eclectic group which combines theater
practitioners with software designers and new media artists. Under
the direction of Marianne Weems, this OBIE award-winning New
York-based performance and media company exploits the richness of
contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. Since
1994, with a growing circle of artists, the company has collaborated
on ten large-scale theater projects that have been presented at many
venues. She is currently at work on a new theater/music event with
David Byrne and Fatboy Slim titled "Here Lies Love."
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STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 26 September 2006, 4:30pm
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
"Metamorphic Software for Good and Evil"
Mark Stamp
San Jose State University
Software is said to be metamorphic if copies of the software are
functionally equivalent but they differ in their internal structure.
This is in contrast to cloned software, in which all copies are
identical. Metamorphism can be viewed as providing "genetic diversity"
for software. In this talk, we show that a small degree of
metamorphism can effectively mitigate a buffer overflow attack. More
generally, we consider the potential role of metamorphism in so-called
"break once, break everywhere" (BOBE) protection. We also outline a
real-world example of the use of metamorphism in a digital rights
management (DRM) product.
In the hacker community, it seems to be an article of faith that
metamorphism can be used to create virtually undetectable viruses and
worms. We examine four virus generators available on the Internet,
each of which claims to produce metamorphic copies. We show that three
of these fail to generate any significant degree of metamorphism. For
the one engine that is highly metamorphic, we show that the viruses it
generates are relatively easy to distinguish, using either a hidden
Markov model approach or a more straightforward similarity index. This
work suggests that the effective use of metamorphism for evil may be
more difficult than is generally believed.
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CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 28 September 2006, 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Detachment, Freedom, and Rationality:
Should we Accept McDowell's claim that
we are essentially Rational Animals?"
Hubert L. Dreyfus
UC Berkeley
John McDowell argues that human beings are essentially rational
animals. Their socialization endows them with a second nature, which
enables them to step back from what they are doing, reflect critically
on their current activity, and on their cultural norms, and then
freely act on the basis of reasons. I argue that human beings can
never be radically free in this sense. Rather human beings at their
best are free to let themselves be fully involved in their current
activity and in their culture. In skillful coping detached reflection
usually undermines skillful action, and, in general, one cannot
reflect on ones current activity without transforming it. Moreover,
the norms we are socialized into are not rational and are so pervasive
and embodied that we cannot step back from them completely and subject
them to rational criticism from the ground up. The only way to change
our second nature completely is not to free ourselves from it by
subjecting our customs to detached critical reflection, but by staying
completely involved and going native in another form of life.
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COMPUTER FORUM TALK
on Thursday, 28 September 2006, 3:00pm - 6:00pm
Packard 101
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/abstract.php?eventId=1856
"NSF: Speaking of the Next Big Thing Come and learn how the
National Science Foundation can help you get started"
Errol Arkilic, Ian Bennett
NSF
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency
created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to
advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the
national defense" With an annual budget of $5.8 billion, NSF is the
funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally-supported
basic research conducted by Americas colleges and universities.
In addition to supporting Academic research, the National Science
Foundation through its Office of Industrial Innovation supports the
small business community with approximately $100 million in seed-stage
funding each year. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and
Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs at NSF support
innovation in five areas: Advanced Materials, Biotechnology,
Chemical-Based Technologies, Electronics and Information Technology.
In this talk, NSF will provide an overview of the federal SBIR/STTR
program and discuss the distinction between the NSFs program and those
of other agencies. We will also cover the differences between an NSF
Academic proposal and SBIR/STTR proposal, highlighting the distinction
in the proposal preparation and review process.
Come learn how you and your startup can effectively use the NSF
SBIR/STTR program to initiate the Next Big Thing.
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SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 28 September 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Efficiently Ordering Subgoals with Access Constraints"
Guizhen Yang
Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/~yang
Ordering subgoals under binding pattern restrictions is an important
problem of practical significance in information integration and query
answering systems. In this talk, we will study the problem of ordering
subgoals under binding pattern restrictions for queries posed as
nonrecursive Datalog programs. We will show that despite their limited
expressive power, the problem is computationally hard PSPACE-complete
in the size of the nonrecursive Datalog program even for fairly
restricted cases. As a practical solution to this problem, we will
present an asymptotically optimal algorithm that runs in time linear
in the size of the query plan. We will also study extensions of our
algorithm that efficiently solve other query planning problems under
binding pattern restrictions. These problems include conjunctive
queries with nested grouping constraints, distributed conjunctive
queries, and first-order queries.
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CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 29 September 2006, 12:30pm-2:00pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work"
Wanda Orlikowski
MIT Sloan School
Over the years, research studies into the relationship between humans
and information technology have generated important insights into the
powerful effects of technology as well as their social consequences.
But because they have often emphasized either one side or the other of
the relationship, such studies have tended to overlook the important
ways in which people and tools are inextricably entangled. Developing
a perspective that takes such entanglement seriously, may thus afford
some novel and valuable insights into relations between technologies
and humans. In this talk, I will discuss a way of doing this --
through the notion of sociomaterial practices -- which emphasizes the
reciprocal and temporally emergent interactions of humans and
technology, as these are realized in different contexts and over time.
I will draw on some empirical research to illustrate how my colleagues
and I have been using such a sociomaterial perspective in our field
studies of technology in organizations.
About the Speaker: Wanda J. Orlikowski is the Eaton-Peabody Chair of
Communication Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and a Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies
at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Her primary research interest
focuses on the dynamic relationship between organizations and
information technologies, with particular emphases on organizing
structures, cultural norms, communication genres, and work
practices. She is currently leading a 5-year NSF project on the social
and economic implications of Internet technologies within
organizations. She has served as a senior editor for Organization
Science, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Information
and Organization, Information Technology & People, Organization
Science, and the Reflections Journal.
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