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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 18 October 2006, vol. 22:7
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
18 October 2006 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 7
______________________________________________________________________
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 18 OCTOBER 2006 TO 27 OCTOBER 2006
WEDNESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2006
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [18-Oct-06]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Cultivating emotional balance in the classroom"
Tish Jennings
Garrison Institute
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12 noon UC Berkeley CITRIS Research Exchange [18-Oct-06]
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
"Imaging the Voices of the Past: Using Optics to Restore Sound
Recordings"
Carl Haber
Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
http://www.citris-uc.org/CRE-Oct18-2006
http://www.citris-uc.org/
4:00pm Literary Studies and the Digital Library [18-Oct-06]
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center
"From Ben Franklin to Tom Cruise: Mining Text Collections for
Scholarly Research"
David Newman
Computer Science, UC Irvine
Sharon Block
History, UC Irvine
http://beyondsearch.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [18-Oct-06]
EK255, SRI International
"Robust Execution of Stochastic Hybrid Systems Using Particles"
Lars Blackmore
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [18-Oct-06]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Measurements vs. Bits:
Compressed Sensing meets Information Theory"
Dror Baron
Rice University
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:15pm NLaSP Colloquium [18-Oct-06]
Bldg. 200:205 (History Corner)
"Developments in Synchronous Grammars"
Stuart Shieber
Harvard
http://nlp.stanford.edu/events.shtml
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [18-Oct-06]
Packard 202
"A New Look at Convexity, Duality, and Optimization"
Dimitri Bertsekas
MIT
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
5:15pm CCRMA Colloquium [18-Oct-06]
CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll
"SESSION 1: Musical sounds and performance"
"Structured Voice Coding for Flexible Expressive Synthesis"
Pamornpol (Tak) Jinachitra (PhD, EE)
"Internal hearing / Simulating the sound of one's own singing voice"
Sook Young Won (PhD, Music)
"Performance, Practice, and the Transmigration of Souls"
Anthony Martin (Faculty, Music)
"Overview of instrumental sound synthesis"
Julius Smith (Faculty, Music / EE)
"Handvox: An Accelerometer-based data-glove for sound synthesis"
Joel Darnauer (PhD, EE)
"SESSION 2: Music as massive data"
"Service in Today's Digital and Analog Library: A Vision for
the Stanford Music Library and Archive of Recorded Sound"
Jerry McBride (Head librarian, Music)
"Edison Cylinder project"
Jonathan Berger (Faculty, Music)
"Audio compression overview"
Marina Bosi (Faculty, Music / EE)
"Can we predict success from music sales data?"
Songhui Chon (PhD, EE)
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/
THURSDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2006
11:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [19-Oct-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Machine Learning via Advice Taking"
Jude Shavlik
University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
12 noon Music 319: CCRMA Hearing Seminar [19-Oct-06]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"ISMIR 2006 Conference Review"
Kyogo Lee, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Malcolm Slaney
Stanford
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Information below
2:00pm SULAIR Technology Chalk Talk [19-Oct-06]
Hewlett 102
"The History of Copyright, and Ownership of Information Today"
Karl Fogel
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/about_sulair/for_sul_staff/sulair_news.html
Abstract below
2:15pm Logic Seminar [19-Oct-06]
Room to be announced
"Constructive NF"
Thomas Forster
Cambridge
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:00pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [19-Oct-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Discussing 'Variation as accessing 'non-optimal' candidates:
A rank-ordering model of EVAL' by Andries Coetzee"
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm Personality Lab [19-Oct-06]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Faculty Q&A"
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_personality.html
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [19-Oct-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Semantic Web Services: Where Are We Headed?"
David L Martin
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [19-Oct-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Uncertainty in an unknown world"
Stuart Russell
UC Berkeley
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy George Myro Memorial Lecture [19-Oct-06]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Practical Reasoning and Inference"
Jonathan Dancy
University of Reading/University of Texas
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ld/Philos/jpd/jpd.htm
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [19-Oct-06]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Resurrecting the Turing Test"
Stuart Shieber
Computer Science, Harvard University
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2006
10:00am Music 319: CCRMA Hearing Seminar [20-Oct-06]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"Harmonic source separation using pitch, amplitude, and spatial"
Bryan Pardo
Northwestern University
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [20-Oct-06]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Will WE be witness to a true revolution in the mind sciences?"
David Presti
Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/NEU/prestid.html
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [20-Oct-06]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Dogmas and the Changing Images of the Foundations of Mathematics"
Jose Ferreiras
Universidad de Sevilla
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [20-Oct-06]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Expressive Intelligence:
Artificial Intelligence, Games and New Media"
Michael Mateas
UC Santa Cruz
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [20-Oct-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Semantics Wikis and Microformats:
Bringing the Semantic Web to Today's Web"
Adam Souzis
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [20-Oct-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"What Have Library Schools and I-Schools Forgotten?"
Bernd Frohmann and Michael Buckland
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [20-Oct-06]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Learning to listen ahead in Spanish: First language learners
are more efficient than second language learners in online
sentence processing"
Casey Williams
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:15pm ME394: Design Forum [20-Oct-06]
Terman 556
"Research"
Larry Leifer
http://me.stanford.edu/faculty/facultydir/leifer.html
http://www.stanford.edu/class/me394/
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [20-Oct-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"VPUE research presentations"
Pat Callier and Cole Paulson, Doug Kenter, Rafe Kinsey, Gabe
Recchia, & Bea Sanford
Undergraduates, Stanford
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Information below
SATURDAY, 21 OCTOBER 2006
all day Biomedical Computation at Stanford (BCATS) [21-Oct-06]
Hewlett Teaching Center
"Symposium"
multiple speakers
http://bcats.stanford.edu/html/bcats-home.html
Information below
MONDAY, 23 OCTOBER 2006
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium [23-Oct-06]
Hewlett Teaching Center 200
Title to be announced
Gill Bejerano
http://bejerano.stanford.edu/pi.html
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
TUESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2006
4:15pm Computer Musings [24-Oct-06]
Skilling Auditorium
"Platologic Computing"
Don Knuth
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html
WEDNESDAY, 25 OCTOBER 2006
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [25-Oct-06]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"One vs. more than one: how children first express plurality"
Eve Clark
Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [25-Oct-06]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"A Structured Orchestration Language"
Jayadev "Jay" Misra
University of Texas at Austin
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
5:30pm Immanuel Kant Lecture 1 [25-Oct-06]
Bldg. 260:113
"Origins of Objectivity"
Tyler Burge
UCLA
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2006
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [26-Oct-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Model-based Programming of Robust Agile Systems"
Brian C. Williams
MIT
http://people.csail.mit.edu/williams/Web%20site/williams.shtml
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [26-Oct-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The Green Energy Revolution"
Roland N. Horne
Stanford
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [26-Oct-06]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Issues in Music Copyright from the Perspective of Musical
Data Representation"
Eleanor Selfridge-Field
Music, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [26-Oct-06]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Devavrat Shah
MIT
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
5:30pm Immanuel Kant Lecture 2 [26-Oct-06]
Bldg. 260:113
"Origins of Objectivity"
Tyler Burge
UCLA
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
FRIDAY, 27 OCTOBER 2006
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [27-Oct-06]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"The Future of Proof"
Dana S. Scott
University Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [27-Oct-06]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Sensing Technologies for Future Computing Form Factors"
Andy Wilson
Microsoft
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [27-Oct-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Comments on the 2nd I-School Conference"
Dean Annalee Saxenian
http://iconference.si.umich.edu/
and
"Electronic Voting as a Case Study in Supporting Transparency
in Digital Democracy"
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
3:15pm Immanuel Kant Seminar [27-Oct-06]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Origins of Objectivity"
Tyler Burge
UCLA
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [27-Oct-06]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Estimating the probabilities of linguistic events"
Dan Yarlett
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [27-Oct-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Weak Bias Language Models and Universal Grammar"
Shalom Lappin
King's College, London
and
Stuart Shieber
Harvard University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [27-Oct-06]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Learning and Adaptation in Visual Cortex"
Stephen Engel
Cognitive Psychology, Psychology, UCLA
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O, A, 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.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENTS
I'm a bit short on Berkeley events this week as I didn't have much
time to mine their web sites before (a) the calendar got really big
and (b) I hit the deadline for getting the calendar out.
Stanford and the LSA are ramping up fast for next Summer's Linguistic
Institute on July 1-27, 2007. See http://linginst07.stanford.edu/ for
information on courses, registration, special lectures, Dead Tongues,
etc.
Symbolic Systems is pleased to announce the inauguration of the
Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholars in Symbolic Systems. Supported by
an endowment grant from anonymous donors, Wasow Scholars are chosen
for their outstanding research contributions in areas of current
interest across two or more departments represented within the
Symbolic Systems Program. Visits by Wasow Scholars to Stanford may
last for one or more weeks, and include a mix of public talks and
informal discussion with students and faculty.
Tom Wasow, Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, was a founder and
long-time director (1992-2000 and 2001-2005) of the Symbolic Systems
Program. Tom's outstanding work in building and teaching in the program
were recognized through several university honors, including the Rhodes
Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1996), a Bass University
Fellow award (2003), and the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for contributions
to undergraduate education (2004). Now the Director of the Center for the
Study of Language and Information, Tom continues to teach in SSP and
serves on the Symbolic Systems Program Committee.
See http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_static?page=Wasow_Scholars.html for
more information.
____________
LITERARY STUDIES AND THE DIGITAL LIBRARY
on Wednesday, 18 October 2006, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center
http://beyondsearch.stanford.edu/
"From Ben Franklin to Tom Cruise: Mining Text Collections for
Scholarly Research"
David Newman
Computer Science, UC Irvine
Sharon Block
History, UC Irvine
Most scholars are already familiar with the array of search engines
that have made "googling" part of our lexicon. We present a new
search technique, topic modeling, that moves beyond keyword-based
queries. Topic modeling is based on the idea that all documents are
intrinsically made up of one or more topics that a computer can
identify by finding words that tend to co-occur. The topic model is
an unsupervised algorithm that automatically (read: without human
involvement) learns the topics from the body of documents. We will
explain topic modeling (in both technical and lay terms!), and give
real world examples of its effectiveness -- ranging from analysis of
an eighteenth-century newspaper to modern entertainment reports.
Ultimately, we show how topic modeling doesn't just immediately index
millions of documents, it opens up new research avenues.
On Thursday, October 19 1-3:00
Discussion and Demonstrations with Newman and Block, Green Library SSRC,
Room 121A (first floor of Bing Wing)
For a news release about the work, see:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/press/view_press?id=51
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 18 October 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EK255, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Robust Execution of Stochastic Hybrid Systems Using Particles"
Lars Blackmore
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Unmanned systems such as Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), Autonomous
Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), planetary rovers and space probes have
enormous potential in areas such as reconnaissance and space
exploration. In order to realize their potential, however, unmanned
systems require a dramatic increase in the level of autonomy they
exhibit. In order to achieve the increased level of autonomy,
operators need to be able to command the system at the level of
desired states, rather than at the level of low-level system
commands. This simplifies the commanding task, for the operator, and
allows the remaining degrees of freedom to be used to give additional
robustness to the plan.
Previous work developed model-based executives that can control agile
dynamic systems given a qualitative state plan, which specifies the
mission requirements at the level of desired states. These executives,
however, are not robust to the uncertainty inherent in the real world,
in particular uncertain state estimation, disturbances, component
failures and uncertainty in the environment. Dynamic systems involving
such forms of uncertainty can be modeled conveniently using stochastic
hybrid systems.
In this talk we present a novel method for robust execution of
stochastic hybrid systems. We formulate robustness using chance
constraints, which ensure that mission failure occurs with a maximum
probability. This probability is specified by the operator, enabling
conservatism to be traded against performance in a meaningful manner;
a plan constrained to have a low probability of failure gives the
operator high confidence in success, but will typically be more
expensive in terms of time or fuel, for example. In order to make this
problem tractable, we introduce a novel chance-constrained particle
control approach. This approach draws from prior work in estimation,
which uses samples or ?particles? to approximate the system state
distribution. Particles are particularly useful as they can
approximate arbitrary probability distributions, even the multimodal
state distributions that occur in hybrid discrete-continuous
models. As the number of particles tends to infinity, the
approximation becomes exact. The chance-constrained particle control
approach works by optimally controlling a distribution of particles to
achieve chance-constrained mission satisfaction. Particle control
therefore solves a tractable deterministic approximation to the
original stochastic problem, with a graceful degradation in
approximation accuracy as computational resources become more
constrained. For an important class of hybrid discrete-continuous
system, the resulting deterministic optimization can be posed as a
Mixed-Integer Linear Program and solved to global optimality using
extremely efficient commercially-available solvers.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 18 October 2006, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Measurements vs. Bits: Compressed Sensing meets Information Theory"
Dror Baron
Rice University
http://www.dsp.rice.edu/CS
Sensors, signal processing hardware, and algorithms are under
increasing pressure to accommodate ever larger data sets; ever faster
sampling and processing rates; ever lower power consumption; and
radically new sensing modalities. Fortunately, over the past few
decades, there have been enormous increases in computational power.
This progress has motivated Compressed Sensing (CS), an emerging field
based on the revelation that optimization routines can reconstruct a
sparse signal from a small number of linear projections of the signal.
The implications of CS are promising for many applications and enable
the design of new kinds of cameras and analog-to-digital converters.
Information theory has numerous rich insights to offer CS. We
investigate three directions along the interface between these fields.
First, we characterize the minimum number of measurements needed to
reconstruct the signal within a specified distortion - a problem
related to rate distortion theory. Our study reveals that the
unavoidable noise in analog measurements is the crucial factor that
dictates the number of CS measurements needed. Second, we leverage the
remarkable success of LDPC channel codes to design low-complexity CS
measurement and reconstruction algorithms. Third, our work on
distributed compressed sensing (DCS) provides new distributed signal
acquisition algorithms that exploit both intra- and inter-signal
correlation structures in multi-signal ensembles. We describe three
models for signal ensembles, propose algorithms for joint recovery of
multiple signals, and establish a parallel between the number of
measurements needed and the Slepian-Wolf theorem from information
theory. DCS is immediately applicable to a range of problems in sensor
networks and arrays.
About the speaker: Dror Baron received the B.Sc. (summa cum laude) and
M.Sc. degrees from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, in
1997 and 1999, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in 2003, all in electrical engineering. From 1997 to
1999 he worked at Witcom Ltd. in modem design. From 1999 to 2003 he
was a research assistant at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, where he was also a visiting assistant professor in
2003. Since 2003 he has been a postdoctoral research associate in the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice
University. His research interests include information theory, signal
processing, and compressed sensing.
____________
NLASP COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 18 October 2006, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Bldg. 200:205 (History Corner)
http://nlp.stanford.edu/events.shtml
"Developments in Synchronous Grammars"
Stuart Shieber
Harvard University
Much of the activity in linguistics, especially computational
linguistics, can be thought of as characterizing not languages
simpliciter but relations among languages. Formal systems for
characterizing language relations have a long history with two primary
branches, based on transducers and synchronous grammars. We present
some background on the systems leading to some new results integrating
transducers and synchronous grammars through the
formal-language-theoretic construct of the bimorphism. We present two
applications of synchronous grammars: to tree-adjoining grammar
semantics and to syntax-aware machine translation.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 18 October 2006, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 202
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"A New Look at Convexity, Duality, and Optimization"
Dimitri Bertsekas
MIT
http://www.athenasc.com/New_Look.pdf
This talk will review a recent book treatment of convex analysis and
optimization. While the subject of the book is classical, the
treatment of several of its important topics is new and in some cases
relies on new research. The new lines of analysis include:
(a) A unified framework for minimax theory and constrained
optimization duality as special cases of duality between two simple
geometrical problems. Within this framework, the fundamental
constraint qualifications needed for strong duality and existence of
saddle points are quite apparent, and admit straightforward proofs.
(b) A unification of conditions for existence of solutions of convex
optimization problems, conditions for the minimax equality to hold,
and conditions for the absence of a duality gap in constrained
optimization. This unification is based on conditions guaranteeing
that a nested family of closed convex sets has a nonempty
intersection.
(c) A unification of the major constraint qualifications that
guarantee the existence of Lagrange multipliers for nonconvex
constrained optimization. This unification is achieved through the
notion of constraint pseudonormality, which is motivated by an
enhanced form of the Fritz John necessary optimality conditions.
(d) The development of incremental subgradient methods for dual
optimization, and the analysis of their advantages over classical
subgradient methods.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 11:00am
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Machine Learning via Advice Taking"
Jude Shavlik
University of Wisconsin-Madison
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~shavlik/
Most research in machine learning focuses on a rather narrow
definition of training example. Commonly, the learning algorithm is
simply given a list of "input-output" (I/O) pairs. From these, the
task of the machine learner is to induce a function that correctly
replicates all, or at least most, of these training examples (and in
addition accurately predicts the output for inputs not seen during
training). However, a much richer sense of training example is
possible, one where the teacher provides broadly applicable
information, rather than just specific cases. We present our recent
work on creating Knowledge-Based Support Vector Machines, which are
able to accept instruction beyond input-output pairs. Since the
learning algorithm is allowed to accept, refine, or discard this
instruction, we view the instruction as advice, as opposed to
commands, which computers must literally follow. We also discuss how
the advice-taking approach can be applied to transfer learning; in
this case, an algorithm automatically creates advice for a new task by
analyzing what was learned on a similar, prior task.
About the Speaker: Jude Shavlik is a Professor of Computer Sciences
and of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of
Wisconsin - Madison, and is a Fellow of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence. He has been at Wisconsin since 1988,
following the receipt of his PhD from the University of Illinois for
his work on Explanation-Based Learning. His current research interests
include machine learning and computational biology, with an emphasis
on using rich sources of training information, such as human-provided
advice. He served for three-years as editor-in-chief of the AI
Magazine and serves on the editorial board of about a dozen
journals. He chaired the 1998 International Conference on Machine
Learning, co-chaired the First International Conference on Intelligent
Systems for Molecular Biology in 1993, co-chaired the First
International Conference on Knowledge Capture in 2001, was conference
chair of the 2003 IEEE Conference on Data Mining, and will be
co-chairing the 2007 International Conference on Inductive Logic
Programming. He was a founding member of both the board of the
International Machine Learning Society and the board of the
International Society for Computational Biology. He co-edited, with
Tom Dietterich, "Readings in Machine Learning." His research has been
supported by DARPA, NSF, NIH, ONR, DOE, AT&T, IBM, and NYNEX.
____________
MUSIC 319: CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 12 noon
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
"ISMIR 2006 Conference Review"
Malcolm Slaney, Kyogu Lee and Eleanor Selfridge-Field
Stanford University
Kyogo Lee, Eleanor Selfridge-Field and I were at the ISMIR
(International Conference on Music Information Retrieval) last week
in Victoria BC. See the conference web site at
http://ismir2006.ismir.net/
There were lots of interesting and wonderful papers, so the three of
us are going to do an ISMIR review at the next CCRMA Hearing Seminar.
Come to CCRMA to hear the very best papers from the meeting, at least
as identified by Kyogo, Eleanor and myself. Come find out what are
the hottest topics in the music IR field (more Bayesian models, better
sound separation) and hear about the results from the MIREX
competition (things like song-similarity).
Note: We're going to have our meetings this quarter at 12 noon so
students in one of the other CCRMA classes can participate.
Bring your music-inquiring minds to CCRMA on Thursday at noon.
--Malcolm Slaney
____________
SULAIR TECHNOLOGY CHALK TALK
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 2:00pm
Hewlett 102
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/about_sulair/for_sul_staff/sulair_news.html
"The History of Copyright, and Ownership of Information Today"
Karl Fogel
Copyright is derived from a 16th-century English censorship law, later
transformed by publishers and the English Parliament into a monopoly
distribution right. This history differs in significant ways from our
modern conception of copyright, which holds that it was invented to
give writers and artists an economic basis for creativity. The actual
story is somewhat more complex than that, and understanding it is
increasingly important today, as the economics of distribution are
undergoing radical change thanks to the Internet.
This talk will provide a mid-level overview of copyright's history,
with pointers to further reading, followed by a brief survey of
alternative economic bases for creation and distribution, and plenty
of time for Q&A about what this all means for librarians and others in
the information sciences.
About the Speaker: Karl Fogel has been active as a free/open-source
software developer since the early 1990's, and more recently as a
copyright reform activist [ http://questioncopyright.org/ ]. He is
the author of two books: Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a
Successful Free Software Project, published by O'Reilly Media in 2005,
and Open Source Development with CVS, published by Coriolis OpenPress
in 1999 and now in a third edition from Paraglyph Press. He is
currently working on a book about the history and consequences of
copyright.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 2:15pm-3:30pm
Room to be announced
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Constructive NF"
Thomas Forster
Cambridge
The classical version of Quine's set theory NF is known to be strong
but not known to be consistent. The strength emerges in some highly
bizarre proofs (Of the axiom of infinity and the negation of the axiom
of choice) and it is not clear what their constructive content is.
Naturally one wonders about the status of the constructive version of
the theory. Is there perhaps an easy proof of its consistency,
perhaps using realizability ideas arising from Specker's
equiconsistency proof for NF and a version of typed set theory?
Nothing of any significance has been published on constructive NF, and
this paper is the result of my attempts to prepare - in collaboration
with Randall Holmes - a background survey paper which would be useful
to people thinking of working on this topic.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Semantic Web Services: Where Are We Headed?"
David L Martin
Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International
The Semantic Web is many things: an ambitious vision for the future of
the Internet; a lively research area; a set of standards activities at
the World Wide Web Consortium; a technology base of Web-oriented
knowledge representation languages, reasoners, and tools; and a
growing collection of shared ontologies, knowledge bases,
collaborative activities and communities supported by these
technologies. The potential of the Semantic Web goes well beyond its
applications to information discovery and querying. In particular, it
encompasses the automation of Web-based activities and Web-accessible
devices as well. When it becomes widespread, the ability to deploy,
discover, and use online processing resources and devices, in an
significantly automated fashion, will likely be viewed as a major
transformation of the Web. Semantic Web services technology is the
embodiment of this developing trend.
Work on Semantic Web Services is complementary (to a degree) with
commercial work on Web services, and provides greater expressiveness
in describing services in a way that software agents can reason about.
This reasoning, in turn, can support more powerful and more fully
automated approaches to Web service tasks such as service discovery,
selection, invocation, execution, composition, monitoring, and
recovery. This presentation will explain the concepts embodied in
Semantic Web Services, show how it ties in with developing industry
standards, and discuss some existing applications. A perspective will
be given on the status of work in this field, tools under development
to support its use, and next steps towards realizing its promise.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Uncertainty in an unknown world"
Stuart Russell
University of California Berkeley
Recent advances in knowledge representation for probability models
have allowed for uncertainty about the properties of objects and the
relations that might hold among them. Such models, however, typically
assume exact knowledge of which objects exist and of which object is
which---that is, they assume *domain closure* and *unique names*.
These assumptions simplify the sample space for probability models,
but are inappropriate for many real-world situations. This talk
presents a formal language, BLOG, for defining probability models over
worlds with unknown objects in which several terms may refer to the
same object. BLOG models define generative processes that combine
"factual" events that specify relationships among objects with
"existence" events that generate the objects themselves. Subject to
certain acyclicity constraints, every BLOG model specifies a unique
probability distribution over the set of possible worlds for the
first-order language. Furthermore, complete inference algorithms exist
for a useful fragment of the language. I will present several example
models and discuss interesting issues arising from the treatment of
evidence in such languages.
About the Speaker: Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England in
1962. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from
Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in computer science from
Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of
California at Berkeley, where he is a professor of computer science,
director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and holder of the
Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. In 1990, he received the
Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science
Foundation, and in 1995 he was cowinner of the Computers and Thought
Award. He was a 1996 Miller Professor of the University of California
and was appointed to a Chancellor's Professorship in 2000. In 1998, he
gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University. He is a
Fellow and former Executive Council member of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the Association for
Computing Machinery. He has published over 100 papers on a wide range
of topics in artificial intelligence.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 19 October 2006, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Resurrecting the Turing Test"
Stuart Shieber
Computer Science, Harvard University
Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar 2006-2007
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his eponymous test of machines -- based
on verbal indistinguishability from humans -- which he intended as a
replacement for the question "Can machines think?" Since then, the
primary philosophical question concerning the Turing Test is whether
or not it is well-founded as a sufficient condition for
intelligence. The state of play on the question has led to the
following stalemate: On one hand, conventional wisdom among
philosophers is that the Test is conceptually flawed as a sufficient
condition for intelligence; Ned Block's "Aunt Bertha Machine" thought
experiment is the crispest argument for this view. On the other hand
is the overwhelming sense that were a machine to pass a real live
full-fledged Turing Test, it would be a sign of nothing but our
orneriness to deny it the attribution of intelligence; this, roughly
speaking, is Daniel Dennett's view. In this talk, we present the
background for the debate, and apply ideas from theoretical computer
science and physics in novel ways in order to cut this Gordian knot.
____________
MUSIC 319: CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 10:00am
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Bryan Pardo is a very creative auditory processor, originally from
Ohio State and Michigan, is now a professor in EE and CS at
Northwestern University. He is an accomplished musician.
Bryan will be talking about an approach to computational auditory
scene analysis (CASA) that combines statistical and perceptual-model-
based approaches. He looks at both the timing of a stereo recording
and the structure of a musical signal to create a mask that shows one
signal at a time. It's very creative work. --Malcolm Slaney
"Harmonic source separation using pitch, amplitude, and spatial cues"
Bryan Pardo
Northwestern University
Recent work in blind source separation applied to two-channel,
anechoic mixtures of speech allows for reconstruction of sources that
rarely overlap in a time-frequency representation. While the
assumption that speech mixtures do not overlap significantly in time-
frequency is reasonable, music mixtures rarely meet this constraint,
requiring new approaches. In this talk, we introduce a method that
uses spatial cues from anechoic, stereo music recordings and
assumptions regarding the structure of musical source signals to
effectively separate mixtures of tonal music, despite time-frequency
overlap between sources. This method builds on existing binary masking
techniques to create partial source signal estimates from regions of
the mixture where source signals do not overlap significantly. We use
these partial signal estimates to predict the relative contribution of
each source in those mixture regions where multiple sources overlap in
time and frequency. We then describe a method for distributing energy
from time-frequency frames where multiple sources contribute to the
mixture. This allows dealing with mixtures that contain
time-frequency frames in which multiple harmonic sources are active
without prior knowledge of individual source characteristics.
About the Speaker: Bryan Pardo is an assistant professor in the
Northwestern University Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science with a courtesy appointment in Northwestern
University's School of Music. Bryan's academic career began at the
Ohio State University, where he received both a B.Mus. in Jazz
Composition and a M.Sc. in Computer Science. After graduation, he
spent several years working as a Jazz musician and software
developer. As a software developer he worked for the Speech & Hearing
Science Department of Ohio State and for the statistical software
company SPSS. Bryan then attended the University of Michigan, where
he received a M.Mus. in Jazz and Improvisation, followed by a Ph.D. in
Computer Science. Over the years, Bryan has also been featured on
five albums, taught for two years as an adjunct professor in the Music
Department of Madonna University, and worked as a researcher for
General Dynamics on machine learning tasks. When he's not programming,
writing or teaching, he performs on saxophone and clarinet throughout
the Midwest.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Will WE be witness to a true revolution in the mind sciences?"
David Presti
Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/NEU/prestid.html
Several profound revolutions have been part of the developmental
trajectory of contemporary science, in particular in the physical and
in the biological sciences. While cognitive science fosters a
multifaceted approach to the study of mind which has generated
substantial progress, no similar revolutions have yet taken place.
Indeed, current approaches to the mind-body problem may be failing to
take seriously phenomena that are very relevant to understanding the
neurobiology of mind.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 12 noon
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"Dogmas and the Changing Images of the Foundations of Mathematics"
Jose Ferreiras
Universidad de Sevilla
I'll offer a critical review of several different conceptions of the
activity of foundational research, from the time of Gauss to the
present. These will be
(1) the traditional image, guiding Gauss, Dedekind, Frege and others,
that views the search for more adequate basic systems as a logical
excavation of a priori structures,
(2) the program to find sound formal systems for so-called classical
mathematics that can be proved consistent, associated with the
name of Hilbert, and
(3) the historicist alternative, guiding Riemann, Poincare, Weyl and
others, that seeks to perfect available conceptual systems with
the aim to avoid conceptual limitations and expand the range of
theoretical options.
I shall contend that assumptions about the foundational enterprise
frequently emerge from certain dogmas that are inherited from
previous, outdated images. To round the discussion, I mention some
traits of an alternative program that investigates the epistemology
of mathematical knowledge.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 12:30pm-2:00pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Expressive Intelligence:
Artificial Intelligence, Games and New Media"
Michael Mateas
UC Santa Cruz
Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in art and
entertainment, enabling the creation of believable characters with
rich personalities and emotions, interactive story systems that
incorporate player interaction into the construction of dynamic plots,
and interactive installations and sculptural works that are able to
perceive and respond to the human environment. At the same time as AI
opens up new fields of artistic expression, AI-based art itself
becomes a fundamental research agenda, posing and answering novel
research questions which would not be raised unless doing AI research
in the context of art and entertainment. I call this agenda, in which
AI research and art mutually inform each other, Expressive AI. These
ideas will be illustrated by looking at several current and past
projects, including the interactive drama Facade (released July 2005,
downloadable from http://www.interactivestory.net/ ).
About the Speaker: Michael Mateas' research in AI-based art and
entertainment combines science, engineering and design into an
integrated practice that pushes the boundaries of the conceivable and
possible in games and other interactive art forms. He is currently a
faculty member in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Cruz,
where he is involved in launching UCSC's game design degree, the first
such degree offered in the UC system. Prior to Santa Cruz, Michael was
a faculty member at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where he held
a joint appointment in the College of Computing and the School of
Literature, Communication and Culture, and founded the Experimental
Game Lab. With Andrew Stern, Michael released Facade, the world's
first AI-based interactive drama in July 2005. Facade has received
numerous awards, including top honors at the Slamdance independent
game festival (co-located with the Sundance film festival). Michael's
current research interests include game AI, particularly character and
story AI, ambient intelligence supporting non-task-based social
experiences, and dynamic game generation. Michael has presented papers
and exhibited artwork internationally including SIGGRAPH, the New York
Digital Salon, AAAI, the Game Developers Conference, ISEA, AIIDE, the
Carnegie Museum, and Te PaPa, the national museum of New
Zealand. Michael received his BS in Engineering Physics from the
University of the Pacific, his MS in Computer Science (emphasis in
Human-Computer Interaction) from Portland State University, and his
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Semantics Wikis and Microformats:
Bringing the Semantic Web to Today's Web"
Adam Souzis
This talk will discuss Semantic Wikis and other light-weight and
user-friendly mechanisms for creating Semantic Web content, such as
microformats and emerging W3C standards such as RDF/A and GRDDL.
Semantic Wikis are wikis that let users add explicit semantics
(usually represented as RDF) to content. Microformats and RDF/A are
different approaches for annotating the content contained in a HTML
page with explicit semantics and GRDDL is a mechanism for describing
how to extract RDF out of arbitrary HTML or XML.
This talk will demonstrate these technologies using Rhizome, an open
source Wiki-like content management and delivery system that treats
all content, metadata, and structure as RDF and lets users edit any
RDF resource as they would a wiki page. Rhizome supports microformats,
RDF/A, and GRDDL through a process called "shredding": a flexible
framework for specifying rules for characterizing semi-structured
content with RDF and providing an ontology that can precisely describe
the relationship between the source content and the resulting
statements.
About the Speaker: Adam Souzis is the creator of the Rhizome project (
http://www.liminalzone.org/ ). Before that he was co-founder and CTO
of content distribution software company Kinecta Corp. For the last
decade Adam has been creating new Internet technology for startups
such as General Magic, NetObjects, and Stellent. Adam received his BA
in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
"What Have Library Schools and I-Schools Forgotten?"
Bernd Frohmann and Michael Buckland
Oct 20 follows both last week's Document Academy conference
http://thedocumentacademy.hum.uit.no/events/docam/index.html and this
week's i-school conference in Ann Arbor
http://iconference.si.umich.edu/
Selected highlights of the Document Academy conference and a
forthcoming volume of essays marking the 10th anniversary of the
Documentation program at the University of Tromso (Norway) will be
briefly reviewed.
What, now, in 2006, could form a fresh, stronger, and more coherent
approach to the foundations, curriculum, and research agendas of
library schools and i-schools? What criteria should be applied?
Join us for an informal discussion. Next week the Dean will tell us
what the participants in the i-school conference thought.
About the Speaker: Bernd Frohmann is Associate Professor in the
Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western
Ontario, and author of Deflating Information: From Science Studies to
Documentation (University of Toronto Press, 2004). His main research
interests are concerned with the materiality and the institutional
environment of documentary systems: how the circulation of documents
of all kinds, together with their related technologies of production
and consumption, intersect with social and institutional structures to
produce specific effects, such as knowledge, cultural phenomena,
social distinction, hierarchies of expertise, domination, and
possibilities of freedom. He has also published on information ethics
and the ways in which information, its users, and its uses are
constructed as objects of disciplinary knowledge. More at
http://www.fims.uwo.ca/whoswho/facultypage.htm?PeopleId=65
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 20 October 2006, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Undergraduate VPUE Research Presentations"
"Quantitative Analysis of Grammatical Variables in Appalachian English"
Pat Callier and Cole Paulson
Faculty mentor: John Rickford
This summer, we transcribed around eight hours of recordings of
Appalachian English, as part of a larger project studying grammatical
variation and change, directed by John Rickford. In our report we'll
discuss some of the challenges of transcription and coding (we were
coding for plural marking, inversion in questions, and relative
pronoun deletion), and zero in on relative pronoun deletion using the
data we transcribed and coded. Among other phenomena we noticed,
relative pronouns are sometimes optional in subject position, yielding
sentences such as "I mean, that's a lot of people [ ] comes through,
you know." Instances we coded as zero-pronoun subject relative clauses
often occurred in existential constructions and that/it-clefts,
although competing syntactic analyses may question the status of some
of these as true relative constructions.
"Studies in Unfree Variation"
Doug Kenter
Faculty mentor: Arnold Zwicky
This project traced the use of expressions which are commonly
acknowledged -- by self-professed grammar experts -- to have an equal
semantic and discourse-functional role, a linguistic position which
forces these experts to recommend avoiding one option and favoring the
other, for reasons of style, or of efficiency. I combed two usage
dictionaries to find instances of these contested pairs of
expressions, and then perused corpora to consider their actual usage
against their recommended usage, so that I might uncover the general
relevance and validity of the advice of these popular usage manuals
(e.g, Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style"). Through these focuses
I arrived at larger conclusions about the nature of grammar
proscription, and of prescriptive grammar as a school of thought.
"What Does THAT Mean?
Experimental Evidence Against the Principle of No Synonymy"
Rafe Kinsey
Faculty mentor: Tom Wasow (with Florian Jaeger)
A prima facie counterexample to Bolinger's dictum that "a difference
in syntactic form entails a difference in meaning" is the optionality
of 'that' in English complement and relative clauses. Various authors
argue for subtle meaning differences between the forms with and
without 'that', but they provide only anecdotal supporting evidence.
We tested these purported meaning differences systematically, by
comparing ratings of sentences with and without 'that', and found no
difference. This questions Bolinger's dictum, suggesting that such a
purely semantic approach cannot explain the presence of both syntactic
forms.
"The Spoken Syntax Lab"
Gabe Recchia
Faculty mentors: Joan Bresnan, Tom Wasow, and Arto Anttila
This summer, I contributed to the nascent Spoken Syntax Lab by
augmenting a richly annotated dataset of dative observations from the
Switchboard corpus and employing this resource in a pilot project that
investigated persistence in the dative alternation. I also developed
general tools that simplify the process of creating similar datasets
for research into arbitrary grammatical constructions.
"The Opposite of Masculine"
Bea Sanford
Faculty mentor: Arnold Zwicky
I will be briefly outlining some of the current research on gay
masculinity and presenting the class syllabus I developed for the
seminar "The Opposite of Masculine," to be taught in the spring
quarter.
____________
BIOMEDICAL COMPUTATION AT STANFORD (BCATS)
on Saturday, 21 October 2006, all day
Hewlett Teaching Center
http://bcats.stanford.edu/html/bcats-home.html
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
Schedule
8:00am On-Site Registration, Badge Pickup, and Breakfast Sequoia Plaza
8:45am Opening Comments TCSEQ Lecture Hall 200
9:00am Scientific Talks Session I (3 talks + 4 spotlights) TCSEQ
Lecture Hall 200
10:00am Poster Session I (even numbered posters) Packard EE Building
Lobby & Plaza
11:00am Keynote Address: Andrew McCulloch, PhD TCSEQ Lecture Hall 200
http://cardiome.ucsd.edu/
11:45pm Lunch Sequoia Plaza
12:30pm Keynote Address: David Lipman, MD TCSEQ Lecture Hall 200
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lipman
1:15pm Scientific Talks Session II (3 talks + 4 spotlights) TCSEQ
Lecture Hall 200
2:15pm Poster Session II (odd numbered posters) Packard EE Building
Lobby & Plaza
3:15pm Scientific Talks Session III (4 talks) TCSEQ Lecture Hall 200
4:15pm Industry Keynote: Cleve Moler, PhD TCSEQ Lecture Hall 200
http://www.mathworks.com/company/aboutus/founders/clevemoler.html
5:00pm - 6:30pm Awards and Closing Clark Center
Some talks of possible interest to CSLI folk might be
2:00-2:15pm Rashmi Raj
"Multi-relational data mining of time-oriented biomedical databases"
3:30-3:45pm Evan Smith
"Efficient auditory coding"
Some posters of possible interest
20 Byron C. Ellis "Higher performance algorithms for learning signaling
pathways using Bayesian networks"
39 Rong Xu "Combining text classification and hidden Markov modeling
techniques for structuring randomized clinical trial abstracts"
54 Yael Garten "Pharmspresso - A tool for semantic search in full-text
articles to support curators and researchers"
Registration Fees
Registration for the conference includes conference materials,
breakfast, lunch, snacks, and refreshments during the Industry
Reception. Note that registration is free for all Stanford students,
faculty and staff (you must have a valid SUNet ID to register).
Early Registration Registration
Stanford Affiliated free $10
Non-Stanford Students $10 $20
Not Stanford Affiliated $75 $150
Early registration has been extended to Wednesday, October 18th.
On-site registration will be on a space available basis.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 25 October 2006, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"A Structured Orchestration Language"
Jayadev "Jay" Misra
University of Texas at Austin
We propose a programming language, called Orc for orchestration, that
supports a structured way of orchestrating distributed services. This
model assumes that basic services, like sequential computation and
data manipulation, are implemented by primitive sites. Orc provides
constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of sites to
achieve a goal: acquire data from one or more remote services,
calculate with these data, and invoke yet other remote services with
the results, handle time-outs and failures, and respond to
notifications. We discuss the programming language and demonstrate
its effectiveness in a variety of applications.
Orc has a strong theoretical foundation that supports modular
composition and analysis of concurrent programs. The composition
constructs in Orc are based on Kleene algebra, the algebra of regular
expressions. Orc includes no explicit constructs for time-out,
parallel-or, interrupt, or arbitration, yet these are easily
programmed in Orc. We demonstrate that Orc provides a general model
for business process orchestration and workflow
Readings: The following papers may be of interest:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wcook/papers/OrcJSSM05/OrcJSSM.pdf
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wcook/Drafts/2006/OrcSemanticProps4-06.pdf
____________
IMMANUEL KANT LECTURE SERIES
On Wednesday, 25 October 2006, 5:30pm
On Thursday, 26 October 2006, 5:30pm
Bldg. 260:113
On Friday, 27 October 2006, 3:15pm (Seminar)
Bldg. 90:92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Origins of Objectivity"
Tyler Burge
UCLA
A central preoccupation of twentieth-century philosophy was to
determine constitutive conditions under which objective representation
of the physical environment is possible.
Nearly all philosophers who engaged in this project maintained some
version of what I call Individual Representationalism: the claim that
objective representation requires that an individual must also
represent basic constitutive conditions for such representation.
One type of Individual Representationalism, defended in the first half
of the century by such philosophers as Russell and the early Carnap,
took objective representation of the physical environment to be
constructed out of more basic representations involving sense data and
logical notions. Another type of Individual Representationalism,
defended in the second half of the century by such philosophers as
Strawson and Quine, tended to be more holist than constructivist; and
it maintained that objective representation of the physical
environment requires that an individual be capable of also
representing general conditions or principles governing such
representation (such as localizability in a general spatial network,
for Strawson, or general criteria for identity and difference, for
Quine).
By contrast, I believe that all forms of Individual
Representationalism are mistaken, and I maintain that objective
representation of the physical environment begins with perception
which, in the relevant sense, is common to a wide variety of animals
quite incapable of meeting Individual Representationalist
requirements. After first attempting to convey some of the immense
breadth of the hold that Individual Representationalism exerted on
twentieth-century philosophy, I will criticize some paradigmatic
versions of the syndrome (especially in its more holistic form), and I
will elaborate, if only briefly, on the conception of perception that
motivates my view. - Tyler Burge
About the Speaker: Burge earned his PhD from Princeton in 1971. His
main fields of interest are: Philosophy of Language and Logic,
Philosophy of Psychology and Mind, Epistemology, and History of
Philosophy. Burge has authored numerous publications including:
-- "Perceptual Entitlement" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
2003
-- "Memory and Persons" Philosophical Review 2003
-- "Logic and Analyticity" Grazer Philosophische Studien 2003
-- "Truth, Thought, Reason, Essays on Gottlob Frege" Oxford University
Press 2005
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 26 October 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Model-based Programming of Robust Agile Systems"
Brian C. Williams
MIT
http://people.csail.mit.edu/williams/Web%20site/williams.shtml
Autonomous, self-repairing explorers, such as deep space probes, have
successfully performed complex missions by employing model-based
executives that continuously monitor mission goals, diagnose failures
and plan repairs. These executives employ models encoded as
probabilistic constraint automata, in order to observe and control the
hidden states of the system. These executives have also been
incorporated within model-based programming languages that facilitate
the creation of a wide range of fault adaptive systems, including
automobiles and naval ships. Future explorers, such as autonomous air
vehicles and walking robots, will require far greater agility, in
order to robustly achieve their missions. For example, to avoid
falling, a walking robot must quickly detect a loss of balance, and
replan its control trajectory appropriately. This talk presents recent
advances in model-based programming and execution for agile systems.
First, to reason about a systems dynamics, these executives employ
probabilistic constraint automata that are extended to hybrid
discrete/continuous constraints. Second, to robustly achieve missions,
these executives employ planning methods that reason about continuous,
as well as discrete, state changes, and employ compilation and
model-predictive control methods in order to adapt on the fly.
Finally, these executives employ estimation methods for hybrid PHA
that detect subtle failures through active control. Model-based
execution is demonstrated both on a team of cooperative air vehicles
and a biped walking machine.
About the Speaker: Brian Williams leads the Model-based Embedded and
Robotic Systems Group at MIT, which is affiliated with the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prof. Williams
research concentrates on model-based autonomy the creation of
long-lived autonomous systems that are able to explore, command,
diagnose and repair themselves using fast, commonsense
reasoning. Current research focuses on model-based programming and
cooperative robotics: Model-based programming is embedding commonsense
within robotic explorers and everyday devices by incorporating
model-based deductive capabilities within traditional embedded
programming languages. Cooperative robotics extends model-based
autonomy to robotic networks of cooperating space, air and land
vehicles, on Earth or other planets. Applications include deep space
explorers, distributed satellites, unmanned air vehicles, Mars rovers,
intelligent offices and automobiles. Research interests include
reasoning at reactive time scales, cooperative and space robotics,
intelligent embedded systems, model-based programming, model-based
reactive planning, execution and diagnosis, data-driven exploratory
modeling, and hybrid system control.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 26 October 2006, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Issues in Music Copyright from the Perspective of Musical Data Representation"
Eleanor Selfridge-Field
Music Department
The study of systems of music representation verifies that there is
no complete, universal, or entirely logical system of
representation for music. Questions of best practice have been
constantly debated since the dawn of computer applications in music
in the 1960s. Quite unexpectedly, these debates have brought to
light many issues that are of prospective value in clarifying
current issues in music copyright.
Potential issues arising from the use of musical data of various
qualities and levels of completeness will be discussed in relation
to agency, ontology, cognition, and collective authorship. Recent
cases of a related nature will also be described.
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LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 27 October 2006, 12 noon
Bldg. 90:92Q
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"The Future of Proof"
Dana S. Scott
University Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University
Goedel showed us many things. Among others he showed us the
*possibility* of proof (via the Completeness Theorem for First-Order
Logic); and then quite soon thereafter he showed us the
*impossibility* of proof (via the Incompleteness Theorem for
(suitable) Higher- Order Logics). These results are well known and
famous, but their impact on the practice of mathematics has perhaps
not been very noticeable. To be sure, related recursive unsolvability
results have a clear explanatory value in keeping people from
searching for algorithms where none can exist. And modern
developments in complexity theory show that many easily stated
problems have -- in general -- no quick solutions. But again, many
commentators agree that there has not been a big shift in main-stream
mathematics as a consequence of Goedel's fundamental work. However,
the insight into formalization sparked by Goedel's original work is
now having major payoffs in mechanized mathematics and proof systems.
The lecture will survey some developments, but it will also bring up
the questions of what we should now regard as a proof and of how new
proof methods develop.
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CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 27 October 2006, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Sensing Technologies for Future Computing Form Factors"
Andy Wilson
Microsoft Research
The vision of ubiquitous computing suggests that interactivity will be
embedded throughout our physical environment in a wide variety of
modes of use and form factors. I will present a series of projects
which exploit sensing technologies such as computer vision to enable a
wide variety of fluid, natural interactions situated on walls and
tabletop surfaces. For example, PlayAnywhere is a compact tabletop
projection-vision system which explores a number of new interactions
on everyday surfaces, while TouchLight combines a transparent
projection screen material with computer vision techniques. These new
form factors have the potential of changing the way we relate to
computing, but they also pose a challenge in terms of interaction
design because they are so different from today's desktop computing.
About the Speaker: Andy Wilson is a member of the Adaptive Systems and
Interaction group at Microsoft Research. His current areas of
interest include applying sensing techniques to enable new styles of
human-computer interaction, but he is also interested in machine
learning, gesture-based interfaces, inertial sensing and display
technologies. Before joining Microsoft, Andy obtained his BA at
Cornell University, and MS and PhD at the MIT Media Laboratory.
Publications and a few videos of his work are located at
http://research.microsoft.com/~awilson/
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LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 27 October 2006, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Weak Bias Language Models and Universal Grammar"
Shalom Lappin
King's College, London
Stuart Shieber
Harvard University
It is widely believed that the scientific enterprise of theoretical
linguistics and the engineering of language applications are separate
endeavors with little for their techniques and results to contribute
to each other at the moment. In this talk, we explore the possibility
that machine learning approaches to natural-language processing being
developed in engineering-oriented computational linguistics may be
able to provide specific scientific insights into the nature of human
language. We argue that, in principle, machine learning results could
inform basic debates about language in one area at least, language
acquisition, and that, in practice, existing results may offer initial
tentative support for this prospect.
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UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 27 October 2006, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Learning and Adaptation in Visual Cortex"
Stephen Engel
Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
Early work in cognitive neuroscience focused on localizing cognitive
and perceptual functions to specific regions in the human brain. More
recent work looks within such regions, to study how neurons represent
information and contribute to behavior. This talk will illustrate the
latter approach using two lines of research. The first examines
whether learning can modify neural representations at early levels of
the visual system. The second investigates whether color and form are
represented jointly in the visual system.
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