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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 15 November 2006, vol. 22:11
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
15 November 2006 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 11
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 15 NOVEMBER 2006 TO 24 NOVEMBER 2006
WEDNESDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2006
all day American Anthropological Association Conference [15-Nov-06]
San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
http://www.aaanet.org/
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [15-Nov-06]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"FYP Talk: How fast is fast mapping, exactly? An eye-tracking
study of frequency effects in novel word learning by 2-year-olds"
Quin Yow
Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12 noon UC Berkeley CITRIS Research Exchange [15-Nov-06]
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
"Texture Analysis of Remote-Sensed Imagery"
Shawn Newsam
Engineering, UC Merced
http://www.citris-uc.org/
Abstract below
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [15-Nov-06]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"How culture gets under the skin: cultural models, parenting
practices, and child self regulation"
Carol Worthman
Emory University
http://www.anthropology.emory.edu/CHB/members/worthman.html
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [15-Nov-06]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"26 Years at PDI"
Richard Chuang
Pacific Data Images ("PDI")/Dreamworks
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
5:15pm CCRMA Colloquium [15-Nov-06]
CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll
"Musical Interface Technology: New Instruments for Enhancing
Expressivity in Computer Music Performance"
Dan Overholt
UC Santa Barbara
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~dano/
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
7:00pm Symbolic Systems Talk [15-Nov-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Powering the Edges"
Allison Fine
author of "Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age"
http://www.momentumthebook.com/
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
7:00pm SF Bay ACM Talk [15-Nov-06]
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
"Extreme Programming"
Rob Myers
NetObjectives
http://sfbayacm.org/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 2006
all day American Anthropological Association Conference [16-Nov-06]
San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
http://www.aaanet.org/
1;00pm Ling205: Advanced Phonetics [16-Nov-06]
Bldg. 60:62A
"Research on basic and translational aspects of voice research"
Yuling Yan
Otolaryngology Head And Neck Surgery, Stanford
http://med.stanford.edu/ohns/faculty/yan.html
3:00pm Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education [16-Nov-06]
175 Barrows Hall (Berkeley)
"Swimming Upstream: Building Institutions in California in the
21st Century"
Carol Tomlinson-Keasey
Founding Chancellor, 1999-2006, UC Merced
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/events/
4:00pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [16-Nov-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Discussion of 'Modeling Productivity with the Gradual
Learning Algorithm: The Problem of Accidentally Exceptionless
Generalizations' by Adam Albright and Bruce Hayes"
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm PARC Forum [16-Nov-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME):
A Next Frontier in Education, Innovation and Economic Growth"
Jim Spohrer
Director, Almaden Services Research
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [16-Nov-06]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"The Bayesian and the Dogmatist"
Brian Weatherson
Cornell University
http://brian.weatherson.org/tbatd.pdf
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [16-Nov-06]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Beyond Copyright: Supporting Creative Work in the Internet Age"
Dean Baker
Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C.
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar [16-Nov-06]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
"How does the amygdala facilitate memory formation in
emotionally arousing conditions?"
Denis Pare
Rutgers University
http://parelab.rutgers.edu/
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
7:00pm Silicon Valley Shannon Lecture [16-Nov-06]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Next-Generation Web Search:
From Information Retrieval to Information Supply"
Andrei Broder
IEEE Fellow & VP Emerging Search, Yahoo! Research
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2006
all day American Anthropological Association Conference [17-Nov-06]
San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
http://www.aaanet.org/
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [17-Nov-06]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Emerging Directions in Brain-Machine Interfaces"
Jose Carmena
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, UC Berkeley
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [17-Nov-06]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Innovation on User Research Methods during the development of
Windows Vista"
Gayna Williams
Microsoft
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [17-Nov-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and
Communication Practices"
Judson King and Diane Harley
Center for the Study of Higher Education
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [17-Nov-06]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"On Specifying Content"
Agustin Rayo
MIT
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [17-Nov-06]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Concepts, an approach to the theoretical and observed limits
of minds"
Idriss Aberkane
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Talk [17-Nov-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Semantic Supercomputing"
Daniel Gruhl
IBM
http://www.research.ibm.com/UIMA
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/
Information below
SATURDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2006
all day American Anthropological Association Conference [18-Nov-06]
San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
http://www.aaanet.org/
all day Berkeley TRilateral phonology weekEND (P-TREND) [18-Nov-06]
370 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phon/PTrend2006.html
SUNDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2006
all day American Anthropological Association Conference [19-Nov-06]
San Jose Conference Center, San Jose, CA
http://www.aaanet.org/
all day Berkeley TRilateral syntax and semantics weekEND (S-TREND) [19-Nov-06]
370 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~syntax-circle/s-trend/
MONDAY, 20 NOVEMBER 2006
4:15pm NLaSP Colloquium [20-Nov-06]
Bldg. 200:205 (History Corner) (but check)
"Belief Updating in Spoken Language Interfaces"
Dan Bohus
Carnegie Mellon University
http://nlp.stanford.edu/events.shtml
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 21 NOVEMBER 2006
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience [21-Nov-06]
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"Towards Multi-Layer Processing of Natural Images"
Urs Koester
University of Helsinki
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
Abstract below
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [21-Nov-06]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Open-Audit Elections"
Ben Adida
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
Abstract below
6:45pm SULUG Meeting [21-Nov-06]
Gates 104
"Starting a technology based company"
http://sulug.stanford.edu/
WEDNESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2006
THURSDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2006 - University Holiday
FRIDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2006 - University Holiday
____________
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.
____________
CALL FOR PAPERS
Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
ICAIL 2007 Call for Papers
4-8 June 2007
Stanford University
http://iaail.org/
Sponsored by:
* The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL)
* Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology, Stanford Law School
* Thomson Legal & Regulatory
The field of AI and Law is concerned with:
* the study of legal reasoning and argumentation, using computational
methods
* the formal representation of norms, normative
actions, normative systems and norm-governed societies and
multi-agent systems
* the investigation of techniques from advanced information
technology, using law as the illustrative domain
* applications of advanced information technology to support tasks in
the legal domain.
ICAIL 2007 will be held under the auspices of the International
Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), an
organization devoted to promoting research and development in the
field of AI and Law with members throughout the world. ICAIL provides
a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research
results and practical applications and stimulates interdisciplinary
and international collaboration. Previous ICAIL conferences have been
held biennially since 1987, with proceedings published by ACM.
Authors are invited to submit papers on topics including but not
restricted to:
* Legal knowledge-based systems
* Advanced judicial support systems
* Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
* Case-based legal reasoning
* Computational models of legal reasoning and argumentation
* Representation of legal and related commonsense knowledge
* Representation of other norm-governed systems
(e.g. business rules, organization rules, security regulations, and
rules of order)
* Applications of machine learning to law
* Automated extraction of information from legal texts
* Intelligent legal tutoring systems
* Advanced legal document drafting systems
* Evidential reasoning with uncertainty
* Legal applications of knowledge-based electronic commerce
* Advanced internet legal research aids
* Knowledge discovery in legal databases
* Legal XML for integration with information retrieval, document
drafting and knowledge-based systems
* Advanced tools for legal knowledge management
* Online dispute resolution
* Modelling norms for multi-agent interaction or electronic institutions
* Modelling contracts and other speech acts for electronic agents
* Semantic Web applications in the legal field
* Legal ontologies
Also invited are survey papers affording perspective on particular
areas of recent work and including extensive bibliographies. All
papers, however, should make clear their relation to prior work.
Papers on theoretical issues in AI and in jurisprudence or legal
philosophy are invited, provided that the relevance to AI and Law is
clearly demonstrated.
Papers on applications are welcome; they should describe clearly the
motivations behind the project, the techniques employed, and the
current state of implementation together with an evaluation of any
implementation. Related demonstrations are also welcome.
MENTORING PROGRAM FOR ICAIL 2007
The International Association of AI and Law will offer a mentoring
program for papers being submitted to the ICAIL conference. The
program is intended primarily for younger authors who have not
published at ICAIL previously. For more details see http://iaail.org/
DONALD H. BERMAN AWARD FOR BEST STUDENT PAPER
To encourage participation by students, IAAIL has created the Donald
H. Berman Award for the best paper submitted to ICAIL by a student or
students. Notification will be made through the ICAIL web site, and
the award will be presented at the conference banquet. For a paper to
be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly
designated as such when the paper is submitted, and any nonstudent
coauthors should provide a statement that the paper is primarily
student work.
ICAIL WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS
ICAIL 2007 will include tutorials and workshops on the first and last
days. Proposals for tutorials and workshops are invited, and should be
sent to the Program Chair. Proposals should contain enough information
to permit evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and
community interest. Each workshop should have one or more designated
organizers and a program or organizing committee. Proposals should be
about 2 to 4 pages and include at least the following information:
* The workshop or tutorial topic and goals, their significance, and
their appropriateness for ICAIL 2007
* The intended audience, including the areas from which participants
may come, the likely number of participants (with some of their
names, if known), and plans for publicizing the workshop
* Organization of the workshop or tutorial, including the intended
format (such as invited talks, presentations, panel discussions) and
the expected length (full day or half day)
* Organizers' details: a description of the main organizer's
background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including
web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable).
IMPORTANT DATES
* Mentoring program notice (optional): November 6, 2006
* Mentoring Program deadline: November 13, 2006
* Workshop and tutorial proposals: December 17, 2006
* Submission (optional) of abstracts: December 17, 2006
* Submission of papers: January 14, 2007
* Notification of acceptance: March 12, 2007
* Camera-ready copies: April 18, 2007
* Conference: June 4-8, 2007
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Papers should not exceed 5000 words. Short papers of up to 2500 words
are also invited. If an approved style file is used, the length limits
are 10 pages and 5 pages respectively. Information about style files
will be available at the web site, http://iaail.org/
Papers should be submitted electronically by means of the conference
support system that will be available on http://iaail.org , by January
14, in PDF or PostScript format. To aid the reviewing process, authors
are requested to submit abstracts of their papers by December 17,
2006, to the conference system. Abstracts should include at least the
title of the paper, up to four keywords, and a contact address for the
author.
CONFERENCE OFFICIALS
Program Chair
Radboud Winkels
Leibniz Center for Law
University of Amsterdam
PO Box 1030
1000 BA Amsterdam, Netherlands
Email: winkels@uva.nl.
Tel: +31-20-525-3485
Conference Chair
Anne Gardner
286 Selby Lane, Atherton, California 94027, USA
Email: gardner@cs.stanford.edu.
Tel: +1-650-368-1297
Secretary/Treasurer
Carole Hafner
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Email: hafner@ccs.neu.edu
Tel: +1-617-373-5116
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Radboud Winkels (chair), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
Danielle Bourcier, CNRS CERSA, University of Paris 2, France
Karl L. Branting, BAE Systems, Columbia, Maryland, USA
Joost Breuker, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Enrique Ceceres Nieto, Instituto de Investigaciones Juridicas, Mexico
City, Mexico
Pompeu Casanovas, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Jack G. Conrad, Thomson Legal & Regulatory, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Anne Gardner, Atherton, California, USA
Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany
Guido Governatori, University of Queensland, Australia
Benjamin Grosof, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University, USA
Peter Jackson, Thomson Legal & Regulatory, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Andrew J.I. Jones, King's College London, UK
Marc Lauritsen, Capstone Practice Systems, USA
Arno Lodder, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ronald Loui, Washington University, St. Louis, USA
Thorne McCarty, Rutgers University, USA
Marie-Francine Moens, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy
Henry Prakken, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts, USA
Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Italy
Uri Schild, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Marek J. Sergot, Imperial College, UK
Bart Verheij, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Australia
____________
UC BERKELEY CITRIS RESEARCH EXCHANGE
on Wednesday, 15 November 2006, 12 noon
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
http://www.citris-uc.org/
"Texture Analysis of Remote-Sensed Imagery"
Shawn Newsam
Engineering, UC Merced
http://www.ucmerced.edu/faculty/facultybio.asp?facultyid=52
Remote-sensed imagery acquired from satellites or aircraft continues
to offer passive, low-cost, and broad-field monitoring of Earth's
surface and has enabled a new suite of consumer-oriented applications
such as Google Earth. Advances in sensing technology are producing
images with increasing spatial resolution, which means that individual
pixels are more likely to represent the spectral reflectance of
regions composed of single rather than mixes of materials. The problem
of determining the composition of the regions imaged by single pixels
through spectral un-mixing is giving way to the problem of
characterizing the spatial arrangement of the pixels. Such
characterizations can help distinguish land-cover classes consisting
of similar materials but in different spatial configurations.
In this context, I will present my work on analyzing spatial
relationships in remote-sensed imagery. I will discuss the application
of a homogeneous image texture descriptor to performing content-based
similarity retrieval in large collections of high-resolution satellite
imagery. This serves as motivation for my subsequent work on using
image texture for a number of classification tasks in remote-sensed
imagery.
About the Speaker: Professor Newsam is an assistant professor of
Computer Science and Engineering and founding faculty at the new
University of California at Merced. He is born-and-bred UC, having
received his B.S. from UC Berkeley, his M.S. from UC Davis, and his
Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara. He also completed a postdoc in the
Sapphire Data Mining group at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.
____________
CCRMA COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 15 November 2006, 5:15pm
CCRMA Classroom, The Knoll
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/
"Musical Interface Technology:
New Instruments for Enhancing Expressivity in Computer Music Performance"
Dan Overholt
UC Santa Barbara
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~dano/
Computer music today offers compelling new methods for sound
synthesis, but most human-computer interfaces lack the expressive
power and nuance needed to simultaneously control many synthesis
parameters affectively in real-time. The goal of improving musical
interaction design for performance interfaces has been the main focus
of my work at CREATE -- the Center for Research in Electronic Art
Technology at UCSB, and this presentation will discuss my own research
as well as some of the results from the physical interaction design
course I teach at MAT -- the Media Arts and Technology program.
Several new instruments will be shown, such as the Sonic Scanner, the
Graphonic Interface, the Overtone Keyboard, and the Overtone Violin. I
will explain the theory behind the development of these new
instruments, demonstrate the new performance possibilities they offer,
and discuss future directions for the research. If you are interested
in the design of gestural input devices with high-bandwidth
sensors/haptics, and expressive mappings to musical parameters of
custom signal processing and audio/visual synthesis techniques, please
come!
About the Speaker: Dan Overholt is a PhD candidate and Lecturer in the
Media Arts and Technology program and the Center for Research in
Electronic Art Technology at UC Santa Barbara. He studied electronics
engineering and music (violin performance) at CSU, Chico, and has a
Masters from the Media Laboratory at MIT, where his thesis focused on
the development of a novel interface called the MATRIX. He has
published and presented work at many academic conferences, such as
ICMC, NIME, AES, CHI, and SIGGRAPH, and was awarded a Fulbright
scholarship to STEIM in 2004, and a National Science Foundation IGERT
fellowship at UCSB. He composes and performs internationally with new
human-computer interfaces and musical signal processing algorithms,
and gives workshops in interaction design for new performance
interfaces and interactive installations at a variety of institutions
with the CREATE USB Interface. He has also worked as a consultant in
the industry for companies such as Eventide, E-mu, and Echo Audio.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS TALK
on Wednesday, 15 November 2006, 7:00pm-9:00pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Powering the Edges"
Allison Fine
author of "Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age"
http://www.momentumthebook.com/
Momentum outlines a new, open way of working, what Allison calls in
her book "working side-to-side" that allows citizens and volunteers to
participate in meaningful ways like never before. "To succeed,"
Allison writes, "we don't have to get bigger, just smarter, more
agile, and more open. We need not become techies to do this, just more
connected."
For the first part of the evening Allison will talk about some of the
key themes in her book: Move power to the edges. Power is shifting
away from institutions towards individuals in this new Connected
Age. Fine shows how, civic leaders put the power for public sanitation
into the hands of beachgoers by removing every trash can from a filthy
New England beach, which led to pristine conditions that last; Replace
top-down with a more democratic, side-to-side style. Fine tells how,
when a broadcast giant planned to air an attack documentary, a swarm
of bloggers sparked 150,000 calls to advertisers. Its stock fell; the
screed never aired.
For the second part of the evening the audience will engage in small
group conversation around the themes raised by Allison's talk:
1. What are the roles of institutions and organizations in the Connected Age
and for social change?
2. How can we build trust across networks?
3. How can we sustain social change efforts?
Jointly presented by PlaNetwork, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, and The Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford
____________
SF BAY ACM TALK
on Wednesday, 15 November 2006, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
http://sfbayacm.org/
"Extreme Programming"
Rob Myers
NetObjectives
XP is a very different way of programming. Rob Myers will how it
works, why it works, when you should use it, risks, and trade-offs. He
will discuss many of the rules and practices such as
PLANNING
* User stories
* Release planning
* Small releases
* Divide project into iterations
DESIGNING
* Simplicity
* Create spike solutions to reduce risk
* Refactor whenever and wherever possible
CODING
* Customer is always available
* Agreed standard coding
* Code unit test first
* Pair programming
TESTING
* All code must have unit tests
* Acceptance tests are run often and score is published
The XP development process is also quite different from the
traditional development procedure.
Rob will walk us through XP process to show where and when everything
fits.
Suggested reading:
http://industrialxp.org/
http://www.jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/
http://www.extremeprogramming.org/
About the Speaker Rob Myers has 20 years of professional experience in
software development, including projects for industry leaders in
medical, aerospace, and financial services. In the late 90's, Rob
became an eXtreme Programming coach and traveled throughout the
country assisting teams with Agile software development practices and
object-oriented design techniques. Rob brings to the classroom his
passion for Lean software development, team development, and sane work
environments. He currently teaches Test-Driven Development and
Refactoring, Effective .NET, and the new, cutting edge Test-Driven
ASP.NET course.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 16 November 2006, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME):
A Next Frontier in Education, Innovation and Economic Growth"
Jim Spohrer
Director, Almaden Services Research
A brief overview of IBM's efforts to work with collaborators from
academics, industry, government, and foundations to establish academic
programs that focus on Service Science, Management, and Engineering
(SSME) is provided. SSME, a frontier field, is defined as the
application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to
tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another
("services.")
There are many reasons for focusing on services and interdisciplinary
approaches to it. First, the economies of most developed countries are
dominated by services (70% of the labor, GDP, etc.). China, in their
2006-2011 Five-Year Plan, has made the "transition to a modern service
economy" a national priority, and India is well along on this path as
well. Second, even traditional manufacturing companies such as GE (70%
services revenue) and IBM (50% services revenue) need to add high
values services to grow their businesses. Third, information services
and business services are two of the fastest growing segments of the
service economy. The growth of B2B and B2C web services, service
oriented architectures, and self-service systems suggest a strong
relationship between SSME and the more established discipline of
computer science. IBM worked to establish the first computer science
department at Columbia University in the 1940's, and now to meet the
skill needs of a growing service innovation business is working to
establish SSME in a number of universities (http://ssme.berkeley.edu).
Finally, improving productivity, quality, compliance, and innovation
in service often requires combining technical, social, and business
innovations, which is formally very difficult, but of great practical
value.
The origins of new service innovations are as ancient as division of
labor and as modern as internet-enabled off shoring. The
multi-disciplinary nature of service creates many challenging research
problems. For example, from an operations research and industrial
engineering perspective, how can people be modeled in people-intensive
business service systems? From a computer science and IT systems
perspective, how can service delivery systems be designed to evolve
rapidly and in tune with shifting strategy, regulatory, and demand
drivers? From an economics and business strategy perspective, how can
service systems grow and achieve economies of scale or increasing
gains lock-in? From a complex systems perspective, how is the
robustness and fragility of service systems, which include people and
technology, similar to and different from naturally occurring
physical, chemical, and biological complex systems? The exciting thing
about services science is that all existing disciplines have something
to contribute. What remains daunting is the lack of a linguistic and
empirical foundation for integrating across the required
multi-disciplinary perspectives.
The goal is to encourage research aimed at solving unique problems of
services businesses and society, and to encourage development of
courses and programs aimed at producing graduates who are ready to
work in the service sector, particularly in areas of
knowledge-intensive business services.
About the Speaker: Dr. Jim Spohrer is the director of Almaden Services
Research, with the mission of creating and deploying service
innovations that matter and scale well both internally at IBM and
externally as offerings to IBM clients ("double win " service
innovations). Innovating service is a multi-disciplinary endeavor,
integrating technology, business model, social-organizational and
demand innovation. Prior to joining IBM, Spohrer was at Apple
Computer, attaining the role of Distinguished Scientist, engineer, and
technologist for his pioneering work on intelligent multimedia
learning systems, next generation authoring tools, on-line learning
communities, and augmented reality learning systems. He has published
in the areas of speech recognition, artificial intelligence, empirical
studies of programmers, next generation learning systems and service
science. Spohrer graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale
University (specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
Science) in 1989 and a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1978.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 16 November 2006, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Beyond Copyright: Supporting Creative Work in the Internet Age"
Dean Baker
Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C.
Copyright is a relic of the Medieval guild system. It is becoming
increasingly difficult to enforce with digital technology and the
Internet. However, it remains the main mechanism for supporting the
production of creative and artistic work. This talk will point out the
ways in which copyright is becoming increasingly inefficient and
describe the concept of 'Artistic Freedom Vouchers (AFV)', as an
alternative mechanism for financing creative and artistic work.
The AFV is modeled after the charitable tax deduction, with the
difference that the AFV would be a credit for a small amount (e.g.
$75-$100) which could only be used to support creative and artistic
work. Writers, artists, musicians and other creative workers, along
with intermediaries, would register to be eligible to receive this
funding in the same way that charitable and non-profit organizations
register to be eligible for tax deductible contributions. Recipients
of AFV funds would not be eligible to receive copyright protection for
their work, all of which would remain in the public domain.
____________
FUNDAMENTAL THEMES IN NEUROSCIENCE SEMINAR
on Thursday, 16 November 2006, 4:15pm
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
"How does the amygdala facilitate memory formation
in emotionally arousing conditions?"
Denis Pare
Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University
Much data indicates that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) facilitates
memory formation in emotionally arousing conditions. However, how BLA
activity facilitates synaptic plasticity in its targets remains
unclear. This lecture will present recent experiments that address
this question in two different networks where synaptic plasticity was
shown to be facilitated by the amygdala in emotionally arousing
conditions.
The facilitating effects of BLA activity extend to various types of
memories, including habit formation and motor learning that are
thought to involve activity-dependent plasticity at corticostriatal
synapses. However, the underlying mechanisms are unknown. We found
that the NMDA-to-AMPA ratio is almost twice higher at BLA than
cortical synapses onto principal striatal neurons and that activation
of BLA inputs greatly facilitates LTP induction at corticostriatal
synapses. Although this facilitation was NMDA-dependent, it occurred
even when BLA and cortical stimuli were up to 0.5 s apart during LTP
induction. Overall, these results suggest that BLA activity opens long
time-windows during which the induction of corticostriatal plasticity
is facilitated.
To examine how BLA activity facilitates plasticity in the rhinal
cortices, we simultaneously recorded BLA and rhinal neurons in
behaving animals. We focused on the rhinal cortices because they
constitute the interface between the hippocampus, a critical mediator
of memory consolidation, and the neocortex, thought to be the storage
site of declarative memories. We found that BLA activity facilitates
impulse transmission from the perirhinal to the entorhinal cortex,
particularly after the delivery of unexpected rewards. Moreover, in a
trace conditioning paradigm where animals learned that a conditioned
stimulus (CS) predicts reward delivery 3 sec later, this effect was
obvious in the initial stages of learning but it vanished as the
animals learned the predictive value of the CS. Since such trace
learning depends on the BLA and hippocampus, this suggests that the
facilitation of rhinal interactions by the BLA is tightly linked to
memory formation in emotionally arousing conditions.
Recent Papers:
[1]Pelletier J-G, *Likhtik K, *Filali M, Pare D (2005) Lasting
increases in basolateral amygdala activity after emotional arousal:
implications for facilitated consolidation of emotional memories.
Learning and Memory, 12: 96-102.
[2] Pare D (2003) Role of the basolateral amygdala in memory
consolidation. Prog Neurobiol, 70: 409-420.
____________
SILICON VALLEY SHANNON LECTURE
on Thursday, 16 November 2006, 7:30pm
Bldg. 380:380C
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
"The next generation Web Search:
From Information Retrieval to Information Supply"
Andrei Broder
VP Emerging Search, Yahoo! Research
In the past decade, Web search engines have evolved from a first
generation based on classic Information Retrieval (IR) algorithms
scaled to web size and thus supporting only informational queries, to
a second generation supporting navigational queries using web specific
information (primarily link analysis), to a third generation enabling
transactional and other " semantic " queries based on a variety of
technologies aimed to directly satisfy the unexpressed " user intent."
What is coming next? In this talk, we argue for the trend towards
context driven Information Supply (IS), that is, the goal of Web IR
will widen to include the supply of relevant information from multiple
sources without requiring the user to make an explicit query. The
information supply concept greatly precedes information retrieval.
What is new in the web framework, is the ability to supply relevant
information specific to a given activity and a given user, while the
activity is being performed. A prime example is the matching of ads to
content being read, however the information supply paradigm is
starting to appear in other contexts such as social networks,
e-commerce, browsers, e-mail, and others.
About the Speaker. Andrei Broder is a Yahoo! Research Fellow and Vice
President of Emerging Search Technology. Previously he was an IBM
Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and
Text Analysis in IBM Research. From 1999 until early 2002 he was Vice
President for Research and Chief Scientist at the AltaVista
Company. He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion and did his
Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University under Don
Knuth. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at WWW6 (for his
work on duplicate elimination of web pages) and at WWW9 (for his work
on mapping the web). He has published more than seventy papers and was
awarded twenty patents. He is an IEEE fellow and served as chair of
the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 17 November 2006, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Emerging Directions in Brain-Machine Interfaces"
Jose Carmena
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, UC Berkeley
The advent of multi-electrode recordings and brain-machine interfaces
(BMIs) has provided a powerful tool for the development of
neuroprosthetic systems. BMIs are powerful tools that use
brain-derived signals to control artificial devices such as computer
cursors and robots. By recording the electrical activity of hundreds
of neurons from multiple cortical areas in subjects performing motor
tasks we can study the spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity and
quantify the neurophysiological changes occurring in cortical
networks, both in manual and brain control modes of operation. In
previous work at Duke University we demonstrated that monkeys can
learn to reach and grasp virtual objects by controlling a robot arm
through a BMI using visual feedback, even in the absence of overt arm
movements. Learning to operate the BMI is paralleled by functional
reorganization in multiple cortical areas, suggesting that the dynamic
properties of the BMI are incorporated into motor and sensory cortical
representations. While significant breakthroughs have been achieved in
recent years and the field is rapidly taking off, there are challenges
that need to be met before BMI technology fully reaches the clinical
realm. In this talk I will outline the emerging directions the field
is taking towards the development of neuroprosthetic devices for the
impaired.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 17 November 2006, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Innovation on User Research Methods
during the development of Windows Vista"
Gayna Williams
Microsoft
To create compelling user experiences it is essential to incorporate
user feedback into product development - this has been known for many
years. There are standard methods utilized by user research
practitioners; however, to deliver a user perspective in large scale
software development has required an expansion of the toolset. Because
of short time frames and finite resources it is essential to integrate
research approaches to provide a holistic user perspective and deliver
a high return on research investments. And for the outcome of the
research to be utilized it is critical to have created a product team
environment that is empathetic to users, and deliver results in a way
that blends with development practices. This talk presents innovation
on research methods used during the creation of Windows Vista to
insure that users were considered at each stage of the development
process. The methods highlighted will include: personas, benchmarking,
desirability, instrumentation, and ethnographies.
About the Speaker: Gayna Williams has been involved in user focused
research at Microsoft for 12 years. Before moving to her new position
as Director for Product Customer Partner Experience, she was the User
Research Director for Windows Vista. In her user research role she
managed a team of researchers that comprised usability engineers,
ethnographers and data miners who pioneered original approaches to
understanding users and impacting products. These include persona use,
wide-scale real-time consumer data collection, and exploratory
ethnography. During her tenure at Microsoft Gayna has worked on a
broad range of products including Windows, Internet Explorer, MSN,
NetMeeting, and consumer products. Her new role at Microsoft allows
her to leverage her user research experience and also have an even
broader view of what it takes to satisfy Microsoft customers and
partners. Her undergraduate training was in ergonomics at Loughborough
University of Technology, England; her undergraduate project on the
use of video to support teams was presented at the 1997 European
Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference. She earned a MS at the
University of Minnesota in human factors, conducting research on
advance traffic information systems for use by general and aging
driver populations. She has presented research papers and methods
overviews at several conferences and universities.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 17 November 2006, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
"The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication
and Communication Practices"
Judson King and Diane Harley
Center for the Study of Higher Education
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication/
We have examined academic values as they influence publishing choices
and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. Direct
interviews were carried out with relevant stakeholders -- faculty,
advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors -- in five fields:
anthropology, biostatistics, chemical engineering, English-language
literature and the intersection of law and economics. The results of
the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty
values and publishing practices, and indeed in underlying the entire
system of research evaluation. There is much more experimentation with
regard to means of communication while research is in progress, for
which single means of publication and communication are not fixed so
deeply in values and tradition, than there is for final, archival
publication. We conclude that approaches that try to move faculty and
deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival,
final publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term.
From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the
needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress
communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to
influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas. We are
pursuing that line of approach in further work.
Note their recent Occasional Paper "The Influence of Academic Values
on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices" at
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROP.Harley.AcademicValues.13.06.pdf
About the Speakers: Jud King started as a faculty member in Berkeley's
chemical engineering department forty-two years ago. In addition to
chairing that department, he has been Dean of the College of Chemistry
and Provost for Professional Schools and Colleges at Berkeley, and
Provost and Senior Vice President -- Academic Affairs for the UC
system. Since leaving that latter post in April 2004 he has been
Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education.
Diane Harley is a Research Associate in the Center.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 17 November 2006, 3:15pm
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"On Specifying Content"
Agustin Rayo
MIT
http://web.mit.edu/arayo/www/
http://web.mit.edu/arayo/www/fc.pdf
Participants in a debate can sometimes disagree about the expressive
capabilities of a fragment of their language. As long as they are able
to find mutually acceptable paraphrases for any claims involving the
disputed vocabulary, there is no reason for concern. But in difficult
cases mutually acceptable paraphrases are hard to find, and impasse
threatens.
In this paper I am concerned with the difficult cases. I suggest a
strategy for specifying truth-conditions for one's interlocutor's
claims in contexts where paraphrase is unavailable. In some cases --
such as the debate whether second-order quantification is
ontologically innocent -- I show that the specification can be carried
out using language that is not under dispute. But in others -- such as
the debate between mathematical fictionalists and their rivals --
there are principled reasons for doubting that the specification can
be carried out on neutral ground. This leads to a complex dialectical
situation in which one is able to specify truth-conditions for one's
interlocutor's claims to one's own satisfaction, but only by using the
disputed vocabulary.
About the Speaker: Agustin Rayo works mainly in the philosophy of
logic, mathematics and language. Within the philosophy of logic, he's
focused on philosophical problems and applications pertaining to
higher-order resources and unrestricted quantification. Within the
philosophy of math, he's done work on logicism, and mathematical
realism. Within the philosophy of language, he's focused mostly on
vagueness. He is associate professor of philosophy at MIT, where he
received his PhD in 2001.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT TALK
on Friday, 17 November 2006, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/
"Semantic Supercomputing"
Daniel Gruhl
IBM
http://www.research.ibm.com/UIMA
Come hear IBM representative Daniel Gruhl present exciting new
technologies for analyzing the world wide web ("semantic
supercomputing"), and participate in an open conversation about how
linguists can collaborate with IBM to pursue new research directions.
This is a special opportunity to make your wildest corpus analysis
dreams come true.
***ALSO*** If you are AT ALL interested in meeting with the IBM folks
in a smaller group, over lunch sponsored by the department at 1pm,
please email Elizabeth Coppock and let her know
(coppock@stanford.edu), so we know how many to plan for.
____________
NLASP COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 20 November 2006, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Bldg. 200:205 (History Corner)
http://nlp.stanford.edu/events.shtml
"Belief Updating in Spoken Language Interfaces"
Dan Bohus
Carnegie Mellon University
Over the last decade, advances in natural language processing
technologies have paved the way for the emergence of complex spoken
language interfaces. A persistent and important problem in the
development of these systems is their lack of robustness when
confronted with understanding-errors. The problem stems mostly from
the unreliability of current speech recognition technology, and is
present across all domains and interaction types. My research
addresses this problem by: (1) endowing spoken language interfaces
with better error awareness, (2) constructing and evaluating a rich
repertoire of error recovery strategies, and (3) developing
data-driven approaches for making error handling decisions.
In this talk, I focus on the first of these problems: error awareness.
Traditionally, spoken dialog systems rely on recognition confidence
scores and simple heuristics to guard against potential
misunderstandings. While confidence scores can provide an initial
reliability assessment, ideally a system should leverage information
from subsequent user turns in the conversation and continuously update
and improve the accuracy of its beliefs.
I describe a scalable machine learning solution for this belief
updating problem. The proposed approach relies on a compressed,
abstracted concept-level representation of beliefs and casts the
belief updating problem as a multinomial regression task. Experimental
results indicate that the constructed belief updating models
significantly outperform typical heuristic rules used in current
systems. Furthermore, a user study with a mixed-initiative spoken
dialog system shows that the proposed approach leads to significant
improvements in both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the
interaction across a wide range of recognition error rates.
____________
BERKELEY REDWOOD CENTER FOR THEORETICAL NEUROSCIENCE SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 21 November 2006, 12 noon
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
"Towards Multi-Layer Processing of Natural Images"
Urs Koester
University of Helsinki
Since the discovery of Simple and Complex cells in primary visual
cortex, which have easily visualized receptive fields, efforts have
been made to build models that show the emergence of similar features
using unsupervised learning techniques applied to natural image data.
Here we discuss recent work on extending single layer models to give
rise to complex cell receptive fields. We proceed to describe a novel
method called "Score Matching" for the estimation of multi-layer
statistical models and the application to modeling of primary visual
cortex.
____________
STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 21 November 2006, 4:30pm
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
"Open-Audit Elections"
Ben Adida
While the debate over voting-machine paper trails rages on in the
press, an end-to-end verifiable solution exists: open-audit elections.
In an open-audit election, Alice, the voter, receives direct assurance
that her vote was correctly captured *and tallied*. Any political
party or activist organization can corroborate this verification.
Surprisingly, ballot secrecy is preserved.
In this talk, we review the cryptographic techniques that make
open-audit elections possible. We also present some new developments
in both vote casting and tallying that should improve practicality and
simplify the explanation of open-audit voting techniques.
(novel work joint with Ronald L. Rivest and Douglas Wikstrom.
____________
END MATERIAL
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