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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 6 December 2006, vol. 22:14
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
6 December 2006 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 14
______________________________________________________________________
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 6 DECEMBER 2006 TO 15 DECEMBER 2006
WEDNESDAY, 6 DECEMBER 2006
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [6-Dec-06]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Quantity representation in infants: Comparing 6-month olds to rats"
Jen Wagner
Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12 noon UC Berkeley CITRIS Research Exchange [6-Dec-06]
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
"Tele-immersion for Everybody (TEEVE). Collaborative cyber-
infrastructure that facilitates synchronized dance
performance in geographically distributed locations"
Ruzena Bajcsy
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
http://www.citris-uc.org/
12:15pm Semantic Web Seminar [6-Dec-06]
Gates 2A open space
"Inconsistency is the Norm"
Carl Hewitt
MIT EECS (emeritus)
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [6-Dec-06]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Flash Player ActionScript Virtual Machine (Tamarin)"
Rick Reitmaier
Adobe Systems
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
6:00pm Berkeley History and Philosophy of Logic Mathematics, and Science
234 Moses, (Berkeley) [6-Dec-06]
"Finding the Causes in an Evolving Population:
Lessons From an Early Drifter"
Roberta Millstein
Philosophy, UC Davis
http://hplms.berkeley.edu/
THURSDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2006
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [7-Dec-06]
Cordura Hall 100
"Conceptic : a physic of imagination"
Idriss Aberkane
Ecole Normale Superieure
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [7-Dec-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Fast Ignition: An Alternative Route to Inertial Confinement Fusion"
Scott C. Wilks
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [7-Dec-06]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"eScience -- A Transformed Scientific Method"
Jim Gray
eScience Group, Microsoft Research
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar [7-Dec-06]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
"Cell Recognition and Wiring the Fly Brain"
Larry Zipursky
Biological Chemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
David Geffen
School of Medicine, UCLA
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
5:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [7-Dec-06]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Graded Constraints in English Word Forms"
Jay McClelland
(a joint meeting with SPLaT)
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~jlm/papers/GCEWFs_2_18_for_comments.pdf
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
7:30pm Captology Film Festival [7-Dec-06]
Stanford (free but pre-registration required)
"Student Films"
Instructor, BJ Fogg
CSLI, Stanford
http://tinyurl.com/yap7fe
Information below
7:30pm Silicon Valley Shannon Lecture [7-Dec-06]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Trustworthy Information Technology A Myth or an Enabler"
Roger R. Schell
Aesec Corporation
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2006
10:00am Stanford CS Seminar [8-Dec-06]
Packard 202
"Executable Biology"
Jasmin Fischer
EPFL
http://mtc.epfl.ch/~fisher/
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/abstract.php?eventId=2101
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [8-Dec-06]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Koala: End user programming on the web"
Tessa Lau, Allen Cypher
IBM Almaden Research Center
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
1:00pm Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education [8-Dec-06]
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall (Berkeley)
"Governing the Academy: Who's the Boss?"
William Bagley, Steve Brint, Bruce Cain, Jack Citrin, Lawrence
Coleman, John Douglass, Tim Gage, Donald Gerth, Judson King,
Velma Montoya, Karl Pister, Lawrence Pitts, William Zumeta
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/events/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [8-Dec-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Progress Report: Education in the virtual world"
Alexis Dailey
"Making Digital Preservation Policy: the National Perspective"
Paul Courant
University of Michigan
Abby Smith
Historian
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
Abstracts below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [8-Dec-06]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Does hearing words help us see?"
Gary Lupyan
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm SRI CSL Seminar Series [8-Dec-06]
EK255, SRI International
"Expressiveness issues in Bio-Inspired Calculi"
Nadia Busi
University of Bologna, Italy
http://www.csl.sri.com/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2006
TUESDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2006
7:30pm BayCHI [12-Dec-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Developing a Great User Interface, a Netflix Case Study"
Sean Kane
Netflix
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2006
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [13-Dec-06]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Recent Advances in Data Mining in the Aerospace Domain"
Ashok N. Srivastava
Intelligent Data Understanding Group Lead, NASA Ames Research Center
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2006
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [14-Dec-06]
EJ228, SRI International
"Unsupervised Learning with Bregman Divergences:
Clustering, Co-clustering, and Beyond"
Arindam Banerjee
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [14-Dec-06]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The Archimedes Codex:
the Many Layers of the World's Greatest Palimpsest"
Reviel Netz
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2006
10:00am Berkeley Information Access Seminar [15-Dec-06]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"A Scalable Front-stage Service Application for a Non-profit
Tutoring Agency"
Lois Wei
"Defining Neighborhoods with Distinct Boundaries"
Bernt Wahl
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
Abstracts below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, A, B-, 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.
____________
NOTE
Best wishes to all students facing finals in the near future.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
I would normally put this in the standard part of the calendar except
the announcement I received is a bit vague about the time. If you are
interested in attending, I suggest contacting Heriberto Avelino
<avelino ... berkeley.edu>.
The 205b Advanced Phonetics class will end the quarter with a special
event. We will have a videoconference with the the Speech
Communication Group (SCG), part of the Research Laboratory of
Electronics at MIT. http://web.mit.edu/speech/
The SCG lab is a multidisciplinary laboratory engaged in teaching and
research on the production and perception of speech by humans and
machines. Their approach is to combine the principles and tools of
electrical engineering and computer science with the insights of
linguistic theory and cognitive science to construct integrated models
of the physics, physiology and cognition of speech processing.
The SCG is one of the most influential labs in field. The lab is
associated to the names of Gunnar Fant, Ken Stevens and Joe Perkell,
Janet Slifka and Helen Hanson, among others. The lab is now directed by
Ken Stevens, who is one of the major figures in Acoustic Phonetics.
When: Thursday December 7
Time: Afternoon, TBA
Where: Wallenberg Hall, room to be announced.
____________
SEMANTIC WEB SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 6 December 2006, 12:15pm
Gates 2A open space
"Inconsistency is the Norm"
Carl Hewitt
MIT EECS (emeritus)
Inconsistency is the norm for large-scale human-interaction
information systems. The experience (e.g. Microsoft, the US
government, IBM, etc.) is that inconsistencies (e.g. among
implementations, documentation, and use cases) are pervasive and
despite enormous expense have not been eliminated.
Standard mathematical logic has the problem that from inconsistent
information, any conclusion whatsoever can be drawn, e.g., "The moon is made
of green cheese." However, our society is increasingly dependent on these
large-scale software systems and we need to be able to reason about them.
In fact professionals in our society reason about these inconsistent systems
all the time. So evidently they are not bound by classical mathematical
logic.
This paper presents Direct Logic for formalizing reasoning more safely
about large-scale human-interaction software systems with their
pervasive inconsistencies. Direct Logic is a restriction of classical
logic that limits the use of indirect proof and the introduction of
irrelevances. Apart from these mild restrictions it allows as much
natural reasoning as possible. Direct Logic provides for increased
safety in reasoning about large software systems because (unlike
classical logic) irrelevances such as "The moon is made of green
cheese." cannot be inferred directly from an inconsistency.
Consequently inconsistent theories in Direct Logic are not made
trivial by being able to deduce every sentence from a single
inconsistency. Such possibly inconsistent theories are called
paraconsistent in the literature.
Goedel first formalized and proved that it is not possible to decide
all mathematical questions by inference in his 1st incompleteness
theorem. However, the incompleteness theorem (as generalized by
Rosser) relies on the assumption of consistency! This paper proves a
generalization of the Goedel/Rosser incompleteness theorem: a
nontrivial paraconsistent theory is incomplete.
What are the implications of pervasive inconsistency for Artificial
Intelligence, Multi-Agent and Multi-Agency Systems, and Software
Engineering? In particular what are the implications for Tony Hoare's
Verifying Compiler Grand Challenge proposal?
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 6 December 2006, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Flash Player ActionScript Virtual Machine (Tamarin)"
Rick Reitmaier
Adobe Systems
The Adobe Flash Player is almost universally available on desktop
computers, yet many people are not even aware of its existence or
of its capabilities.
It is a client application that is accessible within most web
browsers and features support for vector and raster graphics,
audio and video streaming and a scripting language; ActionScript.
The scripting language is executed by a virtual machine (VM), the
internals of which, will be the focus of this talk.
I will also talk about Adobe's recent release of the source code
of this VM to the open source community along with Mozilla's plan
for embedding this module into the Firefox web browser.
About the speaker: Rick Reitmaier is a Senior Scientist at Adobe
Systems Incorporated and was heavily involved in the initial design
and implementation of the ActionScript Virtual Machine currently
embedded in Adobe's Flash Player.
He has held numerous positions in a variety of companies such as
Macromedia, Cognigine, Brio, Sqribe, Exocom and Nortel.
He obtained his BMATH in Applied Mathematics from the University
of Waterloo in 1996.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 7 December 2006, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Conceptic : a physic of imagination"
Idriss Aberkane
Ecole Normale Superieure
Interests of developing a precise concept theory concern at least
philosophy, mathematics, logic, and cognitive science. It is therefore
not surprising that concept theories have been considered, most
notably by Kant, Hilbert, Godel, and Varela. For the cognitive
scientist the main issues may be some approaches to the following
questions:
- what does human imagination have access to?
. Can a human being only understand the way she thinks?
. How narrow is our imagination, and why?
- how are ideas connected to each other?
. Is a Genius idea nothing more than a very unlikely idea?
. Are there some metastable and some "too stable" ideas?
. To what extent can culture avoid the biological constraints
of our creativity?
. To what extent have culture and biology shaped our history of
sciences?
My talk will mainly introduce and develop the notion of the conceptic
universe in order to suggest some modest approaches to these questions.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 7 December 2006, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"eScience -- A Transformed Scientific Method"
Jim Gray
eScience Group, Microsoft Research
I have been working for the last decade to get all scientific data and
literature online and cross-indexed. Progress has been astonishing,
but the real changes will happen in the next decade. First, the
funding agencies are forcing peer-reviewed science literature into the
public domain and peer-reviewed science literature is being curated in
new ways -- cross-indexed to the data that produced it. Scientific
data has traditionally been hoarded by investigators (with notable
exceptions). The forced electronic publication of scientific
literature and data poses some deep technical questions: just exactly
how does anyone read and understand it? How can we preserve so that it
will be readable in a century? Incidental to this, each intellectual
discipline X is building an X-informatics and computational-X
branch. It is those branches in collaboration with Computer Science
that are faced with solving these issues. I have been pursuing these
questions in Geography (with http://TerraService.Net), Astronomy (with
the World-Wide telescope -- e.g. http://SkyServer.Sdss.org/ and
http://www.ivoa.net/ ) and more recently in bio informatics (with
portable PubMedCentral http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ppmcsupport/
).
____________
CAPTOLOGY FILM FESTIVAL
on Thursday, 7 December 2006, 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Stanford (free but pre-registration required)
http://tinyurl.com/yap7fe
"Student Films"
Instructor, BJ Fogg
CSLI, Stanford
My captology students have created over 150 short videos that show how
Web 2.0 services change people's behaviors. Some videos are funny,
some are serious, most are illuminating. For examples, see
http://www.captology.tv . You may not want to wade through all 150
videos. So we've come up with a better plan . . .
We'll share the best videos at the Captology Film Festival on December
7th. You are invited. The event is free, thanks to sponsorship by
American Express.
To help us predict how much popcorn to buy (and for other reasons),
you need to sign up in advance here:
http://captologyfilmfestival.eventbrite.com
At the Captology Film Festival, we'll also unveil something completely
new: the "Web 2.0 Behavior Chain." This framework captures -- step by
step -- the best practices today in Web 2.0 persuasion. Without
exception, every successful Web 2.0 service is following what we've
outlined in the Behavior Chain.
As you might expect, this film festival is my little experiment in
sharing academic work in new, compelling ways. I hope you can join
us. I'll be interested in your feedback.
For this Film Festival, you don't need to dress up or walk down a red
carpet. Just come, have fun, and learn more about how web services
today change what people think and do.
--BJ Fogg
____________
SILICON VALLEY SHANNON LECTURE
on Thursday, 7 December 2006, 7:30pm
Bldg. 380:380C
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
"Trustworthy Information Technology A Myth or an Enabler"
Roger R. Schell
Aesec Corporation
Viable human societies in general and businesses in particular have
always required trust. Our dramatically growing dependence on
information systems inescapably allocate more and more of this trust
from humans to technology. Unfortunately, both accumulated experience
and a growing body of expert opinion increasingly call into serious
question whether it is responsible to place substantial trust in this
technology at all, especially in the face of professional attacks. The
good news is that the state of the science of information security is
astonishingly rich with solutions and tools to incrementally and
selectively solve the hard problems. The bad news is that the state of
the actual application of science, and the general knowledge and
understanding of the existing science, is lamentably poor. The
challenge for scholars and practitioners is to aggressively work to
remedy this before our professional efforts to expand the reach of
technology becomes a recipe for disaster.
About the Speaker. Roger R. Schell is co-founder and President of
Aesec Corporation, a new company focused on verifiably secure
platforms for secure, reliable e-business. He is internationally
recognized as a major contributor to the advancement of computer
security concepts and the overall definition of network security. At
Novell, he led their Class C2 network evaluation and managed
development of product security. He was VP for Engineering at Gemini
Computers where he developed their highly secure (Class A1) commercial
product. He served as the founding Deputy Director of the National
Computer Security Center, which he grew into a respected organization
of more than 150 security professionals. For his work there he is
widely regarded as the father of the Trusted Computer System
Evaluation Criteria (the Orange Book), which has been the most widely
used international security standard for computers and networks.
Dr. Schell originated several key modern security design and
evaluation techniques and holds patents in cryptography and
authentication. He participated in sponsored tiger team penetration
tests of several commercial and security enhanced operating systems
and networks for various government activities including the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the U. S. Air Force, the Office of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Agency. He has more than
60 publications, and was Associate Professor of Computer Science at
the Naval Postgraduate School. The NIST and NSA recognized him with
the 1991 National Computer System Security Award, the nation's highest
honor in the computer security field. Dr. Schell is a retired USAF
Colonel. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the MIT, an
M.S.E.E. from Washington State, and a B.S.E.E. from Montana State.
____________
STANFORD TALK
on Friday, 8 December 2006, 10:00am
Packard 202
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/abstract.php?eventId=2101
"Executable Biology"
Jasmin Fischer
EPFL
http://mtc.epfl.ch/~fisher/
The new emerging field of Systems Biology aims to gain a system-level
understanding of biology. In order to achieve such an understanding we
need to establish the methodologies and techniques that will enable us
to understand biological phenomena in their full complexity. One such
attempt is to use existing formal methods designed for the
construction of computerized systems to model biological systems. We
have recently shown that describing mechanistic models in a dynamic
and executable language has various advantages. Dynamic models can
represent phenomena of importance to biology that static models cannot
represent, such as time and concurrency. In addition, formal
verification methods can be used to ensure the consistency of
computational models with the biological data on which they are based.
In my talk, I will discuss the strength of constructing and analyzing
abstract executable models in biology. This pioneering approach that I
call 'Executable Biology' will be illustrated through two different
models representing signaling crosstalk during animal development. The
construction and analysis of these models has provided new biological
insights that were validated experimentally. If time permits, I will
also discuss some of the new challenges that executable biology poses
for computer science and biology.
About the Speaker: Jasmin Fisher holds a postdoctoral position in the
School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in Lausanne,
Switzerland. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Neuroimmunology from the the
Weizmann Institute of Science and was previously a postdoctoral fellow
in the department of Computer Science also at the Weizmann Institute.
Her research is in systems biology, specifically the modeling of
signaling networks regulating cell fate decisions in development and
cancer, application of formal methods to model and analyze biological
systems, and design of formal modeling languages for biological
systems.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 8 December 2006, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Koala: End user programming on the web"
Tessa Lau, Allen Cypher
IBM Almaden Research Center
http://tlau.org/
http://www.acypher.com/
We have developed a system called Koala that enables users to record
their actions in a web browser, play them back to automate those
actions, and publish them on a wiki to share with a community. Within
a corporation or other community, Koala acts as a "wikipedia of how-to
knowledge". For instance, when one person figures out how to fill in
all of the corporate purchasing codes and customer numbers to purchase
a flat panel display, that person's colleagues can play back the
recorded actions to purchase a monitor themselves.
Koala records actions as commands in plain English, using the textual
labels that appear on a web page. When it interprets written commands
in order to perform them, it loosely matches the words in the command
with the words on the web page. As a result, Koala's language is
largely understandable by both humans and Koala: People can freely
write and edit commands without worrying about a rigid syntax, and
instructions written for a person are often executable by Koala.
We will demonstrate the program, show how it combines programming by
demonstration with social networks, describe various domains where we
hope to apply Koala, and discuss our plans for development and
research.
About the Speakers: Tessa Lau is a Research Staff Member at IBM's
Almaden Research Center. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science
at the University of Washington in 2001. Her research goal is to give
people tools to improve their productivity, enhance their creativity,
and make them more effective. She is interested in information
management, particularly personal information, and how people interact
with and customize their working environment. She has done significant
work in the area of programming by demonstration, giving end users the
ability to automate repetitive tasks simply by showing the system how
to perform the task a few times. More generally, she is interested in
finding patterns in human behavior and human-centric information and
building tools that exploit these patterns to enable people to do more
with less work.
Allen Cypher is a Research Staff Member at IBM's Almaden Research
Center. His main research interests are programming by demonstration
and end-user programming -- giving all computer users capabilities
that have traditionally belonged to programmers. Allen is a
co-inventor of Stagecast Creator -- a program that enables children to
create their own games and simulations and publish them on the Web. He
is the editor of Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. He
created the Eager program, which was one of the first intelligent
agents. Eager constantly monitored a user's actions on the computer,
and when it detected a repetitive activity, it would write a program
to perform that activity automatically. He received a B.A. in
mathematics from Princeton University in 1975, a Ph.D. in computer
science from Yale University in 1980, and spent several years as a
post-doc in cognitive science at the University of California, San
Diego.
____________
BERKELEY CENTER FOR STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
on Friday, 8 December 2006, 1:00pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall (Berkeley)
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/events/
"Governing the Academy: Who's the Boss?"
A critical examination of the governance of the University of
California and the academy generally in the context of major issues
facing higher education, such as funding, access, recruitment and
retention, and political legitimacy.
Who governs the modern university and who should govern it? What
should be the relationships among the major stakeholders:
administration, faculty, students, alumni, taxpayers and their
representatives? What should be the relationship of the central
administration and individual campus at a multi-campus university like
UC and are the prevailing relationships still appropriate given the
changed structure of funding?
Confirmed participants include:
William Bagley, former member, Board of Regents, UC
Steven Brint, Professor, Sociology, UC Riverside
Bruce Cain, University of California, Washington Center
Jack Citrin, Institute of Governmental Studies, UC Berkeley
Lawrence Coleman, Vice Provost, Research, and former Academic Senate chair, UC
John Douglass, Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley
Tim Gage, former director, California Department of Finance
Donald Gerth, President Emeritus, CSU, Sacramento
Judson King, Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley
Velma Montoya, former member, Board of Regents, UC
Karl S. Pister, former chancellor, UC Santa Cruz
Lawrence H. Pitts, former chair, Academic Council, UC San Francisco
William Zumeta, Professor, Public Affairs/Educational Leadership and
Policy Studies, University of Washington
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 8 December 2006, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
"Progress Report: Education in the virtual world"
Alexis Dailey
The virtual world called Second Life is quickly becoming a platform
for a wide range of innovative online experience. Over the past
semester Alex Dailey has been working with the California Digital
Library and UC Office of the President to explore how this space is
being used in higher education. He will report on his survey of the
organizations and the kinds of learning spaces that are emerging
in-world.
"Making Digital Preservation Policy: the National Perspective"
Paul Courant
University of Michigan
Abby Smith
Historian and Consulting Analyst
Abby Smith and Paul Courant, consultants to the Library of Congress's
national digital preservation program, will describe the Library's
development of a national strategy to preserve at-risk digital
content. Areas of particular focus are:
* the identification of content with long-term value;
* the allocation of roles and responsibilities among organizations
with interest in long-term access to that content;
* the economics of archiving;
* and a range of public policy issues, such as intellectual property,
that the Library is engaging.
About the Speakers: Paul N. Courant is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor,
Professor of Public Policy, Professor of Economics, and Faculty
Associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of
Michigan. From 2002-2005 he served as Provost and Executive
Vice-President for Academic Affairs. More at
http://www.fordschool.umich.edu/faculty_staff/fac_dir.php
Abby Smith is a historian and consulting analyst interested in the
creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in a variety of
media; the impact of digital information technologies on cultural
heritage institutions; and the evolving role of information as a
public good. She has worked at the Council on Library and Information
Resources (Washington, DC) and at the Library of Congress. She
currently works with the Library of Congress's National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in
development of its national strategy to identify, collect, and
preserve digital content of long-term value. (See "Distributed
Preservation from a National Perspective: NDIIPP at Mid-Point," in
D-LIB http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june06/smith/06smith.html
____________
SRI CSL SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 8 December 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EK255, SRI International
http://www.csl.sri.com/
"Expressiveness issues in Bio-Inspired Calculi"
Nadia Busi
University of Bologna, Italy
Biological membranes play a fundamental role in the complex reactions
which take place in cells of living organisms. The modeling and the
analysis of biological systems, hence also of membranes and
compartments, has recently attracted the interest of the process
algebra research community. Brane Calculi - recently introduced by
L. Cardelli - are a family of process calculi based on a set of
biologically inspired primitives for modeling the interactions of
dynamically nested membranes. Two basic Brane Calculi have been
proposed: the Phago/Exo/Pino (PEP) calculus, inspired by the
biological operations of endocytosis and exocytosis, and the
Mate/Bud/Drip (MBD) calculus, inspired by membrane fusion and
fission. We present some results on the comparison of the
expressiveness of the PEP and the MBD calculi, as well as of their
deterministic fragments, w.r.t. their ability to perform computations.
We also compare two different semantics for Brane Calculi (namely, the
classical interleaving semantics and the maximal parallelism semantics
typical of Paun's Membrane Systems) and their impact on the
expressiveness.
____________
BAYCHI
on Tuesday, 12 December 2006, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
"Developing a Great User Interface, a Netflix Case Study"
Sean Kane
Netflix
Netflix has a long history of delivering one of the most simple and
elegant user experiences on the web. It has proven essential to
provide a highly personalized web experience to millions of Netflix
Members. Netflix invented the now ubiquitous 5-Star Rating widget
interaction that is used across the web today. The continued use of
Ajax and other rich web technologies has been core to the Netflix
experience ever since.
This presentation will detail many of the innovative Netflix website
features and how they came to be a part of the user experience.
Following a handful of features, this will take you through the
company culture, development process -- from concept to user-testing,
to website-testing and out to launch. Learn about which design
patterns have resonated well with users (and why) and which ones were
left on the cutting room floor.
About the Speaker: Sean Kane is the Director of User Interface
Engineering at Netflix, the world's leading online DVD rental
service. Sean leads a team of developers to create the Ajax-rich web
experience for Netflix. Sean's responsibility for the Netflix UI
framework has included developing several of the Ajax interactions and
features on the Netflix web site, in addition to guiding the UI
framework architecture. During Sean's time at Netflix, the website has
been rated by independent researchers as number one in the world for
customer satisfaction for two consecutive years.
Before joining Netflix in 2002, Sean was the Lead UI Engineer,
architecting the JSP framework for the Kleiner-Perkins startup
Bigvine.com; one of the first B2B marketplaces on the web. In 2001,
Sean was the Web Engineering Manager at AllBusiness.com, and back in
1998, a web developer at AltaVista doing DHTML feature development.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 13 December 2006, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
"Recent Advances in Data Mining in the Aerospace Domain"
Ashok N. Srivastava
Intelligent Data Understanding Group Lead, NASA Ames Research Center
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/tech/groups/index.php?gid=5&ta=1
The presentation will include a technical discussion of recent
algorithmic advances made to address key challenges in text mining and
data mining of heterogeneous data sources. Several new areas of
algorithmic developments will be discussed, including the use of
Mariana, a hybrid Support Vector Machine and Markov Chain Monte Carlo
optimization system for automatic text classification, the Inductive
Monitoring System and Orca for automatic detection of anomalies in
continuous data streams, and "sequenceMiner," a new algorithm based on
ideas from bioinformatics that discovers anomalies in discrete
sequences. The value of these advances will be shown through the use
of Aviation data as well as data from Space Shuttle systems.
About the Speaker: Ashok N. Srivastava, Ph.D. is the leader of the
Intelligent Data Understanding Group at NASA Ames Research Center. The
group performs research and development of advanced machine learning
and data mining algorithms in support of NASA missions. He is the lead
researcher for numerous programs at NASA, including those involved
with improving aviation safety, development of new technologies to
improve the safety of next generation propulsion systems, fundamental
studies in the earth sciences to understand climate change, and
studies in astrophysics regarding the large-scale structure of the
universe. Ashok was Deputy Technical Area Lead for the Discovery and
Systems Health department at NASA Ames Research Center until May
2006. In this role, he co-managed a research department of over 70
Ph.D. and M.S. level researchers in Computer Science, Artificial
Intelligence, and Systems Science. Ashok has given seminars in
numerous international conferences and recently gave a televised
presentation of his work. Ashok has a range of business experience
including serving as Senior Director at Blue Martini Software and
Senior Consultant at IBM. In these roles, he led engagements with
numerous Fortune Global 500 companies including Bank of America,
Chrysler Corporation, Saks 5th Avenue, Sprint, Chevron, and LG
Semiconductor. He has won numerous awards, including the NASA
Distinguished Achievement Award, NASA Group Achievement Awards, the
IBM Golden Circle Award, the Department of Education Merit Fellowship,
and several fellowships from the University of Colorado. Ashok holds a
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at
Boulder.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 14 December 2006, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Unsupervised Learning with Bregman Divergences:
Clustering, Co-clustering, and Beyond"
Arindam Banerjee
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~banerjee/
Unsupervised learning methods are becoming increasingly important due
to the explosive growth in data collection and the diversity of the
data being collected. Several important emerging applications,
especially in Web 2.0, involve multi-aspect and relational data. In
this talk, I will describe a family of unsupervised learning methods
based on Bregman divergences appropriate for such diverse and
potentially multi-aspect data. A fundamental relationship between
Bregman divergences and exponential family distributions allow the
development of probabilistic versions of these unsupervised models. We
demonstrate the efficacy and diverse applicability of such models on a
wide variety of domains, such as text clustering, topic modeling,
recommendation systems, and missing value prediction. Finally, I will
show how our systematic treatment has led to progress in one of the
most challenging open problems in information theory.
About the Speaker: Arindam Banerjee is an assistant professor in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research interests are in Machine
Learning, Data Mining, Information Theory, Convex Analysis,
Computational Games, and their applications to complex real world
learning problems including problems in Text and Web Mining, Social
Networks, and Bioinformatics.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 14 December 2006, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"The Archimedes Codex:
the Many Layers of the World's Greatest Palimpsest"
Reviel Netz
Stanford University
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 13th century Greek prayerbook in which,
just barely visible, one can see traces of what, it turns out, is the
oldest surviving evidence for the works of Archimedes. Sold in
auction, 8 years ago, for 2 million dollars, this unique manuscript
has been the subject of an intensive collaborative project, involving
both scientists and scholars from around the world. How did the works
of Archimedes get buried so deep? What did we find as we uncovered
them? The talk leads through three major breakthroughs, based on
UV-Light, Multispectral Imaging, and X-Ray Fluorescence - revealing
Archimedes' surprising insight into both finite and infinite methods
(which, ultimately, underlie the techniques used in deciphering him).
About the Speaker: Reviel Netz is Professor of Classics at
Stanford. He publishes with Cambridge the first full-fledged English
translation of the works of Archimedes (Vol. 1 of this 3-volume
publication was published in 2004), and, with Nigel Wilson, he
co-edits the Archimedes Palimpsest. His many publications touch on
various aspects of ancient mathematics as a cognitive and aesthetic
system (e.g. The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: a Study in
Cognitive History, Cambridge 1999, Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and
the Alexandrian Aesthetic, Cambridge in Press).
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 15 December 2006, 10:00am - 12 noon
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is296a-1/f06/schedule.html
(Final Progress Reports, note special time)
"Berkeley Academics Management System (BAMS)"
Lois Wei
The goal of BAMS is to complete the design and implementation of an
application for handling online appointment schedule matching, and
payment reminder processing. BAMS is specifically designed for
Berkeley Academics, a local tutoring agency that is in the process of
expanding to several locations. The application will also provide
business intelligence service such as business progress tracking, data
and trend analysis, and dynamic report generation. BAMS is an
extension of a 2006 Master's Final Project titled Berkeley Academics
Information Redesign.
Lois will report on the user studies conducted to determine
application features and requirements; the different web technologies
explored to possibly replace the current PHP based application; and
the progress made on the implementation of an automatic schedule
matching system that allows for human intervention.
"Who Is In My Neighborhood? Defining Neighborhoods with
Distinct Boundaries & Identifying Localized Context"
Bernt Wahl
Cities are generally broken down into sub-regions for data
analysis based on zip code rather than neighborhood characteristics.
Many data users might want to target neighborhoods based on
socioeconomic classes. The ability to precisely delineate neighborhood
boundary brings substantial commercial benefits. However, neighborhood
boundary data for cities are not commercially available. Using
multiple criteria, we developed a new dataset which identifies
neighborhood boundary for 11,000 neighborhoods for the 150 largest
cities in the U.S. on well-established GIS principles. This dataset
has many potential uses by search engine companies, real estate firms,
governmental agencies, researchers, and others.
____________
END MATERIAL
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