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CSLI Calendar, Friday, 5 January 2007, vol. 22:16
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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5 January 2006 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 16
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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/
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ACTIVITIES FROM 8 JANUARY 2007 TO 12 JANUARY 2007
MONDAY, 8 JANUARY 2007
11:00am CS Education Seminar
Gates 104
"Acceptance Barriers for CS Education Software"
Cay Horstmann
San Jose State University
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 9 JANUARY 2007 - first day of Stanford classes
7:30pm BayCHI
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"What I Learned From Self-Experimentation and How the Work Evolved"
Seth Roberts, UC Berkeley
"Getting a Grip on Ubiquitous Computing through Prototyping"
Scott Klemmer, Stanford
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 10 JANUARY 2007
7:30am Stanford Breakfast Briefings
Stanford Faculty Club
"Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape"
Henry Chesbrough
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
(fee $48/$36 for Stanford staff/students/alumni)
http://breakfastbriefings.stanford.edu/
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"The United Communication Transformation"
Anoop Gupta
Microsoft Corporation
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 11 JANUARY 2007
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Moving Research into the Marketplace"
Katharine Ku
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Comparative Probability, Comparative Confirmation, and the
Conjunction Fallacy"
Branden Fitelson
UC Berkeley
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series
M104, Alway
"Dopamine and the motivation to eat"
Richard Palmiter
Biochemistry, U. of Washington
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 12 JANUARY 2007
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Toward a Visual Prosthesis Based on Thalamic Microstimulation"
John Pezaris
Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: InfoSeminar
Gates B12
"Wavescope: A Data Management System for Signals"
Sam Madden
MIT
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract 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.
____________
NOTES
Welcome back.
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CS EDUCATION SEMINAR
on Monday, 8 January 2007, 11:00am-12 noon
Gates 104
"Acceptance Barriers for CS Education Software"
Cay Horstmann
San Jose State University
Many software packages and libraries have been developed for aiding
computer science education, but remarkably few of these efforts find
wide dissemination in the educational community. In this talk, I
analyze the barriers that can cause educational software to be
rejected by instructors or students. The talk should be of interest to
designers of CS education software who are looking for wider
acceptance of their worthwhile efforts, and to those who evaluate and
select CS education software and want to pick the winners.
About the Speaker: Cay Horstmann is professor of computer science at
San Jose State University. For four years, Cay was VP and CTO of an
Internet startup that went from three people in a tiny office to a
public company. He is the author of numerous college texts and
professional books, including the international best-seller Core Java
published by Sun Microsystems Press. He currently serves on the
College Board's development committee for the Advanced Placement
course in computer science.
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BAYCHI
on Tuesday, 9 January 2007, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
"What I Learned From Self-Experimentation and How the Work Evolved"
Seth Roberts
UC Berkeley
http://www.sethroberts.net/
Through self-experimentation, Seth Roberts discovered several
surprising cause-effect connections:
1. If I eat breakfast, I am more likely to wake up too early.
2. If I stand many hours, I sleep better.
3. If I see faces in the morning, my mood is better the next day (but
not the same day).
4. If I drink unflavored sugar water between meals, I lose weight.
There are many reasons to think these effects will hold for almost
everyone. This took more than 10 years. During those years, I slowly
learned a few things about scientific method. One lesson was to always
do the easiest thing that would help. Complex designs were too hard.
Another was that drudgery pays. For example, years of recording my
sleep made it easier to notice accidental improvements.
Throughout the work, I had two things on my side that made a big
difference: I collected the data as part of my everyday life; and I
cared a lot about what I studied--for example, my mood.
* Short Paper http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/405
* Long Paper http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/117/
About the Speaker: Seth Roberts, Ph.D., is an associate professor of
psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He serves on
the editorial board of the scientific journal Nutrition and has
published dozens of scientific articles on many topics, including
health, nutrition, and weight control. According to Wikipedia, "He is
perhaps best known for his self-experimental work which led to his
2006 book, The Shangri-La Diet."
"Getting a Grip on Ubiquitous Computing through Prototyping"
Scott Klemmer
Stanford
http://hci.stanford.edu/srk/
Prototyping is the pivotal activity that structures innovation,
collaboration, and creativity in design. In this talk, Scott Klemmer
will suggest a culture of prototyping and iterative design as a path
to achieving Weiser's goal of calm, ubiquitous computing. The
challenge is that prototyping a mobile or ubicomp system is much
harder than prototyping in traditional product design--where foam core
and duct tape go a long way--or GUI design, where a small library of
widgets expresses most applications. Thus, an important challenge for
computer science researchers is to build tools that better support a
culture of prototyping. Klemmer uses the term "design tools" broadly,
including all of the artifacts that designers marshal and physical
spaces they inhabit in their practice. He will review the research
that his group has been conducting in this arena, and share some
insights into directions that he thinks are particularly promising.
About the Speaker: Scott Klemmer is an assistant professor of Computer
Science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer
Interaction Group. He received a dual BA in Art-Semiotics and Computer
Science from Brown University in 1999, and an MS and PhD in Computer
Science from UC Berkeley in 2001 and 2004 respectively. His primary
research focus is interaction techniques and design tools that enabled
integrated interactions with physical and digital artifacts and
environments. He is a 2006 recipient of the Microsoft Research New
Faculty Fellowship.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 10 January 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"The Unified Communications Transformation"
Anoop Gupta
Microsoft Corporation
This is a transformational time for the communications industry. The
transformation is being driven by two factors: 1) the convergence of
all forms of communications to software-centric IP-based
communications, and 2) the ever increasing need in today"s global
business environment for people and teams to communicate and
collaborate on-demand, anywhere, on any device. As the number of ways
we can communicate with each other has increased (email, IM,
VoIP-telephony, SMS, audio-video-web conferencing), so has the chaos
of dealing with these silos of communications modalities. Microsoft"s
vision for Unified Communications is to break down these silos,
allowing people, teams and organizations to communicate simply and
effectively while integrating communications with their business
applications and processes. Key aspects of the vision are:
* Rich, presence-based, person-centric communications tools that
make it easier and more likely that we successfully connect with
people.
* Integration of communications modalities (e-mail, IM,
VoIP-telephony, SMS, audio/video/Web conferencing) into a seamless
and intuitive experience, to be able to connect with and
communicate with people in the best, most effective ways.
* Communications capabilities contextually available within everyday
applications (inside Office, portals, line-of-business
applications), thus becoming an integral part of business
processes.
* Information agent software and services that allow us to remain
connected to relevant people and in control despite overload of
incoming communications.
* Universal availability on PCs, phones and innovative mobile
devices, at work/home/on-the-road, federated enterprise-consumer
networks, and as on-premise and hosted service solutions.
* Lower TCO for communications solutions by leveraging existing IT
infrastructure and enhancing manageability and security for IT
professionals.
* An extensible UC platform that allows our partner ecosystem and
developers to further build/extend the core offerings to meet
customers' needs.
The talk will discuss the vision, show what we are able to deliver
today in solutions, and research challenges that will need to be
addressed for us to be able to fully deliver on this vision.
About the speaker: As corporate vice president of the Unified
Communications Group (UCG), Anoop Gupta leads Microsoft"s
client-server-service efforts to provide business communications
solutions (e-mail, IM, VoIP, unified messaging, audio/video/Web
conferencing) and platform components. His team is responsible for
Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Speech Server, Microsoft Office
Live Meeting, FrontBridge Services, and Microsoft Office
Communications products and business.
The charter for UCG is to deliver on the "Unified Communications"
vision, allowing people, teams and organizations to communicate simply
and effectively while integrating seamlessly with their business
applications and processes. Before leading the Unified Communications
Group, Gupta was technology assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft"s
chairman. In that role, Gupta helped define the company"s strategy for
real-time collaboration. He also contributed to several initiatives
related to Windows Vista, the next release of the Microsoft Windows
operating system, then code-named "Longhorn." Gupta became Bill Gates"
technology assistant after working for four years at Microsoft
Research, where he led the Collaboration and Multimedia Group. His
team was responsible for development and transfer of many key
technologies to product groups.
Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Gupta was a professor of Computer
Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University for 11
years. His research at Stanford spanned computer architecture,
operating systems, programming languages, simulation and performance
debugging tools, and parallel applications. He also co-led, with John
Hennessy, the development of hardware and software for the Stanford
DASH multiprocessor, a highly concurrent shared-memory parallel
computer that had a large impact on the industry. At Stanford, Gupta
also led the Virtual Classroom project, which explored compression and
networking issues related to transmission of audio-video over the
Internet and its applications in education. In 1995, Gupta used the
seeds of the technology developed in that project to form VXtreme
Inc., a provider of technologies for streaming audio-visual content
over the Web, which Microsoft acquired in 1997.
Gupta has published more than 100 papers in major conferences and
journals, including several that have won awards. He has contributed
to more than 40 patents. With David Culler and Jaswinder Pal Singh, he
co-authored the book "Parallel Computer Architecture: A
Hardware-Software Approach" in 1998. He received the National Science
Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990, and he
held the Robert N. Noyce Faculty Scholar Chair at Stanford for 1993
and 1994. Before joining Stanford in 1987, Gupta was on the research
faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in
computer science in 1986. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical
engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where he
graduated, receiving the Presidents Gold Medal in 1980.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 11 January 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Moving Research into the Marketplace"
Katharine Ku
Stanford University
Stanford is a source of new technologies for companies interested in
developing revolutionary products. But technology transfer of early
stage technologies is a challenge. Stanford's 36 year history of
licensing university research results to industry presents an
interesting picture of some big wins and lots of "long tail"
inventions.
About the Speaker: Katharine Ku has been Director of the Office of
Technology Licensing (OTL) at Stanford University for over 15
years. She was Vice President, Business Development at Protein Design
Labs, Inc. from 1990-1991. She has also worked at Monsanto, Sigma
Chemical, University of California, and taught chemistry and basic
engineering courses. Ku has been active in the Licensing Executive
Society (LES), having served as Vice President of the Western Region
and Trustee. She also served as President of the Association of
University Technology Managers (AUTM) from 1988-90. She received the
AUTM 2001 Bayh-Dole Award for her efforts in university licensing.
Ku has a B.S. Chemical Engineering (Cornell University), an M.S. in
Chem. Eng. (Washington University in St. Louis) and is a registered
patent agent.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 11 January 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Comparative Probability, Comparative Confirmation,
and the Conjunction Fallacy"
Branden Fitelson
UC Berkeley
http://fitelson.org/
The "conjunction fallacy" has been a key topic in discussions and
debates on the quality of human reasoning performance and its
limitations, yet the attempt of providing a satisfactory account of
the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we propose a new
analysis, suggesting that the fallacious probability judgments
experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of
confirmation (or evidential support) relations. The proposed analysis
is shown robust (i.e., not depending on various alternative ways of
measuring degree of confirmation), consistent with available data, and
prompting further empirical investigations. The present approach
emphasizes the relevance of the notion of confirmation in the
assessments of the relationships between the normative and descriptive
study of inductive reasoning. All requisite historical, philosophical,
and psychological background will be provided during the talk. [Note:
this is joint work with psychologists Vincenzo Crupi and Katya Tentori
at the University of Trento.]
About the speaker: I am an assistant professor of Philosophy at the
University of California at Berkeley. I am a member of the Group in
Logic and Methodology of Science, the Institute of Cognitive and Brain
Sciences, and the Cognitive Science core faculty. I am also a
co-organizer (with Paolo Mancosu and John MacFarlane) of the Townsend
Center Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic,
Mathematics, and Science. My primary research and teaching areas are
in (or near) philosophy of science, logic (including automated
reasoning, which is why my Erds number is 4), epistemology, and
metaphysics. I am currently writing a book on confirmation theory
called (creatively) Confirmation Theory.
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 12 January 2007, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Toward a Visual Prosthesis Based on Thalamic Microstimulation"
John Pezaris
Research Fellow in Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
Electronic retinal prostheses represent a potentially effective
approach for restoring some degree of sight in blind patients with
retinal degeneration. Functional restoration of sight would require
hundreds to thousands of electrodes effectively stimulating remaining
neurons in the retina.
The field of visual prostheses has concentrated on two targets for
development of an artificial device for restoration of sight, the
retina and the primary visual cortex. The lateral geniculate nucleus
of the thalamus (LGN), the relay station between these two areas, has
been ignored largely because of the difficulty of surgical approach.
The recent development of deep brain stimulation techniques for
addressing pathologies of the midbrain has opened surgical access to
the thalamus, and motivates a reconsideration of targets for a visual
prosthesis.
With this background, we have performed a series of experiments in an
animal model to demonstrate proof of concept for a visual prosthesis
based on thalamic microstimulation. To assess the characteristics of
electrically-evoked percepts, we performed a study of LGN electrical
microstimulation in awake behaving macaques, using a behavioral report
to assess percept size and location. We used a simple center-out
visually guided saccade paradigm where animals were required to
foveate a central point and then saccade to briefly presented target
stimuli.
While most targets (and all fixation points) were presented on a
computer screen, some targets were presented via electrical
stimulation applied to fine wire bundle electrodes placed in the LGN.
Trials where the target appeared on the screen were used as a baseline
and compared against trials where the target was presented through
electrical stimulation.
Data were collected from three hemispheres of two macaques. After
being trained on screen targets alone, each animal immediately
generalized to the electrical targets in the task, consistently
saccading to a point in space which corresponded to the location of
the previously mapped receptive field of cells at the electrode tip.
Saccade latencies and accuracies to electrical targets were consistent
with those to screen targets, suggestive of a perceptual rather than
motor effect. This was verified through a small number of
double-saccade experiments.
We conclude that the LGN presents a target for a visual prosthesis
with substantial potential for additional investigation. We will
briefly review additional experiments performed along this line of
inquiry, touch upon some of the anticipated scientific insights, and
outline a path for the development of a device.
Supported by: Kirsch Foundation, Dana/Mahoney Foundation, Campbell and
Hall Charity Fund, NIH R01 EY12815.
____________
CS545: InfoSeminar
on Friday, 12 January 2007, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B12
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"Wavescope: A Data Management System for Signals"
Sam Madden
MIT
http://db.lcs.mit.edu/madden/
Sensors capable of sensing phenomena at high data rates on the order
of tens to hundreds of thousands of samples per second are now widely
deployed in many industrial, civil engineering, scientific,
networking, and medical applications. In aggregate, these sensors
easily generate several million samples per second that must be
processed within milliseconds or seconds. The required processing
typically involves a combination of both event stream and signal
processing operations.
In this talk, I will describe the architecture and implementation of
WaveScope, a system that combines these two different classes of
processing functions. WaveScope aims to improve both programmer
productivity, by making it easy to develop user-defined processing
functions, and achieves high performance, processing several million
samples per second on a standard PC. It uses three key ideas to meet
its goals: a new basic data type, the signal segment, to efficiently
manipulate isochronous collections of sensor samples; a new language,
WaveScript, that makes it easy to write user-defined functions that
combine event stream processing and signal processing logic; and an
efficient memory manager and novel scheduler for high performance
execution. Our experiments over three real-world
applications---acoustic monitoring, pipeline leak detection, and
network monitoring---suggest that WaveScope is a viable platform for
an emerging class of very high rate streaming applications.
____________
END MATERIAL
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