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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 14 February 2007, vol. 22:22
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
14 February 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 22
______________________________________________________________________
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 14 FEBRUARY 2007 TO 23 FEBRUARY 2007
WEDNESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2007
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [14-Feb-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"The structure and acquisition of semantic knowledge"
Charles Kemp
MIT
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [14-Feb-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Usability and Software Architecture: The forgotten quality
attribute and the forgotten design problem"
Bonnie John
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Phonology Laboratory Colloquium [14-Feb-07]
46 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Mapping between language and the visual world:
Dissociations between the visual world and its mental representation"
Gerry T.M. Altman
University of York, UK
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:00pm UC Berkeley Psychology Colloquium [14-Feb-07]
3105 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"The Origins of Communication:
Social Influences on Development"
Julie Gros-Louis
Candidate for Social Development Search
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [14-Feb-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Building your own dynamic language is fun and easy!
First steps on the road to reinventing computing"
Ian Piumarta
Viewpoints Research Institute
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [14-Feb-07]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Trojan Detection using IC Fingerprinting"
Pankaj Rohatgi
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
THURSDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2007
12 noon UC Berkeley Psychology Distinguished Speaker [15-Feb-07]
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"Shifting within and between racial identities:
Implications for psychological well-being"
Diana T. Sanchez
Psychology, Rutgers University
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
12:45pm Stanford Networking Seminar [15-Feb-07]
Gates 104
"Optical Circuit Switching Techniques for NSF FIND and GENI Networks"
Daniel Blumenthal
UC Santa Barbara
http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Blumenthal/default.html
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
2:00pm Berkeley ICSI Annual BEARS Open House [15-Feb-07]
ICSI, Rm 607 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/
(RSVP requested)
Information below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [15-Feb-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Koala: a Wikipedia for Business Process"
Tessa Lau
IBM Almaden Research Center
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [15-Feb-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Forensic Science and Weapons of Mass Destruction"
John G. Reynolds
Forensic Science Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [15-Feb-07]
Soda hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"First-order Probabilistic Inference"
Rodrigo de Salvo Braz
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://bashful.cs.uiuc.edu/~braz/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [15-Feb-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Ethics and Nanotechnology: Views of Researchers"
Robert McGinn
Science, Technology and Society
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstracts below
4:15pm NIS Seminar Series [15-Feb-07]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
"Neural basis of motor preparation and prostheses"
Krishna Shenoy
EE and Neuroscience, Stanford
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [15-Feb-07]
Packard 101
"Reconstruction of and Optimization on Networks"
Elchanan Mossel
Berkeley
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
6:00pm Silicon Valley Web Guild [15-Feb-07]
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View
"Online Video: Revolutionizing Advertising & Marketing"
Todd Murtha
VP, Business & Legal Affairs, Fox Interactive Media, Inc.
Jordan Hoffner
Director, Worldwide Web Syndication, YouTube
Timothy Tuttle
Vice President, AOL Video, AOL
http://www.webguild.org/
(registration and fee)
Information below
7:30pm Silicon Valley Shannon Lecture [15-Feb-07]
Packard 101
"New Standards from W3C: XPath, XQuery, and XSLT"
Don Chamberlin
IBM Almaden Research Center
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 2007
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [16-Feb-07]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"The Secret Life Of Fluency"
Danny Oppenheimer
Princeton University
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [16-Feb-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Designing Interfaces for Musical Experience"
Tina Blaine
HCI Institute Carnegie-Mellon University
http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/
Abstract below
2:00pm Stanford Tech Briefing [16-Feb-07]
Turing Auditorium, Polya Hall
"Getting Your Web Site to Deliver to ALL - Universal Accessibility"
John Foliot
Stanford Online Accessibility Program
http://soap.stanford.edu/
(Tech Briefing events are aimed at the Stanford Community)
http://techbriefings.stanford.edu/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [16-Feb-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"The European Commission's Joint Research Centre: a Reference
Center for Science and Technology in the European Union"
Doris Florian
Belgium
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s07/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [16-Feb-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Agency, Mind, and Authority"
Akeel Bilgrami
Columbia University
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/fac-bios/bilgrami/faculty.html
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [16-Feb-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"How does learning about categories change the way we perceive?"
Adam November
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [16-Feb-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"The effect of experience in the perception and representation
of dialects"
Meghan Sumner
SUNY Stony Brook/UC Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Phonology Laboratory Colloquium [16-Feb-07]
46 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Phonological licensing of grammatical morphology in early speech"
Katherine Demuth
Brown University and I-LABS, University of Washington
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [16-Feb-07]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Form Vision in the Periphery"
Bosco Tjan
Psychology, University of Southern California
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: InfoSeminar [16-Feb-07]
Gates B12
"Supporting Scaleable Online Statistical Processing"
Christopher Jermaine
Univ. of Florida
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2007
all day LCOM Study Section Workshop [17-Feb-07]
46 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
MONDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2007
TUESDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2007
12 noon Linguistics Department Colloquium [20-Feb-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Nonmodal phonation in normal and pathological speech:
Same river, different water"
Heriberto Avelino
Stanford University / UC Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience [20-Feb-07]
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"What makes a good model of natural images?"
Yair Weiss
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
3:00pm CSLI Tea [20-Feb-07]
Cordura Hall Greenhouse
5:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium [20-Feb-07]
location to be announced (UC Berkeley)
"Fictive interaction: Face-to-face conversation as a frame for
understanding ordinary and legal thought, language and discourse"
Esther Pascual
University of Amsterdam
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
WEDNESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2007
12 noon UC Berkeley IPSR colloquium [21-Feb-07]
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice"
Jack Glaser
Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/ipsr/colloquia.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [21-Feb-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"Neurochemistry of the adaptive mind"
Roshan Cools
University of Cambridge
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [21-Feb-07]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"The Ethics of Freedom"
T. M. Scanlon
Harvard University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm Morrison Institute Colloquium [21-Feb-07]
Herrin T-175
"Neuropsychiatric Genetics: Where Are We Headed?"
David Goldstein
Duke University
http://www.genome.duke.edu/people/faculty/goldstein
http://www.stanford.edu/group/morrinst/c.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [21-Feb-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"A Fast Wait-Free Hash Table and (time permitting) Scaling Up
a Real Application on Azul"
Cliff Click
Azul Systems
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2007
12 noon Tech Express Brownbag [22-Feb-07]
Turing Auditorium, Polya Hall
"Daylight Saving Time and Sundial"
(Tech Express events are aimed at the Stanford Community)
http://techexpress.stanford.edu/
12:45pm Stanford Networking Seminar [22-Feb-07]
Gates 104
Title to be announced
Michael Mitzenmacher
Harvard University
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:00pm PARC Forum [22-Feb-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The quality of information: High-tech supply and low-tech command"
Paul Duguid
UC Berkeley
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [22-Feb-07]
Soda hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Yun Song
UC Davis
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~yssong
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [22-Feb-07]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Blame and Freedom"
T. M. Scanlon
Harvard University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [22-Feb-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Got Style? The Linguistic Construction of Social Meaning"
Penny Eckert
Linguistics, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Isaac Newton Lecture 1: "Turning Data Into Evidence" [22-Feb-07]
Bldg. 200:203
"Closing the Loop: Testing Newtonian Gravity, Then and Now"
George Smith
Philosophy, Tufts University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2007
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [23-Feb-07]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"The role of temporal fine structure in pitch perception and
speech perception"
Brian Moore
University of Cambridge
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [23-Feb-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Why Phones are not Computers"
Scott Jenson
Google
http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [23-Feb-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
To be announced
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s07/schedule.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [23-Feb-07]
Bldg. 60:61H
"When Does Equality Matter?"
Thomas Scanlon
Harvard University
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~phildept/scanlon.html
Co-Sponsor: Political Theory Workshop and Global Justice Workshop
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [23-Feb-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"¿Se what? Agents, accidents and attributions in English
and Spanish"
Caitlin Fausey
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [23-Feb-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Voiceless, vowel-less syllables in Tashlhiyt Berber:
phonetic and phonological evidence"
Rachid Ridouane
University of Paris III
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation [23-Feb-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"Theory-based causal induction"
Tom Griffiths
Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science, UC Berkeley
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla/schedule.shtml
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: InfoSeminar [23-Feb-07]
Gates B12
Title to be announced
Raghu Ramakrishnan
Yahoo! Research
http://research.yahoo.com/~ramakris/
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of all types. 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
First I want to note that the ACM Data Mining SIG announced in last
week's calendar as being on Feb 14 was rescheduled to Feb 13. It is
usually a good idea to check the actual web site for any last minute
changes (ideally one should have something like an RSS feed for
calendar events that would automatically update one's personal
calendar when event times and locations change, you select the event
[or event series] but I'm not sure anyone has developed that yet).
Second, besides the usual academic talks out there, Stanford also has
some talk series that focus more on technical training. On the
computing side there are the Thursday Tech Brownbags and Friday Tech
Briefings sponsored by Information Technology Services (ITS which use
to be ITSS which use to be something else). On February 16 the Tech
Briefing will be on creating web pages that are accessible which is
not only wise, but, for many Stanford pages is a legal requirement.
In addition sites that are accessible to people with disabilities also
tend to be accessible to unusual web browsers (e.g., palm devices).
Stanford has been pushing this recently and has a site
http://soap.stanford.edu/ to help support this effort.
On February 22 the Tech Brownbag will be on the change in Daylight
Savings Time which will affect many programs/computers that know about
the old formula but not the new. In particular there will be a few
gotchas with Sundial, the University's calendaring system. Computers
with MacOS 10.3 and earlier versions may also have problems.
Oh, and one last thing. Happy Valentine's Day.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 14 February 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Usability and Software Architecture: The forgotten quality
attribute and the forgotten design problem"
Bonnie John
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ebej/
The usability analyses or user test data are in; the development team
is poised to respond. The software had been carefully modularized so
that modifications to the UI can be fast and easy. When the usability
problems are presented, someone around the table exclaims, "Oh, no, we
cant change THAT!" As a field, HCI has produced methods for every
phase of the software development lifecycle except architecture
design. In many projects, HCI professionals have input into system
formulation and functional requirements. They routinely do detailed
design and evaluation of the UI and final overall system. They analyze
log files and calls to the help desk to improve future versions. BUT
the design of the software architecture can have important
ramifications for the usability of the end product and HCI has
traditionally had no role in those design decisions. Len Bass
(Software Engineering Institute, author of several best-selling
textbooks on software architecture) and I have teamed up to bring
usability to the architecture design table as a "first-class citizen"
on a par with other quality attributes like performance, security, and
modifiability. I will present our research, proposed solution, and
empirical results supporting the efficacy of that solution.
About the Speaker: Bonnie John researches techniques to improve the
design of computer systems with respect to their usefulness and
usability. She has investigated the effectiveness and usability of
several HCI techniques (e.g., think-aloud usability studies, cognitive
walkthrough, human performance modeling) and produced new techniques
and tools for bringing usability concerns to the design process (e.g.,
CPM-GOMS, CogTool, Usability-Supporting Architectural Patterns). Much
of her work focuses on human behavior modeling, where she develops
models that assist in the design of computer systems. She creates
prototyping environments and tools for human behavior modeling,
designed for use by UI designers without psychology training. She also
brings the psychology of human-computer interaction into software
engineering techniques, e.g., including usability concerns in software
architecture design. With a bachelors and masters in Mechanical
Engineering, (The Cooper Union, 1977; Stanford University, 1978), and
six years experience as a professional engineer, Dr. John turned to
Human-Computer Interaction in the early 1980s to beat psychology into
a shape that engineers can use it. Earning her doctorate in Cognitive
Psychology (Carnegie Mellon University, 1988), she was on the faculty
of the Computer Science Department and helped to form the
Human-Computer Interaction Institute in CMUs School of Computer
Science. Dr. John has had research contracts with many government and
industrial organizations, including the Office of Naval Research,
NASA, DARPA, NSF, SRI, Boeing, General Motors, Xerox, AT&T, NYNEX, and
U.S.West. Elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2005, she has won both
the NASA Turning Goals into Reality Administrators Award and the Group
Achievement Award in 2004, NSFs Young Investigator Award, and she was
a Professional Engineer in the State of New York. She was is currently
the Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems at Stanford.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 14 February 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Building your own dynamic language is fun and easy!
First steps on the road to reinventing computing"
Ian Piumarta
Viewpoints Research Institute
Viewpoints Research Institute recently began a five-year project to
reinvent how we program and interact with computers. An early goal of
our work is to make a practical, working mathematical model of a
complete personal computer system that invites understanding and
modification by users at all levels.
An essential part of the model is a programming language and
environment that exhibit the properties desired of the system at
large. In computer science terms, this language and environment are:
* metacircular -- they are sufficiently powerful to implement
themselves with no extrinsic behaviour or other `magic'; and
* self-similar -- the essential data abstractions and mechanisms
used to describe the most primitive levels in the implementation
are the same as those presented to the user as the building blocks
of arbitrary computation.
The result is a compact and understandable programming environment in
which nothing is hidden from, or beyond the influence of, its users.
In this talk I will describe several significant aspects of the design
and implementation of this programming environment. The foundation is
a pair of mutually-supporting abstractions for behaviour and state.
These abstractions are individually very simple and incapable of
completely describing their own implementation. When combined,
however, each abstraction provides all of the necessary `extrinsic
magic' required for the other to describe itself.
The behavioural abstraction is inspired by McCarthy's rendering of
LISP in LISP. In a half-page description, McCarthy created a recursive
model that was small enough to be easily understandable and yet
sufficiently complete to permit fruitful thinking about its meaning.
In the spirit of McCarthy's LISP I will show how the abstraction for
state in our system is modelled in terms of objects responding to
messages, where the semantics of message sending are defined
recursively in terms of objects responding to messages.
I will finish by describing of the remaining components of our
programming system (from parsing to code generation) and the
techniques that keep everything open, understandable and dynamically
extensible by the user.
About the Speaker: Ian Piumarta is a computer scientist at Viewpoints
Research Institute. He studied at the University of Manchester (UK)
where he was awarded a B.Sc. followed by a Ph.D. for work on code
generation techniques. After a couple of years as a post-doc at
Manchester he moved to Paris to work at IRCAM. He then spent ten years
working at INRIA and the University of Paris VI before moving to the
United States and taking his current position at Viewpoints. He spends
most of his time thinking about and implementing technologies for
making computer languages more open, reflexive, dynamically
self-describing and understandable. The rest of his time he spends
listening to music, playing Bach on the guitar, building hi-fi
equipment and flying airplanes.
____________
BERKELEY INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE OPEN HOUSE
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Main Lecture Hall, ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/
The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) cordially invites
you to our annual BEARS open house, featuring a talk by Nick Weaver of
the Networking Group on Haptic Keys: A Novel Approach to User
Authentication:
ICSI scientists will be on hand throughout to discuss and demonstrate
their latest research in networking, bioinformatics, artificial
intelligence, speech and natural language processing. In our feature
presentation at 3:00 pm, Nick Weaver will provide a novel take on user
authentication, the notoriously difficult problem of proving
electronically that "you are who you say you are". Grounded in the
familiar, real-world concepts of physical locks and keys, his
approach, is at once thought provoking, powerful--and eminently
pragmatic.
ICSI is located at 1947 Center Street, Suite 600, Berkeley, CA, two
blocks from the UC Berkeley campus and Downtown Berkeley BART
station. A map and detailed directions are at
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/about/location.html.
Please RSVP to Leah Hitchcock (leahh@icsi.berkeley.edu or 510 666-2974)
by February 8th. More information on this event is at
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/news/nb0701.html
A list of technology demonstrations for the open house will be posted
in the next few days.
For more information on ICSI, please see our website,
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Koala: a Wikipedia for Business Process"
Tessa Lau
IBM Almaden Research Center
Knowledge capture and reuse in an enterprise is an ongoing challenge
for businesses. Employees often struggle to find out how to complete
certain processes, such as hiring summer interns or ordering a new
computer. In our Koala project, we are exploiting the synergy of four
related technologies to build a system that enables end users to
document, share, and collaborate on "how to" knowledge. Koala combines
ideas from programming by demonstration, "sloppy" programming, wikis,
and user-specific data into a system that lets users easily record and
play back scripts for tasks performed on the web. Our approach is
based on a human- and machine-understandable "sloppy" programming
language that can be easily read and written by people, and yet also
interpreted by machine to automate common or difficult tasks. Scripts
are published to a company-wide server, in which we are exploring the
broader issues of social search and navigation, and script reuse and
maintenance.
About the Speaker: Tessa Lau is a Research Staff Member at IBMs
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.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
"First-order Probabilistic Inference"
Rodrigo de Salvo Braz
U. of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
Logic and Probabilistic Inference are the two main inference models
available today in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Logic, particularly
first-order, is expressive and high-level, but lacks modelling of
probabilistic uncertainty, which is important in many AI applications
such as common sense, natural language processing and vision.
Probabilistic Inference excels in modeling uncertainty and has been a
success story in many areas. However, it lacks expressivity, being
propositional rather than first-order. This prevents us from applying
them to structured data such as collections of graphs, trees and frames
in a convenient manner.
Several languages have been proposed that allow the expression of
probabilistic knowledge in rich first-order languages. However, at
inference time these solutions still operate at a mostly propositional
level, by grounding the original first-order specification. This is a
severe limitation because the number of propositional random variables
will typically be exponential in the number of objects, and because the
first-order specification contains explicit representation of valuable
domain structure that gets lost in the process.
We present an algorithm that operates directly on the first-order level
specification of a model, thus taking advantage of compact first-order
structures and being potentially much faster. The algorithm keeps the
representation as compact and high-level as possible even during
inference. We show how this brings probabilistic inference closer to
first-order logical inference methods such as resolution.
About the Speaker: Rodrigo de Salvo Braz is finishing his Ph.D. at the
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Before UIUC he received a Masters in Computer
Science from the University of Sao Paulo and spent two years at the
Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Department at Brown University. His
research interests are First-Order Probabilistic Inference, Natural
Language Processing, Machine Learning and Human-Computer Interaction.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Ethics and Nanotechnology: Views of Researchers"
Robert McGinn
Science, Technology and Society
Nanotechnology is an burgeoning field of cutting-edge science and
engineering research that for the last decade has been the focus of
persistent conflict over its social and ethical implications. Some
partisans believe it to be the next great technological revolution,
one that will usher in a wide range of important benefits. Others
believe nanotech to be a field hyped and funded so amply that the
country -- including government, industry, and academia -- has jumped
on board the gravy train and failed to seriously consider the ethical
and social issues it raises. Against the backdrop of a polarized
debate between supporters and opponents of nanotechnology, the speaker
will discuss the findings of a large-scale survey has has conducted
over the last three years of a large group of nanotechnology
researchers at thirteen facilities in the U.S. The focus of the survey
was the beliefs of these front-line researchers about ethical issues
related to their work. The speaker will present the most interesting
findings derived from the survey and discuss what they reveal about
how nanotech researchers view ethics as it relates to their work.
About the Speaker: Robert McGinn is Professor of Management Science
and Engineering (Teaching). He currently serves as Chair of Stanford's
Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program. McGinn took his
B.S. in Stevens Institute of Technology's Unified Science and
Engineering Program, his M.S. in mathematics at Stanford, and his
Ph.D. in philosophy and humanities at Stanford. He taught at Columbia
University (Barnard College), and Tufts University before returning to
Stanford. Apart from a year at Bell Laboratories in 1978-79, McGinn
has been at Stanford since 1971.
His main scholarly interest is in the interplay of technology and
contemporary society, with emphases on issues of applied ethics,
theories of technology in society, and problems and policies
associated with transformations of contemporary workplaces. He has
taught a seminar entitled "Work, Technology, and Society" in the MS&E
Department since 1981. McGinn is the author of the widely used
Science, Technology, and Society (1991), a part of Prentice-Hall's
Foundations of Modern Sociology Series. He has published a number of
scholarly articles, most recently in the Journal of Applied
Philosophy, Science and Engineering Ethics, and Professional
Ethics. McGinn lectures and consults internationally on technology and
society issues. He has received research grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Norwegian Marshall Fund, and the
Mellon Foundation, and has received the Stanford Phi Beta Kappa Prize,
the Tau Beta Pi Award, and Dinkelspiel Award for excellence in
teaching.
____________
NIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 4:15pm
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
"Neural basis of motor preparation and prostheses"
Krishna Shenoy
EE and Neuroscience, Stanford
It has long been recognized that, before moving, we somehow prepare
neural activity such that, when called upon, the desired movement
unfolds. But the goals of movement preparation and the underlying
neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. I will describe some of
our recent electrophysiological investigations of how cerebral
(pre-motor) cortex prepares and helps execute movements. Our results
suggest that the brain is attempting to optimize preparatory neural
activity and can delay movement until this activity is sufficiently
accurate. With an increased understanding of movement planning, it is
also possible to design real-time electronic systems capable of
translating neural plans into prosthetic movements. I will also
describe our recent electrophysiological investigations aimed at
establishing the fundamental, neurobiologically dictated performance
limits of communication prostheses. Our results suggest that at least
a factor of four performance improvement is possible, which is
essential for starting to assess the potential benefits of clinical
cortically-controlled prosthetic systems. Finally, I will also
describe a very recent effort to record neural activity and head
acceleration from freely-behaving animals, which provides insights
into the signal nonstationarities to be expected in human neural
prosthetic systems.
Recent Papers:
[1] Churchland MM, Afshar A, Shenoy KV (2006) A central source of
movement variability. Neuron. 52:1085-1096.
[2] Santhanam G, Ryu SI, Yu BM, Afshar A, Shenoy KV (2006) A
high-performance brain-computer interface. Nature. 442:195-198.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Reconstruction of and Optimization on Networks"
Elchanan Mossel
Berkeley
Stochastic models defined on networks introduce novel algorithmic
challenges. This challenges arise from diverse application fields,
such as molecular biology, computer networks and social networks. In
this talk I will survey some recent progress in this area. In
particular, I will discuss the problem of reconstructing the network
from observations at some nodes and optimization problems defined on
such networks.
Based on joint works with C. Daskalakis and S. Roch, with S. Roch and
with C. Daskalakis, D. Karp, S. Riesenfeld and E. Verbin
About the Speaker: Elchanan Mossel is from Jerusalem where he earned
his PhD in Mathematics at the Hebrew University under Prof. Yuval
Peres. He was a post-doc with the Theory Group at Microsoft Research
and a Miller fellow in Statistics and Computer Science at
Berkeley. His research Interests include Applied Probability, Discrete
Fourier analysis, Markov Chains, Markov Random Fields, Learning,
Social Choice and Phylogeny.
____________
SILICON VALLEY WEB GUILD
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 6:00pm
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View
http://www.webguild.org/
"Online Video: Revolutionizing Advertising & Marketing"
Todd Murtha
VP, Business & Legal Affairs, Fox Interactive Media, Inc.
Jordan Hoffner
Director, Worldwide Web Syndication, YouTube
Timothy Tuttle
Vice President, AOL Video, AOL
YouTube, AOL Video, Fox Interactive Media As broadband penetration
becomes pervasive and distribution technology continues to improve,
the proliferation of online video is expected to undergo phenomenal
growth. Users now control what to watch, where, and when to watch it.
Google's acquisition of YouTube validated online video as a
revolutionary new advertising platform. Mainstream companies are
taking notice of this opportunity to reach and connect with consumers
in unique ways. This panel will examine some of the business, legal,
and technological implications of this new medium for advertisers and
marketers. It will also discuss the impact of social networking and
user generated content in online advertising and marketing, legal
implications of use and reuse of content, and monetization strategies.
Online registration for members $10 and non-members $20.
On-site registration for members $15 and non-members $25.
____________
SILICON VALLEY SHANNON LECTURE
on Thursday, 15 February 2007, 7:30pm
Packard 101
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
"New Standards from W3C: XPath, XQuery, and XSLT"
Don Chamberlin
IBM Almaden Research Center
On January 23, 2007, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a
new suite of XML-related recommendations, including a new query
language called XQuery and significant updates to the widely-used
XPath and XSLT languages. This talk will describe the new languages,
their significance, and their relationship to other XML standards. It
will also discuss the W3C design process and some of the influences
that shaped the design of these languages. It will conclude with a
look at some of the ongoing work at W3C relating to XML languages and
standards.
About the Speaker: Don Chamberlin is an IBM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow,
and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is co-inventor
of the SQL relational database language and co-inventor of the Quilt
language which became the basis for the design of XQuery. Don works at
the IBM Almaden Research Center, and for the past several years he has
represented IBM on the W3C XML Query Working Group. He is an editor of
the XPath and XQuery language specifications.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 16 February 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Designing Interfaces for Musical Experience"
Tina Blaine
Entertainment Technology Center,
Carnegie-Mellon University
As designers, we seek to create meaningful experiences, regardless of
the media delivery platform. Enabling technologies coupled with the
widespread availability of computers and low-cost sensors has led to
the development of a surprising array of new interfaces related to
sound and music. Recent years have also brought a proliferation of
inexpensive controller devices that enhance player interaction with
musical video games, mobile devices and other interactive
entertainment play experiences. With various design constraints,
playing music can be made accessible to non-musicians in ways that
give players a sense of belonging and access to a new community.
This new frontier of musical interface design has embraced the act of
participation and changed the role of music in the design process
toward metrics that involve the player experience. Particularly when
developing for mobile devices, casual games and public exhibitions
intended for "walk-up and play" interactions, the designer must
account for the limited amount of time that someone can spend learning
an interface. This also poses a challenge to create readily accessible
musical experiences that can sustain continued exploration. This talk
will give an overview of several interfaces developed to foster
musical expression, with a focus on performance, public installation
and videogames.
About the Speaker: Tina Blaine (aka Bean) teaches in Carnegie Mellon
University's Entertainment Technology Center, developing collective
experiences that integrate game design, sonic discovery and
interactive media. As a musical interactivist at Interval Research,
she led a development team in the creation of a collaborative
audiovisual instrument known as the Jam-O-Drum, now on permanent
exhibit at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Her subsequent
research and project teamwork with ETC students has been featured at
SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies, Zeum's Youth Art and Technology
Center in San Francisco, Give Kids the World Resort in Orlando, FL and
Ars Electronica's Museum of the Future in Linz, Austria. Inspired by
global traditions and spontaneous music-making, Blaine has explored
musical interaction since the mid-80's building electronic MIDI
controller instruments and large-scale audience participation devices
for live performance with the multimedia ensemble D'CuCKOO. Blaine has
written for numerous publications including Electronic Musician,
Computer Life and the Journal for New Music Research, and is
co-founder of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)
conference. In September 2005, she was honored for her inspiring and
innovative work in the sciences by the Women and Girls Foundation of
Southwestern Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Science Center in
Pittsburgh PA.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 16 February 2007, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s07/schedule.html
"The European Commission's Joint Research Centre:
a Reference Center for Science and Technology in the European Union"
Doris Florian
European Commission Institute for Reference Materials and Measurement
The Joint Research Centre (JRC), a Directorate General of the European
Commission, is a reference centre for science and technology in the
European Union. The JRC supports the European Union from the
scientific point of view when new legislation is conceived, developed,
and finally implemented and monitored in the Member States. The JRC
consists of 7 Institutes in 5 Member States of the European Union
(Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain). The presentation
will briefly cover the European Union legislative cycle and the
scientific support needed for it. Further it will cover the JRC
scientific activities by presenting examples also of relevance to the
USA and US information scientists.
About the Speaker: Doris Florian is Head of the Institute Development
and Programme Management Unit at the Institute for Reference Materials
and Measurements ( http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int ) of the Joint Research
Centre ( http://www.irmm.jrc.be/ ) of the European Commission. She is
in charge of strategy development and programme management, public
relations, training of staff and the library and information
center. Formerly working for Joanneum Research, Graz, Austria, Doris
Florian was Visiting Scholar here in the School of Information in the
mid and late 1980s.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 16 February 2007, 3:15pm
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Agency, Mind, and Authority"
Akeel Bilgrami
Columbia University
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/fac-bios/bilgrami/faculty.html
Professor Bilgrami's paper will try and ground first person authority
in a very specifically normative conception of mind and its relations
to human agency. If there is time, he will explore what effects such
authority has on issues of linguistic meaning and its normativity.
About the Speaker: Professor Bilgrami received a B.A. from Bombay
University (1970), a B.A. from Oxford University (1974), and a
Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1983). He specializes in
Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy and
Moral Psychology. He is the Director of The Heyman Center for the
Humanities at Columbia University. His publications include two books:
Belief and Meaning (Blackwell, 1992), and Self-Knowledge and
Resentment (Harvard University Press, 2006). A third book, Politics
and The Moral Psychology of Identity, is forthcoming in 2007 from
Harvard University Press. He has also published various articles in
Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Some
of his articles in these latter subjects speak to issues of current
politics in their relation to broader social and cultural issues.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 16 February 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"The effect of experience in the perception and representation
of dialects"
Meghan Sumner
SUNY Stony Brook/UC Berkeley
The effect of experience in the perception and representation of
dialects
Variation in the speech signal abounds. A single speaker can produce a
number of acoustically distinct utterances for any given word.
Moreover, any word can be produced uniquely by different speakers
depending on unpredictable indexical characteristics (e.g., gender,
age; Abercrombie, 1967), or more systematic phonetic characteristics
(e.g., dialect, native language). In short, spoken words are variable.
They are not bounded by spaces. Identical productions of words (even
by the same speaker) are rare. The task of recognizing spoken words is
notoriously difficult. Once dialectal variation is considered, the
difficulty of this task increases. When living in a new dialect
region, however, processing difficulties associated with dialectal
variation dissipate over time. While the issue of variation has been
gaining attention in the field, the majority of attention has been
given to indexical variation. The projects that have focused on
language-specific and phonetic variation have focused either on
arbitrary variation (e.g., the processing of service vs. gervice;
Connine et al., 1993) or assimilation (e.g., Gow, 2001). Little
attention has been paid to the processing of words with multiple
surface instantiations or the effect of experience in the perception
and representation of cross-dialectal variation.
Through a series of priming tasks (form priming, semantic priming, and
long-term repetition priming), I examine the general issue of
variation in spoken word recognition, while investigating the role of
experience in perception and representation. The main questions
addressed in this talk are: (1) How are cross-dialect variants
recognized and stored, and (2) How are these variants accommodated by
listeners with different levels of exposure to the dialect? Three
claims are made based on the results: (1) Dialect production is not
representative of dialect perception and representation, (2)
Experience is linked with a listener's ability to recognize and
represent spoken words, and (3) There is a general benefit for having
the status as the "ideal" variant, even if this variant is not the
most common one. Results of this research have implications for
autonomous models of phonology and raise interesting questions
regarding the non-production side of having a dialect.
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 16 February 2007, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Form Vision in the Periphery"
Bosco Tjan
Psychology, University of Southern California
To perceive form, small local features detected in the early stages of
visual processing must be selectively integrated to form larger
coherent shapes. The precise nature of this selective integration
process, which appropriately separates and integrates local features,
is largely unknown. A form-vision deficit in the peripheral visual
fields, known as crowding, provides a useful model for studying this
selective integration process. In peripheral vision, flanking an
otherwise identifiable target can impair identification of the target.
In a series of psychophysical and fMRI experiments, we concluded that
crowding cannot be explained by the spatial-tuning properties of the
periphery or the spatial uncertainty for isolated features. Instead,
crowding seems to be caused by an inability to segment or select
features that are within a range equal to the average receptive-field
size of an V2 neuron at the given eccentricity.
____________
CS545: INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 16 February 2007, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B12
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"Supporting Scaleable Online Statistical Processing"
Christopher Jermaine
Univ. of Florida
Data warehousing and analytic processing have been active areas of
database research and development for nearly two decades, and many
experts now consider these problems to be "solved", especially with
regard to performance. However, an argument can be made that users and
databases have simply reached an uneasy truce with regard to analytic
processing. If users avoid ad-hoc, exploratory queries that might take
days to execute, then the database performs just fine.
In this talk, I will describe query processing in database system
called DBO that is designed from the ground up to support interactive
analytic processing. Like traditional relational database systems, DBO
can run database queries from start to finish and produce exact
answers in a scaleable fashion. Our initial results show that DBO has
all of performance of a traditional system when processing analytic
queries. However, unlike any existing research or production system,
DBO is able to produce statistically meaningful approximate answers at
all times throughout query execution. These answers are continuously
updated from start to finish, even for "huge" queries requiring
arbitrary quantities of temporary secondary storage. Thus, a user can
stop execution whenever satisfied with the query accuracy, which may
translate to dramatic time savings during exploratory processing.
About the Speaker: Chris Jermaine is an assistant professor of
computer science at the University of Florida, where he has been since
earning his PhD degree from Georgia Tech in 2002. His research is
generally concerned with databases and data analysis. With his
students and colleagues at UF he has published papers in forums such
as ACM TODS, VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE. He is the recipient of an NSF
CAREER award for his research on approximate query processing.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Tuesday, 20 February 2007, 12 noon
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Nonmodal phonation in normal and pathological speech:
Same river, different water"
Heriberto Avelino
Stanford University / UC Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~avelino/
Nonmodal (e.g. laryngealized, breathy) phonation occurs in
pathological speech as well as a contrastive feature in natural
languages. Is the phonetic nature of these two types of speech the
same or different? How do speakers achieve the production of such a
feature? How do listeners of a language with contrastive nonmodal
phonation perceive pathological speech? To answer these questions, in
this talk I present an integrated approach to the laryngeal phonology
phenomenon in three American Indian languages and pathological speech
that includes acoustic, electrophysiological analyses, and
perceptual-experimental evidence.
The findings indicate that (1) contrastive and pathological nonmodal
phonation are different phenomena; (2) the patterns of nonmodal
phonation in languages in which it is contrastive are a function of
the phonemic status of laryngeal features, tone and phonation; (3) the
production of nonmodal phonation in normal natural languages is
characterized by a wide range of variability; (4) in perception,
phonetic variability is suppressed at a level of representation in
which nonmodal phonation corresponds to a single category. These
results are discussed in relation to typological generalizations, and
theoretical considerations.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 22 February 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"The quality of information: High-tech supply and low-tech command"
Paul Duguid
UC Berkeley
Can the seventeenth-century publishing business or the
nineteenth-century wine trade tell us much about twenty-first century
high-tech supply chains? In this talk, I will suggest that each of
these commercial sectors faced problematic questions about the quality
of information in disaggregated supply chains and each came up with
surprisingly similar solutions. A comparison suggests that as
vertically integrated organizations come under attack, "vertical
competition" may become a particularly salient feature of the
high-tech landscape, and that while much attention has focused on the
role of copyrights and patents in this landscape, trademarks may turn
out to be the more influential branch of the IP triad.
About the Speaker: Paul Duguid is adjunct professor at the School of
Information at the University of California, Berkeley and professorial
research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. His current
research interests include the history and development of trademarks.
A more complete bio can found at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~duguid/
____________
ISAAC NEWTON LECTURE
on Thursday, 22 February 2007, 4:15pm-6:00pm
Bldg. 200:203
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/cisst/events.html
"Turning Data into Evidence:
Three lectures on the role of Theory in Science"
George Smith
Philosophy, Tufts University
Lecture 1: 22 February 2007
"Closing the Loop: Testing Newtonian Gravity, Then and Now"
Lecture 2: 1 March 2007
"Getting Started: Building Theories from Working Hypotheses"
Lecture 3: 8 March 2007
"Gaining Access: Using Seismology to Probe the Earth's Insides"
The view that all observation is theory-mediated and hence that
scientific evidence invariably rests on theoretical presuppositions
now seems beyond dispute. Many see the consequent apparent lack of
uncontestable grounding as raising deep questions about the nature and
limits of the knowledge achieved in the sciences, questions that are
sometimes taken to challenge all claims of science to epistemic
authority. The three lectures will concede from the outset that theory
of some sort is always needed to turn data into evidence and hence
that theory always enters constitutively into evidence. But they will
then argue that close analysis of historical practice in certain
representative areas of physics shows that the ways in which theory
has in fact entered into the process of marshalling evidence has not
undercut but actually strengthened their claim to epistemic authority.
About the Speaker: George E. Smith is widely recognized as a leading
authority on Isaac Newton, and, in particular, on Newton's
contributions to scientific methodology. Together with I. B. Cohen, he
edited The Cambridge Companion to Newton, where he has a central piece
on Newton's methodology. Aside from being Professor of Philosophy at
Tufts University, Smith has pursued a highly successful career as a
practicing mechanical engineer, and he Directed the Dibner Institute
for the History of Science and Technology at MIT from 2001-2006. The
three lectures will discuss a number of key developments in the
physical sciences, including gravitational research from Newton to
Einstein, J. J. Thomson's work on the electron at the end of the
nineteenth century, and twentieth-century seismological research into
the earth's interior, in order to depict the fine structure of
evidential reasoning in these sciences and thereby illustrate and
defend their epistemic authority. The lectures will be of wide
interest to historians, philosophers, pure and applied physicists,
engineers, and earth scientists, as well as to all those interested in
the question of the distinctive place of the "hard" sciences in
Western intellectual life.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 23 February 2007, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"The role of temporal fine structure in pitch perception and
speech perception"
Brian Moore
University of Cambridge
Broadband complex sounds such as music and speech are decomposed by
the cochlea into a series of narrowband signals, each corresponding to
the waveform at a specific place on the basilar membrane. Each signal
can be considered as composed of a "carrier" (the temporal fine
structure, TFS) with a fluctuating envelope, E. In the auditory
nerve, the TFS is represented in the detailed timing of neural
impulses (phase locking), while the E is represented by fluctuations
in firing rate over time. In this talk, I will review evidence
supporting the idea that TFS plays an important role in pitch
perception and in speech perception. TFS may be especially important
when listening to a target talker in the presence of one or more
background talkers. People with cochlear hearing loss have a reduced
ability to process TFS, and people with cochlear implants have almost
no ability to process TFS. This can partly account for their poor
pitch perception and poor abilities to understand speech when
background sounds are present.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 23 February 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Why Phones are not Computers"
Scott Jenson
Google
http://www.jensondesign.com/scott.html
This talk will give a brief history of the mobile phone: how it grew
and blossomed as a communicator but has badly stumbled with the advent
of data services. The solution is to deeply understand the pros/cons
of phone capabilities and create new services that are not "scaled
down web designs."
About the Speaker: Scott Jenson is the lead mobile UI designer for
Google. Before joining Google he ran an independent design
consultancy, after having worked in the Apple Human Interface Group
and Newton Project, and serving as director of the Symbian Design Lab.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 23 February 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Voiceless, vowel-less syllables in Tashlhiyt Berber:
phonetic and phonological evidence"
Rachid Ridouane
University of Paris III
http://ed268.univ-paris3.fr/lpp/?page=equipe/rachid_ridouane/
Different approaches of assigning syllable structure have in common
the fact that the distribution between nuclear and non-nuclear
syllable constituents is highly correlated with the difference between
vowels and consonants (Kenstowicz 1994). This correlation is not
absolute; witness the numerous cases, in different languages, where
consonants can occupy syllable nucleus positions (e.g. the /l/ in
English [bA.tl] "bottle", the /r/ in Czech in [br.no] "Brno", or the
/n/ in German [ha.bn] "to have"). Notice, however, that all these
nulcear consonants are sonorants. Because of their inherent
properties, these segments behave like vowels (they are produced with
spontaneous vocal-fold vibration and display a vowel-like acoustic
structure). The case of languages where any segment, including
voiceless obstruents, can form the syllable nuclei is far more
surprising. At least two such languages have been reported in
literature, the Salish language Nuxalk (Bella Coola) (Bagemihl 1991)
and a Tashlhiyt Berber language (Dell & Elmedlaoui 2002). In this
talk, I will deal with Tashlhiyt Berber and tackle the issue of the
uniqueness of the syllable structure of this language.
The syllable structure of Tashlhiyt Berber was initially described by
Dell and Elmedlaoui in two widely read studies (1985, 1988). This
syllable structure, usually cited as a typologically unique phenomenon
(e.g. Zec 1995), became a famous example in phonology, especially
since its use by Prince & Smolensky (1993) as a prime illustration of
Optimality Theory. The most striking and controversial examples, taken
as arguments in favor of this analysis, involve consonant-only words
(e.g. [tssrglttnt] "you closed them"). This claim is challenged by
different authors who argue that the alleged consonant-only sequences
are actually pronounced with epenthetic schwa vowels in the context of
the syllabic consonants (Coleman 1996, 1999, 2001, Louali & Puech
1996, 1999, 2000, Angoujard 1997). In this talk, I will try to
determine, based on phonetic and phonological data, whether, in
addition to /a/, /i/, and /u/, there is a fourth vocalic segment at
the level of phonetic and phonological representations that can act as
a syllable peak.
One particular aspect of this question concerns the laryngeal quality
(voiced or voiceless) of epenthetic vowels. In Tashlhiyt Berber, roots
and affixes may consist at the underlying level of consonants only;
when combined they can give rise to long sequences consisting of only
voiceless obstruents (e.g. /tkkst/ "you took off", /tftktstt/ "you
sprained it (fem)", /tsskSftstttfktstt/ "you dried it and you gave
it"). Acoustic, fiberscopic, and photoelectroglottographic data will
be presented showing that such words are genuinely voiceless and
deprived of schwa vowels which can act as syllable nuclei. In addition
to these phonetic data, two additional types of evidence will be
presented for the position that there are truly vowel-less syllables
in this language, metrics and an assibilation process. The argument,
based on versification, shows that voiceless obstruent-only syllables
of the type [tk] are treated in Tashlhiyt poetry as light syllables in
which the second consonant is a nucleus and not a coda. The second
type of evidence, based on the behaviour of dental stops vis-a-vis the
process of assibilation, shows that two consonants not separated at
the underlying level by one of the full vowels /a, i, u/ are adjacent
at the surface. To conclude, I will present results of a preliminary
study, based on electropalatographic data, in which I handle the issue
of the phonetic manifestations of consonant-only syllables in
Tashlhiyt Berber.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Friday, 23 February 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla/schedule.shtml
"Theory-based causal induction"
Tom Griffiths
Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science, UC Berkeley
Methods for learning the structure of causal graphical models in
computer science have traditionally made little use of prior knowledge
or constraints on the set of hypotheses being considered. However,
recent work has begun to explore how such knowledge or constraints can
make the problem of structure learning more tractable. In this talk, I
will argue that the same notions are central to explaining how people
can infer causal relationships from small amounts of data. To this
end, I will outline an account of human causal induction that uses
"theory-based" Bayesian inference, where a causal theory generates a
hypothesis space of possible causal structures that are evaluated
using Bayes' rule. The relationship between theory and causal
structure is similar to the relationship between a generative grammar
and syntactic structures in linguistics, with Bayesian inference
providing a way to "parse" observed data using the constraints
provided by the theory. I will describe some experiments exploring the
predictions of this account, based on joint work with Josh Tenenbaum,
Dave Sobel, and Alison Gopnik.
____________
END MATERIAL
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