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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 18 April 2007, vol. 22:31
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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18 April 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 31
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 18 APRIL 2007 TO 27 APRIL 2007
WEDNESDAY, 18 APRIL 2007
3:00pm GIS Special Interest Group [18-Apr-07]
Stanford Humanities Center
"GIS: Approaches and Exemplars"
Ruth Mostern (University of California, Merced),
Paul S. Ell (Queen's University, Belfast)
Ian Gregory (Lancaster University)
http://gissig.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [18-Apr-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Glenn Schellenberg,
University of Toronto
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [18-Apr-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Software Not Provided: Challenges, Experience, and
Opportunities in Supporting Communities and Democracy"
Jerry Feldman, ICSI
Todd Davies, Stanford
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
5:30pm Wesson Lectures on Problems of Democracy [18-Apr-07]
Cordura 100
"What Makes a Demos?"
David Miller
Oxford University
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/homepage.html
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Talk [18-Apr-07]
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
"Maker Faire: The Re-emergence of Maker Culture"
Dale Dougherty
editor and publisher of "Make" and "Craft" magazines
http://sfbayacm.org/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 19 APRIL 2007
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [19-Apr-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"Music and Autobiographical Memories"
Petr Janata
Center for Mind and Brain, Psychology, UC Davis
http://atonal.ucdavis.edu/~petr/
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [19-Apr-07]
Gates 104
"Meraki: Bringing $1/month access to the next Billion Internet users"
Sanjit Biswas
Meraki Networks / MIT
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [19-Apr-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"little b, a language for building mathematical models of
biological systems"
Aneil Mallavarapu
Harvard
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [19-Apr-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Electric Vehicles and the Future of Transportation Energy
Use Tesla Motors Perspective"
JB Straubel
Tesla Motors
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [19-Apr-07]
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"Statistical Network Analysis and Inference: Methods and Applications"
Eric P. Xing
CMU
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [19-Apr-07]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Visual Search: Is it a matter of life and death?"
Jeremy M. Wolfe
Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [19-Apr-07]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"What Could Constructivism in Ethics Possibly Be?"
Nadeem Hussain
Stanford University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [19-Apr-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Understanding Students' Learning from Computerized Tutors:
Incorporating Individual Differences in Computational Models"
Anna Rafferty
M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm US-ASIA Technology Management Center Public Lecture Series [19-Apr-07]
Skilling Auditiorium
"An Intelligent Data Format for Robot-Assisted Surgery:
Challenges and Solutions in Software Control"
Jun Nakaya
Tokyo Medical and Dental University
http://asia.stanford.edu/Nakaya%20Profile.htm
http://asia.stanford.edu/
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [19-Apr-07]
Packard 101
"Models and Algorithms for Large-scale Networks"
Amin Saberi
Stanford
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
5:30pm Wesson Lectures on Problems of Democracy [19-Apr-07]
Cordura 100
"Democratic Inclusion & Exclusion"
David Miller
Oxford University
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/homepage.html
FRIDAY, 20 APRIL 2007
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [20-Apr-07]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Brain networks underlying the retrieval and experience of music-
evoked autobiographical memories"
Petr Janata
Psychology, UC Davis
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [20-Apr-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Social perturbations and posited practices:
looking at prototypes as more than immature proto-products"
Elizabeth Churchill
Yahoo!
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley HWNI Seminar [20-Apr-07]
101 LSA (Berkeley)
"Exit Seminar: Whorf Takes Sides in the Debate on Language and
Thought"
Aubrey Gilbert
Ivry Lab, Neuroscience
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [20-Apr-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Digitization and Uses of Digitized Irish Studies Journals"
Paul Ell
Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, Queen's University Belfast
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s07/schedule.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [20-Apr-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Rapid perceptual reorganization in Bing preschoolers,
Stanford undergraduates, and the Piraha"
Davie Yoon
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [20-Apr-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"We know, therefore I ask"
Ivano Caponigro
UC San Diego
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley talk [20-Apr-07]
210 Barker Hall (Berkeley)
"A New Look at the Visual System"
Robert Galambos
UCSD
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
4:10pm UC Berkeley Logic and the Methodology of Science [20-Apr-07]
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"Constructive Reverse Mathematics"
Douglas S. Bridges
University of Canterbury
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
5:10pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Department Colloquium [20-Apr-07]
182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
"Two haiku or one? --
a close linguistic analysis of two poems by Basho"
Masako Hiraga and Haj Ross
Rikkyo University, Tokyo and University of North Texas
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
SATURDAY, 21 APRIL 2007
all day UC Santa Cruz Workshop [21-Apr-07]
Cowell Conference Room (UC Santa Cruz)
"Dialogues in Language and Poetry"
http://ling.ucsc.edu/news_events/poetics/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 23 APRIL 2007
4:00pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [23-Apr-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Keren Rice's paper 'Language Contact, Phonemic Inventories,
and the Athapaskan Language Family'"
Alessandro Jaker
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Ear Club [23-Apr-07]
3105 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Novel speech strategies for cochlear implants"
Anhi Kulkarni
Advance Bionics
http://ear.berkeley.edu/ear-club-schedule.html
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium [23-Apr-07]
Hewlett Teaching Center 200
Title to be announced
Jana Kosecka
Computer Science, George Mason University
http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~kosecka
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
TUESDAY, 24 APRIL 2007
12:30pm Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience [24-Apr-07]
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"EEG studies of object recognition"
Jeff Johnson
UC Davis
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [24-Apr-07]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Conditional E-Cash"
Radu Sion
Stony Brook University
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 25 APRIL 2007
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [25-Apr-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"FYP: Factors affecting how Spanish-speaking children learn
and interpret adjectives in real-time speech comprehension"
Adrianna Weisleder
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12:30pm Center for Internet and Society Talk [25-Apr-07]
Law School 271
Title to be announced
Tom Rubin
Associate General Counsel at Microsoft
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [25-Apr-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"IT-based Innovation in the 21st Century"
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
VP, Technical Strategy and Innovation, IBM
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
6:00pm Berkeley History and Philosophy of Logic Mathematics, and Science
234 Moses (Berkeley) [25-Apr-07]
"Logic and Modeling Intelligent Interaction"
Johan van Benthem
Stanford University
http://hplms.berkeley.edu/
THURSDAY, 26 APRIL 2007
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [26-Apr-07]
Gates 104
"Lessons Learned From The Internet Project"
Douglas Comer
VP of Research, Cisco Systems
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [26-Apr-07]
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
title to be announced
Pieter Abbeel
Stanford
http://ai.stanford.edu/~pabbeel/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [26-Apr-07]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Immediate perception and feedforward models of the ventral
steam in viaual cortex: what is next?"
Tomaso Poggio
Brain Sciences, MIT
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [26-Apr-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"The Ghost of Johannes Brahms"
Jonathan Berger
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [26-Apr-07]
Packard 101
"Economic-based Mechanisms for Dynamic Spectrum Sharing"
Randall Berry
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
7:30pm Silicon Valley Shannon Lecture [26-Apr-07]
Bldg. 380:380C
"Dataspaces: The Next Frontier to Data Integration"
Alon Halevy
Google
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 27 APRIL 2007
all day WCCFL 26 [27-Apr-07]
370 Dwinelle (UC Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/wccfl26
Information below
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [27-Apr-07]
Room to be announced
Title to be announced
Alistair Isaac
Stanford University
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [27-Apr-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Evolving Evaluation from Engineers to Experience:
What History can Teach us About Evaluation in HCI"
Joseph `Jofish'Kaye
Cornell University
http://jofish.com/
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [27-Apr-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Rationality, Reasoning and Group Agency"
Philip Pettit
Princeton University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [27-Apr-07]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Mapping the microcircuitry of attention: attentional
modulation varies across cell classes in visual area V4"
John Reynolds
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, UC San Diego
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 28 APRIL 2007
all day WCCFL 26 [28-Apr-07]
370 Dwinelle (UC Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/wccfl26
Information below
SUNDAY, 29 APRIL 2007
all day WCCFL 26 [29-Apr-07]
370 Dwinelle (UC Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/wccfl26
Information below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, A-, and B-. 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.
____________
GIS SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
on Wednesday, 18 April 2007, 3:00pm
Stanford Humanities Center
http://gissig.stanford.edu/
"GIS: Approaches and Exemplars"
Ruth Mostern
University of California, Merced
Paul S. Ell
Queen's University, Belfast
Ian Gregory
Lancaster University
Geographical information is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Cars and
cell phones support intuitive and visually compelling navigation
systems; mapping services are a feature of sites promoting real
estate, public safety, and recreation; news reports are saturated with
descriptive and often interactive maps. In academia, the capacity to
readily organize, analyze and visualize geographical information has
changed the face of disciplines from Environmental Science to
Sociology. "Learning to think spatially," as a recent report from the
National Research Council puts it, has emerged as a challenge for
scholars, students, and society alike. Geographic information science
and systems hold the promise for reshaping scholarship in the
humanities. However, uptake in the humanities has been relatively
slow. For our disciplines, normally grounded in close, contextualized
and nuanced readings of texts, the demand for quantification and
modeling can be challenging, and the available data in any area may be
sparse and inconsistent. Nevertheless, in the past decade, scholars
have used GIS in the humanities to expand our knowledge of culture
while challenging the technology to better suit our disciplinary
traditions. In this presentation, we consider exemplary GIS research
agendas that have shown promise in both approaches and results. We
will reflect on both the new knowledge they provide about culture and
history, and on the ways that humanists and social scientists can
extend and enhance the capacity of all scholars to be more
sophisticated spatial thinkers.
About the Speakers: Ruth Mostern is Assistant Professor and Founding
Faculty in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the
University of California, Merced. Before joining the UC Merced
faculty, she was Head of Collections Development for the Electronic
Cultural Atlas Initiative, and continues to sit on the ECAI
ePublications board. She is also on the steering committee of
Pleiades: an Online Workspace for Ancient Geography and has served as
Historical Geography network chair for the Social Science History
Association. She is a specialist in geographical history with
particular interests in spatial organization in imperial China, and
the development of digital tools and methods for historical geography.
She is the author of several articles and is currently completing a
book entitled Apprehending the Realm: Territory and Authority in China
During the Song Era (960-1276 CE). She is Principal Investigator on a
grant from the Hewlett Foundation to create an interactive timeline
builder for historical study and has recently received research
fellowships from the University of California President's Research
Fellowships in the Humanities and the University of Sydney School of
Philosophical and Historical Inquiry.
Paul S Ell is the founding director of the Centre for Data
Digitisation and Analysis at Queen's University Belfast. He has
research interests in e-Science, e-resources and Geographical
Information Systems. He is the author of many articles and half a
dozen books including two published by Cambridge University Press, one
examining the geography of Victorian religion in Britain, and a second
looking at the role of Geographical Information Systems in the
Humanities and Arts. As director of CDDA he has been awarded more than
45 grants worth, in total, over $10 million. He actively promotes the
Centre and Queen's University internationally in a leadership role
within the University of California at Berkeley based Electronic
Cultural Atlas Initiative, and as an organizer of conference sessions
at the Association of American Geographers and the US-based Social
Science History Association. He has established memoranda of
understanding with key research centres around the world with
e-resource and GIS interests including the Humanities GIS Center at
Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the Polis Center at Indiana University
Purdue University Indianapolis and with International and Area Studies
at UC Berkeley. He is co-editor of the new Edinburgh University Press
International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing.
Dr. Ian Gregory is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at
Lancaster University where he leads the university's initiative in
digital humanities. His main research interests are in using GIS in
historical research and the humanities more broadly. He has written
two books on this topic and a large number of journal articles and
book chapters on this topic. He has twice been network chair of the
Social Science History Association's Historical Geography network,
is on the advisory committee of the Arts and Humanities Data Service,
History, is on the Institutional Board of the Electronic Cultural
Atlas Initiative, and is on the editorial boards of Social Science
History, Historical Methods, and the recently re-launched
International Journal of Arts and Humanities Computing. Current funded
projects include the Historical GIS Research Network, an Economic and
Social Research Council funded project to encourage the use of GIS
amongst historians (see http://www.hgis.org.uk) and a National
Endowment for the Humanities funded project on the links between
railways and rural population change in nineteenth century England and
France.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 18 April 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Software Not Provided: Challenges, Experience, and
Opportunities in Supporting Communities and Democracy"
Jerry Feldman and Todd Davies
ICSI and Stanford (respectively)
Software that gets produced is generally
(a) profitable,
(b) desired by software developers for their own use,
(c) easy to write, and/or
(d) similar to something that already exists.
But these criteria leave a large class of software underprovided. We
argue, in particular, that software which supports community and
democratic (rather than individual) goals for under-resourced
populations is very useful and needed. But it tends not to get
produced, or is difficult to sustain, because it requires approaches
that are novel and complex, is difficult to fund, and does not fill a
void in the lives of enough software developers.
We will discuss experiences, challenges, and trends in community and
democracy supporting software, highlighting examples such as the East
Palo Alto web portal EPA.Net and the Election Incident Reporting
System (EIRS) -- both of which were funded by grants to nonprofit
organizations. Over the last few years, groups at Cal and Stanford
have been independently developing and trying to deploy platforms for
supporting community and other democratic institutions. We will
discuss the state of our efforts and some unanticipated difficulties.
The visions of the two projects differ somewhat and we will leave time
for a panel-like discussion of both specific and general ideas on
under-/un-provided software.
About the speakers: Todd Davies is Associate Director of the Symbolic
Systems Program at Stanford University. He is involved with PIECE (the
Parternship for Interenet Equity and Social Engagement) and Deme: A
Platform for Online Deliberation.
Jerry Feldman is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science at UC Berkeley and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and
Brain Sciences. From 1988 to 1998 he was the director of the
International Computer Science Institute, where he is a member of the
AI group.
Feldman is a life member of Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility (CPSR), and Davies is CPSR's current president.
____________
SF BAY ACM TALK
on Wednesday, 18 April 2007, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
http://sfbayacm.org/
"Maker Faire: The Re-emergence of Maker Culture"
Dale Dougherty
editor and publisher of "Make" and "Craft" magazines
This year's Maker Faire will be a showcase of hundreds of amazing
makers. Maker Faire is a newfangled science fair, art fair and craft
faire. It's a family-friendly event that attracted over 20,000
attendees last year. This year's event will be held May 19-20 once
again at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. In this talk, Dale will preview
Maker Faire, talk about the development of Make and Craft magazines,
and offer insights into a range of re-emerging technologies
represented by Make and Craft magazines.
Please note: you are encouraged to bring items you have made to this
meeting. You will have an opportunity to briefly present your items at
the end of the talk.
Attendees will have a chance to win copies of Make magazine, Craft
magazine, and tickets to the Maker Faire..
About the Speaker: Dale Dougherty is the founder, editor, and
publisher of Make and Craft magazines, both of which focus on DIY
technology projects. He also organized Maker Faire, which will be held
May 19-20 in the Bay Area at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Maker Faire is
a new kind of fair, combining elements of science fair, arts and
crafts fair, and county fair. Last year's event attracted more than
200 makers and 20,000 attendees.
Dale has been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important
efforts, working closely with Tim O'Reilly to establish O'Reilly as a
leading technical publisher. An early Web pioneer, Dale was the
developer and publisher of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first
commercial Web site launched in 1993 and sold to America Online in
1995. Dale was developer and publisher of Web Review, the online
magazine for Web designers from 1995-1999, which was sold to CMP in
1999. He developed the Hacks Series of books in 2003, which includes
the bestselling Google Hacks and Excel Hacks.
Dale is General Manager of the Maker Media division of O'Reilly Media.
He lives and works in Sebastopol, California.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 19 April 2007, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Music and Autobiographical Memories"
Petr Janata
Center for Mind and Brain, Psychology, UC Davis
http://atonal.ucdavis.edu/~petr/
Music often evokes vivid autobiographical memories and emotions.
Accordingly, excerpts of music may serve as potent retrieval cues with
which to study the functional architecture of autobiographical memory.
In this talk I will address the question of where the integration of
music with autobiographically salient information might be achieved.
First I will review evidence that attentive listening to music engages
domain-general attention and working memory circuits, and will then
focus on evidence suggesting that the medial prefrontal cortex is a
site for the integration of music, memories, and emotion.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 19 April 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"little b, a language for building mathematical models of
biological systems"
Aneil Mallavarapu
Harvard
http://littleb.org/
Systems biology is increasingly turning to mathematical modeling to
understand the dynamics of molecular pathways. A model builder
translates a high-level description couched in terms of biology and
mechanistic assumptions into one of mathematical variables and
functions. Typically a modeller will need to prepare several related
models. Complexity arising from molecular complex formation and
reaction mechanics means that even small conceptual changes can
require numerous modifications at the mathematical level, making model
preparation both time consuming and error prone. Little b is a
Lisp-based modeling language designed to solve such problems. Current
work focuses on generating ordinary differential equation systems of
single or multi-compartment molecular systems. The core language
provides reasoning and symbolic mathematics capabilities with an
object-oriented framework, enabling users to extend the base
libraries, or develop modeling frameworks of their own.
About the Speaker: Aneil Mallavarapu is Senior Research Scientist at
Harvard Department of Systems Biology, where I helped start the
Virtual Cell Program, and currently lead the little b project. I
worked in the technology group of Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
developing software and hardware for genomics research, and initiated
pathway-centered knowledge management efforts there. I did my PhD in
Cell Biology and Biochemistry at UCSF. There and later at Harvard
Medical School, I studied cytoskeletal dynamics and developed a number
of optical technologies for marking, perturbing and visualizing
proteins in living cells.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 19 April 2007, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
"Statistical Network Analysis and Inference: Methods and Applications"
Eric P. Xing
CMU
Exploring the statistical properties and hidden characteristics of
network entities, and the stochastic processes behind temporal
evolution of network topologies, are essential for computational
knowledge discovery and prediction based on network data from biology,
social sciences and various other fields. In this talk, I first
discuss a hierarchical Bayesian framework that combines the mixed
membership model and the stochastic blockmodel for inferring latent
multi-facet roles of nodes in networks, and for estimating stochastic
relationships (i.e., cooperativeness or antagonisms) between
roles. Then I discuss a new formalism for modeling network evolution
over time based on temporal exponential random graphs, and a MCMC
algorithm for posterior inference of the latent time-specific
networks. The proposed methodology makes it possible to
reverse-engineer the latent sequence of temporally rewiring networks
given longitudinal measurements of node attributes, such as
intensities of gene expressions or social metrics of actors, even when
a single snapshot of such measurement resulted from each
(time-specific) network is available.
Joint with Edo Airoldi, Dave Blei, Steve Fienberg, Fan Guo and Steve
Hanneke
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Thursday, 19 April 2007, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Visual Search: Is it a matter of life and death?"
Jeremy M. Wolfe
Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School
Like Gaul, this talk is divided into three parts: 1) I will give an
introduction to the problem of visual search and to the Guided Search
model that my lab has been working on for a number of years. The
details of Guided Search will be discussed in my other talk. 2) I will
place the problem of search into the larger context of visual
perception and show how our need to use selective attention leads to
some interesting perceptual errors. 3) Finally, in an effort to
convince you that my particular intellectual obsessions are, in fact,
"a matter of life and death." I will discuss an important practical
problem in search. Rare targets are hard to find simply because they
are rare. We ask people to find rare targets in some very important
tasks like airport baggage screening and routine mammography so, if
low target prevalence makes search difficult, this could be a real
problem.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 19 April 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Understanding Students' Learning from Computerized Tutors:
Incorporating Individual Differences in Computational Models"
Anna Rafferty
M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
Cognitive tutors that allow students to interact with a computer for
practice in a particular subject, such as math, are increasingly
appearing in student classrooms. These computer tutors use cognitive
models to track what skills students are learning and what skills
require more practice in order to select future problems; often, these
models must contain relatively few individualized student parameters
due to computational concerns. I will discuss a hybrid approach
emphasizing tractability and customization that can be used to balance
the need for computable cognitive models and more flexibility to
reflect learner characteristics. By using stereotypic student groups,
it is possible to model learning at a level of granularity
intermediate to individual students and the entire population of
students. Additionally, I will examine how particular algorithms can
be used to show that these groups do require different cognitive
models that have greater expressivity than the original model and what
consequences emerge from these differences in models.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 19 April 2007, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Models and Algorithms for Large-scale Networks"
Amin Saberi
Stanford
The issue of performance scalability is of fundamental importance in
complex communications networks. How does congestion scale on the
Internet? At what rate do crawlers discover new web pages? In this
talk, I will focus on the expansion and spectral gap of a network and
show how they help characterize the performance of many algorithms. I
use these concepts to answer the above questions in several families
of random graphs that model the Internet and WWW. I will also talk
about distributed algorithms that can measure, maintain, or improve
these metrics on a large-scale decentralized network such as a
peer-to-peer network.
About the Speaker: Amin Saberi is an Assistant Professor of Management
Science and Engineering and affiliated with the Institute for
Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. He
received his BS from Sharif University in 2000 and his PhD from
Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004. He also was post-doc in the
Theory group at Microsoft Research. He is interested in the design and
analysis of efficient algorithms especially in the areas of
algorithmic game theory and approximation algorithms. His interests
also include modeling, design, and algorithmic analysis of large-scale
complex networks such as the Internet, WWW, or peer-to-peer networks.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 April 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Social perturbations and posited practices:
looking at prototypes as more than immature proto-products"
Elizabeth Churchill
Yahoo!
Prototypes are an effective way of communicating. But communicating
what precisely? This talk explores the role of different types of
prototypes in researching and designing interactive artifacts - I will
emphasize the critical role prototypes play in the exchange and
development of potential product ideas but also in the development of
social theories of action and interaction.
Using notions from innovation management, design studies, social
theory and critical theory, I will illustrate how prototypes are
understood and misunderstood when people talk at cross purposes about
the illustrative intent of the prototype. Using a long term research
project that resulted in a product as an example, I will discuss the
different mock-ups and early prototypes that were used to illustrate
the technical, informational and social concepts that were being
illustrated; each one played a role many times clarifying and
sometimes confusing the conversation between different stakeholders in
the design and production process.
About the Speaker: Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research
scientist at Yahoo! Research, where she is developing the area of
Media Experience Research. Originally a psychologist by training, for
the past 15 years she has drawn on diverse areas to consider how to
design effective communication situations both face to face and
technologically mediated. Influences on her work include psychology,
sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture, and film
studies. Applications developed and/or evaluated include cell phone
interfaces, textual and 3d graphical social interaction environments,
interactive digital posterboards and animated interface
personas. Until 2006 she worked at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center
in Palo Alto, California. Before that she was the project lead of the
Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox's research
lab in Palo Alto.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 20 April 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"We know, therefore I ask"
Ivano Caponigro
UC San Diego
Rhetorical questions constitute an extremely interesting area of
investigation for the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface, given the
mixed properties they exhibit: they look like standard questions, but
are not used like standard questions, nor - it has been claimed - are
interpreted as standard questions. For instance, it has been suggested
that a rhetorical question like the one in (2) "feels" closer in
meaning to the negative statement in (3) rather than to the ordinary
question in (1), though (1) and (2) look identical.
(1) (I am really curious:) what does Onavi know about semantics?
Standard Question
(2) (After all,) what does Onavi know about semantics?
Rhetorical Question
(3) (After all,) Onavi knows nothing about semantics.
Negative Statement
In this talk, I first present evidence that shows that rhetorical
questions are semantically the same as ordinary questions (they allow
for an answer and the answer does not need to be a negative
one). Then, I argue that the differences between rhetorical and
ordinary questions can be accounted for by looking at their
pragmatics, in particular at the different relations the speaker and
the addressee hold with regard to the true answer to the
question. Intuitively, the answer to an ordinary question is not known
to the speaker, while the answer to a rhetorical question is known to
both the speaker and the addressee. I outline a preliminary
implementation of this idea by using Stalnaker's (1978) notion of
Common Ground (CG). Finally, I briefly discuss some predictions that
this pragmatic analysis makes for the typology of questions.
____________
UC SANTA CRUZ WORKSHOP
on Saturday, 21 April 2007, all day
Cowell Conference Room (UC Santa Cruz)
http://ling.ucsc.edu/news_events/poetics/
"Dialogues in Language and Poetry"
In recent years, the formal structure of verbal art has been the
subject of renewed interest for linguists and literary scholars. While
considering the subject from different directions and with different
backgrounds, these approaches seek to reveal the connection between
poetic form and the structure of language in which it is ultimately
grounded. Our workshop, "Dialogues in Language and Poetry," is
intended as a common forum for the diverse group of scholars
interested in these common themes. It consists of a day-long series of
talks addressing the problems of structure and form in poetry from a
variety of perspectives.
On the linguistic side, the study of metrics has been a fruitful
subfield of phonology (the study of sound systems across languages)
for several decades. This work has been couched in the Jakobsonian
hypothesis, which states that the categories utilized in poetic form
are the same that are relevant for phonological grammars of natural
languages. This premise has led to fruitful collaboration between
metrics and linguistic theory: proposals about the organization of
grammar make predictions about metrical form that have been tested on
the actual metrical practice of poets. The new interest in metrics
from phonological theorists has been centered around two main
debates. First, to what extent is the metrical organization of verse a
matter of rhythmic organization? If it is, how can we understand the
structure of meters without a clear rhythmic structure, such as pure
syllabic or `templatic' meters? Second, what is the nature of metrical
variation? No metrical system that has been studied in sufficient
detail is free of optionality, i.e. metrical variants that exist
alongside each other as equally acceptable versions of some general
underlying template, in ways that vary systematically from author to
author. Literary scholars have long been aware of such `metrical
signatures,' and have used the facts about the details of the
distribution of metrical variants to determine authorship of disputed
texts. Likewise, it has become clear in the past decade that variation
is also pervasive in phonological grammars, leading to intense debates
in theoretical phonology about the nature of speakers' knowledge of
optionality. Here, just as in other areas, new ideas in linguistics
make predictions about and are tested on metrical data.
On the literary side, there has been a renewed interest in poetic form
both from poets and scholars. Formal experimentation by authors such
as Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Annie Finch, and other representatives
of the New Formalist movement seek to both bring back the venerable
English iambic pentameter, and to revive more neglected meters and
complex stanza forms. For these poets, strict form offers a way of
challenging the dominant `free verse' tradition, in the spirit of the
old paradox that formal constraints, as long as willingly chosen, have
a liberating potential, echoing Auden's famous dictum: "Metrical rules
that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts,
free us from the fetters of Self." This new enthusiasm about form is
reflected in recent literary scholarship as well. Kristin Hanson's
recent work on the relationship between structure and meaning in
Shakespeare, J. R. Ross's Jakobsonian micro-analyses of poems, and
Derek Attridge's influential work on rhythm in poetry have all
addressed the problems of structure from a variety of perspectives.
Ultimately, both the linguistic and literary approaches to meter
center on a cluster of common problems having to do with the nature of
the relationship between poetic form and linguistic structure,
reflecting the Chomskyan thesis that a generative system of rules is
at the basis of the creative use of language. The general questions
that linguists and scholars of literature address are largely
parallel. Is there such a thing as natural form, and, if so, what
criteria can characterize it? To what extent can it be subverted by
conscious manipulation, or overridden by the accidents of historical
conventions? In what way is the knowledge of metrical conventions
represented in speakers' minds; to what extent is it accessible to
introspection?
The Invited Speakers
Mark W. Edwards is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Stanford
University. From an early stage in his career, his research interests
focused on Homeric language and style, first on the traditional
expressions and later on the typical scenes on which the Homeric
narrative is based. After a number of articles, this work led to a
general book on Homer (1987) and a volume in the six-volume Cambridge
Commentary on the Iliad (1991). He has also had a general interest in
the meters of Greek, Latin, and English poetry, which resulted in 2002
in a book on those topics.
Ellen Louise Hart is Lecturer Emerita of Writing at UCSC. Her
interests lie in literature and democracy, poetry, and Emily
Dickinson. Her numerous articles on Dickinson and her poetry have been
influential. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Dickinson
Electronic Archives, and her textual-critical work has appeared in The
Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Emily Dickinson
Journal, An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia, Tulsa Studies in Women's
Literature, The Women's Review of Books, and The Heath Anthology of
American Literature. In 1998, she co-edited Open Me Carefully: Emily
Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Two essays
will be published in fall 2007: one co-authored with Sandy Chung in A
Companion to Emily Dickinson (Blackwell Publishing), the other in
Wider Than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of
Emily Dickinson (Kent State University Press).
Kristin Hanson is Associate Professor of English at the University of
California, Berkeley. She has taken the generative metrics program in
a wholly new direction, with exciting results. Her work on the
relationship between metrical structure and poetic effects has helped
bridge the gap between the formalist study of linguistic meter and the
humanistic tradition of literary scholarship.
Paul Kiparsky of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University
is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor in the School of
Humanities and Sciences. He has contributed some of the foundational
research in linguistic metrics. His work dealing with topics as
diverse as the meter of the Kalevala, Vedic meters, Shakespeare's
pentameter, and American folk meters have both set the standard in the
field for empirical research and defined the theoretical debates in
it.
Kevin Ryan is a second-year graduate student of Linguistics at UCLA,
specializing in phonology. Having earned his B.A. in Linguistics and
South Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, his language interests include
Tamil, Sanskrit, Georgian, and Mesoamerican languages. Within poetics
he has worked most extensively on the typology of rhyme and
alliteration, especially in the context of pre-modern Dravidian verse.
____________
STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 24 April 2007, 4:30pm
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
"Conditional E-Cash"
Radu Sion
Stony Brook University
We introduce a novel conditional e-cash protocol allowing future
anonymous cashing of bank-issued e-money only upon the satisfaction of
an agreed-upon public condition. Payers are able to remunerate payees
for services that depend on future, yet to be determined outcomes of
events. Once payment complete, any double-spending attempt by the
payer will reveal its identity; no double-spending by the payee is
possible. Payers can not be linked to payees or to ongoing or past
transactions. The flow of cash within the system is thus both correct
and anonymous. We discuss several applications of conditional e-cash
including online trading of financial securities, prediction markets,
and betting systems.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"IT-based Innovation in the 21st Century"
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
VP, Technical Strategy and Innovation, IBM
http://irvingwb.typepad.com/
Advances in information technologies, combined with open standards,
and especially the Internet, are helping us build a global
infrastructure with the potential to transform business, society and
its institutions, and our personal lives, not unlike the impact that
steam power had in ushering the Industrial Revolution in generations
past. The resulting environment is characterized by collaborative
innovation and access to information on an unprecedented scale. It
holds the promise to help us apply engineering disciplines, tools and
processes to the design and management of highly complex systems,
including businesses and organizations, as well as to make
applications much more user-friendly through the use of highly visual,
interactive interfaces.
About the speaker: Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is responsible
for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments
critical to the future of the IT industry, and organizing appropriate
activities in and outside IBM in order to capitalize on them. In
conjunction with that, he leads a number of key innovation-oriented
activities and formulates technology strategy and public policy
positions in support of them. As part of this effort, he is also
responsible for the IBM Academy of Technology and the company's
university relations office.
Dr. Wladawsky-Berger's role in IBM's response to emerging technologies
began in December 1995 when he was charged with formulating IBM's
strategy in the then emerging Internet opportunity, and developing and
bringing to market leading-edge Internet technologies that could be
integrated into IBM's mainstream business. He has led a number of
IBM's company-wide initiatives including Linux, IBM's Next Generation
Internet efforts and its work on Grid computing. Most recently, he led
IBM's on demand business initiative.
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Thursday, 26 April 2007, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Immediate perception and feedforward models of the ventral
steam in viaual cortex: what is next?"
Tomaso Poggio
Brain Sciences, MIT
Understanding the processing of information in our cortex is a
significant part of understanding how the brain works and of
understanding intelligence itself, arguably one of the greatest
problems in science today. In particular, our visual abilities are
computationally amazing and we are still far from imitating them with
computers. Thus, visual cortex may well be a good proxy for the rest
of the cortex and indeed for intelligence itself. But despite enormous
progress in the physiology and anatomy of the visual cortex, our
understanding of the underlying computations remains fragmentary.
I will briefly review hierarchical feedforward quantitative models of
the ventral stream which, heavily constrained by physiology and
biophysics, are surprisingly successful in explaining several
physiological data and psychophysical results in scene categorization.
I will then focus on the limitations of such models for object
recognition, suggesting specific questions about the computational
role of attention and about recognition tasks beyond scene
classification.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 26 April 2007, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Economic-based Mechanisms for Dynamic Spectrum Sharing"
Randall Berry
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University
It is becoming widely recognized that current approaches for
allocating wireless spectrum can result in highly inefficient usage.
Moreover, advances in technology, such as software-defined radio,
offer the promise of implementing new more flexible spectrum sharing
paradigms. These include the use of trading spectrum access on
secondary markets or allowing for more various forms of open access.
In this talk, we describe some simple economic-based mechanisms for
such spectrum sharing approaches. We will consider both the case where
a spectrum manager regulates access to a given band as well as the
"open access" case where there is no manager. In the first case, we
study various auction-mechanisms which the manager may use to allocate
spectrum usage. In the second case, we give a distributed algorithm
which the users must implement to manage spectrum access.
This is joint work with Jianwei Huang and Michael Honig.
About the Speaker: Randall Berry received the B.S. degree in
Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1993
and the M.S. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and
2000 respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at
Northwestern University. During the summer of 2000 he was a
postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision
Systems at MIT. In 1998 he was on the technical staff at MIT Lincoln
Laboratory in the Advanced Networks Group. His primary research
interests include wireless communication, data networks, and
information theory. He is the recipient of a 2003 NSF CAREER award and
the Best Teacher award for the 2001/2002 academic year from the ECE
Department at Northwestern University.
____________
SILICON VALLEY SHANNON LECTURE
on Thursday, 26 April 2007, 7:30pm
Bldg. 380:380C
http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~tylin/ieeesilicon/
"Dataspaces: The Next Frontier to Data Integration"
Alon Halevy
Google
Data integration is a pervasive challenge faced in applications that
need to query across multiple autonomous and heterogeneous data
sources. Data integration is crucial in large enterprises, large-scale
scientific projects, and government agencies. Data integration also
holds the promise of fueling the next revolution of data content on
the Web. This talk will review some the impressive progress on data
integration made in research and in industry, but will argue that
despite the progress, data integration is either still too hard for
most users or does not address the real needs in applications. I will
describe a new abstraction, dataspaces, that attempts to address these
two challenges. I will give examples of data management at Web-scale
at Google that motivate the need for dataspaces.
About the Speaker. Alon Halevy is a member of technical staff at
Google Inc. Before joining Google, Alon was a professor of Computer
Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. Alon is the founder
of two data integration companies, Nimble Technology and Transformic
Inc. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and a 10-year Best Paper Award at
the International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2006) for
his work on data integration. In 2006, Alon was elected Fellow of the
ACM.
____________
WCCFL 26
on Friday-Sunday, 27-29 April 2007, all day
370 Dwinelle (UC Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/wccfl26
26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
Registration is $35 for Students ($45 on the day), $50 for
non-students ($60 on the day).
Invited speakers:
Adam Albright, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lyn Frazier, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin and Zentrum fur
Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 27 April 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Evolving Evaluation from Engineers to Experience:
What History can Teach us About Evaluation in HCI"
Joseph `Jofish'Kaye
Cornell University
http://jofish.com/
Human-Computer Interaction sits at the boundary between technical and
social practice. Unlike entirely technical disciplines, we cannot
always evaluate our work on clearly defined criteria such as
bits-per-second or megahertz. Unlike social science disciplines, our
focus on the /building /of novel technology requires evaluation to
determine what (intended and unintended) effects are induced by that
particularly technology. Over the history of HCI, different criteria
have been key for evaluation, and these criteria have changed and
shifted over time. In this talk, I'll discuss the evolution of HCI's
notion of evaluation, and redefinitions over time of what HCI
considers valid knowledge. I culminate with case studies showing how
this understanding may be of use in light of current questions about
the evaluation of experience-focused rather than task-focused HCI
About the Speaker: Joseph `Jofish'Kaye is a Ph.D Candidate in
Information Science at Cornell University. He recently spent six
months as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and
has also worked with the Domestic Design & Technology Research Group
at Intel and several startups. His work includes ethnographic,
cultural, critical and technological studies of, among other topics,
academics' archiving practices, couples in long distance relationships,
affective computing, ubiquitous computing, social networking, and
smart homes and kitchens. He has a B.S. in Cognitive Science from MIT,
and Masters degrees in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT and Information
Science from Cornell.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 27 April 2007, 3:15pm
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Rationality, Reasoning and Group Agency"
Philip Pettit
Princeton University
The rationality of individual agents is secured for the most part by
their make-up or design. Some agents, however - in particular, human
beings - rely on the intentional exercise of thinking or reasoning in
order to promote their rationality further; this is the activity that
is classically exemplified in Rodin's sculpture of Le Penseur. Do
group agents have to rely on reasoning in order to maintain a rational
profile? Recent results in the theory of judgment aggregation show
that they do. In a slogan: group agents are made, not born.
About the Speaker: Philip Pettit is L.S.Rockeller University Professor
of Politics and Human Values, and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy,
at Princeton University. He works in moral and political theory and on
background issues in philosophical psychology and metaphysics. His
single-authored books include The Common Mind (OUP 1996),
Republicanism (OUP 1997), A Theory of Freedom (OUP 2001) and a
selection of his papers, Rules, Reasons and Norms (OUP 2002). He is
the co-author of Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004), with Geoffrey Brennan;
and Mind, Morality and Explanation (OUP 2004), a selection of papers
with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith. A new book, Made with Words:
Hobbes on Language, Mind and Politics is forthcoming with Princeton
University Press and he is currently working on a book on Group Agents
with Christian List, LSE.
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 27 April 2007, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Mapping the microcircuitry of attention: attentional
modulation varies across cell classes in visual area V4"
John Reynolds
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, UC San Diego
Cortical neurons differ from one another in important ways, including
their neurochemical properties, patterns of connectivity, laminar
distribution, gene expression patterns and developmental
origin. Previous studies of attention have not sought to distinguish
among different classes of neurons. We therefore know almost nothing
about the complex circuitry that transforms attentional feedback
signals into improved visual processing. Studies in the slice and in
anesthetized animals find that parvalbumin expressing GABA-ergic
interneurons with the morphologies of basket and chandelier cells have
short duration action potentials, whereas most excitatory cell classes
have longer duration action potentials, a difference that is due to
expression of different classes of sodium and potassium channels. We
thus examined differences in attentional modulation across visual area
V4 neurons classified on the basis of action potential width. The
distribution of action potential widths in our sample of 179 neurons
was clearly bimodal. Broad spiking neurons made up ~80% of our sample
and exhibited markedly lower levels of spontaneous activity and weaker
stimulus-evoked responses than narrow spiking neurons. Narrow spiking
neurons showed a median increase in firing rate that was more than
five times larger than the increase that was observed among broad
spiking neurons. Attention also reduced response variability, as
measured by the Fano factor. This reduction was significantly larger
among narrow than broad spiking neurons. We also examined the
spike-field coherence (SFC), a measure of response synchronization.
Consistent with earlier studies, we find that high frequency SFC is
increased with attention, but this increase was observed only for
narrow spiking neurons. Both classes of cells showed significant
attention-dependent reductions in low frequency SFC. These findings
lead to the surprising conclusion that attention has a more pronounced
influence on local inhibitory interneurons than on pyramidal neurons.
____________
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