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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 2 May 2007, vol. 22:33
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
2 May 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 33
______________________________________________________________________
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 2 MAY 2007 TO 11 MAY 2007
WEDNESDAY, 2 MAY 2007
all day Berkeley Cognitive Computing 2007 Conference [2-May-07]
Auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum
http://www.citris-uc.org/CognitiveComputing07
Information below
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [2-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Causal reasoning in children"
Jay McClelland
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12 noon UC Berkeley Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium
5101 Tolman (Berkeley) [2-May-07]
"Mediation in Multilevel Models"
Niall Bolger,
Psychology, Columbia University
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [2-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
BJ Casey,
Weill Medical College
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [2-May-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Taking Concurrency Seriously:
New Directions in Multiprocessor Synchronization"
Maurice Herlihy
Brown University
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 3 MAY 2007
all day Berkeley Cognitive Computing 2007 Conference [3-May-07]
Auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum
http://www.citris-uc.org/CognitiveComputing07
Information below
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [3-May-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"Conditional Intentions and Planning"
Luca Ferrero
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~ferrero/
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12 noon Music 319: CCRMA Hearing Seminar [3-May-07]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"A Neural Implementation of Top-down Processing in Auditory Cortex"
Malcolm Slaney
Yahoo! Research and CCRMA
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
3:30pm History of Science Colloquium [3-May-07]
Bldg 200:307 (History Corner)
"Data Extinction: How Does Information Disappear?"
two talks
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/colloquia.html
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [3-May-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Fuels and Chemicals from Renewable Resources:
An Industrial Renaissance?"
Douglas C. Cameron
Khosla Ventures
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [3-May-07]
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"Apprenticeship learning for robotic control, with application
to autonomous helicopter flight"
Pieter Abbeel
Stanford
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley HWNI Talk [3-May-07]
434 Barker Hall (Berkeley)
"The role of human primary olfactory cortex"
Christina Zelano
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [3-May-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Geometric Approaches to Polyphonic Music Similarity"
Christian Romming
Computer Science, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [3-May-07]
Packard 101
"Optimization Beyond Optimality: New Trends in Networking Applications"
Mung Chiang
Princeton
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 4 MAY 2007
11:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [4-May-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Hypermedia Discourse: Theory and Technology for the Pragmatic Web?"
Simon Buckingham Shum
The Open University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
12 noon Ethics@Noon [4-May-07]
Bldg. 60:61H
"The Stanford Housing Draw - Who should live where?"
Marc Pauly
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
Abstract below
12 noon Asian Linguistics and Language Colloquium [4-May-07]
Bldg. 50:51A (Asian Languages Library)
"How Iconicity Works in Basho's Haiku"
Masako Hiraga
Rikkyo University/U.C. Berkeley
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/asianlang/
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [4-May-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Knowledge Media to Aid Multimedia Communications and Human Cognition"
Ron Baecker
University of Toronto
http://kmdi.utoronto.ca/rmb/
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:15pm Fourth Annual QP Fest [4-May-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Several talks
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/qp-fest/2007/
Information below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [4-May-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"What's Going on in Research Libraries?"
Bernie Hurley
University Library
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s07/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [4-May-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Politics and the Good: Reflections on Rawls"
Richard Kraut
Northwestern University
http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/people/kraut.html
Co-sponsor: Classics Department
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [4-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Metaphorical meaning in motion"
Sandra Lozano & Daniel Casasanto
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm SRI CSL Seminar Series [4-May-07]
EK255, SRI International
"Finding network modules by ranking pathways"
Dusko Pavlovic
Kestrel
http://www.csl.sri.com/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [4-May-07]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Visual Working Memory: Representation, Process, & Function"
Steven J. Luck
Psychology, Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Group in Logic and Methodology of Science [4-May-07]
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"A Correctness Result for Canonical Inner Models"
John R. Steel
UC Berkeley
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
SATURDAY, 5 MAY 2007
all day UC Berkeley - Stanford Social Psychology talks [5-May-07]
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
MONDAY, 7 MAY 2007
2:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [7-May-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Donkey Pluralities:
Plural Information States vs. Non-atomic Individuals"
Adrian Brasoveanu
UCSC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
3:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [7-May-07]
Bldg. 380:380D (math corner)
Title to be announced
Patrick Girard
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium [7-May-07]
Hewlett Teaching Center 200
"Navigating the World's Photographs"
Steve Seitz
Computer Science, University of Washington
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 8 MAY 2007
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [8-May-07]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"The Current State of Phishing Attacks"
Zulfikar Ramzan
Symantec
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
Abstract below
7:30pm BayCHI [8-May-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"A MeshWalk down the street - connections, communications, and
networked economics"
Shannon Clark
co-founder of nela.mobi, founder/organizer of MeshForum
"8 Ways to Mobilize Your Web Product"
Jonathan Grubb
a founder of Satisfaction Unlimited, co-founder and design
director Rubyred Labs
http://www.baychi.org/program/
WEDNESDAY, 9 MAY 2007
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [9-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Vision and Perception Neuroscience"
Golijeh Golarai
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [9-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Daniel Pine
National Institute of Mental Health
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [9-May-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
Title to be announced
Catherine H. Crawford
IBM Systems & Technology Group
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [9-May-07]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Exploratory Mining in Cube Space"
Raghu Ramakrishnan
VP and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 10 MAY 2007
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [10-May-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Mobile Persuasion Technology and Disclosive Behavior Change"
Dean Eckles
Symbolic Systems Program
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [10-May-07]
Packard 101
"Capacity and dependence in communication networks"
Michael Gastpar
UC Berkeley
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 11 MAY 2007
11:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [11-May-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Towards Practical Heterogeneous Teams"
Paul Scerri
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [11-May-07]
Bldg. 60:62J
"Three Logical Views of Information, and Counting..."
Johan van Benthem
Stanford University & University of Amsterdam
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [11-May-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments:
Searching for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker and other Elusive Creatures"
Ken Goldberg
IEOR and EECS, UC Berkeley
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm Workshop on Neurosystems [11-May-07]
Clark Center (S 361)
http://www.stanford.edu/~scheler/neurosystems.html
Information below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [11-May-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
Title to be announced
Charles Parsons
Harvard University (Visiting UCLA)
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~phildept/parsons.html
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [11-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
David Noelle
UC Merced
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [11-May-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Title to be announced
Geoffrey Nunberg
UC Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, A-, B-, and AB-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.
____________
BERKELEY COGNITIVE COMPUTING 2007 CONFERENCE
on 2, 3 May 2007, all day
Auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum
http://www.citris-uc.org/CognitiveComputing07
registration required but free
"A Multi-disciplinary Synthesis of Neuroscience, Computer Science,
Mathematics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Information Theory"
WHAT IS COGNITIVE COMPUTING? Cognitive Computing is when computer
science meets neuroscience to explain and implement psychology.
We have, in the brain and nervous system, an information processing
system unrivalled by artificial means. While it trails machines in
accuracy and mathematical computation, it wins on adaptability,
flexibility, functionality, and parallelism. The ultimate goal is to
reverse engineer enough of this system so that the design principles
can be applied to building robust and adaptable computer systems.
Cognitive Computing is different from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
Neural Networks (NN). From the outset, AI ignored neurobiology. While
neural networks started from biological motivation, they too quickly
discarded biological plausibility. In both cases, the approach has
been to focus on a suitable problem, and to offer a "symbolic" or
"neural network" solution to it. The brain, however, works in exactly
the opposite fashion, it has evolved a solution that allows it to deal
with problems as they arise.
AI and NN technologies take one or more cognitive phenomena exhibited
by the brain as a starting point and then try to replicate that
capability by inventing algorithms/learning rules. In contrast, CC is
about learning how the brain operates, about algorithms, about
diligent reverse engineering and testing plausible models.
Cognitive Computing is about engineering the mind by reverse
engineering the brain.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 3 May 2007, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Conditional Intentions and Planning"
Luca Ferrero
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~ferrero/
Although we often express our intentions in the categorical form 'I
intend to ?' or 'I will ?', we usually do not mean to say that we
intend to ? *no matter what*. For most intentions there is at least a
condition C such that the intention would be better described as the
intention to ? if C. Despite the familiarity of conditional intentions
(and the large literature on related issues¯such as indicative
conditionals and conditional obligations), conditional intentions have
been surprisingly neglected in the philosophical literature. This
neglect could be justified if accounting for conditional intentions
were a straightforward matter. But this is not so. Conditional
intentions raise many puzzling questions. As a partial list, consider
the following issues. First, there are many different ways of
interpreting the role of the condition in avowals of intentions. Does
the condition qualify the acquisition, justification, or object of the
intention? Second, are clauses such as 'if I can', 'if I do not change
my mind', 'if I am alive' genuine conditions on intentions? Third,
under which circumstances is a conditional intention to ? if C
satisfied? Does the falsity of C count? What is the agent supposed to
do if she has the ability and opportunity to influence the occurrence
of C, while she holds the conditional intention to ? if C? Fourth,
what is the relation between conditional intentions and contingency
planning? Is a conditional intention is weaker kind of commitment than
an unconditional one?
In this talk, I will offer a sketch of an account of the different
kinds of conditional intentions that avoids some of the confusions
generated by the conflation between what I will call external
conditions, internal conditions, and necessary preconditions of an
intention. I will then try to answer some of the questions raise
above, with particular attention to what is distinctive of conditional
intentions as planning attitudes with respect to other conditional
attitudes and speech acts.
____________
MUSIC 319: CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 3 May 2007, 12 noon
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
"A Neural Implementation of Top-down Processing in Auditory Cortex"
Malcolm Slaney
Yahoo! Research and CCRMA
At the next CCRMA Hearing Seminar, I want to talk about some work that
we did at the 2006 Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop.
For the last few years we've been very interested in how auditory
cortex works and, perhaps more importantly, how top-down information
flows in the brain. At last summer's workshop a number of us worked
to implement Rodney Douglas' ideas called a Relational Network, a
network of neurons that are constrained to satisfy a set of relations.
In our work, we use the constraints to enforce language constraints.
I'll talk about the software and the hardware implementation of these
ideas.
This is a very preliminary talk. Think about it more like a
discussion. But we do have results, and I can talk about the neural
chips that we used in Telluride to simulate this architecture.
Bring your auditory cortex and we'll see if we can make any progress
deciphering its architecture.
____________
HISTORY OF SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM
on Thursday, 3 May 2007, 3:30pm
Bldg. 200:307 (History)
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/colloquia.html
"Data Extinction: How Does Information Disappear?"
"Disappearing Data: Incentives, Disincentives, and Neglect"
Christine L. Borgman
Information Studies, UCLA
While a central goal of cyberinfrastructure and e-Science is to
improve the use and reuse of research data, massive amounts of
research data cease to exist each year. The disappearance of data
represents not only the loss of expensive intellectual resources, it
represents a huge opportunity cost for comparative and longitudinal
research. Relatively little is understood about the scholarly
practices associated with data that lead to use and reuse. The talk
will present several scenarios of unintentional data loss, mostly in
the sciences, discussing situations in which data are lost due to
incentives not to maintain them, to the lack of incentives to maintain
them, or due to neglect (benign and otherwise).
"Disappearance and Reality: The Practice of Forgetting"
Geoffrey Bowker and Dianne McKenna
Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University
Analyzes various modalities of forgetting used in science and business
and their relationship to information infrastructure.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 3 May 2007, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
"Apprenticeship learning for robotic control, with application
to autonomous helicopter flight"
Pieter Abbeel
Stanford
Many problems in control have unknown, stochastic, and highly
non-linear dynamics, and offer significant challenges to classical
control methods. Some of the key difficulties in these problems are
that (i) It is often hard to write down, in closed form, a formal
specification of the control task (for example, what is the objective
function for "driving well"?), (ii) It is difficult to learn good
control---as opposed to merely descriptive---models of the dynamics
(cf. the "exploration problem" in reinforcement learning), and (iii)
It is expensive to find closed-loop controllers for high dimensional,
highly stochastic domains. In this talk, I will present formal
results showing how these problems can be efficiently addressed in the
apprenticeship learning setting, in which expert demonstrations of the
task are available. I will also present an application of our ideas
to autonomous helicopter flight. Our results significantly extend the
state of the art in helicopter control, and include the first
successful completion of the following four aerobatic flight
maneuvers: in-place forward flip and sideways roll, nose-in funnel,
and tail-in funnel.
About the Speaker: Pieter Abbeel is a PhD student in Prof. Andrew Ng's
group at Stanford University. His research interests include machine
learning, robotics, and control.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 3 May 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Geometric Approaches to Polyphonic Music Similarity"
Christian Romming
Computer Science, Stanford
As the amount of digitally encoded symbolic music increases, methods
for content-based retrieval become more important. The first
algorithms developed for this purpose used ideas from the text
retrieval paradigm, but more recently methods involving geometric
representations and algorithms have become more popular. We present
the basics of geometric representation of symbolic music, as well as
work in progress on retrieval algorithms.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 11:00am
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Hypermedia Discourse: Theory and Technology for the Pragmatic Web?"
Simon Buckingham Shum
The Open University
The Hypermedia Discourse research programme is investigating theory
and technology at the nexus of these two fields, building and
evaluating tools for contesting ideas as networks grounded in
discourse schemes. Were striving for representations that are both
cognitively and computationally tractable: fluid enough to serve as
augmentations to group working memory, yet structured enough to
support long term memory. I will describe how such networks can be (i)
mapped by multiple analysts to visualize and interrogate the claims
and arguments in a literature, and (ii) mapped in real time to manage
a teams information sources, competing interpretations, arguments and
decisions, particularly in time-pressured scenarios where harnessing
collective intelligence is a priority. Ill include case studies from
the NASA Mobile Agents project, and personnel recovery in a
DARPA-PMESII exercise. I then reflect on the emergence of interest in
Pragmatic Webs where context, conversation and commitment are of
central importance. Hypermedia Discourse may exemplify how web
pragmatics complement social web semantics.
About the Speaker: Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer at the
UK Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, and leads the
Hypermedia Discourse project. With a background in Cognitive
Ergonomics (UCL) and HCI (York), he has worked on visual hypertext for
mapping argumentation since his PhD work on Design Rationale at Xerox
EuroPARC in 1990. "Visualizing Argumentation" (Springer, 2003) brought
together leading figures in argument mapping, and "Knowledge
Cartography" (2007) expands this. He is a PI/CI on several US/UK
sensemaking technology projects, and is a co-founder of the Compendium
Institute, with his group leading development of the Compendium tool
for Conversational Modelling. He is Co-Chair of the 2nd Int. Conf. on
the Pragmatic Web.
____________
ETHICS@NOON
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 12 noon
Bldg. 60:61H
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
"The Stanford Housing Draw - Who should live where?"
Marc Pauly
Philosophy, Stanford
Every year, Stanford undergraduates contemplate where they want to
live the following year. In order to participate in the Stanford
Housing draw, they need to form draw groups and decide on a common
list of housing preferences. But given these preferences, how should
students be assigned to houses? What criteria of fairness are
available? And which of these criteria does the current mechanism
actually meet?
____________
ASIAN LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 12 noon
Bldg. 50:51A (Asian Languages Library)
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/asianlang/
"How Iconicity Works in Basho's Haiku"
Masako Hiraga
Rikkyo University/U.C. Berkeley
This presentation focuses on the styles of meaning creation by
metaphor and iconicity in Basho's haiku. The analysis particularly
looks at the revising process of his two haiku texts, in terms of
semantics, phonology, and orthography. Through a detailed analysis of
1) the grammatical and rhetorical structure, 2) local and global
metaphors, 3) background knowledge, 4) sound patterns, and 5) the use
of kanji as a cognitive medium, it attempts to clarify how the
principle of iconicity contributes to enhancing the music and image of
the text in the revising process. At the same time, issues of
translation will be discussed in relation to iconicity.
About the Speaker: Masako K. Hiraga, Ph.D. is professor of English and
Linguistics at the Graduate School of Intercultural Communication,
Rikkyo University, Tokyo. She completed her Ph.D. in Applied
Linguistics at the University of London in 2000. She is currently a
Fulbright visiting scholar at the linguistics department, in
U.C. Berkeley.
Professor Hiraga's research interests include Poetics, Cognitive
Linguistics, and Pragmatics, with a strong focus on the workings of
metaphor and iconicity in both written and spoken discourse. Her
recent publications include Cultural, Psychological and Typological
Issues in Cognitive Linguistics (John Benjamins, 1999), Metaphor and
Iconicity: A Cognitive Approach to Analyzing Texts (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005).
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Knowledge Media to Aid Multimedia Communications and Human Cognition"
Ron Baecker
University of Toronto
http://kmdi.utoronto.ca/rmb/
Knowledge media were anticipated although not named as such in seminal
papers by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and JCR Licklider in 1960. This talk
reviews 40 years (1966-2006) of my work in the design of knowledge
media for multimedia communications, and previews 40 years (2001-2041)
of work in the design of knowledge media that aid human cognition.
The review of tools for multimedia communications begins with a
seminal interactive computer animation system, digresses to a landmark
example of algorithm animation, returns to the main thread with tools
for creating and publishing structured digital videos (including our
current ePresence Interactive Media system), and concludes with an
attempt to abstract lessons learned.
I will then describe current work (funded by the Alzheimer's
Association) in the participatory design of DVD-based multimedia
biographies for individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or mild
cognitive impairment (MCI) and their families. Result from this last
project are aids to cognition, specifically, the memory process of
reminiscence by AD or MCI individuals.
Since demographers forecast significant increases in the numbers of
senior citizens and in the prevalence of cognitive impairments caused
by afflictions such as AD, it is compelling to consider how
information technology, and especially advances in mobile, ubiquitous,
and multimedia computing, could allow us to create powerful new aids
to cognition. I have therefore begun a research programme to
envision, prototype, design, construct, and evaluate powerful and
flexible electronic cognitive aids. These should help people,
including individuals who are aging and who have cognitive
impairments, carry out activities of daily living; remember names,
faces, and appointments; find objects of importance, such as glasses,
wallets, and keys; understand and remember procedural instructions,
such as taking medications; reminisce about their lives; and
communicate with distant loved ones.
I shall then describe one other current project, the work of PhD
student Mike Wu with individuals who have anterograde amnesia and
their families, and conclude with mention of several projects that
illustrate different points in the design space of technological aids
to cognition. Of particular interest is whether the technology is
intended as a prosthesis, or as an aid to rehabilitation, or most
ambitiously as a mechanism for prevention, e.g., helping to delay
cognitive decline.
About the Speaker: Ron Baecker is Professor of Computer Science, Bell
University Laboratories Chair in Human-Computer Interaction, founder
and Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the
University of Toronto, and Affiliate Scientist with Baycrest's
Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit. Baecker is Principal
Investigator of the Canada-wide Network for Effective Collaboration
Technologies through Advanced Research (NECTAR), has been named one of
the 60 Pioneers of Computer Graphics by ACM SIGGRAPH, has been elected
to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and has been awarded the Canadian
Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. He has
published over 125 papers and articles, is author or co-author of 4
books, and has founded and run 2 software companies. His current
University of Toronto "entrepreneurial" venture ( http://epresence.tv/ )
develops and distributes the open source ePresence Interactive Media
system.
____________
FOURTH ANNUAL QP FEST
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 2:15pm - 4:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/qp-fest/2007/
Session I
2:15pm-2:45pm Olga Dmitrieva
"Consonant length in Russian:
Sociolinguistic and linguistic constraints"
2:45pm-3:15pm Yuan Zhao
"The effect of lexical frequency on tone space dispersion:
Evidence from Cantonese tone production"
3:15pm-3:30pm Break
Session II
3:30pm-4:00pm Anubha Kothari
"Accented pronouns and unusual antecedents: A corpus study"
4:00pm-4:30pm Hal Tily
"Phonetic effects of syntactic probability"
4:30pm Close, Social
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s07/schedule.html
"What's Going on in Research Libraries?"
Bernie Hurley
University Library
We'll spend some time discussing the Google Book scanning project and
the University of California's involvement, the UC Libraries
Bibliographic Services Task Force Report. Executive summary at
http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/ExecSum.pdf and
how this all relates to the future of research libraries. And more.
Last meeting of the semester, the seminar will resume in the Fall
semester on August 31.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 3:15pm
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Politics and the Good: Reflections on Rawls"
Richard Kraut
Northwestern University
http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/people/kraut.html
Co-sponsor: Classics Department
I propose a conception of the good that provides a suitable guide for
the design of political institutions and the conduct of citizens. It
is the sort of conception that John Rawls calls "comprehensive," in
that it is applicable to all spheres of life, and not merely the
political realm. Part of my goal will be to challenge his thesis that
citizens of free and democratic regimes should carry out their
collective deliberations by employing what he calls a "political"
conception of the good, one that makes no claims about what is
valuable outside the political realm. A neglected feature of Rawls's
approach is that he conceives of goodness (for political purposes) as
the achievement of rational aims that would survive deliberative
scrutiny. Goodness as rationality (as he calls it) is, I believe, a
deeply flawed theory of human well-being. One of its defects is that
it does not adequately explain what is good about some of the most
valuable institutions of modern political life -institutions that
assure us of religious liberty, free choice of occupations and
marriage partners, and so on. We can arrive at a deeper understanding
of what is valuable in the major components of liberal regimes if we
take goodness to consist not in rational action but in the flourishing
of human powers - an Aristotelian idea whose value for political
philosophy Rawls underestimates.
About the Speaker: Richard Kraut is Charles and Emma Morrison
Professor in the Humanities. His interests include moral and
political philosophy, particularly in Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle. He is the author of Socrates and the State (Princeton:
1984), Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: 1989); and Aristotle
Politics Books VII and VIII, translation with commentary (Clarendon:
1997), as well as of Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford:
2002). He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992) and
Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Rowman &;Littlefield, 1997). He has
also written on contemporary issues in ethics and political
philosophy. His most recent book is entitled What is Good and Why: The
Ethics of Well-Being (Harvard, 2007). In 2006 he became a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
____________
SRI CSL SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 3:30pm-4:30pm
EK255, SRI International
http://www.csl.sri.com/
"Finding network modules by ranking pathways"
Dusko Pavlovic
Kestrel Institute
Computer networks, social networks, food webs, protein interactions,
genetic regulatory networks, and many other distributed computational
systems share not just the underlying structures, but also the modes
of information processing. Moreover, they share the problems of scope
and scaling. In order to understand, control, and sometimes secure the
correct functioning of complex networks, we need to decompose them
into smaller, more manageable parts. One aspect of this task is
addressed in the large body of work on graph partition, clustering and
classification, which seeks to identify those network nodes which play
similar roles. A more recent effort has been directed towards
developing the methods to recognize and structure the functional
network subunits, spanned by the nodes which act together. Such
functional subunits are often called modules.
In this talk, I shall briefly survey the problem of network
modularity, and argue that it requires an analysis of network
information flows, and not just of the link structure. As a step in
this direction, I shall present a method for extracting modules from a
network, and for recognizing their own network structure, based on the
idea of ranking the pathways that carry the information flows.
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 4 May 2007, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Visual Working Memory: Representation, Process, & Function"
Steven J. Luck
Psychology, Center for Mind and Brain, UC Davis
Visual working memory is a short-term storage system that allows
visual information to be buffered briefly in the service of cognitive
tasks. I will describe our research addressing the nature of the
representations that are stored in this system, the processes that
create and use these representations, and an example of an important
but underappreciated real-world visual task that makes use of this
system. Specifically, I will discuss evidence indicating that
integrated objects (or object parts) are the fundamental storage units
in visual working memory and evidence indicating that the process of
creating representations is highly resource-demanding, whereas the
process of comparing these representations with new sensory
information is fast and highly efficient. I will also describe studies
showing that this memory system plays an important role in the control
of eye movements, allowing us to rapidly recover from the errors that
commonly occur as we try to fixate objects in the periphery. Finally,
I will provide psychophysical evidence concerning the resolution of
these representations.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Monday, 7 May 2007, 2:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Donkey Pluralities:
Plural Information States vs. Non-atomic Individuals"
Adrian Brasoveanu
UCSC
The talk argues that two distinct and independent notions of plurality
are involved in natural language anaphora and quantification: plural
reference (the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse
reference, i.e. reference to a quantificational dependency between
sets of objects (e.g. atomic / non-atomic individuals) that is
established and subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. Following
van den Berg (1996), plural discourse reference is modeled as plural
information states (i.e. as sets of variable assignments) in a new
dynamic system couched in classical type logic that extends
Compositional DRT (Muskens 1996). Given the underlying type logic,
compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and
standard techniques from Montague semantics (e.g. type shifting)
become available. The idea that plural info states are semantically
necessary (over and above non-atomic individuals) is motivated by
relative-clause donkey sentences with multiple instances of singular
donkey anaphora. At the same time, allowing for non-atomic individuals
over and above plural info states enables us to capture the intuitive
parallels between singular and plural (donkey) anaphora, while
deriving the incompatibility between singular donkey anaphora and
collective predicates.
References: Van den Berg, M.: 1996. Some Aspects of the Internal
Structure of Discourse. The Dynamics of Nominal Anaphora, PhD
dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Muskens, R.: 1996. Combining
Montague Semantics and Discourse Representation, Linguistics and
Philosophy 19, 143-186.
____________
CS528: BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 7 May 2007, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Hewlett Teaching Center 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
"Navigating the World's Photographs"
Steve Seitz
Computer Science, University of Washington
There's a big difference between looking at a photograph of a place
and being there. But what if you had access to every photo ever
captured of that place and could conjure up any view at will? With
billions of photographs currently available online, the Internet is
beginning to resemble such a database, capturing most of the world's
significant sites from a huge number of vantage points and viewing
conditions. For example, a Google image search for "notre dame" or
"grand canyon" each returns more than half a million photos, showing
the sites from myriad viewpoints, different times of day and night,
and changes in season, weather and decade. This talk explores ways of
transforming this massive, unorganized photo collection into
visualizations of the world's sites, cities, and landscapes. After a
brief recap of our work on Photo Tourism and Photosynth, I will focus
on current efforts and newest results, in the domains of 3D scene
reconstruction and new visual interfaces for navigating photo
collections.
About the Speaker: Steven Seitz is Short-Dooley Associate Professor in
the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University
of Washington. He received his B.A. in computer science and
mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his
Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in
1997. Following his doctoral work, he spent one year visiting the
Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, and subsequently two
years as an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie
Mellon University. He joined the faculty at the University of
Washington in July 2000. He was twice awarded the David Marr Prize for
the best paper at the International Conference of Computer Vision, and
has received an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and
an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. Professor Seitz is interested in
problems in computer vision and computer graphics. His current
research focuses on capturing the structure, appearance, and behavior
of the real world from digital imagery.
____________
STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 8 May 2007, 4:30pm
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
"The Current State of Phishing Attacks"
Zulfikar Ramzan
Symantec
Phishing is the act of sending a fake email, to a user, appearing to
originate from a legitimate institution with which the user transacts
(e.g., their bank, credit card company, etc). The email directs the
user to a spoofed web site and asks for sensitive information (e.g.,
usernames/passwords, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, social
security numbers, etc.); in the hands of a malicious party, leaking
this sensitive information is very dangerous. While it used to be easy
to tell apart a phishing attempt from a legitimate email, phishers
have started to using techniques of ever-increasing sophistication. As
a result, phishing has catapulted into a major component of the new
threat landscape.
This talk will survey the current state of phishing attacks,
leveraging real-world data obtained through Symantec's data collection
fabric. We will describe:
* The overall magnitude of the threat, including seasonal &
day-of-week effects, geographic distinctions, spoofed brand
segmentation, and geographic/population targets;
* The latest trends in attacks that have actually been mounted and
how phishers are trying to circumvent existing countermeasures.
The talk will be self contained and assumes no prior knowledge of the
phishing threat.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 9 May 2007, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
"Exploratory Mining in Cube Space"
Raghu Ramakrishnan
VP and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~raghu/
Data Mining has evolved as a new discipline at the intersection of
several existing areas, including Database Systems, Machine Learning,
Optimization, and Statistics. An important question is whether the
field has matured to the point where it has originated substantial new
problems and techniques that distinguish it from its parent
disciplines. In this talk, we will discuss a class of new problems and
techniques that show great promise for exploratory mining, while
synthesizing and generalizing ideas from the parent disciplines. While
the class of problems we discuss is broad, there is a common
underlying objective-to look beyond a single data mining step (e.g.,
data summarization or model construction) and address the combined
process of data selection and transformation, parameter and algorithm
selection, and model construction. The fundamental difficulty lies in
the large space of alternative choices at each step, and good
solutions must provide a natural framework for managing this
complexity. We regard this as a grand challenge for Data Mining, and
see the ideas in this talk as promising initial steps towards a
rigorous exploratory framework that supports the entire process.
This is joint work with several people, in particular, Beechung Chen.
About the Speaker Raghu Ramakrishnan is VP and Research Fellow at
Yahoo! Research, where he heads the Community Systems group. He is on
leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Professor
of Computer Sciences, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that
pioneered question-answering communities such as Yahoo! Answers, and
provided collaborative customer support for several companies,
including Compaq and Sun. His research is in the area of database
systems, with a focus on data retrieval, analysis, and mining. He has
developed scalable algorithms for clustering, decision-tree
construction, and itemset counting, and was among the first to
investigate mining of continuously evolving, stream data. His work on
query optimization and deductive databases has found its way into
several commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to
deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window
functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm
received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the
widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (WCB/McGraw-Hill, with
J. Gehrke), now in its third edition.
He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and
the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and has served as
editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery,
associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the
Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming. Dr.
Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM), and has received several awards, including a Packard Foundation
Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an ACM
SIGMOD Contributions Award.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 10 May 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Mobile Persuasion Technology and Disclosive Behavior Change"
Dean Eckles
Symbolic Systems Program
Interactive technology can be designed to persuade -- and mobile
devices are uniquely equipped and situated to change user behavior in
many domains. This talk has two parts. First, I consider how mobile
persuasive technology reshapes the contours of persuasion and
influence; I introduce the idea of persuasive faculties. Second, I
report on the new experimental study of strategies for changing the
self-disclosure behavior of mobile users. Both different influence
strategies and ways of representing the requester are studied. This
and on-going work has implications for the design of interactive
systems and understanding influence -- in persuasive technology and
more generally.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 11 May 2007, 11:00am
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Towards Practical Heterogeneous Teams"
Paul Scerri
Carnegie Mellon University
The process of taking well developed theories of teamwork and creating
large, practical, heterogeneous teams has revealed new challenges
requiring novel solutions. In this talk, I will discuss some of the
challenges and the solutions we have developed. Specifically, I will
focus on the use of *tokens* as an abstraction for scalable and robust
coordination algorithms. Tokens encapsulate both information and
control, thus allowing agents to make local decisions that are likely
to lead to good global behavior. A key to many of our scalable
coordination algorithms is that locally improbable events become
highly likely on a large scale. These algorithms often use orders of
magnitude less communication than optimal approaches while performing
almost as well. I will also discuss some of the additional algorithms,
e.g., meta-reasoning, that are useful for practical environments.
Finally, I will describe applications of the approach to a variety of
projects and open issues raised by specific projects.
About the Speaker: Paul Scerri is a Systems Scientist at Carnegie
Mellon University. Since 1997, when his RoboCup football simulation
team won a game at the first world championships, Paul has been
dedicated to building bigger and better teams (because his team also
lost two games and he is very competitive). Currently, much of his
focus is on heterogeneous teams with a mixture of robots, agents and
people. His thesis work, conducted at Linkoping University and USC,
and post-doctoral work at USC, looked specifically at how humans and
agents can flexibly work together, transferring control in a way that
maximizes overall team reward. Since then, he has been trying to make
bigger and bigger teams for a variety of domains. Most recently Paul
has been building heterogeneous teams of unmanned aerial vehicles
which isn't half as much fun as RoboCup soccer, but uses many of the
same algorithms and makes for some really cool demos.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 11 May 2007, 12 noon
Bldg. 60:62J
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
"Three Logical Views of Information, and Counting..."
Johan van Benthem
Stanford University & University of Amsterdam
Logic has implicit views of what information is, but no official
story. This hurts when one wants to put logic on the map as a paradigm
of meaningful information, as has been proposed in recent
epistemology. We will distinguish at least three major senses of
logical information: information-as-range, information-as-correlation,
and information-as-elucidation. These may be associated, respectively,
with epistemic logic, situation theory, and (perhaps: it's a
surprisingly tricky issue) proof theory and related
combinatorial/computational frameworks. We will map out the three
views, discuss their connections, and point out the many open problems
that remain. The background: a similar diversity reigns in information
theories generally, and there may not even be one Grand Unification
serving all needs.
P. Adriaan & J. van Benthem, eds., 2007, "Handbook of the Philosophy
of Information", Elsevier, Amsterdam.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 11 May 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments:
Searching for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker and other Elusive Creatures"
Ken Goldberg
IEOR and EECS, UC Berkeley
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/
I'll describe a new class of systems that combine networks, robots,
cameras, sensors, actuators, and human input to observe and record
detailed animal behavior in remote settings. In one application, we
are assisting the Cornell team that is searching a remote area of
Arkansas for the elusive Ivory Billed Woodpecker, thought extinct
since the 1940s.
I'll present a series of results on robots collaboratively controlled
by humans via networks. My lab has been investigating the algorithmic
foundations for such observatories: new metrics, models, data
structures, and algorithms, that will comprise a robust, mathematical
framework for collaborative observation. Newly available robotic
cameras offer pan, tilt, and extreme zoom capabilities with built-in
network servers at low cost. These cameras motivate the Single Frame
Selection (SFS) problem, where $n$ users share control of a single
robotic camera. I'll present several algorithms, O(n^2 m) for a set of
m zoom levels, and O((n + 1/\epsilon^3) log^2 n) for an infinite set
of zoom levels. The algorithms can be distributed to run in O(n m)
time at each client and in O(n \log n) time at the server. We are
building prototypes that will be accessible via the internet to
scientists, students, and the public
worldwide. http://www.c-o-n-e.org/
This work is joint with Prof. Dez Song at Texas A&M and supported in
part by the National Science Foundation.
About the Speaker: Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor at UC
Berkeley. He is Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations
Research, with an appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science. He received his PhD in Computer Science from CMU in 1990 and
studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Edinburgh University, and
the Technion. From 1991-95 he taught at the University of Southern
California, and in Fall 2000 was visiting faculty at MIT Media Lab.
Goldberg and his students work in two areas: Geometric Algorithms for
Automation, and Networked Robots. In the first category, he develops
algorithms for feeding, sorting, and fixturing industrial parts, with
an emphasis on mathematically rigorous solutions that require a
minimum of sensing and actuation so as to reduce costs and increase
reliability. In the area of Networked Robots, Goldberg and colleagues
developed the first robot publically operable via the Internet (in
1994). He has published over 100 research papers and edited four
books. In 2004, Goldberg co-founded the IEEE Transactions on
Automation Science and Engineering and is Founding Chair of its
Advisory Board. Goldberg was named National Science Foundation Young
Investigator in 1994 and NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow in 1995. He
is the recipient of the Joseph Engelberger Award (2000), the IEEE
Major Educational Innovation Award (2001) and was elected IEEE Fellow
in 2005.
____________
WORKSHOP ON NEUROSYSTEMS
on Friday, 11 May 2007, 2:00pm - 6:00pm
Clark Center (S 361)
http://www.stanford.edu/~scheler/neurosystems.html
Several researchers from UCSF and Stanford will discuss exciting new
results on the brain and computing with neuronal circuits. This
research raises new questions on addiction, motivation and learning,
based on analyses in different brain regions - hippocampus, amygdala,
the dopamine system, cortex and cerebellum.
The event is free for all interested participants, pre-registration is
not required.
The goal of the meeting is to put together related approaches on
understanding neural activation and to discuss the systemic issues
involved. There will be a focus on making experimental results
transparent with respect to the general methodological and theoretical
considerations that go into it. The discussions during the workshop
should aim to find common themes among the different neural systems
(striatum, cerebellum, cortex, hippocampus, amygdala) and experimental
approaches (electrophysiology, calcium imaging, molecular
pharmacology) used.
Schedule
2:00pm Michael Molineux (Stanford, Neurobiology, Schnitzer laboratory)
2:30pm Gal Chechik (Stanford, Computer Science)
3:00pm Etienne de Villers-Sidani, MD (UCSF, Keck Center for Integrative
Neuroscience, Merzenich Laboratory)
"Sensory input coherence and the regulation of developmental
plasticity in the rat primary auditory cortex"
3:30pm Coffee Break
4:00pm Elyssa Margolis (UCSF, Gallo Center)
4:30pm Jesse Hanson (Stanford, Madison lab)
5:00pm Ajai Vyas (Stanford)
5:30pm Terry Kremin (UCSF, Gallo Center)
____________
END MATERIAL
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