[Date Prev][Date Next][Date Index]
CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 16 May 2007, vol. 22:35
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
16 May 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 35
______________________________________________________________________
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 16 MAY 2007 TO 25 MAY 2007
WEDNESDAY, 16 MAY 2007
12 noon Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [16-May-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Resolving Fragments: A Theory of Context for Conversation"
Jonathan Ginzburg
King's College London
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [16-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"English yes/no questions: A model integrating variation as a
determinant of children's acquisition"
Bruno Estigarribia
Linguistics Department
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [16-May-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Walk the Talk: Connecting Language, Knowledge, and Action in
Route Instructions"
Matt MacMahon
University of Texas at Austin
http://robotics.csres.utexas.edu/~adastra/
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [16-May-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Stream Processors Software Tools and Applications for Storm-1
Parallel Processor"
Ujval Kapasi and Peter Mattson
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
6:00pm Silicon Valley Web Guild [16-May-07]
Google, 1625 Charleston Road, Building 44, Mountain View
"Future of Online Advertising"
http://www.webguild.org/
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Talk [16-May-07]
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
"Web 2.0++: Why We Got Here and What's Next"
Rolf Skyberg,
Disruptive Innovator, eBay Inc
http://sfbayacm.org/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 17 MAY 2007
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [17-May-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"Search versus inference: why search is more basic"
Adam Morton,
Philosophy, University of Alberta
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12 noon Music 319: CCRMA Hearing Seminar [17-May-07]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"Musical Scale Designers -- the First Psychoacousticians"
Gareth Loy
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
4:00pm Stanford Algorithms Seminar [17-May-07]
Gates 498
Title to be announced
Michael Mahoney
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mmahoney/
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aflb/
4:00pm PARC Forum [17-May-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"From Smart Dust to Reliable Networks"
Kris Pister
University California Berkeley and Dust Networks
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [17-May-07]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Surrogate loss functions, divergences and decentralized detection"
XuangLong Nguyen
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [17-May-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"General Game Playing"
Michael Genesereth
Computer Science, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [17-May-07]
Packard 101
Fountain Codes: Theory and Practice
Michael Luby
Digital Fountain
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 18 MAY 2007
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [18-May-07]
Bldg. 60:62J
"Dependence Logic"
Jouko V\"a\"an\"anen
University of Amsterdam and University of Helsinki
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [18-May-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Implicit Interaction"
Wendy Ju
Stanford Center for Design Research
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley Psychology Talk [18-May-07]
5101 Tolman (Berkeley)
"To see or not to see: critical elements in the emergence of
human percepts"
Rafael Malach
Weizmann Institute, Israel,
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
2:00pm UC Santa Cruz CITRIS Distinguished Speaker [18-May-07]
E2 180 (UC Santa Cruz)
"Smart Bombs to Reading Machines for the Blind"
James Fruchterman
President and CEO of Benetech
http://www.citris-uc.org/
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [18-May-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Fourth Year Graduate Student Colloquia"
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
SATURDAY, 19 MAY 2007
all day Berkeley Linguistics Event [19-May-07]
370 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Indigenous Languages and Linguistics in the 21st Century:
A Celebration in Honor of Leanne Hinton"
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~garrett/hintonfest.html
SUNDAY, 20 MAY 2007
10:00am Philosophy Talk [20-May-07]
KALW FM 91.7 (also other stations and other times)
"Artificial Intelligence"
http://philosophytalk.org/
MONDAY, 21 MAY 2007
2:00pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [21-May-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
title to be announced
Olga Dmitrieva
Stanford
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium [21-May-07]
Hewlett Teaching Center 200
Title to be announced
Mike Montemerlo
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/magic/
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
5:30pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [21-May-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Singular thoughts about the non-existent"
Tim Crane
University College London
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 22 MAY 2007
4:00pm UC Berkeley Working Group in the Philosophy of Mind [22-May-07]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
David Whitney
UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain
http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/people/dwhitney
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.htm
WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY 2007
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [23-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Factors affecting how Spanish-speaking children learn and
interpret adjectives in real-time speech comprehension"
Kirsten Thorpe
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
2:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [23-May-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"A Non-Relativist Treatment of Predicates of Personal Taste"
Pranav Anand
UCSC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [23-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Max Muenke,
National Human Genome Research Institute
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [23-May-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Off-the-Record Messaging: Useful Security and Privacy for IM"
Ian Goldberg
University of Waterloo
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
8:00pm Liu Lecture [23-May-07]
Bldg. 370:370
John Maeda
MIT Media Lab
http://www.stanford.edu/group/liu_lectures/
THURSDAY, 24 MAY 2007
10:00am Special Communication Workshop [24-May-07]
Encina 3rd floor, APARC- Philippines Room
"Communication between and with Humans and Technologies"
(RSVP needed, this may be restricted to Stanford only)
Information below
4:00pm PARC Forum [24-May-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Synthetic biology in the pursuit of low-cost, effective,
anti-malarial drugs"
Jay D. Keasling
UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [24-May-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Logic and Reasoning: Do the Facts Matter?"
Johan van Benthem
Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
FRIDAY, 25 MAY 2007
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [25-May-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Building the Danger Hiptop: Striking the Right Balance for a
New Mobile Internet Platform"
Joe Britt
Danger
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [25-May-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"The Reality of Numbers"
Gideon Rosen
Princeton University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, A-, B-, 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.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Wednesday, 16 May 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Resolving Fragments: A Theory of Context for Conversation"
Jonathan Ginzburg
King's College London
Non sentential utterances (NSUs), examples of which are in (1)-(4),
are pervasive in conversation:
(1) A: Did Bo leave? B: Yes / No, Jo/ Bo?
(2) A: Did Bo ... B: leave?
(3) A: Did Bo ... No, Jo leave?
(4) A: [in a ticket office] A return to Maidenhead please.
NSUs have had a rather mixed reputation in theoretical and
computational linguistics. Beliefs about the intrinsic messiness of
conversation, in particular its being littered with fragments, have
been used as important motivation for a strong modularity assumption
in language acquisition. Conversely, computational linguists have
argued that fragment resolution generally requires plan recognition
techniques (e.g. Allen and Perrault, 1980, Carberry, 1991).
In the first part of this talk I will briefly survey some recent work,
jointly with Raquel Fernandez and Shalom Lappin, showing that
conversational NSUs are actually amenable to domain independent
classification: a taxonomy of fewer than 20 classes reliably
classifies the NSUs in the British National Corpus and the taxonomy
can be learnt by a variety of machine learning algorithms.
The main part of the talk will address the issue of how to develop a
theory of context that is capable of underpinning a grammatical
analysis of the wide range of observed fragments, as exemplified
above. My main claim will be that given a sufficiently detailed theory
of conversational interaction, fragment resolution is relatively
straightforward, akin in a sense to the resolution of traditional
indexical elements. The resulting theory of context allows us to
associate a hierarchy of complexity among NSUs. Some predictions this
makes about the order of acquisition of NSUs, in contrast with
traditional, syntactically oriented views of resolution, will be
discussed.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 16 May 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Walk the Talk:
Connecting Language, Knowledge, and Action in Route Instructions"
Matt MacMahon
University of Texas at Austin
http://robotics.csres.utexas.edu/~adastra/
Following natural language instructions requires transforming language
into situated conditional action; robustly following instructions,
despite the director's natural mistakes and omissions, requires the
pragmatic combination of language, action, and domain knowledge. This
dissertation demonstrates building a software agent that parses,
models and executes human-written natural language instructions to
accomplish complex navigation tasks as often as people following the
same instructions. By selectively removing various syntactic,
semantic, and pragmatic abilities, this work empirically measures how
often these abilities are necessary to correctly navigate along
extended routes through unknown, large-scale environments to novel
destinations.
To study how route instructions are written and followed, we collected
a corpus of about 1600 free-form instructions from 30 directors for
252 routes in three virtual environments. About 100 other people
followed these instructions and rated them for quality, successfully
reaching and identifying the destination only about two-thirds of the
trials. Our software agent, Marco, followed the same instructions in
the same environments with a success rate approaching human levels.
Marco's performance was a strong predictor of human performance and
ratings of individual instructions. By ablation testing, we
demonstrate that implicit actions are crucial for following verbal
instructions using an approach integrating language, knowledge and
action. We also measure the performance impact of a wide range of
linguistic, execution, and spatial abilities in successfully following
natural language route instructions.
About the Speaker: Matt MacMahon has designed, implemented, tested,
and deployed intelligent robotic systems while working at some of the
world's leading AI laboratories at NASA Johnson Space Center, NASA
Ames Research Center, and the Navy Center for Applied Research in
Artificial Intelligence. Matt's focus has been on human-robot
interaction with adjustable autonomy and reactive execution in the
face of unpredictable events. He has published work on these topics
and multi-agent systems at AAAI, CogSci, ICRA, FSR, AAMAS, and AI
Magazine. Matt is completing his doctorate in Software Engineering at
the University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of Dr.
Benjamin Kuipers, Computer Sciences, and Dr. Brian Stankiewicz,
Psychology.
____________
SF BAY ACM TALK
on Wednesday, 16 May 2007, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
http://sfbayacm.org/
"Web 2.0++: Why We Got Here and What's Next"
Rolf Skyberg,
Disruptive Innovator, eBay Inc
The pony express. Towns in Kansas. Claude and Ignace Chappe. Birds of
the Salton sea. How are these related?
The Web is full of lists describing the "what" of Web 2.0, but where
is the list of the reasons "why?" Through an examination of the past,
learn why Web 2.0 was a pre-destined consequence of social psychology,
military dollars, and determined hackers and entrepreneurs.
Come explore with us where the Web will be tomorrow and beyond by
extending the same rich patterns which tie all these events and
locations together.
About the Speaker: As Disruptive Innovator at eBay, Rolf Skyberg
investigates the creation of engaging buyer experiences. While at eBay
he has focused on inspiring new ways of approaching problems and
exploring them from a holistic viewpoint. His particular interests
include forming socio-retail spaces and leveraging adopted technology
to reduce buyer frictions. Rolf has a BS in Information Systems and
Quantitative Analysis with additional studies in System Science. He
has worked in technology since before the first dot.com bust and hopes
to continue thinking up great ideas through the second boom.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 17 May 2007, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Search versus inference: why search is more basic"
Adam Morton,
Philosophy, University of Alberta
Cognitive scientists who take logic seriously often understand thought
in terms of inference, more specifically in terms of deduction. I
describe ways in which search is as basic as deduction, and as deeply
connected to logical form. I present evidence that people can perform
some cognitive tasks better when they are framed in terms of search
rather than in terms of inference.
____________
MUSIC 319: CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 17 May 2007, 12 noon
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Gareth Loy will be talking about the design and perception of musical
scales at this week's CCRMA Hearing Seminar. This dovetails nicely
with last week's wonderful discussion on musical consonance and
dissonance.
How is it that we ended up with the 12-note scale? Why are their
variations, and why do cultures make different choices? It's all
based on psychoacoustics.
Bring your musical ears. Perfect pitch is *not* required.
- Malcolm
"Musical Scale Designers -- the First Psychoacousticians"
Gareth Loy
Principles of psycoacoustics and information theory are fundamental to
the design of musical scales used the world over and through history,
and historical scale designers were arguably the first
psychoacousticians. Musical scales are also the quintessential
introduction to the mathematics of music, a subject that is
arbitrarily deep and completely rewarding.
Questions entertained will include: why are musical scales organized
the way they are? Why is most Western music based on scales made up of
seven tones but there are twelve tones per octave? What does
'equal-tempered' mean, and why after all these centuries is it still
controversial? What choices have other cultures made about intonation,
and why? What can we learn about ourselves, our music, and our culture
by taking a careful look at the underlying mathematics?
If I have the time, I'll finish off with a small discovery regarding
the construction of the 22-sruti Hindu scale.
About the Speaker: Gareth Loy is the author of Musimathics (two
volumes) published by the MIT Press. Somewhere between a tutorial and
a desk reference, Musimathics is an encompassing review of a wide
range of mathematical disciplines relevant to music including (vol. 1)
acoustics, psychoacoustics, musical scales, musical instrument design,
composition, and (vol. 2) signal processing.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 17 May 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"From Smart Dust to Reliable Networks"
Kris Pister
University California Berkeley and Dust Networks
Wireless sensor networks are destined to see widespread adoption in
such diverse sectors as industrial process control, health care, and
home automation. The promise and application domain of this field
continues to grow, but several false-starts have limited deployments
to date. This talk will cover some of the history of the field, along
with the problems and their solutions, commercial applications, and
research directions.
About the Speaker: Kris Pister is a professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He coined the phrase
Smart Dust in 1996 to describe the impact of miniaturization in
sensing, computation, and communication. He is the CTO of Dust
Networks, a company that he founded to commercialize the Smart Dust
vision. His research interests include sensor network protocols, MEMS,
microrobots, and low-power circuits.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 17 May 2007, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~feisha/cis-seminar
"Surrogate loss functions, divergences and decentralized detection"
XuangLong Nguyen
UC Berkeley
Most of the machine learning literature on detection and
classification is abstracted away from considerations of an underlying
communication-theoretic infrastructure, constraints from which may
prevent an algorithm from aggregating all relevant data at a central
site. In many real-life applications, however, resource limitations
make it necessary to transmit only partial descriptions of
data. Examples include sensor networks, in which each sensor operates
under power or bandwidth constraints.
In this talk, I shall describe an algorithmic framework for
nonparametric decentralized detection from empirical data. In
constrast to classical work on classification, we need to learn both
quantization rules at individual sensors and a classification rule at
the central coordinator. The key ingredients of our framework are the
use of surrogate convex loss functions and marginalized kernels, which
result in a computationally efficient learning algorithm.
In the second part of the talk, I'll show that there is a class of
surrogate convex losses for which our learning procedure is
consistent, i.e., it is guaranteed to find optimal decision rules with
respect to the 0-1 loss. This is due to a precise correspondence
between surrogate loss functions and a class of divergence functionals
known as Ali-Silvey distances or f-divergences. This correspondence
has implications far beyond the decentralized detection setting. In
particular, it motivates a nonparametric M- estimation method for
estimating f-divergence functionals and the density ratio of two
probability distributions, given only the empirical data. I shall
describe theoretical properties and an empirical evaluation of this
estimator.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 17 May 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"General Game Playing"
Michael Genesereth
Computer Science, Stanford
A general game playing system is one that can play arbitrary games
based solely on formal game descriptions supplied at "runtime".
Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue and Chinook,
general game players do not rely on algorithms designed in advance by
their programmers for specific games; instead, they utilize general
information processing technologies, based on research in areas like
knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and rational decision
making. General Game Playing has theoretical value as a microcosm
within which to study theories and mechanisms of intelligence. It also
has practical value; general game playing techniques have value in a
variety of areas, including enterprise management, electronic
commerce, and semantic web integration.
About the Speaker: Michael Genesereth is an associate professor in the
Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He received his
Sc.B. in Physics from M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from
Harvard University. Genesereth is most known for his work on
Computational Logic and applications of that work in Enterprise
Management and Electronic Commerce. He is one of the founders of
Teknowledge, CommerceNet, and Mergent Systems. He is the current
director of the Logic Group at Stanford and the founder and research
director of CodeX - The Stanford Center for Computers and Law. He
likes to play games.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 18 May 2007, 12 noon
Bldg. 60:62J
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
"Dependence Logic"
Jouko V\"a\"an\"anen
University of Amsterdam and University of Helsinki
In 1961 Henkin suggested a game theoretic semantics for first order
logic and its extension by so called partially ordered quantifiers. It
remained an open problem whether this extension and other similar
logics could be given a compositional semantics. In 1997, Wilfrid
Hodges made a breakthrough in this area by giving a compositional
semantics for these logics. In his semantics satisfaction is defined
as a relation between formulas and sets of assignments, rather than as
a relation between formulas and individual assignments, as is
customary in first order logic. Based on this idea, we introduce
Dependence Logic. This is an extension of first order logic, in which
dependence of variables on each other is a basic atomic concept. We
give an overview of this logic, its properties, and its applications,
from database theory of set theory.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 18 May 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Implicit Interaction"
Wendy Ju
Stanford Center for Design Research
The infiltration of computer technologies into everyday life has
brought the problems of traditional interaction design to a head. As
we begin to design products which adapt their behaviors, which infer
what we are doing, and which try to assist us proactively, we need new
ways of thinking about how to design these interactive products so
that they are more helpful than they are annoying.
In this presentation, I outline implicit interactions as an emerging
area of applied design research that investigates the design of
implicit interactions, which occur without the behest or awareness of
the user. Implicit interactions allow computers to be more proactive
and less distracting through the use of the implicit signals inherent
in physical interaction. I present a framework for implicit
interactions, and a methodology for implicit interaction design; these
are illustrated by projects which apply implicit interaction to the
design of electronic whiteboards, automatic doors, and automotive
navigation.
About the Speaker: Wendy Ju is a PhD candidate at the Center for
Design Research, Stanford University. She received her MS from the MIT
Media Lab in 2001. She is also the founder and Editor at Large for
Ambidextrous Magazine, Stanford's Journal of
Design. http://ambidextrousmag.org/
____________
UC SANTA CRUZ CITRIS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
on Friday, 18 May 2007, 2:00pm
E2 180 (UC Santa Cruz)
http://www.citris-uc.org/
"Smart Bombs to Reading Machines for the Blind"
James Fruchterman
President and CEO of Benetech
What do smart bombs and reading machines for the blind have in common?
They both use the same underlying technology to do their jobs. Jim
Fruchterman, engineer, high tech entrepreneur and now social
entrepreneur, traces his journey from learning about pattern
recognition for military uses, to building the leading Silicon Valley
company making optical character recognition for reading documents, to
starting a deliberately nonprofit tech company to make reading
machines for the blind. Benetech is now using academic, military and
commercial technology to help human rights groups, environmental
groups and people with disabilities get the technology tools they
desperately need. Jim is a strong advocate for encouraging the
technology and business communities to realize the socially beneficial
applications of their innovations, not just those that make the most
money!
About the Speaker: A technology entrepreneur and engineer, Jim
Fruchterman has been a rocket scientist, founded two of the foremost
optical character recognition companies, and developed a successful
line of reading machines for the blind. He is now a leading social
entrepreneur through his deliberately nonprofit technology company,
Benetech. Benetech concentrates on applying technology to human rights
and literacy for people with disabilities. Fruchterman has won
numerous awards for his work, including the 2006 MacArthur Fellowship
and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2004 and 2006. He
was named a Schwab Social Entrepreneur of 2003, which has included
attending and speaking five times at the World Economic Forums in
Davos, Switzerland. Fruchterman believes that technology is the
ultimate leveler, allowing disadvantaged people achieve more equality
in society.
Public webviewing will be setup at UC Berkeley. As always, these
talks are free, open to the public and broadcast live online at
mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 21 May 2007, 3:15pm
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Singular thoughts about the non-existent"
Tim Crane
University College London
Our language contains empty names: names for things that do not
exist. Given that there are no non-existent things, then the logic of
our language (if it has one) cannot be a classical logic. I agree with
Burge, Sainsbury and others that a negative free logic gives the best
treatment of empty names. A negative free logic treats all simple
sentences containing empty names as false. So for example 'Sherlock
Holmes is a detective' is false. But so is 'Conan Doyle is thinking
about Sherlock Holmes'. Yet surely it can be literally true that
someone can think about Sherlock Holmes, especially his own inventor!
This talk will explore this puzzle, and proposes a way of thinking
about the phenomenon of 'thinking about' which might explain how it
can be true that someone can think about the non-existent.
About the Speaker: Tim Crane is Professor of Philosophy at UCL
(University College London) and Director of the Institute of
Philosophy in the University of London. He has been at UCL since 1990;
before that he did his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He works
mostly on the mind-body problem and the problem of intentionality. He
is the author of The Mechanical Mind (1994) and Elements of Mind
(2001) and a number of articles on the philosophy of mind and
metaphysics.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Wednesday, 23 May 2007, 2:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"A Non-Relativist Treatment of Predicates of Personal Taste"
Pranav Anand
UCSC
Recent work in philosophical and semantic circles (e.g., MacFarlane
2003, Lasersohn 2005) has attempted to understand how certain
predicates, such as `tasty', `fun', or `possible', can give rise to
what Koebel (2003) terms 'faultless disagreement', such as witnessed
in the following conversational fragment: (1) A: That ride was fun. B:
No it wasn't! The dilemma discourses like (1) reveal is the following:
a) on the one hand, there is a sense in which we assume that the truth
of predicates like 'fun' is relativized to a perspectival center (what
Lasersohn calls the ''judge''), possibly the speaker; b) however, if
that is the case, how could A and B be disagreeing at all, if they are
indicating their own preferences (compare the discourse if A had
uttered ''That ride was fun for me.'')? Previous treatments have
sought to escape the dilemma either by redefining disagreement
(Lasersohn 2005, Stephenson 2006) or what the perspectival center is
(Moltmann 2005). In this talk, I will present a series of problems for
each of these approaches, and suggest treating such predicates in a
non-relativist fashion, reanalyzing putative instances of knock-down
relativism as a species of partial quotation.
____________
SPECIAL COMMUNICATION WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 24 May 2007, 10:00am - 3:00pm
Encina 3rd floor, APARC- Philippines Room
(RSVP needed, this may be restricted to Stanford only)
"Communication between and with Humans and Technologies"
If interested please RSVP immediately to Susie Ementon -
susiele .. stanford.edu specifying if you would like to attend in the
morning, the afternoon, or both.
10:00am "Talking About Talk"
Speakers: Joseph Capella, University of Pennsylvania
Howie Giles, University of California at Santa Barbara
Clifford Nass, Stanford University
Abstract: With dramatic advances in fMRI, speech production and
recognition technologies, and statistical and methodological
technique, there are tremendous opportunities to ask and answer both
classical and wholly new questions about how people speak and
understand from psychological, socio-cultural, and technological
frameworks.
11:45am - 1:15pm: Lunch Break
1:15pm "The Future of Human Representation in Communication:
The Uniqueness of Digital Identity"
Speakers: Justine Cassell, Northwestern University
Jaron Lanier, University of California at Berkeley
Joe Walther, Cornell University
Moderated by Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University
Abstract: The fundamental processes underlying social interaction are
evolving as digitally mediated communication becomes more prevalent.
This panel will explore the manner in which new social issues arise
from the use of digital technology during communication.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 25 May 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Building the Danger Hiptop: Striking the Right Balance for a
New Mobile Internet Platform"
Joe Britt
Danger
When mobile telephones became within the financial grasp of the
everyman, the value was easily understood. Telephone-accessible
"content" (other people with phones) could now be enjoyed from a car,
while waiting in line, or from a table at a restaurant (sometimes to
the dismay of other patrons).
With the rise in popularity of the Internet, new kinds of valuable but
tethered content became available to ordinary people. The most
popular included the web, email with friends and family, and,
especially for the younger generation, instant messaging. In early
2000 Danger began developing an analogue to the mobile phone for
Internet content. The goal was to create a pocket-sized, inexpensive,
and easy to use device with always-on connectivity to provide a
computer-like Internet experience anywhere. The result was the Danger
hiptop, also known as the T-Mobile Sidekick.
Though most end users are aware only of the device, achieving the
design goal required a tight marriage of custom hardware, operating
system software, application software, user interface design, and a
back-end service. Together, these components comprise the Danger
mobile Internet platform.
In this talk, I will discuss several key aspects of the platform's
development and share the design philosophy applied by the team.
Strong belief in the importance of hardware/software integration
and an organic, iterative design process were critical for success.
Lessons learned at companies like Apple, General Magic, and WebTV
provided the team with a context for partitioning a complex problem
across hardware, software, and a powerful back-end service. The
result is a product that enjoys widespread popularity among the 18-34
year old set. To the relief of restaurant-goers everywhere, this form
of mobile communication is silent.
About the Speaker: As Chief Technology Officer, Joe acts as a
strategic and tactical guide for the technical and intellectual
property aspects of Danger's business. Joe brings more than 14 years
of experience building consumer products to Danger, and he has been
awarded 13 patents as a result of his work. His specialty is designing
system software for consumer electronic devices.
Prior to co-founding Danger, Joe spent over four years at WebTV
Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 1995. As the first
non-founding employee, he was responsible for the architecture and
creation of the system software used in the WebTV set-top boxes. Joe
was involved in the design of every hardware product shipped by WebTV
during his time there. Before WebTV, Joe worked at Catapult
Entertainment. Joe was part of the team that created the Xband Video
Game Network, a system which enabled multi-player gaming over the
Internet. Joe contributed to the system software as well as the
technology required to enable video games for network play. Before
Catapult, Joe worked at the 3DO Company, contributing to the design of
a game console powered by a PowerPC CPU.
Joe started his Silicon Valley career at Apple Computer, working in
the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) Products Group. Joe was a
core member of the ROM (Read Only Memory) development team for the
first generation PowerPC-based Macintosh. He holds a B.S. in Computer
Engineering from North Carolina State University.
____________
END MATERIAL
The CSLI Calendar appears weekly on most Wednesdays throughout the
year. Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in
the Calendar should be submitted to the editor, who reserves the right
to decide what does or does not go in the calendar
mailto:incalendar@csli.stanford.edu
Requests to be added to the mailing list should be sent to
majordomo@csli.stanford.edu. With the lines in the body of the text
of either
subscribe csli-calendar
for the long form or
subscribe csli-short-calendar
for the short form (i.e., no abstracts). Problems with subscribing or
unsubscribing should be sent to
owner-csli-calendar@csli.stanford.edu
The full current issue is at
http://cslicalendar.stanford.edu/current.shtml
and the archives at
http://cslicalendar.stanford.edu/Archive/
People on many of the CSLI computers can type 'help csli-calendar' to
see the current issue.
The CSLI Calendar is also posted each week to the su.events usenet
newsgroup (only available from computers on the Stanford network)
Information about CSLI's research program is available at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
For maps to the Stanford University rooms see
http://cslicalendar.stanford.edu/locations.shtml