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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 30 May 2007, vol. 22:37
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
30 May 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 37
______________________________________________________________________
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 30 MAY 2007 TO 8 JUNE 2007
WEDNESDAY, 30 MAY 2007
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [30-May-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Cognitive neuroscience of mathematical development"
Vinod Menon
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [30-May-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Energy Harvesting for Wireless Sensors"
Raj Amirtharajah
UC Davis
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 31 MAY 2007
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [31-May-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"Kinesthesia and Cognition: Towards the Merleau-Pontian Universes"
Idriss Aberkane
Ecole Normale Superieure
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12 noon Cardinal Walk [31-May-07]
Roble Field
1.5 mile walk
http://events.stanford.edu/events/114/11454/
4:00pm UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [31-May-07]
Tolman 3105 (Berkeley)
"Special Seminar: A hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in
human cortex"
Uri Hasson
Postdoctoral Scholar - NYU
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [31-May-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"What You Need to Know about Intellectual Property - and How
to Stay Out of Trouble!"
Margaret Johnson
Computer Science Department, Google
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [31-May-07]
Packard 101
"Sequential Decision Making under Parameter Uncertainty"
Shie Mannor
McGill University
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
6:00pm Keizai Society Talk [31-May-07]
Bldg 950, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosatti, 950 Page Mill, (Palo Alto)
"The Future of Digital Media"
Darin Kyoichi Grant, Dreamworks Head of Production Technolog
Yuji Ichimura, NEC Solutions Business Group Vice President
Sheridan, Tatsuno Dreamscape Principal
http://www.keizai.org/
(registration required, $30 for members, $40 for non-members)
Information below
FRIDAY, 1 JUNE 2007
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [1-Jun-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Sketching and Experience Design"
Bill Buxton
Microsoft Research
http://www.billbuxton.com/
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [1-Jun-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Linguistics Honors Colloquium"
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstracts below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation [1-Jun-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"State Abstraction in Learning Real-Time Heuristic Search"
Vadim Bulitko
Computing Science, University of Alberta
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla/schedule.shtml
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 2 JUNE 2007
all day 8th IEEE/NATEA AnnualConference [2-Jun-07]
Stanford University
"Multicore-the New Face of Computing-Promises and Challenges"
http://www.natea.org/sv/conferences/nfic/2007/nfic_2007.php
(fee and reservation [except for students not eating the lunch])
MONDAY, 4 JUNE 2007
all day ICAIL 2007 [4-Jun-07]
Stanford University
"Artificial Intelligence and Law"
various speakers and workshops
http://www.iaail.org/icail-2007/
Information below
2:00pm Phonology Workshop [4-Jun-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Advanced Phonology class presentations"
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:15pm CS528: Broad Area Colloquium [4-Jun-07]
Hewlett Teaching Center 200
Title to be announced
Lydia Kavraki
Computer Science and Bioengineering, Rice
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki/
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs528/
TUESDAY, 5 JUNE 2007
all day ICAIL 2007 [5-Jun-07]
Stanford University
"Artificial Intelligence and Law"
various speakers and workshops
http://www.iaail.org/icail-2007/
Information below
5:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [5-Jun-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Tense and Aspect in Japanese: 'tokoro-da' as a reference time marker"
Yukinori Takubo
Kyoto University, Carleton College
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE 2007
all day ICAIL 2007 [6-Jun-07]
Stanford University
"Artificial Intelligence and Law"
various speakers and workshops
http://www.iaail.org/icail-2007/
Information below
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [6-Jun-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
Title to be announced
Allan Reiss
Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [6-Jun-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
Title to be announced
Adele Diamond
University of British Columbia
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [6-Jun-07]
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
"Botnets: Anticipating Failure"
Rick Wesson
CEO, Support Intelligence, LLC
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:30pm Computer Musings [6-Jun-07]
Terman Auditorium
"Cool Graphs"
Don Knuth
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html
THURSDAY, 7 JUNE 2007
all day ICAIL 2007 [7-Jun-07]
Stanford University
"Artificial Intelligence and Law"
various speakers and workshops
http://www.iaail.org/icail-2007/
Information below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [7-Jun-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Social Software: Logic and Social Interaction"
Marc Pauly
Stanford University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [7-Jun-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The Social Atom: Physics and Human Affairs"
Mark Buchanan
Associate Editor Complexus
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [7-Jun-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Senior Honors Theses"
Symbolic Systems Senior Honors Students
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
FRIDAY, 8 JUNE 2007
all day ICAIL 2007 [8-Jun-07]
Stanford University
"Artificial Intelligence and Law"
various speakers and workshops
http://www.iaail.org/icail-2007/
Information below
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [8-Jun-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Getting it right by getting it wrong: Why learners change
languages and what learning failures can tell us about the
mechanisms involved in acquisition"
Carla Hudson Kam
UC Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
____________
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.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 31 May 2007, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Kinesthesia and Cognition: Towards the Merleau-Pontian Universes"
Idriss Aberkane
Ecole Normale Superieure
This talk will give an overview of the cognitive functions that
interact with kinesthesia and develop the concept of a para-linguistic
knowledge universe. This concept will then be applied to some open
problems in Information Technology and Knowledge Management.
Therefore, the second part of this talk will be more oriented towards
concrete applications, especially for the knowledge business.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 31 May 2007, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Sequential Decision Making under Parameter Uncertainty"
Shie Mannor
McGill University
Markov decision processes are an effective tool in modeling
decision-making in uncertain dynamic environments. The parameters of
these models are often estimated from data, learned from experience,
or designed by hand. It is therefore not surprising that the actual
performance of a chosen strategy often significantly differs from the
designer's initial expectations due to unavoidable modeling ambiguity.
In this talk we address this uncertainty in the model parameters and
its ramifications on decision making in dynamic environments. We start
with highlighting the magnitude of the problem in a real-world data
intensive decision problem. We then consider a methodological approach
that enables the decision maker to take this uncertainty into account.
By taking a Bayesian perspective we can consider a percentile
optimization approach that allows the decision maker to naturally
optimize a desired level of risk measured in terms of percentile
performance. We show that some forms of this uncertainty can be
efficiently solved and others are NP-hard. We then explain how to
address a very high dimensional state space by using non-parametric
statistics tools such as Gaussian processes to approximate the value
function.
About the Speaker: Shie Mannor graduated from the Technion with a BSc
in Electrical Engineering and BA in mathematics (both summa cum laude)
in 1996. After that he spent almost four years as an intelligence
officer with the Israeli Defence Forces. He was involved in a few
ventures in the high-tech industry. He earned my PhD in Electrical
Engineering from the Technion in 2002, under the supervision of Nahum
Shimkin. He was then a Fulbright postdoctoral associate with LIDS
(MIT) working with John Tsitsiklis for two years. He joined the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in McGill University
in July 2004, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine
Learning.
____________
KEIZAI SOCIETY TALK
on Thursday, 31 May 2007, 6:00pm
Bldg 950, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosatti, 950 Page Mill, (Palo Alto)
http://www.keizai.org/
"The Future of Digital Media"
Darin Kyoichi Grant, Dreamworks Head of Production Technolog
Yuji Ichimura, NEC Solutions Business Group Vice President
Sheridan, Tatsuno Dreamscape Principal
From the day when filmmakers gained the ability to manipulate their
imagery digitally, the medium has changed significantly. New
opportunities for visual exploration as far as the human imagination
are now possible. Movies are combining animation and visual effects
into areas that were traditionally reserved for human actors, sets,
props, and physical effects. Nowadays, most movies have Computer
Graphics Imagery (CGI).
The ubiquity of digital imagery, from movies "shot" digitally instead
of using film to cell phone videos making world news, has opened the
world to a plethora of pictures and opportunities, especially for
independent film makers and small companies doing visual effects and
animation. It has also challenged companies to utilize more of these
digital tools, starting the fusion of technology and entertainment.
Come and find out how people in the business are viewing the next five
years and find out where technology reserved for other applications
might expand along with the challenges of movie production,
projection, distribution and future applications. We have Darin Grant
who has a background in Visual Effects and Computer Animation as well
as being a major contributor to ACM's SIGGRAPH, and Yuji Ichimura of
NEC who leads NEC''s development of new solution offerings and
business strategies for various industries, including the Digital
Cinema, markets, and Sheridan Tatsuno who is an independent film
writer who is active in independent digital cinema.
Tickets required, $30 for members, $40 for non-members if bought in
advanced. Corporate Sponsor members are free (but need tickets).
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 1 June 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Sketching and Experience Design"
Bill Buxton
Microsoft Research
http://www.billbuxton.com/
Among others, Hummels, Djajadiningrat and Overbeeke (Knowing, Doing
and Feeling: Communication with your Digital Products.
Interdisziplinares Kolleg Kognitions und Neurowissenschaften,
Gunne am Mohnesee, March 2-9 2001, 289-308.), have expressed the
notion that the real product of design is the resultant "context for
experience" rather than the object or software that provokes that
experience. This closely corresponds to what I refer to as a
transition in focus from a materialistic to an experiential view of
design. Paraphrasing what I have already said, is not the physical
entity or what is in the box (the "material" product) that is the true
outcome of the design process. Rather, it is the behavioural,
experiential and emotional responses that come about as a result of
its existence and use in the "wild".
Designing for experience comes with a whole new level of complexity.
This is especially true in this emerging world of information
appliances, reactive environments and ubiquitous computing, where,
along with those of their users, we have to factor in the convoluted
behaviours of the products themselves. Doing this effectively
requires both a different mind-set, as well as different techniques.
This talk is motivated by a concern that, in general, our current
training and work practices are not adequate to meet the demands of
this level of design. This is true for those coming from a computer
science background, since they do not have sufficient grounding in
design, at least in the sense that would be recognized by an architect
or industrial designer. Conversely, those from the design arts, while
they have the design skills, do not generally have the technical
skills to adequately address the design issues relating to the complex
embedded behaviours of such devices and systems.
Hence, in this talk, we discuss the design process itself, from the
perspective of methods, organization, and composition. Fundamental to
our approach is the notion that sketching is a fundamental component
of design, and is especially critical at the early ideation phase.
Yet, due to the temporal nature of what we are designing, conventional
sketching is not - on its own - adequate. Hence, if we are to design
experience or interaction, we need to adopt something that is to our
process that is analogous to what traditional sketching is to the
process of conventional industrial design.
It is the motivation and exploration of such a sketching process
that is the foundation of this presentation.
About the Speaker: Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher
concerned with human aspects of technology. His work reflects a
particular interest in the use of technology to support creative
activities such as design, film making and music. Buxton's research
specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to
computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and
ubiquitous computing.
In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft
Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based
boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design, where his time was
split between working for clients, lecturing, and trying to finish a
long-delayed book on sketching and interaction design. As well, he is
an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Toronto, where he still works with graduate students.
Buxton began his career in music, having done a Bachelor of Music
degree at Queen's University. He then studied and taught at the
Institute of Sonology, Utrecht, Holland, for two years. After
completing an M.Sc. in Computer Science on Computer Music at the
University of Toronto, he joined the faculty as a lecturer. Designing
and using computer-based tools for music composition and performance
is what led him into the area of human-computer interaction. From 1994
until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, (now
part of Autodesk) and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In the
fall of 2004, he was a part-time instructor in the Department of
Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In
2004/05 he was also Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design
Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto. And from January
through April 2005 and 2006, was a Visiting Researcher with the
Computer-Mediated Living Group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge
England. He currently splits his time between Redmond and Toronto.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 1 June 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"A Corpus Study of Sentence-Final me: 'Cosmopolitan' Mandarin?"
Pat Callier
Honors student in Linguistics
Faculty Honors Advisor: Penny Eckert
Erbaugh (1985) notes that in many East Asian languages, many speakers
believe sentence-final particles are more frequently used by women
than by men. She speculates that if men and women's usage actually
reflects this stereotype, it is a product of the burden placed on
women's shoulders to facilitate smooth interaction in conversation. I
focus on one modal particle of Mandarin Chinese: me, which is
sometimes described as marking the obviousness of an utterance.
With a corpus study of conversational Mandarin, using two separate
corpora, I also examine the relationship between me frequency and
speakers' region of origin, perceived accent, among other factors. I
show that, in Mainland China, me's use is generally favored by (young)
women compared to other gender and age demographics, while three other
particles--a/ya, ba, and la--show no differentiation in use according
to sex and age. In both Mainland China and Taiwan, speakers perceived
as having southern regional accents produce more me than speakers with
other accents, though Taiwanese speakers produce more me than
Mainlanders overall.
I argue against describing me as merely a particle for smoothing out
interaction, and rule out an account of its gender distribution based
on this misleading generalization. Following more recent work in
language, gender, and sociolinguistic variation, in particular Zhang
(2005), and supported by additional corpus data, I suggest that me's
sociolinguistic distribution can be better understood as a resource in
the creation of linguistic styles. In this account, megains
significance as a salient feature of Taiwanese or Southern Mandarin,
and speakers use it in the course of a linguistic presentation that
draws on the symbolic value of association between Taiwan and Southern
China and its transnationally-flavored brand of urban, capitalist
modernity.
Title to be announced
Monique King
Honors student in Linguistics
Faculty Honors Advisor: John Rickford
"Text-to-Tune Alignment in the Music of La Charanga Habanera"
Ryan Mead
Undergraduate student in the Symbolic Systems Program
Faculty Advisor: Paul Kiparsky
Setting lyrics to music involves the creation of an interface between
two distinct rhythmic structures: linguistic prominence (stress) and
musical meter (rhythm). Prior scholarship suggests that these two
rhythmic hierarchies tend to align themselves in the most
straightforward way possible -- stressed syllables will fall on
musically strong beats -- but my thesis shows that this generalization
does not always hold. I transcribed the lyrics of the first four
albums recorded by La Charanga Habanera (hereafter CH), one of the
groups that defined the currently popular style of Cuban dance music
known as timba. Because of its strong African influence, Cuban music
exhibits a high degree of rhythmic complexity, and CH's songs are no
exception. The sophisticated rhythms present in CH's music interact
with Spanish stress patterns in unexpected but systematic ways, and it
is common for lexically stressed syllables to fall on the weakest
musical beats. In my paper I formulate some well-formedness
constraints that govern the placement of stressed and unstressed
syllables within the musical rhythmic hierarchy. I also show how
inter-word vowel elision (synalepha), which is the typical pattern in
spoken and poetic Spanish, is obligatory in CH's lyrics except under
very specific conditions. Finally, I show how the text-to-tune
alignment rules established in the first three albums shifted in the
fourth, when the group began to incorporate elements of American rap
into its music.
Title to be announced
Gabe Recchia
Honors student in the Symbolic Systems Program
Faculty Honors Advisor: Joan Bresnan
____________
CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Friday, 1 June 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla/schedule.shtml
"State Abstraction in Learning Real-Time Heuristic Search"
Vadim Bulitko
Computing Science, University of Alberta
In this talk we describe how one can substantially improve the
learning performance of LRTA* by running it in a smaller, abstract
search-space. The resulting algorithm retains real-time performance
and completeness/convergence properties. Empirically, the abstraction
is found to improve efficiency by trading off planning time, learning
speed and other antagonistic performance measures. The talk will be
illustrated with applications to path-planning in computer video
games.
____________
ICAIL 2007
on Monday-Friday, 4-8 June 2007, all day
Stanford University
http://www.iaail.org/icail-2007/
"Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law"
Monday, June 4
All day workshops
* FMEC: Formal modelling for electronic commerce
* LOAIT: Legal ontologies and AI techniques
* DESI: Supporting search and sensemaking for electronically stored
information in discovery proceedings
Afternoon tutorials
* Advanced legal technology in practice
* Enhanced dispute resolution through the use of information
technology
Welcome reception
Tuesday, June 5 -- technical sessions
Wednesday, June 6 -- technical sessions and conference dinner
(The speaker at the dinner will be CSLI's John Perry)
Thursday, June 7 - technical sessions
Friday, June 8 - All day workshops
* ODR: Online Dispute Resolution
* SW4Law: Semantic Web technology for law
INVITED SPEAKERS
* Deborah L. McGuinness, Acting Director, Knowledge Systems,
Artificial Intelligence Lab, Stanford University, and Principal
Research Scientist, CodeX: Stanford Center for Computers and Law,
"Semantically Enabling Computational Legal Information Systems"
* George Fisher, Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Stanford Law
School, "Argument as Storytelling"
* Thomas F. Gordon, IAAIL President and Senior Research Scientist,
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS);
Berlin, Germany, "20 Years of ICAIL: Reflections on the Field of
AI and Law
Sponsored by:
* International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL)
* Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology, Stanford Law School
* Thomson West
In cooperation with:
* ACM Sigart
* Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Conference Registration is
Full Regular - $475 (late)
Full Student - $300 (late)
Single Day Regular - $200 (late)
Single Day Student - $150 (late)
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 5 June 2007, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Tense and Aspect in Japanese: 'tokoro-da' as a reference time marker"
Yukinori Takubo
Kyoto University, Carleton College
In this talk, I will discuss the basic uses of tense/aspect forms in
Japanese, 'ru. ta, tei(ru/ta)' and how the uses are constrained by the
addition of 'tokoro-da.' 'Tokoro-da', a combination of 'tokoro', a
formal noun meaning 'location' and 'da' the copula, restricts the uses
of 'ru' 'ta' and 'tei(ru/ta)' forms to immediate future, past and
progressive, respectively. I will show that the meaning of immediacy
imposed by 'tokoro-da' can be described by the constraint which says
that the reference time be included in the interval denoted by the
predicates, i.e., the same interpretation of tense for stative
predicates. I will show that the interpretation can be reduced to the
meaning of 'tokoro' as 'a reference point marker', i.e., basically the
same function of 'tokoro' used as a locative noun, e.g., John-no
tokoro (John's place) or (i):
(i) kono tizu-no *-no tokoro this map-GEN *-GEN location
(the point where the * mark is on this map).
Cosponsored with the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 6 June 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01 (HP Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Botnets: Anticipating Failure"
Rick Wesson
CEO, Support Intelligence, LLC
Detecting global abuse patterns with realtime black lists, spamtraps
and honey pots. Understanding what your network is doing to the rest
of the community is difficult, we discuss how to use our tools to
understand how your network is abusing other networks and show graphs
and stats of trends globably and within the United States.
About the speaker: Rick Wesson is the CEO of Support Intelligence
which provides a security monitoring service for critical networks,
the service targets compromised hosts and provides alerts to
operations staff in real time so breaches can be shut down
immediately, before serious problems arise. The service is entirely
external, passive, and lightweight and operates much like a smoke
detector for security breaches of all kinds. The technology works by
collecting data from a distributed network of traffic capturing and
classification devices spread across the Internet. Currently Support
Intelligence tacks some 2.2 Million events per day, users include
Fortune 500 companies, national labs, federal law enforcement
agencies, universities, and network service providers. Mr Wesson is
also the CEO of Alice's Registry, Inc an ICANN accredited domain
registrar. Mr Wesson worked in the IETF, NANOG and ICANN to help build
current domain registrars, implement Registration protocols and Domain
Name System Security (DNSSEC). Within the ICANN framework Mr Wesson
served as the co-chair of the DNSO's Registrars Constituency for 4
years and was a member of the ICANN Security and Stability
Committee. Mr Wesson participated in the .ORG DNSSEC testbed and
currently runs the only deployed registrar with the DNSSEC
registration capability. On the non-profit side in 2001 Mr Wesson
served as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Santa Cruz
Community Development Credit Union (SCCCU) in Santa Cruz California.
The SCCCU has worked to foster small business development, financial
literacy and create economic opportunity and is the second largest
Community Development Credit Union within the United States. Mr Wesson
received his B.S. in Management Information Systems from Auburn
University.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 7 June 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Social Software: Logic and Social Interaction"
Marc Pauly
Stanford University
Voting Procedures, fair division algorithms, auctions and markets are
all examples of social software, i.e., algorithms that process
individual preferences or judgments in order to come up with some
social outcome. I will illustrate how formal logic enters into the
picture by two examples. First, I will discuss the relatively recent
area of judgment aggregation, where individual judgments need to be
aggregated into a group judgment. Judgments are here modeled by sets
of logical formulas. Second, I will talk about an example of real-life
social software, the Stanford Housing Draw that assigns undergraduates
to residences on campus. Here, the plan is to use logic to specify the
algorithm and to verify properties of the algorithm such as optimality
and strategic non-manipulability.
About the Speaker: Marc Pauly is an assistant professor of philosophy
at Stanford University. He received his PhD in 2001 from the
University of Amsterdam. Before coming to Stanford, he was a lecturer
in Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK, and a
researcher at the CNRS in France.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 7 June 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"The Social Atom: Physics and Human Affairs"
Mark Buchanan
Associate Editor Complexus
What if someone told you that the way to understanding human behavior
was through physics, rather than psychology? Suggesting that we can
apply the laws of physics to humanity is sometimes a frightening
thought. I take on the reasoning of major economic theory, and then
use the law of physics and the cutting-edge work of some of the
world's most creative scientists to explain how by looking at humans
as social atoms (and computer modeling now enables us to do this, we
are much more likely to be able to predict and understand our own
behavior.
Why are some bars crowded one week and empty the next? What's the
logic behind the New York Stock Exchange, and other financial
markets, and how do streams of thinking feed on themselves to
create rallies and crashes that no one ever intended? What makes
ethnic violence break out?
Using these and other examples, I will show that our collective
behavior follows mathematical patterns of surprising precision. But
this way of thinking does not demean or devalue human life, it merely
accepts that mathematics and mechanics of the ordinary world apply to
us as much as to anything else. "Looking at patterns, not people" - in
the way that physicists observe atoms-offers us a basic, yet
revolutionary way to understand the ways in which we all live
together, and why sometimes it works so well, and why sometimes so
badly.
About the Speaker: Mark Buchanan is a theoretical physicist and
associate editor at Complexus, a journal of bio-complexity. He was
formerly an editor at Nature and New Scientist, and is the author of
numerous magazine and newspaper articles in the U.S. and U.K. He
writes a monthly column for Nature Physics, and - over the past month
- has been a guest columnist for the New York Times.
Dr Buchanan is a European Commission expert in the area of the
"complexity sciences," and the author of two prize-nominated books,
Ubiquity: The Science of History and Nexus: Small Worlds and the
Groundbreaking Science of Networks. His third book, The Social Atom,
is publishing on June 5, 2007, and explores how ideas and concepts
from the physical sciences can help us understand human affairs. He
lives in Cambridgeshire, England.
____________
END MATERIAL
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