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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 11 July 2007, vol. 22:43
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
11 July 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 43
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 11 JULY 2007 TO 22 JULY 2007
WEDNESDAY, 11 JULY 2007
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [11-Jul-07]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"In-Database Analytics: A Disruptive Technology"
Marcos M. Campos
Data Mining Technologies group, Oracle
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 12 JULY 2007
4:00pm PARC Forum [12-Jul-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Neural representation of expected value"
Brian Knutson
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 13 JULY 2007 - Triskadekaphobia day
2:00pm Stanford Tech Briefing [13-Jul-07]
Turing Auditorium, Polya Hall
"What's New from Apple"
Wyn Davies
Apple's Stanford Rep
http://techbriefings.stanford.edu/
SUNDAY, 15 JULY 2007
7:30pm Summer Institute Forum Lecture [15-Jul-07]
Kresge Auditorium
"Statistical Language Learning:
Computational and Maturational Constraints"
Elissa Newport
University of Rochester
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/schedule.html
Abstract below
MONDAY, 16 JULY 2007
TUESDAY, 17 JULY 2007
7:30pm Summer Institute Collitz Lecture [17-Jul-07]
Kresge Auditorium
"'Fish', 'crab', and 'fig': Can we make sense of the Indus pictograms?"
Asko Parpola
University of Helsinki
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/schedule.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 18 JULY 2007
7:00pm SF Bay ACM TechMaster Talk [18-Jul-07]
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
"What Everyone Should Know About Open Source"
Ron Goldman
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
http://sfbayacm.org/
THURSDAY, 19 JULY 2007
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [19-Jul-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Expectation Engines: Biological Substrates for Choices and Habits"
Christopher Ian Connolly
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [19-Jul-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Putting the Turing into Manufacturing:
Recent Developments in the Science of Automation"
Ken Goldberg
IEOR, EECS, Center for New Media, UC Berkeley
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 20 JULY 2007
SATURDAY, 21 JULY 2007
all day 8th Annual Engineering Day [21-Jul-07]
Arrillaga Alumni Center
"Engineering from Head to Toe"
http://soe.stanford.edu/eday07/
(registration required and limited to Stanford affiliates)
SUNDAY, 22 JULY 2007
7:30pm Summer Institute Forum Lecture [21-Jul-07]
Kresge Auditorium
"Probing Lexical Processing in Modern Dutch Poetry"
Harald Baayen
MPI-Nijmegen
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/schedule.html
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, A-, A+, AB-, 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. Remember
the usual supply of vic^H^H^Hstudents is mostly gone for the summer.
____________
NOTE
On Saturday July 21, the Engineering school is having its 8th annual
Engineering Day for Stanford alumni, faculty, students, and staff and
their families (Middle and High School teachers are also eligible).
This year's theme -- "Engineering from Head to Toe" -- will showcase
exciting discoveries in the field of human health.
A fusion of engineering and the life sciences has enabled the
development of new biomedical technologies and therapies. Researchers
are applying engineering principles to medical problems and biological
systems to advance human health. In accessible but intriguing
presentations, faculty from across the school will share the latest in
their research. Stanford Engineering students will also be on hand to
showcase their research projects.
Youth ages 10 or older as well as adults will enjoy this chance to
find out what's going on at the cutting edge. Older teenagers in
particular may find that "Camp" EDAY gives them a valuable preview of
the kind of research projects students can join when they go to
college.
Registration is currently open to Stanford alumni, faculty, staff, and
students. Youth must be accompanied by an adult. The cost is $25 for
adults and $15 for youth 18 and younger. Breakfast and lunch is
included, and all attendees will receive a special gift.
See http://soe.stanford.edu/eday07/ for more information.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 11 July 2007, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
"In-Database Analytics: A Disruptive Technology"
Marcos M. Campos
Data Mining Technologies group, Oracle
Analytics matters. Study after study shows that analytics is a key
competitive factor. However, the uptake of analytics by companies is
still quite limited compared to its potential. There is a need for
analytical technology that is easy to use, is scalable, operate on
different types of data, and integrate easily within the overall
information technology infrastructure.
This talk will discuss how In-Database Analytics is a technology well
positioned to address these needs. It will also make the point that it
is a disruptive technology that can change how analytics impacts
organizations.
About the Speaker: Marcos M. Campos is Technology Development Manager
for the Data Mining Technologies group at Oracle. Previously he was a
Senior Scientist with Thinking Machines. Over the years he has been
working on transforming databases into easy to use analytical servers.
He has created, led, and participated in the design and implementation
of multiple in-database analytics projects, including: Oracle
Personalization, a distributed real-time recommendation system, and
Oracle Data Mining. He is an active contributor to the machine
learning community through technical papers and participation in
industry standards: PMML (XML) and JDM (Java Data Mining
specification).
Marcos is also the author of the popular Oracle Data Mining and
Analytics blog. http://oracledmt.blogspot.com/
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 12 July 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Neural representation of expected value"
Brian Knutson
Stanford University
Psychologists and economists have argued that people must assess
expected value in order to decide on their next course of action.
Recent advances in neuroimaging make it possible to visualize
anticipatory changes in activity deep in the living human brain. I
will review original functional magnetic resonance imaging research
suggesting that a region of the subcortex (the nucleus accumbens, or
NAcc) plays an important role in anticipation of financial gains. I
will then describe additional findings related to financial decision
making, in which NAcc activation precedes risk-taking, while
activation in a distinct brain region precedes risk-avoidance. I'll
conclude by discussing implications of this research for neurally
constrained theories of decision making and the rational actor model.
About the Speaker: Brian Knutson is an assistant professor of
psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University. His research
focuses on the neural basis of emotional experience and expression. He
investigates this topic with a number of methods including
self-report, measurement of nonverbal behavior, comparative ethology,
psychopharmacology, and functional brain imaging.
His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and
neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience and to
explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and
treatment of clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as
economic behavior.
Knutson has received Young Investigator Awards from the National
Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Association
for Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychiatric
Association, and the New York Academy of Science. He received BA
degrees in experimental psychology and comparative religion from
Trinity University, a PhD in experimental psychology from Stanford,
and has conducted postdoctoral research in affective neuroscience at
UC-San Francisco and at the National Institutes of Health.
____________
SUMMER INSTITUTE FORUM LECTURE
on Sunday, 15 July 2007, 7:30pm
Kresge Auditorium
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/schedule.html
"Statistical Language Learning:
Computational and Maturational Constraints"
Elissa Newport
University of Rochester
In recent years a wide variety of studies have shown that infants,
young children, and adults can successfully utilize the statistics of
distributional linguistic information to find candidate words in a
speech stream, form and alter phonetic categories, discover
grammatical categories, and acquire simple syntactic structure in
miniature languages in the laboratory. A major question we face, then,
is how to think about the broader picture of statistical learning: How
many kinds of statistical computations can learners perform? How are
these computations organized, and how are they constrained? Must such
mechanisms be combined with qualitatively different, more traditional
mechanisms that form symbolic rules or set linguistic parameters?
I will address these questions by presenting findings from recent
studies of statistical learning of syntax, examining the effects of
complex multiple cues and also comparing child and adult learners
given inconsistent input and (sometimes) forming rule-like
generalizations. The results of these studies suggest the outlines of
several distinct but suitably sophisticated candidate statistical
learning mechanisms and raise questions for future research regarding
how to develop a theory of statistical language learning.
About the Speaker: Elissa Newport is the department chair and the
George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the
University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania and was a Sloan Fellow in Linguistics and
Cognitive Science at Penn and MIT. She has been on the faculty at the
University of California at San Diego, University of Illinois, and,
since 1988, University of Rochester. She is a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the National Academy of
Sciences. Her primary research interest is in human language
acquisition, with research projects including naturalistic studies of
children learning their first languages, experimental studies of
infants, adults, and non-human primates learning miniature languages
in the lab, fieldwork on emerging sign languages, and fMRI research on
language and the brain.
____________
SUMMER INSTITUTE COLLITZ LECTURE
on Tuesday, 17 July 2007, 7:30pm
Kresge Auditorium
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/schedule.html
"'Fish', 'crab', and 'fig': Can we make sense of the Indus pictograms?"
Asko Parpola
University of Helsinki
The Harappan or Indus Civilization was the most extensive culture of
its time, c. 2600-1900 BC. It is famed for its town planning and water
engineering, but in comparison to the other early civilizations, we
know very little of it. Yet it was a literate civilization -- about
5000 inscriptions have been excavated, but they are all short and
written in a forgotten script and in an unidentified language. There
are no translations into known scripts and languages, nor any
historical information of the kind that has been instrumental in the
decipherment of other early scripts.
The Indus script thus presents a tantalizing puzzle. Many solutions
have been published, but none has won general acceptance. One recent
attempt to solve the problem even claims that the Indus pictograms do
not represent language-bound writing at all, but are non-linguistic
symbols. The hypothesis is discussed in a separate workshop of the
Institute, but not in this lecture beyond its general thrust. The aim
is to show by means of a few select pictograms that the Indus script
is a phoneticized logo-syllabic writing system based on a Dravidian
language, which made good use of the rebus principle, like all other
early scripts. The emphasis is on methodology and on checking the
hypotheses.
About the Speaker: Asko Parpola has been invited to the Stanford
Summer Linguistic Institute as the 2007 Hermann Collitz Professor. He
is Professor Emeritus of the University of Helsinki, where he chaired
the Department of South Asian and Indo-European Studies 1982-2004. He
has been a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge
(1987), Kyoto University (1999) and the Research Institute for
Humanity and Nature in Kyoto (2006). His research focuses on a
philological and archaeological study of early South Asia, in
particular the Vedic religion, the Indus script, and the prehistory of
the Indo-Iranian languages.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 19 July 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Expectation Engines: Biological Substrates for Choices and Habits"
Christopher Ian Connolly
SRI
Martingales provide a theoretical framework for examining exploratory
and habitual behavior. The ``expectation engine for a finite
martingale can be constructed using a resistive network or digital
relaxation algorithm. Potentials in the resistive network are exactly
the expected values (as a function of state) for the corresponding
martingale. This talk will explore the relationships among exploratory
and habitual behavior in a state-space context, using the physiology
and pathology of the basal ganglia as a source of inspiration.
About the Speaker: Areas of research:
* Computer vision
* Robotic path planning
* Computational neuroscience
* Experimental neuroscience.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 19 July 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Putting the Turing into Manufacturing:
Recent Developments in the Science of Automation"
Ken Goldberg
IEOR, EECS, Center for New Media, UC Berkeley
Manufacturing, which includes everything from electronics to
industrial equipment, represents a major sector of the American
economy. In 2006, durable-goods manufacturing accounted for 6.9
percent of the GDP whereas all information-communications-technology
industries comprised 3.9 percent.
Yet manufacturing today is where computer technology was in the early
1960's, a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions lacking a rigorous scientific
methodology. Computer Aided Design has been widely adopted for
modeling of mechanical parts and behavior. What is missing is an
associated science for Manufacturing: the required handling, assembly,
inspection, and storage of these parts, the robots and tooling for
assembling of these parts into products through networks to reach
customers in a timely and quality manner. What are the models of
manufacturing analogous to the models of computing that Alan Turing
invented to establish the mathematical and scientific foundations for
computer science?
In short: it's time to put the Turing into Manufacturing. A science of
manufacturing will require mathematical and algorithmic abstractions
for basic elements of robotics and automation such as part feeding and
fixturing and production systems. Abstractions allow functionality to
be specified independent of hardware and software implementations,
which in turn provides the foundation for formal specification,
algorithmic design, consistency checking and optimization. Abstraction
facilitate the integrity, reliability, interoperability, and
maintainability of automation, and streamlines upgrading as new
technology and theory becomes available. Such research would have
broader impacts into laboratory automation, agriculture, and health
care.
Over the past decade, researchers have made progress, developing a
variety of algorithmic models and results for part feeding and
fixturing. I'll review selected results from my lab and others,
including a new framework for fixturing deformable parts and new
geometric primitives for vibratory bowl feeders, and propose several
open problems for future research.
I'll also describe the Berkeley Center for New Media and its current
cross-disciplinary research projects.
About the Speaker: Ken Goldberg is Professor of IEOR, EECS, and the
iSchool at UC Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Center for New
Media. He is Vice-President of Technical Activities for the IEEE
Robotics and Automation Society. His research addresses robot
manipulation, geometric algorithms for automation, and networked
robots. More information on his work, art, and projects are available
at: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/ .
____________
SUMMER INSTITUTE FORUM LECTURE
on Sunday, 22 July 2007, 7:30pm
Kresge Auditorium
http://linginst07.stanford.edu/schedule.html
"Probing Lexical Processing in Modern Dutch Poetry"
Harald Baayen
MPI-Nijmegen
http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/private/baayen/
Most studies investigating lexical processing have made use of
experimental techniques presenting words in isolation. These studies
have revealed a wide range of factors co-determining lexical
processing, but leave us with questions concerning the ecological
validity of the results obtained. For instance, Pinker & Ullman (2002)
admit that frequency effects for regular inflected words are attested,
contrary to the original assumptions of their dual mechanism model,
but they maintain that such frequency effects are task artifacts that
are not used in normal listening, reading, or speaking.
In this presentation, I report the results of a large self-paced
reading study addressing lexical processing in modern Dutch poetry
(Breukers, 2006). A linear mixed-effects analysis of some 300,000
logarithmically transformed reading latencies, with Subject, Word and
Poem as random effects, confirmed that the specific form frequency of
an inflected word is the key frequency measure predicting performance
not only in isolated word recognition but also in reading poetry. This
frequency effect was attenuated (but still significant) for males, in
line with the hypothesis of Ullman et al. (2002) that females have
slightly superior declarative memory. Conversely, males emerged with
an advantage reading multiply complex words, in line with Ullman's
hypothesis that males have slightly superior procedural memory.
Measures gauging paradigmatic morphological connectivity in the mental
lexicon turned out to be predictive mainly for words in the initial
position of a line of poetry, a position generally eliciting
relatively long reading latencies that allow these semantic effects to
emerge. Assonance and rhyme led to faster reading latencies, whereas
repetition (measured by the number of times a word had occurred)
slowed reading, especially for older subjects.
This study shows that it is now becoming possible to model lexical
processing of individual words read by individual subjects, taking
into account a wide range of factors ranging from characteristics of
the reader to the position of a word in a verse of poetry, and from
structural factors relating to morphological complexity to poetic
devices such as repetition, assonance and rhyme.
Breukers, C. (2006). 25 jaar Nederlandstalige poezie 1980-2005 in 666
en een stuk of wat gedichten. De Contrabas Bloemlezing, BnM
Publishers, Nijmegen.
Pinker, S. and Ullman, M. (2002). The past and future of the past
tense, Trends in the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456-462.
Ullman, M. T., Estabrooke, I. V., Steinhauer, K., Brovetto, C.,
Pancheva, R., Ozawa, K., Mordecai, K. & Maki, P., (2002). Sex
differences in the neurocognition of language. Brain and Language 83,
141-143.
____________
END MATERIAL
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