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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 22 August 2007, vol. 22:49
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
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22 AUGUST 2007 Stanford Vol. 22, No. 49
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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/
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ACTIVITIES FROM 22 AUGUST 2007 TO 31 AUGUST 2007
WEDNESDAY, 22 AUGUST 2007
2:00pm SRI CSL Seminar Series [22-Aug-07]
EK255, SRI International
"k-Anonymity Considered Harmful, or How To Break Data Privacy
for Fun and Profit"
Vitaly Shmatikov
University of Texas
http://www.csl.sri.com/
THURSDAY, 23 AUGUST 2007
10:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [23-Aug-07]
EJ291, SRI International
"VGRAM: Improving Performance of Approximate Queries on String
Collections Using Variable-Length Grams"
Chen Li
UC Irvine
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [23-Aug-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Recent Developments in Modular Self-reconfigurable Robots"
Mark Yim
University of of Pennsylvania
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [23-Aug-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Navigating in Planning Search Spaces:
why it is useful to have a backbone"
Blazej Bulka
SRI AI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 24 AUGUST 2007
SATURDAY, 25 AUGUST 2007
all day 4th annual Bay Area Memory Meeting (BAMM4) [25-Aug-07]
Genetics and Plant Biology Bldg. (UC Berkeley)
http://psychology.stanford.edu/~wagner/BAMM/Bamm_2007.html
Information below
MONDAY, 27 AUGUST 2007
TUESDAY, 28 AUGUST 2007
6:45pm SULUG Meeting [28-Aug-07]
Gates 104
"CandyFab: Cheap 3-D printing"
Windell Oshakay
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
http://www.candyfab.org/
http://sulug.stanford.edu/
WEDNESDAY, 29 AUGUST 2007
THURSDAY, 30 AUGUST 2007
3:00pm CURIS Poster Session [30-Aug-07]
Gates Lobby
Computer Science undergraduate summer interns present their
work (3-5pm)
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/abstract.php?eventId=2541
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [30-Aug-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Using Evolutionary Modeling and Pathway Ontologies to Help
Uncover Genetic Factors in Human Disease"
Paul D Thomas
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 31 AUGUST 2007
12:30pm UC Berkeley HWNI Talk [31-Aug-07]
101 LSA (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Axel Brunger
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, O+, A-, 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. Remember the usual supply of vic^H^H^Hstudents is gone for
the summer. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new
bloodmobile.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 23 August 2007, 10:00am
EJ291, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"VGRAM: Improving Performance of Approximate Queries on String
Collections Using Variable-Length Grams"
Chen Li
UC Irvine
Many applications have the emerging need to answer approximate string
queries efficiently. Such a query can ask for strings that are similar
to a given string, such as "names similar to Schwarzenegger" and
"telephone numbers similar to 412-0964," where "similar to" uses a
predefined, domain-specific function to specify the similarity between
strings, such as edit distance. We will report our recent results on
solving related problems. We will focus on a new technique, called
VGRAM. It improves those algorithms that use fixed-length grams, which
are substrings of a string used as signatures to identify similar
strings. The main idea of VGRAM is to judiciously choose high-quality
grams of variable lengths from a collection of strings to support
queries on the collection. We give a full specification of this
technique, including how to select high-quality grams from the
collection, how to generate variable-length grams for a string based
on the preselected grams, and what is the relationship between the
similarity of the gram sets of two strings and their edit distance. A
primary advantage of the technique is that it can be adopted by a
plethora of approximate string algorithms without the need to modify
them substantially. We present our extensive experiments on real data
sets to evaluate the technique, and show the significant performance
improvements on three existing algorithms. Related results have
appeared in recent VLDB papers.
About the Speaker: About the Speaker: Chen Li is an associate
professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of
California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science
from Stanford University in 2001, and his M.S. and B.S. in Computer
Science from Tsinghua University, China, in 1996 and 1994,
respectively. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award
in 2003. He is currently a part-time Visiting Research Scientist at
Google. His research interests are in the fields of database and
information systems, including data cleansing, data integration and
sharing, data warehousing, and data privacy.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 23 August 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Recent Developments in Modular Self-reconfigurable Robots"
Mark Yim
University of of Pennsylvania
Modular Self-Reconfigurable robots have been in development for many
years. These are robot systems that are made up of many repeated
modules that can be rearranged to form different shapes and perform a
variety of tasks. As these systems increase the number of modules
they promise to be
1) low cost from economies of scale and batch fabrication
2) robust from redundancy and self-repair abilities
3) versatile from being able to adopt different shapes to suit the need
While not there yet, this talk will present progress towards these
promises. More specifically, this talk will include recent
developments in the dynamic control of modular systems with large
degrees of freedom, designs for scaling up the number of modules in
system, applications for space and the search for life, and
self-reassembly after explosion.
About the speaker: Mark Yim joined the Department of Mechanical
Engineering and Applied Mechanics at U Penn in the fall of 2004 where
he is Gabel Family Term Junior Professor of Mechanical Engineering,
Associate Professor, MEAM Undergraduate Curriculum Chair and Associate
Faculty Director of the Weiss Tech House. Prior to this, he was a
Principal Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center where he
established a group developing modular self-reconfigurable robots.
His other research interests include biologically inspired mechanism,
haptics for virtual reality, and most recently flying robots. Honors
include induction as a World Technology Network Fellow; IEEE Robotics
and Automation Distinguished Lecturer, and induction to MIT's
Technology Review TR100 in 1999. He has over 30 patents issued
(perhaps most prominent are ones related to the Sony Playstation and
Microsoft Xbox joypad vibration control which have recently been ruled
over $100,000,000 in litigation and settlements) and over 50
publications.
____________
FOURTH ANNUAL BAY AREA MEMORY MEETING (BAMM4)
on Saturday, 25 August 2007, all day
Genetics and Plant Biology Bldg. (UC Berkeley)
http://psychology.stanford.edu/~wagner/BAMM/Bamm_2007.html
We are pleased to announce that the fourth annual Bay Area Memory
Meeting (BAMM!) will be held on Saturday, August 25th at the
University of California, Berkeley. BAMM! brings together
investigators studying memory and cognitive control from the peninsula
(Stanford & UC Santa Cruz), city (UCSF), east bay (UC Berkeley and
Martinez VA), and valley (UC Davis). This year's BAMM! may also
include labs from Southern California. The objectives of BAMM! are to:
(1) foster communication and an exchange of ideas between scientists
in the bay area who study memory and cognitive control, and
(2) provide a forum in which students and postdocs can present their
research and build relationships with faculty and peers beyond
their local institution.
Hosting of BAMM! will rotate annually, providing an additional
opportunity for researchers to visit the various labs in the area.
See web page for registration information.
http://psychology.stanford.edu/~wagner/BAMM/Bamm_2007.html
Schedule
9:00 Arrival and breakfast refreshments
9:25- 9:30 Opening comments
9:30-10:30 Talk Session 1
9:30- 9:50 Steve Kennerley, UC Berkeley
"Neurons in the frontal lobe encode an abstract
representation of choice value"
9:50-10:10 Rob Blumenfeld, UC Davis
"Neural and behavioral distinctions between item-specific
and relational memory encoding"
10:10-10:30 Rosanna Olsen, Stanford
"High-resolution fMRI of medial temporal lobe during
delayed-match-to-sample"
10:30-11:30 Poster Session 1 (w/ refreshments)
*Crystal L. Cook Reeck (Stanford)
*Dana De Master (UC Davis)
*Sandrine Duverne (UC Irvine)
*Hiroki Hayama (UC Irvine)
*Pedro M. Paz-Alonso (UC Davis)
*Anne Richards (UC Davis)
*Tracy H. Wang (UC Irvine)
*Maheen M. Adamson (VA Palo Alto HCS/Stanford)
11:30-12:30 Talk Session 2
11:30-11:50 Jessy Lancaster, UC Santa Cruz
"Implicit knowledge of biomechanics and its effects
on human motion perception"
11:50-12:10 Francesca Fortenbaugh, UC Berkeley
"The peripheral visual field and spatial representations:
What you have now affects what you remember"
12:10-12:30 Kristen Lyons, UC Davis
"The development of metamemory monitoring in early childhood"
12:30- 2:00 Lunch
2:00- 3:00 Talk Session 3
2:00- 2:20 Deborah Hannula, UC Davis
"Medial temporal lobe contributions to the expression of
eye-movement-based relational memory effects"
2:20- 2:40 Janice Chen, Stanford
"Associative retrieval and mismatch signals in the CA
fields of human hippocampus"
2:40- 3:00 Bradley Buchsbaum, UC Berkeley
"Neural mechanisms underlying auditory-verbal sequence learning"
3:00- 4:00 Poster Session 2 (w/ refreshments)
*Rui S. Costa (UC Davis)
*Lauren J. Gottlieb (UC Irvine)
*Ellen C. Klostermann (UC Berkeley)
*Adriane Mayda (UC Davis)
*Liz Race (Stanford)
*Shanti Shanker (Stanford)
*Jessica Wilson (UC Berkeley)
*Weiwei Zhang (UC Davis)
4:00- 5:20 Talk Session 4
4:00- 4:20 Diane Marian, UC Berkeley
"The emotional monster: Effects of context on memory for
emotional expression"
4:20- 4:40 Linda Murray, UC Davis
"The effects of complexity on source memory ROCs"
4:40- 5:00 Colleen Parks, UC Davis
"Testing the threshold nature of recollection using a
second-choice procedure"
5:00- 5:20 Bernadette Guimberteau, UC Berkeley
"What is the role of the prefrontal cortex in learning
and remembering? Searching for insights using a new model
of learning with the tower of Hanoi"
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 14 *Month* 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Navigating in Planning Search Spaces:
why it is useful to have a backbone"
Blazej Bulka
SRI AI
In a classical automated planning setting, a planner is given
information about the current state of the world, the definitions of
available actions, and a set of goals that should be achieved. The
planners task is to determine which actions will lead to the
accomplishment of the goals. A planner may be created to reason for
only a single domain (domain-dependent planner; e.g., a planner that
is designed solely to create an itinerary for air travel) or for a
whole class of domains (domain-independent planner). Although
domain-independent planners are more flexible than domain-dependent
ones, they are also slower than domain-dependent planners, which use
specialized algorithms. One of the reasons for this difference is that
these algorithms already embed the result of human reasoning and
analysis of the problem (e.g., finding recurring patterns within the
problem or discovering similarities to another known
problem). Enabling domain-independent planners to perform this type of
reasoning themselves may lead to significant performance improvements.
I propose to use previous experience and proactive analysis to create
a planning backbone, which is a library of plans based on the topology
of the underlying structure of the domain and other features of the
search space. To enable the construction of the backbone, I identify
a number of features that can be used to characterize search spaces
and state spaces. Particular attention is given to topological
features, which provide important information about the internal
structure and patterns within the problem. Although
domain-independent planners can plan in multiple domains, in practice,
they are typically used to produce many plans in any given domain.
Therefore, the proposed solution will be efficient, because the
additional computational cost can be amortized across multiple
planning episodes in the same domain.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 30 August 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Using Evolutionary Modeling and Pathway Ontologies to Help
Uncover Genetic Factors in Human Disease"
Paul D Thomas
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/esb/
In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the application of
evolutionary modeling to the problem of predicting which genetic
polymorphisms are most likely to impact phenotype. The evolutionary
history of a gene, as well as the histories of related genes, provides
information about the sequence changes that have been the target of
natural selection. My group has used measures of both negative
selection (evolutionary conservation) and positive selection across
different species to help predict the effects of genetic mutations and
polymorphisms in the human population.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss recent work on using
biological pathway information in analysis of genetic association
(genotype-phenotype) data. I show how pathway ontologies can provide
structured priors in a Bayesian analysis framework.
____________
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