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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 27 August 2008, vol. 23:49



                    CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________

27 August 2008                Stanford                 Vol. 23, No. 49
______________________________________________________________________

                     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 27 AUGUST 2008 TO 5 SEPTEMBER 2008

WEDNESDAY, 27 AUGUST 2008

THURSDAY, 28 AUGUST 2008
all day Stanford High Performance Computing Conference IV [28-Aug-08]
        James H. Clark Center 
        http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/
        Information below

 3:00pm CURIS Poster Session [28-Aug-08]
        Gates Lobbies, 1st and 2nd floors
        CURIS summer research undergraduate intern posters
        Computer Science undergraduates
        session 3:00pm - 5:00pm
        http://curis.stanford.edu/

 4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [28-Aug-08]
        Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
        "Exploiting Online Games"
        Gary McGraw
        http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
        Abstract below

FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST 2008
all day Stanford High Performance Computing Conference IV [29-Aug-08]
        James H. Clark Center 
        http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/
        Information below

11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [29-Aug-08]
        Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
        "Individual differences in movements may reflect common neural
        processes for action and cognition"
        Lena Ting
        Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech
        http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
        Abstract below

12:30pm UC Berkeley HWNI Student Seminar [29-Aug-08]
        101 LSA (Berkeley)
        "Molecular regulation of synapse formation in development"
        Kang Shen
        Stanford University 
        http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Kang_Shen/
        http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/

 3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [29-Aug-2008]
        107 South Hall (Berkeley)
        "Introduction. Recent developments"
        Clifford Lynch
        http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html

MONDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2008

TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2008

WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 2008

THURSDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2008
 4:00pm PARC Forum [4-Sep-08]
        George Pake Auditorium at PARC
        "Navigating the Network of Knowledge: Mining quotations from
        massive-scale digital libraries of books" 
        Bill Schilit
        Google Research
        http://www.parc.com/forum/
        Abstract below

FRIDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 2008
 3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [5-Sep-08]
        107 South Hall (Berkeley)
        "Taking the Scholars' Perspective on Scholarly Archiving"
        Cathy Marshall
        Microsoft Research 
        http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
        Abstract below
                             ____________

Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O, A, B, and AB-.  For an
appointment: <http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/> or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.  
                             ____________

                             ANNOUNCEMENT

  UC Berkeley Townsend Working Group in Neuroscience and Philosophy

The purpose of this group is to promote interdisciplinary dialogue on  
topics of interest to faculty, graduate students, and postgraduate  
researchers engaged in the contemporary study of the mind. The group  
meets several times each semester. Some meetings are led by a  
researcher, usually from a bay area institution, whose work is of  
particular relevance to the interests of the group. Other meetings  
will be dedicated to discussion of readings related to the topic.

This year's topic will be "Learning - how to change a mind". We hope
to discuss various aspects of learning and read works in both
philosophy and neuroscience on this topic.

We are currently planning this semester's activities of the group and
would be happy to receive suggestions. If there is a paper you think
would be interesting for this group, or if there is a speaker you
think we should invite, please let us know.

Last year's meetings and readings are still described on our website:
<http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/>

We are currently planning to hold the meetings of the group on
Tuesdays at 4-6 PM, once every two-three weeks. If you are interested
in participating, but this time is inconvenient for you, please write
us and let us know. It will probably be difficult to accommodate
everyone, but we will try. If you are not on the mailing list and are
interested in joining the mailing list, to receive messages about our
activities, please let me know at: arokem@berkeley.edu If you don't
know whether you are on the mailing list, you can verify that on
<http://lists.berkeley.edu>.  The list name is "mindworkinggroup".

Please feel free to disseminate this email widely to your colleagues
and friends who might have an interest in this group's activities!

Thanks,

Ariel Rokem - Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute
James Stazicker - Department of Philosophy
Student organizers, Townsend Working Group in Neuroscience and  
Philosophy
                             ____________

          STANFORD HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CONFERENCE IV
    on Thursday and Friday, 28 and 29 August 2008, 8:00AM - 5:00PM
                        James H. Clark Center 
      (for Stanford students, staff, faculty, affiliates, free)
            http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/index.html

The fourth annual Stanford HPC Conference is rapidly approaching,
brought to you by Bio-X, Flow Physics & Computational Engineering and
Stanford ITS.

Registration is now open. Breaks and Lunch Provided
http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/index.html

Some of the sessions are:

* Matlab Training
* TotalView Training
* Hands-on Cluster Building
* Rocks System Administration Classes
* Stanford HPC Experiences
* Facilities Challenges

There are a number of great research presentations from many
departments on campus and SLAC, in addition to outside research
institutions.

As always, the conference is free of charge, fully-funded by our sponsors!

Be sure to sign up now: http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/
                             ____________

                      STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
                 on Thursday, 28 August 2008, 4:30pm
                 Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
              http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html

                      "Exploiting Online Games"
                             Gary McGraw

The talk, based on a book of the same title (co-authored by Greg
Hoglund), exposes the inner workings of online game security for all
to see, drawing illustrations from MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft
to discuss:
 1. Why online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come
 2. How millions of gamers have created billion dollar virtual economies
 3. How game companies invade your privacy
 4. Why some gamers cheat
 5. Techniques for breaking online game security
 6. How to build a bot to play a game for you
 7. Methods for total conversion and advanced mods

But ultimately this talk is about security problems associated with
advanced massively distributed software. With hundreds of thousands of
interacting users, today's online games are a bellwether of modern
software yet to come.  The kinds of attack and defense techniques I
describe are tomorrow's security techniques on display today.
                            ____________

          BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
                  on Friday, 29 August 2008, 11:00am
                        Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
                      http://icbs.berkeley.edu/

    "Individual differences in movements may reflect common neural
                 processes for action and cognition"
                              Lena Ting
      Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech

Why can we recognize people at a distance by the way they walk? How do
an individual's unique social, cultural, and biological influences
shape how they move? What does this tell us about the interactions
between the brain, body, and environment that shape us as individuals?
Using a broad combination of computational and experimental techniques
in neurophysiology and biomechanics I have created a new conceptual
framework for understanding how complex and variable muscle activation
patterns arise from interactions between the neural and
musculoskeletal systems.  For the first time, we are approaching a
critical understanding of not only commonalities in movements across
individuals, but also differences both within and across individuals
which appear to be shaped by experience. I propose that general neural
processes identified in cognitive processes such as speech, language,
and social interactions are also inherent in motor tasks. No matter
how primitive, neural systems make predictions and decisions in the
face of uncertainty and ambiguity. Thus, the nervous system must
contain stable representations of prototypical interactions with the
environment---be they physical, social, cultural, or conceptual.  For
example, when speaking a new language, an individual's performance is
limited by the structure of his or her native language. The relative
inflexibility of the categorization process by which sounds are
represented in the nervous system leads to predictable biases in both
perception and pronunciation---an accent. We have identified building
blocks for motor tasks called muscle synergies that may contribute to
each individual's unique motor accent. We have used muscle synergies
to characterize the structure of motor variability in individuals and
we have identified common optimizing principles that shape the
adaptation of muscle activity patterns in motor learning and motor
deficit.  Compared to "cost" of repeating a mispronounced word,
"costs" of movements can be more readily quantified in terms of
performance, energy expenditure, and biomechanics. By developing
technologies simulate how individuals perform the motor tasks, we may
be able to quantify how our unique motor accents reflect our culture,
our perceptual and motor skill, and our neural circuits.  As a
neurophysiologist trained in mechanical engineering, this will be a
highly speculative talk mean to encourage discussion, establish broad
interdisciplinary collaborations and to identify areas of research in
which I need to be educated.
                             ____________

                              PARC FORUM
            on Thursday, 4 September 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
                     George Pake Auditorium, PARC
           (directions at <http://www.parc.com/directions>)
                      http://www.parc.com/forum/

     "Navigating the Network of Knowledge: Mining quotations from
              massive-scale digital libraries of books"
                             Bill Schilit
                           Google Research

Scanning books, magazines, and newspapers is widespread because people
believe a great deal of the world's information still resides
off-line. In general, after works are scanned they are indexed for
search and processed to add links. In this talk I will describe a new
approach to automatically add links by mining repeated passages. This
technique connects elements that are semantically rich, so strong
relations are made. Moreover, link targets point within rather than to
the entire work, facilitating navigation. Our system has been run on a
digital library of over 1 million books (Google Book Search), has been
used by thousands of people, and has generated the world's largest
collection of quotations. I will also present a follow-on project
based on the theory that authors copy passages from book to book
because these quotations capture an idea particularly well: Jefferson
on liberty; Stanton on women's rights; and Gibson on cyberpunk. These
projects suggest that mining quotations for links and ideas are an
important mechanism for understanding the knowledge contained in
books.  This work is in collaboration with Okan Kolak, Google
Research.

Bill Schilit is a researcher at Google. Before joining Google, Schilit
was principal scientist with Intel's Digital Home Product Group,
co-director of Intel Research Seattle, managed personal computing
research at Fuji-Xerox (FXPAL), worked on networked systems at AT&T's
Bell Labs, and was part of the team that invented ubiquitous computing
at PARC from 1992-1995. His interest is ubiquitous information with a
focus on the development of personal and mobile technologies
supporting knowledge work. Schilit received a PhD in computer science
from Columbia University. He is an associate editor in chief of
Computer, a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. Contact
him at schilit@computer.org.
                             ____________

                 BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
             on Friday, 5 September 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
                      107 South Hall (Berkeley)
    http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html

      "Taking the Scholars' Perspective on Scholarly Archiving"
                            Cathy Marshall
                          Microsoft Research

About a year ago, I undertook a qualitative field study of the
scholarly writing, collaboration, information management, and
long-term archiving practices of researchers in five related
subdisciplines. Fifteen generous participants allowed me to interview
them about the kinds of artifacts they create in the process of
writing a paper, how they exchange and store materials over the short
term, how they handle references and bibliographic resources, and the
strategies they use to guarantee the long term safety of their
scholarly materials. The findings revealed some surprising design
implications for collaboration infrastructure and personal scholarly
archives in addition to suggesting some ways to facilitate the deposit
of scholarly materials into institutional and disciplinary
repositories.

What did I learn? Come find out!
                             ____________

                             END MATERIAL

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