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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 7 November 2007, vol. 23:10
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
7 NOVEMBER 2007 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 10
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
a subdivision of H-STAR, http://hstar.stanford.edu/
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 7 NOVEMBER 2007 TO 16 NOVEMBER 2007
WEDNESDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2007
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [7-Nov-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Relationship between brain development and stress-related
conditions in children and adolescents"
Victor G Carrion
Stanford University Medical Center, Child Psychiatry
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
4:00pm CCRMA Hearing Seminar [7-Nov-07]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"MuSA.RT and the Visualization of Tonality"
Elaine Chew
University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~echew
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Note different day and time
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Lecture [7-Nov-07]
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Net Neutrality on the Internet: A Two-sided Market Analysis"
Nicholas Economides
NYU Stern School of Business
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events/sl20071107
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [7-Nov-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Software Threading"
Renee James and Wei Li
Intel Corporation
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
7:00pm Continuing Studies: Brainstorms [7-Nov-07]
Hewlett Teaching Center, room 200
"Computing and the Problem of Evil"
John Mitchell
Computer Science, Stanford
http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/course/EVT191.asp
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 8 NOVEMBER 2007
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [8-Nov-07]
Cordura Hall 100
"Two kinds of math - and how to teach them"
Keith Devlin
CSLI, Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [8-Nov-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"Collective Intelligence and the Next Evolution of Money"
Jean-François Noubel
TheTransitioner
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [8-Nov-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Water Challenges, Past, Present, and Future"
Perry L. McCarty
Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [8-Nov-07]
Soda Hall 320 (UC Berkeley)
"Sequential Document Visualization"
Guy Lebanon
Purdue University
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [8-Nov-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"What Everyone Should Know About Open Source"
Ron Goldman
Sun Microsystems Laboratories,
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Neuroscience Seminar [8-Nov-07]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
"A functional role for motor cortical oscillations"
Stuart Baker
Newcastle University
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/stuart.baker/
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
FRIDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2007
11:00am UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [9-Nov-07]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"What is Reasoning Good For?"
Sherri Roush
Philosophy, UC Berkeley
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/roush
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12 noon Ethics@Noon [9-Nov-07]
Bldg. 110, first floor seminar room
"The Personal and Professional Ethics of Physicians:
Engaging the Public Trust"
Phillip Pizzo
Dean, Stanford Medical School
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [9-Nov-07]
Gates B01
"Data Modeling and Conceptual Sketching in the Design Process
at Microsoft"
Monty Hamontree
Microsoft
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm GRAI Seminar [9-Nov-07]
Gates 104
"Activity Recognition"
Rahul Biswas
Stanford
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [9-Nov-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"From Science Information's Concilium Bibliographicum of the
1890s to Espionage and Communist Dungeons in the 1950s"
Colin Burke
University of Maryland Baltimore
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f07/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [9-Nov-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Top-down control processes in visual working memory"
Jesse Rissman
Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [9-Nov-07]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"A Truth in Conservatism"
Gerald Cohen
All Souls College, Oxford
http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/fellows/fellow.php?refid=1834
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [9-Nov-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Modeling Local Coherence"
Mirella Lapata
University of Edinburgh
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [9-Nov-07]
Bldg. 420:048
Title to be announced
Sol Feferman
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
MONDAY, 12 NOVEMBER 2007
3:45pm Social Lab [12-Nov-07]
Bldg. 160:326
"Absorption and the Art of Hearing God"
Tanya Luhrman
Anthropology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_social.html
TUESDAY, 13 NOVEMBER 2007
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [13-Nov-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"The Time-Traveler Threat to Privacy"
Brad Templeton
Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [13-Nov-07]
Bldg. 420:048
"Will-o'-the-wisp? In Pursuit of a Foundation for
Unrestricted Category Theory"
Solomon Feferman
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
5:00pm UC Berkeley ISD Lecture [13-Nov-07]
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
"MyLifeBits: A Personal Lifetime Store"
Jim Gemmell
Microsoft Research
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
Abstract below
6:45pm SULUG Meeting [13-Nov-07]
Gates 104
Title to be announced
John Whaley
Founder of Moka5
http://www.moka5.com/
http://suif.stanford.edu/%7Ejwhaley/
http://sulug.stanford.edu/
7:30pm BayCHI [13-Nov-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"GUI Bloopers Updated: New Common UI Design Mistakes and How
to Avoid Them"
Jeff Johnson
President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 2007
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [14-Nov-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Statistical Inference and inductive learning in infants and children"
Fei Xu
University of British Columbia
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
2:00pm UC Berkeley Seminar [14-Nov-07]
207 South Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Revisiting Query Clarity:
a Distinctiveness Measure for Information Retrieval"
Daniel Tunkelang
Chief Scientist Endeca
Abstract below
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [14-Nov-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Force dynamics and the semantics of negative causation"
Phillip Wolff
Emory University
(cosponsored with SPLaT!; refreshments at 5:15pm)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley School of Information Distinguished Lecture [14-Nov-07]
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved -
Part 2: The Internet and the World Wide Web"
Mitch Kapor
Open Source Applications Foundation
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
4:10pm UC Berkeley Howison Lecture [14-Nov-07]
Toll Room, Alumni House (Berkeley)
"What We See"
Fred Dretske
Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, Stanford University
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/lectures/howison/dretske.shtml
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [14-Nov-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
Title to be announced
Robert M. Lefkowitz
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
THURSDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2007
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [15-Nov-07]
Nora Suppes Hall 103
"Apprenticeship Learning with Applications in Autonomous
Helicopter Flight and Robot Dogs"
Pieter Abbeel
Stanford University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12 noon CTL Talk [15-Nov-07]
Hartley Conference room, Mitchell Earth Sciences
"Blending Face-to-Face and Online Teaching: Successes and Challenges"
Kim McShane
The Institute for Teaching & Learning (ITL), The University of Sydney
http://events.stanford.edu/events/121/12147/
Abstract below
3:00pm SRI CCB Seminar Series [15-Nov-07]
AE201, SRI International
"Bioinformatics - an Australian perspective: through the eyes
of the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics"
Jeremy Baker
CEO, Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics, Australia
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [15-Nov-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Title to be announced
Ross Mayfield
SocialText
http://ross.typepad.com/about.html
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [15-Nov-07]
Soda Hall 320 (UC Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Gal Elidan
Stanford University
http://ai.stanford.edu/~galel/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [15-Nov-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Expected Value and the Neural Prediction of Decisions"
Brian Knutson
Psychology Department, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar [15-Nov-07]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
"Memory and how it fails: a molecular and cellular perspective"
Alcino Silva
Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Psychology, Stanford
http://www.silvalab.org/
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 2007
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [16-Nov-07]
Gates B01
"ChucK: A Computer Music Programming Language, Designing
Instruments for Laptop Orchestras"
Ge Wang
Stanford University CCRMA
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [16-Nov-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"How Does an Online Art Community Take Shape?"
Dan Perkel
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f07/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [16-Nov-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Inversion and Paradigm Collapse in the Lower Sepik Languages,
Papua New Guinea"
William Foley
University of Sydney/Stanford
(cosponsored by the Linguistics Colloquium Committee)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, O+, A-, 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.
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 7 November 2007, 4:00pm
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
I'm very pleased to announced that Prof. Elaine Chew, from USC, will
be talking about her work on measuring and recognizing tonality in
music. Tonality, as I understand it, describes the harmonic
construction of a piece of music, both in frequency and over time.
Elaine will tell us how to visualize tonality and how to use these
visualizations to understand our perception of music.
This is a special Wednesday afternoon talk. Not Thursday.
Bring your favorite tonality perceivers.
- Malcolm
"MuSA.RT and the Visualization of Tonality"
Elaine Chew
University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~echew
The talk will begin with an introduction to the Spiral Array model
(Chew 2000) and its associated algorithms for recognizing and tracking
tonality in music. Tonality refers to the system by which pitches
relate one to another to generate varying degrees of perceived
stabilities amongst the pitches. The Spiral Array offers a way to
represent tonality and the perceived relations amongst its interacting
elements.
Questions that pertain to tonality include: why does this phrase sound
finished, and that one not? how does one create tension and release
in a composition? what are some bases for musical humour? where in a
piece should one stretch the time values of notes in an expressive
performance to produce the desired emotional effect? Musical
illustrations will provide some answers to these questions. The
illustrations will be brought to live through the MuSA.RT system for
real-time tonal analysis and visualization, based on the Spiral Array
model.
The MuSA.RT project is joint work with Alexandre Francois.
About the Speaker: Elaine Chew is an Associate Professor of Industrial
and Systems Engineering and of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, where
she founded and directs the Music Computation and Cognition
Laboratory. In the 2007-2008 academic year, Elaine is a Fellow at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she and Alexandre
Francois form a cluster on "Analytical Listening Through
Interactive Visualization".
Elaine Chew earned a BAS in mathematical and computational sciences
with honors and music with distinction from Stanford University, and
PhD and SM degrees in operations research from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology MIT. Awards and support for her work include
the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering and the
National Science Foundation Early Career and Information Technology
Research grants. She also holds diplomas in piano performance from
Trinity College, London.
____________
BERKELEY LECTURE
on Wednesday, 7 November 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events/sl20071107
"Net Neutrality on the Internet: A Two-sided Market Analysis"
Nicholas Economides
NYU Stern School of Business
We discuss the benefits of net neutrality regulation in the context of
a two-sided market model in which platforms sell Internet access
services to consumers and may set fees to content and applications
providers "on the other side" of the Internet. When access is
monopolized, we find that generally net neutrality regulation (that
imposes zero fees "on the other side" of the market) increases total
industry surplus compared to the fully private optimum at which the
monopoly platform imposes positive fees on content and applications
providers. Similarly, we find that imposing net neutrality in duopoly
increases total surplus compared to duopoly competition between
platforms that charge positive fees on content providers. We also
discuss the incentives of duopolists to collude in setting the fees
"on the other side" of the Internet while competing for Internet
access customers. Additionally, we discuss how price and non-price
discrimination strategies may be used once net neutrality is
abolished. Finally, we discuss how the results generalize to other
two-sided markets.
About the Speaker: Nicholas Economides is an expert on the economics
of networks, telecommunications, computers, information, the economics
of technical compatibility and standardization, the structure and
organization of financial markets, and on the application of public
policy to network industries, and the strategic analysis of
markets. He has published widely in the areas of networks,
telecommunications, oligopoly, antitrust, product positioning, and on
the liquidity and the organization of financial markets and exchanges.
____________
CONTINUING STUDIES: BRAINSTORMS
on Wednesday, 7 November 2007, 7:00pm
Hewlett Teaching Center, room 200
http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/course/EVT191.asp
"Computing and the Problem of Evil"
John Mitchell
Computer Science, Stanford
Computers and the Internet have changed business, education,
entertainment, and recreation dramatically over the past two
decades. But there are some problems. For example, why are computer
systems vulnerable to worms and viruses? Can't all those smart people
who built these clever machines fix these problems? What about the
Web? Is online banking secure? Should I stop using my credit card
online? What is phishing? How does phishing work? Can it be prevented?
Who is trying to steal my passwords and why? How can I tell if my
computer has been broken into and turned into a "bot" or "zombie"?
In this lecture and discussion, we will look at some of these
questions and talk about the current and future state of computer
security for ordinary everyday computer users.
About the Speaker: John Mitchell teaches programming languages and
computer security. His computer security research is in the areas of
access control, trust management, network protocol security, and Web
security. With Dan Boneh and their team, Mitchell received a Horizons
Award from Computerworld magazine for a Web browser phishing defense.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 8 November 2007, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Two kinds of math - and how to teach them"
Keith Devlin
CSLI, Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/
By the year 2020, we are likely to have seen two major revolutions in
mathematics education. Videogame technology will bring an
understanding of mathematics to children in the affluent western
societies who do not respond to current teaching methods. At the other
end of the economic spectrum, cheap mobile phones will deliver
instruction in basic quantitative skills to the millions in the
developing world for whom the mobile phone is the only programmable
computing device in the home. Both revolutions require taking a fresh
look at the nature of mathematics and how it can be taught.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 8 November 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Collective Intelligence and the Next Evolution of Money"
Jean-François Noubel
TheTransitioner
http://thetransitioner.org/
Collective Intelligence, Wisdom and Consciousness (CIWC) is a new
discipline which aim is to observe and understand from an integral
perspective what social organizations humanity is producing for itself
along its evolutionary journey. The need for wider consciousness and
embrace of the world at collective levels leads to more and more
initiatives of building global wisdom driven organizations. This has
always been possible at small group level when participants get highly
trained, today the emergence of socialware, the growth of the cultural
creatives society everywhere and the many initiatives that can be
observed through the civil society demonstrate that global wisdom
driven organizations are possible. The next step that can be
anticipated is the globalization of community currencies,
i.e. currency systems that communities (people, organizations, even
countries...) will create for their own market places. Scarce,
debt-based and interest-based national tender anymore prove today to
be an inadequate tool for a knowledge and wisdom based society. We
will explore what this evolution means through the most advanced
monetary project called open money.
About the Speaker: TheTransitioner.org is an international research
organization on Collective Intelligence, Wisdom and Consciousness
(CIWC). It gathers pioneers who are exploring the next human
organizations that humanity is creating through evolutionary
drives. By applying cutting edge discoveries to itself,
TheTransitioner.org aims to be a living example of this emerging
humanity. We believe there is no greater transforming force than
inspiration.
TheTransitioner.org is a non-profit, ideologically and financially
independent organization. We consider knowledge is a commons, our
discoveries are directly offered to the public domain.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 8 November 2007, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 320 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Sequential Document Visualization"
Guy Lebanon
Purdue University
Documents and other categorical valued time series are often
characterized by the frequencies of short range sequential patterns
such as n-grams. This representation converts sequential data of
varying lengths to high dimensional histogram vectors which are easily
modeled by standard statistical models. Unfortunately, the histogram
representation ignores most of the medium and long range sequential
dependencies making it unsuitable for visualizing sequential data. We
present a novel framework for sequential visualization of documents
based on the idea of local statistical modeling. The framework embeds
categorical time series as smooth curves in the multinomial simplex
summarizing the progression of sequential trends. We discuss several
visualization techniques based on the above framework and demonstrate
their usefulness for document visualization.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 8 November 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"What Everyone Should Know About Open Source"
Ron Goldman
Sun Microsystems Laboratories,
Open source is an important software development methodology. It can
also be an important part of business strategy. In this talk Ron
Goldman, a Sun Microsystems researcher, will describe how open source
works and discuss why a company might want to participate. He will
touch on open source business models, building community, licensing,
and common mistakes. Also covered is why open source is important to
computer professionals, educators and regular people.
About the Speaker: Ron Goldman is a researcher working at Sun
Microsystems Laboratories on alternative software development
methodologies and new software architectures. He is currently a member
of the Sun SPOT's project that is investigating the use of Java on
small embedded, wireless devices. Ron was instrumental in defining the
vision and details for the java.net website and helped start the
Javapedia project. He has advised many Sun open source projects
including OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, and Jini. He is the
co-author of the book "Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as
Business Strategy" published in April 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann.
Prior to Sun, he developed a program to generate and manipulate visual
representations of complex data for use by social scientists as part
of a collaboration between NYNEX Science & Technology and the
Institute for Research on Learning. He has a continuing interest in
the design of programming languages and has developed various
programming environments (IDEs). He has a PhD in computer science from
Stanford University where he was a member of the robotics group.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 9 November 2007, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"What is Reasoning Good For?"
Sherri Roush
Philosophy, UC Berkeley
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/roush/
It is possible to have beliefs that are reliably correlated with the
world without being able to talk informatively about this fact. In
perception this may be the rule rather than the exception. Why then
should we have an ability to reason about our beliefs, and convince
ourselves that we are right about them? I argue that this reasoning
has a function that is also carried out at the basic perceptual level
through self-monitoring that does not use reasoning or
consciousness. This function is calibration, the attunement of one's
degree of belief in p to one's track record of reliability in making
judgments about p-like matters. I argue that the function of
calibration, in turn, is pre-emptive self-correction, the adjustment
of your belief-states before the world punishes you for being wrong.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 9 November 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Data Modeling and Conceptual Sketching in the Design Process
at Microsoft"
Monty Hamontree
Microsoft
This talk delves into 5 interrelated keys that Microsoft teams focus
on to elevate the impact of "design research". Namely how to: team
insightfully as project teams; observe our users holistically; broker
user and design patterns proudly; distill fresh insights collectively;
and envision design essence vividly. A model of various design
research modeling approaches is used to spur discussion around the
strengths and weakness of each approach. For a subset of the
techniques discussed their value is characterized as being derived
from their systematic approach to yielding a broad set of bottom up
objects to think with. A contrasting set of approaches is
characterized as best suited to distilling or characterizing the
overall gist or essence of a body of design research. The position is
taken that the most effective design research models capture the
essence of the design research while at the same time conveying
stories that serve to "re-hydrate" the richness of the data behind
them, making the real world 'come alive' for Microsoft product teams.
About the Speaker: Monty joined Microsoft in October of 2001. He is
currently serving as the Director of User Experience for Microsoft's
developer tools division. A primary thread that has run throughout his
career has been the development and utilization of team-based
techniques for uncovering innovation opportunities, exploring creative
concepts, visualizing solution alternatives, and evaluating/refining
candidate solutions. He has over 15 years of industry experience in
product design and usability management. Prior to joining Microsoft
Monty co-founded and served as Vice President of User Experiences for
ChannelPoint. Prior to his tenure with ChannelPoint, Monty spent 5
years with Sun Microsystems managing product design and
usability. Monty holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors Engineering from Old
Dominion University.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 9 November 2007, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f07/schedule.html
"From Science Information's Concilium Bibliographicum of the
1890s to Espionage and Communist Dungeons in the 1950s"
Colin Burke
University of Maryland Baltimore
This talk describes a forthcoming book on the history of an 1890s
attempt to create and sustain a world-wide, random-access, cumulative,
and updatable data-base of all scientific information indexed in an
"international language", a language that helped to develop the
UDC. The Zurich Concilium's history was deep and long. It's fate was
tied to the birth of the American research university, the wealth and
values of a liberal American Quaker family, the struggles between
pragmatic and theoretical information specialists, the
internationalist movements (including the work of Paul Otlet), the
rise of America's eastern liberal elite and its institutions, the
nationalist urge in American science information, and, much, much
more,--including the modern art movement. The history of the
Concilium's founder, and his family, are also linked to: the ambitions
of the American intelligence agencies in World Wars I and II; Soviet
espionage in the 1930s and 1940s; the brutal purges in Eastern and
Central Europe in the 1940s and 1950s; and, the shaping the cold war's
science information systems.
About the Speaker: Colin Burke is Emeritus Professor, Dept of History,
University of Maryland Baltimore Campus. His writings include
Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the other Memex
(Scarecrow Pr., 1994), The secret in Building 26 : the untold story of
America's ultra war against the U-boat Enigma codes (with Jim
DeBrosse) (Random House, 2004), and "History of Information Science"
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 4 (2007): 3-54.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 9 November 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Modeling Local Coherence"
Mirella Lapata
University of Edinburgh
In this talk we introduce a novel framework for representing and
measuring local coherence. Central to this approach is the entity grid
representation of discourse which captures patterns of entity
distribution in a text. Inspired by Centering Theory, our algorithm
automatically abstracts a text into a set of entity transition
sequences and records distributional, syntactic, and referential
information about discourse entities. We re-conceptualize coherence
assessment as a learning task and show that our entity-based
representation is well-suited for ranking-based generation and text
classification tasks. Using the proposed representation, we achieve
good performance on text ordering, summary coherence evaluation, and
readability assessment.
(This talk reports joint work with Regina Barzilay.)
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 13 November 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"The Time-Traveler Threat to Privacy"
Brad Templeton
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Automation allows privacy invasion to scale up resulting in a massive
change in the balance of power in surveillance. AI technologies such
as face recognition, speech recognition, natural language
understanding and general systems for the identification and
understanding of human behaviours present significant risks. It is not
sufficient to consider simply current technology in understanding
these risks, because cheap storage means that present-day activities
can be recorded and then analysed by more advanced systems in the
future, resulting in a retroactive threat to privacy.
The talk will discuss the value of privacy, changes to the law,
technologies that threaten it, and attempts at solutions. Also
discussed will be current efforts by the EFF at stopping the
encroachment of such systems, such as our legal battle with AT&T over
alleged assistance with warrentless wiretaps for the NSA.
About the Speaker: Brad Templeton founded and ran ClariNet
Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company, then
sold it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. ClariNet publishes an online
electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers
machines. He has been active in the computer network community since
1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its
earliest days and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the
worlds most widely read computerized conference on that network, and
today the worlds longest running blog. He has been a software company
founder, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software
products. He is chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He
also sits on the advisory boards for a few internet
startups. Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone
call. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute (a Nanotech
think-tank) and BitTorrent, Inc.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 13 November 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 420:048
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
"Will-o'-the-wisp? In Pursuit of a Foundation for
Unrestricted Category Theory"
Solomon Feferman
Stanford
Category theory deals in a mathematically natural way with certain
kinds of algebraic structures on possibly very large collections of
structures, such as the category Grp of all groups and the category
Top of all topological spaces, in terms of the structure preserving
maps ("morphisms") between such objects. From this point of view, the
category Cat of all categories is itself such a structure whose
morphisms are the so-called functors between categories. Grp, Top and
Cat are examples of objects in Cat. Even more, if A and B are two
categories, no matter how large, there is a "still larger" category
whose objects are all the functors from A to B, and whose morphisms
are the so-called natural transformations between functors. Existing
set-theoretical foundations accounts for these kinds of constructions
only in terms of certain kinds of restrictions, e. g. by making a
distinction between "small categories" and "large categories" in a
theory of sets and classes. Nevertheless, it is plausible that the
foundation of an unrestricted category theory can be established
without invoking such distinctions. I shall present several criteria
for such a theory and show how they can be met to a considerable
extent in a strong consistent extension of NFU (Quine's system NF with
urelements). However, a full foundation is blocked in stratified
systems (with or without urelements) as presently treated. The talk
will go over the article, "Enriched stratified systems for the
foundations of category theory" to be found at
http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/ess.pdf
____________
UC BERKELEY ISD LECTURE
on Tuesday, 13 Tuesday 2007, 5:00pm - 6:30pm
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
"MyLifeBits: A Personal Lifetime Store"
Jim Gemmell
Microsoft Research
http://www.mylifebits.com/
MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of
Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text &
audio annotations, and hyperlinks. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in
lifetime storage and a software research effort. As an experiment,
Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards,
CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home
movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them
digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone
calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. In this talk, we will
demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, which
leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports,
saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is
designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right
click, voice annotation, and Web browser integration. It includes
tools to record Web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The
MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are
beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and
faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get
a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam
output.
About the Speaker: Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher in Microsoft's
Next Media research group. His current research focus is on personal
lifetime storage, as architect of the MyLifeBits project and chair of
the First and Second ACM Workshops on Capture, Archival and Retrieval
of Personal Experience (CARPE). Dr. Gemmell received his Ph.D. from
Simon Fraser University and his M. Math from the University of
Waterloo. His research interests include personal media management,
telepresence, and reliable multicast. He produced the on-line version
of the ACM 97 conference and is a co-author of the PGM reliable
multicast RFC. Dr. Gemmell serves on the editorial boards of the
ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal and Computer
Communications. He also served on the editorial advisory board of ACM
netWorker.
____________
BAYCHI
on Tuesday, 13 November 2007, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
"GUI Bloopers Updated:
New Common UI Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them"
Jeff Johnson
President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards
In March 2000, the first edition of GUI Bloopers was published, and
Jeff Johnson summarized it at BayCHI. Now, seven years later, GUI
Bloopers 2.0 has been published, and Jeff returns to describe what has
changed in the bloopers UI designers make. (Hint: In many ways much
has changed, but in many ways things haven't changed much.) The talk
is illustrated with examples of bloopers in commercially-available
software products and websites.
About the Speaker: Jeff Johnson is President and Principal Consultant
at UI Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm that offers
UI design, usability reviews, usability testing, and training
(http://www.uiiwizards.com). He has worked in the field of
Human-Computer Interaction since 1978. After earning B.A. and
Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked as a
user-interface designer and implementer, engineer manager, usability
tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard
Labs, and Sun Microsystems. In 2006, he was an Erskine Teaching Fellow
at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand. He has
published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of topics
in Human-Computer Interaction and the impact of technology on
society. He frequently gives talks and tutorials at conferences and
companies on usability and user-interface design. He is the author of
GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Dos for Software Developers and Web Designers
(2000), Web Bloopers: 60 Common Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
(2003), and GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and
Dos (2007).
____________
UC BERKELEY SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 14 November 2007, 2:00pm
South Hall 207 (UC Berkeley)
"Revisiting Query Clarity:
a Distinctiveness Measure for Information Retrieval"
Daniel Tunkelang
Chief Scientist Endeca
For the past three decades, most research in information retrieval has
assumed a ranked retrieval model, in which a query returns a ranking
of corpus documents by their estimated relevance to this query. This
model maps to the familiar user interface of most commercial and
academic search engines.
Despite its popularity, the ranked retrieval model suffers because it
does not provide a clear split between relevant and irrelevant
documents. This weakness makes it impossible to obtain even basic
analysis of the query results, such as the number of relevant
documents, let alone a more complicated one, such as the result
quality.
In contrast, a set retrieval model partitions the corpus into two
subsets of documents: those that are considered relevant, and those
that are not. A set retrieval model does not rank the retrieved
documents; instead, it establishes a clear split between documents
that are in and out of the retrieved set. As a result, set retrieval
models enable rich analysis of query results, which can then be
applied to improve user experience.
Armed with a set retrieval framework, we revisit query clarity, an
information gain measure introduced by Cronen-Townsend and Croft in
2002 to predict the ambiguity of a query against an information
retrieval system. While Cronen-Townsend and Croft offered evidence in
support of query clarity as a measure, subsequent research by Turpin
and Hersh in 2004 showed a lack of correlation between clarity scores
and user performance.
We claim that query clarity is an effective measure, but that it needs
to be revised to leverage a set retrieval model. We present a
normalized clarity score that measures the clarity of a query result
set relative to other document sets of its size. We discuss
theoretical results about the distribution of normalized clarity,
preliminary evidence in favor of normalized clarity as a tool to
measure query quality, and applications of normalized clarity to
interactive information retrieval.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Wednesday, 14 November 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Force dynamics and the semantics of negative causation"
Phillip Wolff
Emory University
(cosponsored with SPLaT!; refreshments at 5:15pm)
According to process theories of causation, people represent causation
by modeling the physical and social processes that bring about
causation in the world. These theories usually require that causal
relations involve an uninterrupted chain of influences from the cause
to the effect. A key problem for this view is the phenomenon of
"negative causation." Negative causation is present when causation
occurs in the absence of a cause. We say, for example, "The absence of
nicotine causes withdrawal" or "Lack of water causes thirst." It is
also present in cases of so-called "double prevention," or, situations
where preventions are prevented, as when, for example, rescuers
prevent guards from preventing an escape and thereby cause or allow
the escape. In all cases of negative causation, there is a gap in the
chain of influences from the cause to the effect. In my talk I show
that negative causation is not, in fact, a problem for process
theories based on force dynamics. Indeed, several patterns in the
meaning of causal expressions encoding negative causation may provide
support for process approaches over competing approaches. According to
statistical, counterfactual, and logical approaches to causation,
expressions of causation involving negation and positive causation are
symmetric: for example, NOT-CAUSE --> PREVENT and PREVENT -->
NOT-CAUSE. In contrast, from a force dynamic perspective these
different expressions are often related to each other asymmetrically:
for example, NOT-CAUSE --> PREVENT, but not PREVENT --> NOT-CAUSE.
The predictions of the force dynamic approach were supported in
several experiments in which people re-expressed causal expressions
taken from the internet and described animations depicting complex
causal interactions. Because these asymmetries cannot be explained by
statistical or logical approaches, the results support the view that
causal reasoning involves simulating the actual processes that bring
about causation in the world.
____________
UC BERKELEY HOWISON LECTURE
on Wednesday, 14 November 2007, 4:10pm
Toll Room, Alumni House (Berkeley)
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/lectures/howison/dretske.shtml
"What We See"
Fred Dretske
Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, Stanford University
We see (at least) three fundamentally different sorts of things:
objects (a tomato), properties of these objects (the tomato's size,
shape, color, orientation), and facts about them (that it is a tomato,
that it is red). I shall be concerned with only the first: our
perception of objects. I will furthermore restrict my topic by
assuming, without argument, that the objects we see, in normal
circumstances, are ordinary dry goods--tomatoes, pencils, people,
trees and houses. I am interested in how many of these objects we see
in brief, but attentive, observation. The answer to this question
tells us something important about the nature of conscious perceptual
experience.
About the Speaker: Fred Dretske specializes in epistemology and the
philosophy of mind, with an emphasis upon self-knowledge and conscious
experience. In 1994, he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris,
which annually recognizes the contributions of a leading philosopher
of mind. Dretske is emeritus professor of philosophy at both Stanford
University and the University of Wisconsin, and has served as senior
research scholar in the philosophy department at Duke University since
1999.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 15 November 2007, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Nora Suppes Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Apprenticeship Learning with Applications in Autonomous
Helicopter Flight and Robot Dogs"
Pieter Abbeel
Stanford University
Many problems in control have unknown, stochastic, and highly
non-linear dynamics, and offer significant challenges to classical
control methods. Some of the key difficulties in these problems are
that (i) It is often hard to write down, in closed form, a formal
specification of the control task (for example, what is the objective
function for "driving well"?), (ii) It is difficult to learn good
control---as opposed to merely descriptive---models of the dynamics
(cf. the "exploration problem" in reinforcement learning), and (iii)
It is expensive to find closed-loop controllers for high dimensional,
highly stochastic domains. In this talk, I will present formal results
showing how these problems can be efficiently addressed in the
apprenticeship learning setting, in which expert demonstrations of the
task are available. I will also present an application of our ideas to
autonomous helicopter flight and four-legged locomotion. Our
helicopter results significantly extend the state of the art in
helicopter control, and include the first successful completion of the
following five aerobatic flight maneuvers: tic-toc, in-place forward
flip and sideways roll, nose-in funnel, and tail-in funnel. Our
resulting robot dog controller constitutes the state of the art in
quadruped locomotion across rugged, previously unseen terrains.
About the Speaker: Pieter Abbeel is a PhD student in Prof. Andrew Ng's
group at Stanford University. His research interests include machine
learning, robotics, and control.
____________
CTL TALK
on Thursday, 15 November 2007, 12 noon
Hartley Conference room, Mitchell Earth Sciences
http://events.stanford.edu/events/121/12147/
"Blending Face-to-Face and Online Teaching: Successes and Challenges"
Kim McShane
The Institute for Teaching & Learning (ITL), The University of Sydney
Drawing on examples from her recent research that investigated faculty
experiences of making the move online, Dr. McShane will outline some
of the successes and challenges associated with online and blended
teaching. There will be an opportunity for all to share examples of
what they know does work well online and face-to-face. In these times
of student-centred learning is it useful to reflect on what is
learning and what it is becoming in our universities and colleges? In
this presentation, Dr. McShane will review how online learning might
be changing university teaching and, indeed, changing student
learning, in significant ways. When distance learning is not the only
option, what case can we make for taking up online teaching, and what
case do we make for integrating face-to-face and online teaching?
Cosponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Stanford
Center for Professional Development
____________
SRI CCB SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 15 November 2007, 3:00pm
AE201, SRI International
"Bioinformatics - an Australian perspective: through the eyes
of the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics"
Jeremy Baker
CEO, Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics, Australia
Australia covers a large geographic area with large distances between
the main research centres. Because of this, bioinformatics capability
has grown from those groups that started out in genomics research
largely independently. As often happens in the domain, there is a lot
of replication of capability and skills with little cohesion of
effort. Bioinformatics groups in Brisbane, Queensland recognised that
there was no group providing local up-to-date data which they needed
for their projects. Hence the genesis of the Queensland Facility for
Advanced Bioinformatics, (QFAB). Together, the QFAB collaborators and
the Queensland State government have funded the initiative for three
years. QFAB aims to deliver access to data as well as bioinformatics
capability to researchers throughout Australia. Initially it is
focussed on delivering against its partner's requirements and will
soon begin some challenging national projects. This talk will outline
some of the QFAB and Australian bioinformatics related infrastructure
and projects that rely on it.
About the Speaker: Mr Barker joined the Queensland Facility for
Advanced Bioinformatics as the full time CEO in June 2007 having
previously been contracted to arrange the planning, personnel, finance
and contractual arrangements for the Facility.
Mr Barker has a track record of establishing or growing a number of
organisations in the life sciences sector. These have included high
technology marine production facilities, a biotechnology advisory
business, seven years developing the Australian Genome Research
Facility Ltd which includes a specialist bioinformatics service, and
is a director and shareholder in ESPData Pty Ltd which provides
pre-clinical and clinical trials capability.
Mr Barker originally graduated with a Bachelor of Science and Masters
of Science from Auckland University, New Zealand. His thesis covered
the population genetics of a freshwater fish complex using allozyme
electrophoresis. He also holds an MBA from Deakin University,
Australia and is a Member of the Australian Institute of Company
Directors and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management. He
has been actively involved as member and Chair of the Queensland
Branch of Ausbiotech Ltd, the peak body for Australian biotechnology.
____________
FUNDAMENTAL THEMES IN NEUROSCIENCE SEMINAR
on Thursday, 15 November 2007, 4:15pm
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
"Memory and how it fails: a molecular and cellular perspective"
Alcino Silva
Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Psychology, Stanford
http://www.silvalab.org/
Our laboratory is studying the role of hippocampal and prefrontal
function in recent and remote memory. We are interested in uncovering
general rules for how these two brain regions account for their unique
roles in recent and remote memory. We are also studying how molecular
mechanisms modulate cellular responses that underlie key microcircuit
properties implicated in learning and memory. To accomplish this we
are using a myriad of techniques including region and temporal
specific transgenic manipulations, viral vectors, pharmacology, in
vivo and in vitro electrophysiology, in vivo two-photon scanning
confocal microscopy, as well as a battery of behavioral tasks designed
to probe hippocampal and prefrontal cortical function. Our laboratory
is also interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying
cognitive disorders such as those underlying learning disabilities
associated with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1), Tuberous Sclerosis and
schizophrenia.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 16 November 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"ChucK: A Computer Music Programming Language, Designing
Instruments for Laptop Orchestras"
Ge Wang
Stanford University CCRMA
http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/
http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/
In the first part of this talk, we present the design, philosophy, and
development of ChucK, a computer music programming language intending
to provide a different approach, expressiveness, and thinking with
respect to time and parallelism in audio programming - as well as a
platform for precise and rapid experimentation. The basic tenets of
ChucK include a syntax for representing audio flow, a new time-based
programming model that allows programmers to precisely control time
across concurrent program components (we call this "strongly-timed"),
and facilities to rapidly experiment with programs "on-the-fly" (i.e.,
as they run). A ChucKian approach to "live coding" as a new musical
performance paradigm is also discussed. This in turn motivates the
Audicle: a graphical environment to visualize audio programming in
real-time. We also present the applications of ChucK in audio
research, composition/performance, and education.
In the second part of this presentation, we describe our adventures
with the "laptop orchestra": a new type of large-scale,
computer-mediated music ensemble. The laptop orchestra consists of 12
or more sets of laptops, humans, special hemispherical speakers,
sensors, and software, and presents new challenges in music
technology, instrument design, composition, performance, and
pedagogy. Since its instantiation at Princeton University in 2005 (as
the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLOrk), the orchestra has premiered
more than 50 new compositions and offered four new courses (in
Computer Science and Music), using ChucK as a primary tool for
teaching, composition, and instrument design in the ensemble and
classroom. In these contexts, we present our ongoing experiences in
building new human-computer musical instruments and performances, and
discuss the potential of the laptop orchestra as a unique platform for
teaching and experimentation with music and technology. Lastly, we
present plans for the upcoming "Stanford Laptop Orchestra".
About the Speaker: Ge Wang received his B.S. in Computer Science in
2000 from Duke University, PhD (soon) in Computer Science (advisor
Perry Cook) in 2007 from Princeton University, and is currently an
assistant professor in the Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. His research interests
include interactive software systems (of all sizes) for computer
music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music
information retrieval, new performance ensembles (e.g., laptop
orchestra) and paradigms (e.g., live coding), visualization,
interfaces for human-computer interaction, interactive audio over
networks, and methodologies for education at the intersection of
computer science and music. Ge is the chief architect of the ChucK
audio programming language and the Audicle environment. He is a
founding developer and co-director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra
(PLOrk), and a co-creator of the TAPESTREA sound design
environment. Ge composes and performs via various electro-acoustic and
computer-mediated means, including with PLOrk, with Perry as a live
coding duo, and with Princeton graduate student and comrade Rebecca
Fiebrink in a duo exploring new performance paradigms, cool audio
software, and great food.
Ge joins the Stanford music faculty as an assistant professor in the
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He
excitedly looks forward to many things, including working with the
strong faculty, researchers, and students and forging new directions
in computer music research, software, and pedagogy, as well as writing
music and initiating and developing new performance ensembles and
paradigms, including a Stanford Laptop Orchestra.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 16 November 2007, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f07/schedule.html
"How Does an Online Art Community Take Shape?"
Dan Perkel
How do ongoing practices of making and sharing art shape the
development of the technological aspects of an art community website
and how does the production of the site in turn shape the social and
creative practices of the diverse groups of people involved? What are
the various ways in which the site's "users" influence the
technological production of the site? How is the creative expression
and creative production going on in the site structured by the social
organization, technical implementation, and ongoing social practices
on the site? Finally, what role do youth play in the site's
development and how do they understand their own practices on the
site? I intend an ethnographic approach to technology use and design
by participating on the site, finding ways to get into the lives and
activity of the site's members (including both "users" and
"designers," a highly problematic distinction on this particular
site), and tracing the historical and ongoing development of
particular site features and practices from multiple points of view.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 16 November 2007, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Inversion and Paradigm Collapse in the Lower Sepik Languages,
Papua New Guinea"
William Foley
University of Sydney/Stanford
(cosponsored by the Linguistics Colloquium Committee)
Direct versus inverse inflectional systems are a commonplace feature
of languages which signal their grammatical relations primarily by
verbal agreement, such as many Amerindian languages or Tibeto-Burman
languages of the Himalayas. Direct versus inverse systems are
characterized by one inflectional pattern when a speech act
participant or local person (first or second person) functions as
actor to a non-speech act participant or nonlocal person (third
person) as patient and another inflectional pattern when the opposite
situation holds. Scenarios in which local participants (first and
second person) act on each other pose particular problems. The
Algonkian languages of North America are the paradigm case of this
grammatical inflectional pattern. As the Lower Sepik languages are
morphologically complex languages which express grammatical
information almost exclusively through verbal morphology, they, not
unexpectedly, exhibit direct-inverse inflectional systems, and such a
system was unquestionably a feature of Proto-Lower Sepik. However,
while all six currently extant languages have such systems, each is
different to a greater or lesser extent from the others, particularly
in dealing with the pragmatically complex scenario in which local
participants act on each other. I will employ a version of Optimality
Theory to set out an analysis of the parameters of variation across
the languages. Starting with a revision of Wunderlich's revision of my
description of Yimas, I will propose 5 constraints that determine the
patterns of verb inflection for transitive verbs in that language. I
will then look at each language in turn and demonstrate how the
variation among them is due to different ranking of these constraints,
and in some cases, due to grammatical changes elsewhere, their
apparent loss. The findings have important implications for procedures
for the reconstruction of morphological systems in comparative
linguistics, but also, due to the high degree of homophony in the
paradigms in some languages, particularly in the inverse forms, and
the disjunctive semantics of a number of the morphemes, for
morphological theory more generally.
____________
END MATERIAL
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