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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 5 December 2007, vol. 23:14
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
5 DECEMBER 2007 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 14
______________________________________________________________________
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 5 DECEMBER 2007 TO 14 DECEMBER 2007
WEDNESDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2007
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [5-Dec-07]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Using a head camera on babies to capture their view of the
world and what it tells us"
Linda Smith
Indiana University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12:45pm UC Berkeley School of Information Lecture
110 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Social Entrepreneurship and the Use of ICTD for
Socio-economic Development"
Kamran Elahian
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events/sl20071205
3:30pm Bio-X: Talks in English [5-Dec-07]
Clark Center S360
"Neural 'learning rules' for tuning motor programs"
Jennifer Raymond
Neurobiology
http://biox.stanford.edu/news/tie.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [5-Dec-07]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"Action, Objects, Shape and Early Word Learning"
Linda Smith,
Indiana University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [5-Dec-07]
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Science communication, science literacy and public support:
new models in place of old thoughts"
Rob Semper
San Francisco Exploratorium
http://www.exploratorium.edu/
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:15pm CREEES Talk [5-Dec-07]
Bolivar House Conference Room, 582 Alvarado
"When Languages Die:
Tracking Global and Local Trends of Language Extinction"
K. David Harrison
Linguistics, Swarthmore College
Research Director, Living Tongues Institute
http://CREEES.stanford.edu/events/
THURSDAY, 6 DECEMBER 2007
10:30am Ontolog Invited Speaker [6-Dec-07]
online/conference call
"If we build it, will they come? Social-engineering of
new technology to disseminate biomedical ontologies"
Mark Musen
Stanford University
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2007_12_06
Abstract below
11:00am CCRMA Hearing Seminar [6-Dec-07]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"Modeling and Processing of Audio using a Nonlinear, Auditory
Sinusoidal Model"
Ryan Cassidy
CCRMA
http://www.stanford.edu/~rcassidy/
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [6-Dec-07]
Packard 101
"Networks on the Edge:
Challenges and Opportunities in Residential Wireless Networks"
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
12:29pm Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium [6-Dec-07]
Terman 217
"The Company You Keep:
Do Status and Stigma Diffuse Through Mere Proximity?"
Hayagreeva Rao
GSB, Stanford University
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/rao/research.html
(Joint WTO-STVP Colloquium)
http://stvp.stanford.edu/research/seminars.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
Abstract below
1:00pm UC Berkeley Trust Seminar [6-Dec-07]
Wozniak lounge, Soda Hall
"Quantifying Strengths and Risk Assessments of Software
Protections"
George Cybenko
Dartmouth College
http://www.truststc.org/seminar.htm
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [6-Dec-07]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Strategies For Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies"
Charlene Li
Forrester Research
http://www.forrester.com/rb/analyst/charlene_li
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Aristotelian Imagination and the Explanation of Behavior"
Joel Yurdin
UC Berkeley
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [6-Dec-07]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Learning to Recognize Facial Emotions:
Psychologists vs. Artists"
David C. Wilkins
Symbolic Systems, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [6-Dec-07]
Packard 101
"Exchanging Limits: Why Iterative Decoding Works"
Rüdiger Urbanke
School of Computer & Communication Sciences, EPFL
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Fundamental Themes in Neuroscience Seminar [6-Dec-07]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman
"Imaging circuit development in the vertebrate retina"
Rachel Wong
Washington University
http://wonglab.biostr.washington.edu/
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
5:30pm Stanford Psychology of Language Tea (SPLaT!) [6-Dec-07]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"The Great Importance of Scene Information for Language
Comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking and ERPs"
Pia Knoeferle
UCSD
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~knoferle/Home.html
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/newsletter/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2007
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [7-Dec-07]
Gates B01
"Adaptive Interaction Techniques for Sharing and Reusing
Design Resources"
Brian Lee
Stanford HCI
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley HWNI Student Seminar [7-Dec-07]
101 LSA (Berkeley)
"Hippocampal circuits and dynamic range"
Massimo Scanziani
UCSD
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [7-Dec-07]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"The Fall in Review"
Clifford Lynch
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f07/schedule.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [7-Dec-07]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Yoichiro Masuda
Jikei University School of Medicine (Tokyo) and Stanford University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
SUNDAY, 9 DECEMBER 2007
7:00pm San Francisco Ask A Scientist
The Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St. (21st Ave) San Francisco
"Holiday Puzzle Party"
Wes Carroll
Do The Math Private Tutoring Services
http://www.askascientistsf.com/
MONDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2007
9:00am Berkeley Brain Imaging Center Research Day
Heynes Room, Faculty club (Berkeley)
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
"Gradient OCP and harmonic alignment in English phonotactics"
Olga Dmitrieva, Matthew Adams, Jason Grafmiller, Scott Grimm,
Yuan Zhao, and Arto Anttila
Stanford University
(LSA talk, Chicago, January 3, 2008)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
TUESDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2007
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [11-Dec-07]
EJ291, SRI International
"Towards Useful 3D Semantic Maps"
Radu B. Rusu
AIC
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
7:30pm BayCHI
George Pake Auditorium at PARC [11-Dec-07]
"Learning to create engaging apps for Facebook:
What works & what does not"
BJ Fogg, Dave McClure, and colleagues
CSLI
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2007
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Unlearning What You Have Learned"
Mike Titelbaum
UC Berkeley
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [12-Dec-07]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Putting Engineering Back in Protein Engineering"
Sridhar Govindarajan and Claes Gustafsson
DNA 2.0
http://www.dna20.com/
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2007
1:00pm UC Berkeley Trust Seminar [13-Dec-07]
Wozniak lounge, Soda Hall
"Two Techniques for Programming by Sketching"
Rastislav Bodik
UC Berkeley
http://www.truststc.org/seminar.htm
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [13-Dec-07]
EJ228, SRI International
"A Quest to Understand and Accept Scientific Results"
Paulo Pinheiro da Silva
University of Texas at El Paso
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC [13-Dec-07]
"By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated
Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for
$12,107.09"
Guy Kawasaki
Truemors, Garage Ventures
http://www.guykawasaki.com/about/
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Two Ways to Be Moved"
Agnes Callard
UC Berkeley
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
FRIDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2007
7:00pm Long Now Foundation Talk
Kanbar Hall, JCCSF, San Francisco
"At the Edge of Art"
Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais
http://www.longnow.org/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O-, A-, and B-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.
____________
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____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 5 December 2007, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Science communication, science literacy and public support:
new models in place of old thoughts"
Rob Semper
San Francisco Exploratorium
http://www.exploratorium.edu/
Scientists often think of solving science and society concerns in
terms of a lack of public understanding of science. overcoming a lack
of public science literacy. But new models of public science literacy
are beginning to change the paradigm from a one way transmission
approach of lecture, publishing and journalism to one of public
engagement and even debate. From approaches such as the use of
"framing" to shape the discussion to the movement from public
understanding to public dialog to the role of science centers as
intermediary institutions between the world of science and the public,
new thinking is emerging for this critical arena.
About the speaker: Rob Semper, a physicist and science educator, is
Executive Associate Director of the Exploratorium, Director of the
Exploratorium's Center for Media and Communication and Interim
Director of the Exploratorium’s Center for Teaching and Learning. In
addition to supporting the graphics, media, editorial and information
resources needs of the Exploratorium, the Center for Media and
Communications is the home of an extensive commercial publishing
program, a variety of radio and television broadcast projects, the
Interactive Media Laboratory researching the use of new tools for
learning and the Exploratorium's Website and Webcast activities which
develops interactive media for the museum setting and external
venues. The Center for Teaching and Learning supports the relationship
between the Exploratorium and the formal education environment through
teacher development activities, field trips and explainer programs and
outreach efforts and is the headquarters for CILS, the Center for
Informal Learning and Schools.
Since 1977, Rob has been project director for a number of NSF and NASA
sponsored exhibit, education and media projects at the Exploratorium
including most recently a series of Internet test-bed projects
designed to explore the use of on-line museum responses to support
school science instruction. He is also executive producer of "The
Exploratorium’s X-Lab", an integrated children’s television,
publication and Website project focused on developing problem solving
skills. In 1988, during a leave, he was a Schumann fellow at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of a creative
collaboration between Apple Computer and Lucasfilm Ltd. that developed
interactive multimedia education projects combining computer graphics
and film and video technology. He was the recipient of the 1994 NSTA's
Informal Educator of the Year award. His personal academic interests
are in visual thinking, the use of media in education, the impact of
environments on learning and distributed learning environments.
____________
ONTOLOG INVITED SPEAKER
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 10:30am PST
online/conference call
http://ontolog.cim3.net/
"If we build it, will they come? Social-engineering of
new technology to disseminate biomedical ontologies"
Mark Musen
Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University
RSVP requested to peter.yim...cim3.com
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is developing a wide range
of Web-based services to assist end users in browsing, evaluation, and
use of ontologies. These features include capabilities for which there
is no specific correlate in current technology for ontology
management. These features include online community-based review and
annotation of ontologies, support for declaring mappings between
ontologies, and the push of information about ontology changes
directly to a user's desktop. These novel capabilities for ontology
access and use have the potential to address pressing end-user needs
and to engage entire research communities in the development,
evolution, and evaluation of controlled terminologies and
ontologies. Our work offers possibilities for the creation of a new
kind of collaborative, community-based approach to the dissemination
and use of ontologies. The key question is whether our user community
is ready for such capabilities. The issue is one of sociology and
culture as much as it is one of technology. This talk will describe
the BioPortal for access to biomedical ontologies online, and will
outline our future plans for this novel, Web-based resource.
The online Ontolog events are open and free of charge. Anyone who is
interested, or (better still) who may have something to contribute, is
welcome. Refer to individual event details on their respective session
pages. The links are given, where you will find session agenda,
presentation abstract, conference call dial-in and other pertinent
details . This event's wiki page is at:
<http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2007_12_06>
*RSVP* by by emailing peter.yim...cim3.com so that they can prepare
enough resources to support everyone. (Kindly include your affiliation
and job title if you aren't already a member of the Ontolog
community.) Before participating, please also make sure you are aware
of the IPR policy (ref:
<http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid32>).
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 11:00am
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Stanford CCRMA has been at the forefront of sinusoidal modeling. This
is the idea that one can model an audio signal as an ensemble of
sinusoids. Given the sinusoids then there are all sorts of
modifications one can make to the signal.
Ryan has been investigating the use of a perceptual model to help tune
the sinusoids. He says his talk on Thursday will be accompanied by
audio examples. I'm curious to hear how using a different error
criteria (that increases the SNR) improves the sound.
Bring your own spectral analyzers.. and we'll talk about how modeling
them can improve sinusoidal analysis. - Malcolm
"Modeling and Processing of Audio
using a Nonlinear, Auditory Sinusoidal Model"
Ryan Cassidy
CCRMA
http://www.stanford.edu/~rcassidy/
In this seminar, I will present one aspect of my thesis work on
auditory signal processing to improve impaired music listening
experiences. In particular, we investigate the use of an auditory
sinusoidal model in impaired processing tasks. In general, sinusoidal
models (along with their extensions) offer several advantages over
filter bank or transform-based approaches, such as accurate and
explicit modeling of tonal component peaks and frequencies, superior
performance in low-bit-rate coding applications, amenability to
practical effects such as denoising, and robustness to more exotic
effects such as time-stretching and pitch- shifting. Most prior work
has involved identification of sinusoidal candidates using
non-auditory, typically uniform transforms, followed by candidate
selection based on signal-to-mask ratios or more simplistic criteria.
In such cases, it has been shown that such techniques tend to be
biased towards lower-frequency components which may have little effect
on the sound's excitation pattern, while ignoring significant
higher-frequency components (Painter, PhD Dissertation, 2000). Prior
attempts to resolve this problem have involved non-auditory component
candidate identification, followed by an iterative,
excitation-matching scheme for component selection (Painter and
Spanias, ITSAP 2005). In this work, we present an alternative
involving direct identification and selection of sinusoidal components
via excitation pattern peaks. The time-varying excitation patterns
are computed using the Glasberg/Moore method, which has been adapted
to the problem of time-varying loudness computation (Glasberg and
Moore, JAES 2002), and has been a subject of recent optimization by
the authors (Cassidy and Smith, MWSCAS 2007). While an examination of
artifacts in certain test cases will be examined and discussed, sound
examples show reasonably good correspondence between original and
resynthesized audio.
____________
STANFORD NETWORKING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 12:15pm
Packard 101
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
"Networks on the Edge:
Challenges and Opportunities in Residential Wireless Networks"
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University
Wireless data networking technology is ideal for residential use
because it is inexpensive and easy to install (no wiring). As a
result, we have seen a sharp increase in wireless communication in
residential settings. In the first part of the talk, I will focus on
the privacy and interference problems created by this deployment
trend. As we grow more reliant on these wireless devices and use them
in more settings, the fact that they leak a variety of identifying
user information and fail to provide robust connectivity when expected
will become more troublesome. I will describe both our work on
quantifying the privacy leaks and interference problems and our
initial work on improving wireless protocol designs to address this
issue. In the second half of the talk, I will focus on the opportunity
to create cooperative neighborhood networks using existing wireless
network deployments. In current residential neighborhoods, the
wireless bandwidth between homes far exceeds each home's ability to
transfer data to the Internet. I will describe some of the interesting
alternatives for delivering data to the typical user that this
bandwidth gap enables.
About the speaker: Srinivasan Seshan is currently an Associate
Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He held
the Finmeccanica chair at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to
2006. Dr. Seshan received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Computer Science
Department at University of California, Berkeley. From 1995 to 2000,
Dr. Seshan was a research staff member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research
Center. Dr. Seshan's primary interests are in the broad areas of
network protocols and distributed network applications. In the past,
he has worked on topics such as transport/routing protocols for
wireless networks, fast protocol stack implementations, performance
prediction for Internet transfers, ISP multihoming, new approaches to
congestion control, large-scale multiplayer games, and large-scale
sensor networks. His current work explores the challenges and
opportunities created by chaotic wireless network deployments.
____________
WORK, TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION COLLOQUIUM
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 12:30pm
Terman 217
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
(Joint WTO-STVP Colloquium)
"The Company You Keep:
Do Status and Stigma Diffuse Through Mere Proximity?"
Hayagreeva Rao
GSB, Stanford University
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/rao/research.html
We ask whether stigma travels quicker than status under conditions of
mere proximity. We study whether a focal artist gains employment when
affiliates acquire status after working with the focal artist, and
conversely, whether a focal artist loses employment when affiliates
are stigmatized after working with the focal artist in the Hollywood
film industry. We find that a focal artist loses employment when
affiliates of a focal artist are blacklisted after working with the
focal artist. By contrast, mere proximity to Oscar winners has no
effect on the work prospects of artists. We validate these findings
through an experiment and discuss implications for the diffusion of
status and stigma.
About the Speaker: Professor Rao has published widely in the fields of
management and sociology and studies the social and cultural causes of
organizational change. In his research, he studies three sub-processes
of organizational change: a) creation of new social structures, b) the
transformation of existing social structures, and c) the dissolution
of existing social structures. His recent work investigates the role
of social movements as motors of organizational change in professional
and organizational fields.
He has published widely in sociology and management in journals such
as the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of
Sociology, American Sociological Review, Academy of Management
Journal, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. He
serves as the Associate Editor of Administrative Science Quarterly,
and has been a member of the editorial boards of American Journal of
Sociology and Organization Science and Academy of Management
Review. He has been a Member of the Organizational Innovation and
Change Panel of the National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the
Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science and of the
Sociological Research Association.
His teaching specialties include leading organizational change,
building customer focused cultures, and organization design. He
teaches courses on these topics to MBA and executive audiences. He has
consulted with, and conducted executive workshops for, organizations
such as Aon Corporation, British Petroleum, CEMEX, General Electric,
Hearst Corporation, IBM, Mass Mutual, James Hardie Company, Seyfarth
and Shaw. Additionally, he also worked with nonprofit organizations
such as the American Cancer Society and governmental organizations
such as the FBI and CIA, and the intelligence community.
Among the awards he has received are the Sidney Levy Teaching Award
from the Kellogg School of Management, and the W. Richard Scott
Distinguished Award for Scholarship from the American Sociological
Association.
____________
UC BERKELEY TRUST SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 1:00pm
Wozniak lounge, Soda Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.truststc.org/seminar.htm
"Quantifying Strengths and Risk Assessments
of Software Protections"
George Cybenko
Dartmouth College
There has been great interest in developing quantitative metrics and
economic models for computer security, but relatively little progress.
This talk will present a novel approach called 'Quantitative
Evaluation of Risk for Investment Efficient Strategies" (QUERIES) for
quantitative metrics and economic models relevant to
cybersecurity. The methodology relies on a variety of different
ingredients: red teaming, information markets, partially observable
Markov decision processes and even American options pricing
algorithms. The technique has been applied to a specific DoD software
protection problem in which critical digital intellectual property is
to be protected against reverse engineering, piracy and/or
unauthorized modification. The methodology and actual experimental
results will be presented in this talk. Possibilities for extending
the methodology to other security domains will be discussed.
About the Speaker: George Cybenko, Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor
of Engineering at Dartmouth, received his B.Sc. in mathematics at the
University of Toronto, and an M.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in applied
mathematics from Princeton. He has taught on the computer science
faculty at Tufts University and was professor of electrical
engineering and computer science at the University of Illinois,
Champaign-Urbana. He has served as editor for several mathematics,
computer, and information theory publications, has helped organize
dozens of conferences and symposia, and has published over one hundred
journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings. An IEEE
Fellow, he is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and SIAM. In
November 2002, he was named founding editor-in-chief of IEEE Security
& Privacy magazi
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Strategies For Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies"
Charlene Li
Forrester Research
http://www.forrester.com/rb/analyst/charlene_li
With the advent of social technologies like blogs and social networks,
the world has transformed to one where people get what they need from
each other, rather than from traditional institutions. Companies are
threatened by this new order, and need new frameworks and strategies
for how to approach the groundswell of active, participating
customers. This forum will address the following issues:
-What process should companies use to create a coherent social
strategy?
-What business objectives and results can be achieved with Web 2.0
technologies?
-Who should lead and own the social strategy within an organization?
-How will social technologies transform your business in the future?
About the Speaker: Charlene primarily contributes to Forrester's
offerings for the Interactive Marketing professional. She is one of
the driving forces behind Forrester's Social Computing and Web 2.0
research, and examines how companies can use technologies like blogs,
social networking, RSS, tagging, and widgets for marketing purposes.
During her eight years at Forrester, Charlene has also lead the
marketing and media research team, and ran the San Francisco office.
In her research, Charlene covers such marketing-related topics as
consumer portals, search, and media site design. She also leverages
her background in newspaper publishing and looks at online local media
and online classifieds. In the past, she has also written about
online advertising, online gaming, and media content strategies. She
also contributes to her Groundswell blog and plans to publish a book
by the same name in spring 2008. A former strategy consultant for
Monitor Company, Charlene is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard
University and holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Learning to Recognize Facial Emotions:
Psychologists vs. Artists"
David C. Wilkins
Symbolic Systems and CSLI
http://www.stanford.edu/~dwilkins/
Psychologists and Artists have adopted very different approaches to
the cognitive task of learning to recognize facial emotions.
Psychologists teach mainly by showing classified example of of faces,
e.g., <http://www.PaulEkman.com>. Artists teach by the immersive
experience of drawing live models, e.g.,
<http://www.DrawTheFeeling.org/>. Which is better? This talk
presents these different approaches and describes our efforts to
identify metrics and design experiments to quantify the differences. A
Symbolic Systems seminar course on this topic is offered next quarter,
and is described at
<http://www.stanford.edu/~dwilkins/symbsys210.pdf>.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Exchanging Limits: Why Iterative Decoding Works"
Rüdiger Urbanke
School of Computer & Communication Sciences, EPFL
Most new communication standards employ sparse graph codes and
iterative decoding algorithms.
The standard way of designing such systems is to assume that the
codelength is infinite and that a fixed number of iterations is
performed. We then imagine that we perform more and more iterations
and consider the resulting performance limit. This is called the
``density evolution'' limit. But what happens if we exchange the two
limits and we first let the number of iterations tend to infinity and
then only consider increasing blocklengths? From simulations it seems
that these two limits are the same but what can we say
mathemathically? Proving that the exchange of limits is valid is not
only intellectually pleasing but is also a first step in considering
scaling laws for sparse graph codes.
I will consider the noise regime below the threshold computed by
density evolution. For sparse graph codes with large variable degrees,
expansion arguments provide an easy way to show that the exchange of
limits is valid.
The situation is more interesting for sparse graph codes with small
left degrees. In this case expansion arguments are no longer
sufficient and we have to rely on combinatorial arguments and specific
properties of the decoder.
This is joint work with Satish Korada, EPFL.
About the Speaker: Rüdiger L. Urbanke received the Diplomingenieur
degree from the Vienna Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in
1990 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from
Washington University, St. Louis, MO,in 1992 and 1995
respectively. From 1995 to 1999, he held a position at the Mathematics
of Communications Department at Bell Labs. Since November 1999, he has
been a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication
Sciences of EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr. Urbanke is a recipient of
a Fulbright Scholarship. From 2000-2004 he was an Associate Editor of
the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and he is currently on the
board of the series "Foundations and Trends in Communications and
Information Theory." He is a co-recipient of the IEEE Information
Theory Society 2002 Best Paper Award and the co-author (jointly with
Tom Richardson) on an upcoming book entitled "Modern Coding Theory."
____________
STANFORD PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE TEA (SPLAT!)
on Thursday, 6 December 2007, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/newsletter/
"The Great Importance of Scene Information for Language
Comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking and ERPs"
Pia Knoeferle
UCSD
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~knoferle/Home.html
We know that people rapidly use information from visual contexts to
inform language comprehension. Beyond non-modularity of the language
system, however, little is known about the nature and time course with
which visual context influences sentence comprehension: How fluid is
the interplay between language-mediated attention and the use of
attended visual context? Is visual context on a par with -- or even
more important than -- linguistic and world knowledge for sentence
comprehension? Findings from eye tracking and ERPs provide evidence
for the rapid, temporally coordinated, and sometimes preferred use of
scene events. They also suggest, however, that we must take into
account cost associated with the use of visual context (e.g., when
scene and sentence are incongruous) and that this cost appears to vary
as a function of which scene aspects (actions versus actors)
mismatch. Together our findings contribute to an account of human
language processing that looks at language situated in a rapid
interplay with non-linguistic sources of information.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 7 December 2007, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Adaptive Interaction Techniques for Sharing and Reusing
Design Resources"
Brian Lee
Stanford HCI
Today's designers generate content both on paper and online. Designers
spread their work over physical and digital media, each of which has
powerful -- but distinct -- sets of affordances. Recent work suggests
that augmented paper interfaces can marry the ubiquity of paper
interactions with the ease of search, annotation, and presentation
afforded by digital representation. This dissertation examines novel
ways to support and augment the practice of design through sharing and
reappropriation of digitally captured design content.
The thesis of this dissertation is that an ecology for design that
integrates augmented paper and digital tools can facilitate
collaboration between designers and improve the visibility of design
resources. Our contributions are twofold: we study actual use of
augmented paper tools for capture and access of design content, and we
design selection and presentation algorithms for proactive display of
design materials. To investigate the potential value of augmented
tools for design, we developed the iDeas design ecology, which
integrates physical notebooks with a digital faceted metadata browser
that offers explicit annotation and sharing mechanisms, and conducted
four studies with student design teams. Our findings indicate that
while there are clear benefits to use, such as increased excerpting
and sharing of design material, naïve sharing mechanisms carry
significant perceived costs to adoption, including concerns over
permissions, which depress usage.
The findings from these studies motivated our second tool, Adaptive
Ideas, which explores the use of implicit sharing mechanisms to
improve visibility of example design resources. We describe an
optimization-based approach to selecting and presenting design
material adaptively, using decision-theoretic selection, designer
specification, and end-user preference as inputs. Results from two
laboratory studies of an example-based web page builder indicate that
proactive presentation of examples is useful in helping designers
explore and understand spaces of design alternatives.
About the Speaker: Brian Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science
at Stanford University. He studies Human-Computer Interaction, and is
advised by Scott Klemmer.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 11 December 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ291, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Towards Useful 3D Semantic Maps"
Radu B. Rusu
AIC
Learning useful representations of 3d environments and automatically
segmenting objects of interest is a challenging task. For the last
decade, the area of robot mapping has been struggling to
simultaneously localize and build maps of robots as they move in
unknown environments. With a few exceptions, consistent point cloud
maps can be acquired in a large variety of scenarios. On the other
hand, people in robot planning have been developing algorithms that
can operate robots, with the assumption that the underlying world
model is known.
Our work is driven by the fact that a new area of research has been
spawn, which connects the two, in the sense that meaningful
representations have to be carefully extracted and higher level
semantics discovered in the acquired world map, in order to be useful
for higher level planning.
We investigate the problem of acquiring 3D semantic maps in a variety
of scenarios, with a strong emphasis on our indoor distributed
ubiquitous sensing project (the AwareKitchen). The objects modeled in
these maps include cabinets, tables, drawers and shelves, and objects
in the environment that have particular relevance for a household
robotic assistant. The mapping approach is based on point cloud
representations, and a set of sophisticated and robust interpretation
methods operating on these representations, which lie at the
intersection of various research fields like: computer graphics,
statistics, photogrammetry and sensing, robotics, and optimization
theory.
Several example applications for interpreting data coming from indoor,
outdoor, and aerial scans, digitized models, and human motion
segmentation are given as well.
____________
BAYCHI
on Tuesday, 11 December 2007, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
"Learning to create engaging apps for Facebook:
What works & what does not"
BJ Fogg, Dave McClure, and colleagues
CSLI
In September 2007, psychologist BJ Fogg teamed up with startup-advisor
Dave McClure to teach a new Stanford course about using metrics to
create engaging Facebook apps. They knew the risks: The course could
end up a spectacular failure. Now in December, their experimental
Facebook course is complete after 10 busy weeks. So what did they
learn working with a teaching team and 73 Stanford students?
For the first time in public, Fogg and McClure will share the course
outcomes -- both good and bad. Stanford students will take the stage
as they demo their new Facebbok apps and share inside stories about
what worked and what did not.
You will see:
* Why over 4 million Facebook users installed the student apps in six
weeks
* Why over 1 million people engage with the student apps each day
* How some apps targeted user engagement while others were designed
for wide distribution
* Why many first attempts at creating viral apps failed
* How metrics can be applied to product development and marketing
* Why Facebook is #1 persuasive technology of 2007
* How class insights apply to many web experiences for consumers
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 12 December 2007, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
"Putting Engineering Back in Protein Engineering"
Sridhar Govindarajan and Claes Gustafsson
DNA 2.0
http://www.dna20.com/
ProteinGPS, the technology for navigation in protein space, addresses
the shortcomings of existing protein engineering paradigms and takes
advantage of the last 50 years of development in linear and nonlinear
systems optimization. Protein engineering has classically been
approached from two diametrically opposed directions: rational design
and directed evolution. Rationalism attempts to understand protein
structure and function at a complete mechanistic level so that the
effect of any modification to the protein can be estimated by
calculation from first principles. Directed evolution on the other
hand follows the strict empirical tradition and attempts to find a
desired solution by testing many many different solutions, typically
using various evolution-based algorithms. ProteinGPS instead uses
established machine learning and nonlinear systems optimization
technologies to provide a standard convention for protein space
navigation. The method calculates the specific location of a protein
variant in multidimensional space and places unique information rich
variants called infologs, at important crossroads within the space
assessed. The resulting datasets are used to map the hyper space and
calculate new protein variant sequences that fulfill the functional
constraints needed. Application of technologies that the data mining
society has established over the last 50 years, to Protein
Engineering, results in far more functional protein improvement while
needing far less samples to test.
References:
Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol. 2005 9:202-9. Predicting enzyme function from
protein sequence. Minshull, Ness, Gustafsson, Govindarajan.
BMC Biotechnol. 2007 7:16. Engineering proteinase K using machine
learning and synthetic genes. Liao, Warmuth, Govindarajan, Ness, Wang,
Gustafsson, Minshull.
About the Speakers: Sridhar Govindarajan is a cofounder and VP of
Informatics at DNA2.0. He has over 15 years of scientific computing
experience and leads the DNA2.0 automation and protein engineering
efforts. Prior to DNA2.0 Sridhar led the computational research at
Maxygen in optimizing directed evolution technologies. He has also
held the position of systems architect at EraGen Biosciences. He
received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and holds an
undergraduate degree from IIT Bombay, India.
Claes Gustafsson is a cofounder and has served as DNA2.0's VP of Sales
and Marketing since its inception. Before founding DNA2.0, he headed
the Bioinformatics group at Maxygen and was project leader for
metabolic engineering of natural product synthesis. Prior to this,
Claes was one of the first employees at Kosan Biosciences, developing
technology for manipulating Streptomyces polyketide production. He was
a post-doctoral fellow at UCSF and UCSC and received his Ph.D. in
Umea, Sweden and is a co-author of one of the first publications
applying nonlinear systems optimization to biopolymers.
____________
UC BERKELEY TRUST SEMINAR
on Thursday, 13 December 2007, 1:00pm
Wozniak lounge, Soda Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.truststc.org/seminar.htm
"Two Techniques for Programming by Sketching"
Rastislav Bodik
UC Berkeley
Programmers would love to have their code automatically synthesized
but current synthesizers are domain-specific and require expert
guidance. With programming by sketching, we seek to bring software
synthesis to everyday programming. I will present results from two
efforts: a sketching language for high-performance kernels and a
programmer's search engine. SKETCH: In the SKETCH language, the
programmer writes a program with holes, called a sketch. The
synthesizer then fills in the holes so that the completed sketch
behaves like a separately provided specification. Buggy sketches are
rejected, giving us correctness by construction. Also, since holes
stand for tricky code fragments, programmer can develop sophisticated
implementations faster. SKETCH is based on the first combinatorial
(2QBF) synthesizer. PROSPECTOR: Reusing code is hard because flexible
APIs are necessarily complex. To ease development of client code, we
developed Prospector, a programmer's search engine. Given a query
expressing the coding intent, Prospector synthesizes code candidates
ready for insertion into the program. The enabling innovation is the
jungloid, a code pattern that covers many API coding headaches. I will
explain how jungloids lead to simple search queries, how jungloids are
mined, and how Prospector synthesizes jungloids never seen in the
mining corpus.
About the Speaker: Ras Bodik is an Assistant Professor at UC
Berkeley. Previously, he was at University of Wisconsin. His current
projects explore how run-time information can aid program analysis in
solving problems of computer architecture, software engineering, and
dynamic compilation.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 13 December 2007, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"A Quest to Understand and Accept Scientific Results"
Paulo Pinheiro da Silva
University of Texas at El Paso
Scientific applications are quickly becoming more sophisticated and
capable of producing breakthrough results that some scientific
communities have been requesting for many years. At the same time that
scientific applications are becoming more capable of responding to
scientists requests, application results are becoming more difficult
for scientists to understand and accept. The complexity of the
underlying technologies supporting sophisticated applications may
explain why some scientists are reluctant to accept results from
complex applications. For instance, scientific workflow specifications
often used in support of cyber-infrastructure applications can be
instantiated by hundreds or even thousands of web services accessing
and processing data gathered by large scientific communities or
streamed in by swarms of large-scale sensor networks. With this
not-so-futuristic context in mind, we can say that when most current
complex scientific applications return results, many scientists do not
know what information sources were used, when the sources were
updated, how reliable the source was, or what information was looked
up versus derived. Many scientists also do not know how results were
derived.
This talk is centered on a single scientific question in the context
of geophysics, i.e., a scientists request, and on the problem a
scientist may face when deciding whether to accept a map as a quality
result for his/her request. The acceptance of maps as quality results
becomes even more challenging when the scientist acquires multiple
maps, not all of them similar, yet all of them are possible results
for the scientific question. We first discuss the use of provenance
and provenance visualization as key mechanisms for scientists to
understand maps as scientific results. In particular, we present the
Inference Web approach that aims to take opaque scientific results and
make the results more transparent by providing infrastructure for
presenting and managing explanations. To assess our provenance
solution, we present a user study that statistically demonstrates the
need for scientists to use provenance information to correctly
identify and explain map imperfections, if any, and thus to determine
map quality.
Later in the talk, we discuss the use of trust management as a way of
reinforcing scientists decisions concerning acceptance of maps as
quality results. A comprehensive representation of trust that includes
the notions of distrust, ignorance and vagueness is used to encode
trust relations between agents providing spatial information used to
derive map results, e.g., people, organizations, sensor networks. A
topic-driven, web-based information extraction approach has been used
to learn trust relations about people and organizations in the
geoscience community. With the combined use of provenance and the
geoscience trust network, we compute a new layer on top of maps
generated by cyber-infrastructure applications and demonstrate the
potential benefits of using the new layer to support a quality
decisions.
About the Speaker: Paulo Pinheiro da Silva is an Assistant Professor
of Computer Science and the leader of the Trust Laboratory at the
University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Texas. At UTEP, Paulo is a
co-PI of the Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence for Cyber-Infrastructure
Applications funded by the National Science Foundation, where he is
actively involved in multi-disciplinary research between computer
science, Earth sciences, and environmental sciences. Paulo is a
co-leader of the Inference Web project, a collaborative research
effort between Stanford University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
and UTEP that aims to provide infrastructure for explaining responses
from software systems. Inference Web is sponsored by a number of DARPA
and DTO projects. Paulo received his Bachelors degree in Mathematics
and his M.Sc. degree in computer science both from the Federal
University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and his Ph.D. in computer science
from Manchester University, United Kingdom. He was a Postdoctoral
Fellow of the Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at
Stanford University for three and a half years.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 13 December 2007, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content,
Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09"
Guy Kawasaki
Truemors, Garage Ventures
http://www.guykawasaki.com/about/
In this talk, Guy will explain why and how he launched Truemors.com
using open-source software, contractors, favors, and cajoling. He will
also cover the current entrepreneurial and venture-capital funding
conditions.
About the Speaker: Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of Truemors and a
managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. He is also a
columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple
Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books
including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to
Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh
Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well
as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.
____________
LONG NOW FOUNDATION TALK
on Friday, 14 December 2007, 7:00pm
Kanbar Hall, JCCSF, San Francisco
http://www.longnow.org/
"At the Edge of Art"
Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais
http://at-the-edge-of-art.com/home.html
Art is humanity's long-term unconscious memory. Artists work by
creative misuse, and thanks to the Internet there have never been so
many tools for so many artists (and multitudes who don't know they're
artists) to creatively misuse. Take a cruise through how strange and
meaningful it is getting with the authors of At the Edge of Art.
A $10 donation is very welcome as our Seminars cost thousands to
produce each month, but it is certainly not required for
attendance. Cash or check accepted at the door.
Seminar audio is available for download and podcast. See the web
site.
____________
END MATERIAL
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