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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 16 January 2008, vol. 23:17
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
16 JANUARY 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 17
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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 16 JANUARY 2008 TO 26 JANUARY 2008
WEDNESDAY, 16 JANUARY 2008
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [16-Jan-08]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"The Neuroscience of Social Connection"
John Cacioppo,
University of Chicago
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [16-Jan-08]
Gates B01
"The Lively Kernel: A Self Supporting System on a Web Page"
Dan Ingalls
SUN Microsystems
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [16-Jan-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Mitch Kapor
Founder, Foxmarks http://www.foxmarks.com/
Founder, Lotus
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Talk [16-Jan-08]
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
"Livescribe: Creating Paper-Based Computing"
Frank Canova & Dan Keller
Livescribe, Inc.
http://sfbayacm.org/
Abstract below
7:00pm San Francisco Ask A Scientist [16-Jan-08]
Axis Cafe, 1201 8th Street (btw. 16th & Irwin) San Francisco
"Where Did Language Come From?"
Terry Deacon
Biological Anthropology and Linguistics, UC Berkeley
http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/deacon.html
http://www.askascientistsf.com/
THURSDAY, 17 JANUARY 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [17-Jan-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"Computation as Grammaticalization"
John Kadvany
Policy and Decision Science
http://www.johnkadvany.com/
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [17-Jan-08]
Packard 101
"Upgrading the Internet with Flow Technology"
Lawrence Roberts
Anagran
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [17-Jan-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"More than Symbolic Systems for Advancing Research (Access)"
John Willinsky
Education, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [17-Jan-08]
Packard 202
"Sparse graphical codes: MAX-XORSAT, compression and binning"
Martin Wainwright
UC Berkeley
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [17-Jan-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Adaptive neural coding"
Adrienne Fairhall
Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington
http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/people_fac_page.php?fac_ID=10
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 18 JANUARY 2008
12 noon Ethics@Noon [18-Jan-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
"Discovery and Justice: The Impact of Medical Innovation on
Social Disparities in Health"
Paul Wise
School of Medicine/Health Research and Policy
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [18-Jan-08]
Gates B01
"How good Google searchers get to be that way"
Dan Russell
Google
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [18-Jan-08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"What is That Thing Called 'Efficacy'?"
Nancy Cartwright
London School of Economics and Political Science
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [18-Jan-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Computing Linguistically-based Textual Inferences"
Danny Bobrow, Cleo Condoravdi, Lauri Karttunen, Tracy Holloway King,
Valeria de Paiva, and Annie Zaenen
PARC Natural Language Group
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [18-Jan-08]
Gates B03
"MonetDB/X100: a (very) fast column-store"
Peter Boncz
CWI
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 21 JANUARY 2008 - University Holiday
TUESDAY, 22 JANUARY 2008
4:00pm Stanford Algorithms Seminar [22-Jan-08]
Gates 498
"Local Embedding of Metric Spaces"
Ofer Neiman
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aflb/
4:15pm ENGR110/210: Perspectives in Assistive Technology [22-Jan-08]
Meyer Library 124
"Life on Wheels"
Gary Karp
Speaker / Author / Trainer
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engr110/
5:15pm Syntax Workshop [22-Jan-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Sluicing And Prepositions: A Connectivity Effect That Doesn't Work"
Joanna Nykiel
Stanford University/University of Silesia, Poland
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 23 JANUARY 2008
3:00pm Current Topics in Formal Pragmatics [23-Jan-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:127B
Organization meeting
http://www.stanford.edu/~svlauer/ReadingGroup/
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [23-Jan-08]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"The Perils of Prejudice: Universal Biases in Brain, Mind & Culture"
Susan Fiske
Princeton University
http://www.princeton.edu/~fiskelab/
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [23-Jan-08]
Gates B01
"Adapting Systems by Evolving Hardware"
Jim Tørresen
University of Oslo, Norway
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [23-Jan-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Ron Conway
Founder, Angel Investors LP
Mike Maples
Founder, Maples Investments http://www.maplesinvestments.com/
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
THURSDAY, 24 JANUARY 2008
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [24-Jan-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Virtual Humans: Bringing the Pieces Together"
Bill Swartout
Institute of Creative Technologies, USC
http://people.ict.usc.edu/~swartout/
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [24-Jan-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Two Kinds of Math?"
Keith Devlin
CSLI
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [24-Jan-08]
Bldg. 200:307
"How Do Languages Disappear?"
Lindsay Whaley
Dartmouth
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~linguist/faculty/whaley.html
(cosponsored with Project Absentia and CSLI)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [24-Jan-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Pascal Vontobel
HP Labs
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [24-Jan-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Inducible clocks: Living in an unpredictable world"
Clif Saper
Neurology, Harvard
http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dms/neuroscience/fac/saper.html
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 25 JANUARY 2008
12 noon Ethics@Noon [25-Jan-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
"Beyond Female Access to Education:
A Feminist Cross-National Perspective"
Christina Wotipka
Education/Sociology
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [25-Jan-08]
Gates B01
"Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web:
Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO"
Ronny Kohavi
Microsoft
http://www.kohavi.com
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
4:00pm Stanford Algorithms Seminar [25-Jan-08]
Gates 498
"Testing Symmetric Properties of Distributions"
Paul Valiant
MIT
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aflb/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [25-Jan-08]
Soda Hall 320 (UC Berkeley)
"Causation and Prediction Challenge"
Isabelle Guyon
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [25-Jan-08]
Gates B03
"XML Access Modules:
Towards Physical Data Independence in XML Databases"
Ioana Manolescu
INRIA
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
SATURDAY, 26 JANUARY 2008
all day Technology in Wartime Conference at Stanford [26-Jan-08]
Stanford Law School
http://www.technologyinwartime.org/
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of all types but 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.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program is seeking applicants to its
Master of Science Program, with specialization tracks in
Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Technology, and an
Individually Designed Track option. Symbolic Systems is an
interdepartmental program focusing on the relationships between
computation and the human mind. We welcome qualified applications from
outside Stanford who are interested in pursuing an intensive,
cross-disciplinary, research-oriented degree that integrates the
cognitive and computational sciences.
Please pass the word on to interested parties. The program's
application deadline for 2008-2009 is February 19. Further
information is available on our website at
<http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_static?page=masters.html>.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
A new reading group is forming on
CURRENT TOPICS IN FORMAL PRAGMATICS
The goal is to meet biweekly and discuss one or several recent(ish)
papers dealing with formal approaches to pragmatics, broadly
construed.
A tentative first topic is the host of 'optimization'-based
(optimality/decision/game-theoretic) approaches to (Neo-)Gricean
pragmatics that have been developed in the last decade or so.
All interested are invited to the
Organizational Meeting
Date: Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Time: 3pm-4pm
Place: Margaret Jacks Hall (B460), Room 127B
We'll agree on a regular meeting time and a schedule for the first
couple of weeks then and there.
Future meetings will be announced via a separate email-list as well as
at: http://www.stanford.edu/~svlauer/ReadingGroup/
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 16 January 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"The Lively Kernel: A Self Supporting System on a Web Page"
Dan Ingalls
SUN Microsystems
The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a new approach to web programming. It
provides a complete platform for web applications, including dynamic
graphics, network access, and development tools, and requires nothing
more than available web browsers. We call the system lively for three
reasons:
* It comes live off a web page.
* There is no installation.
* The entire system is written in JavaScript, and it becomes active as
soon as the page is loaded by a browser.
It can change itself and create new content. The Lively Kernel
includes a basic graphics editor that allows it to alter and create
new graphical content, and also a simple IDE that allows it to alter
and create new applications. It comes with a basic library of
graphical and computational components, and these, as well as the
kernel, can be altered and extended on the fly.
It can save new artifacts, even clone itself, onto new web pages. The
kernel includes WebDav support for browsing and extending remote file
systems, and thus has the ability to save its objects and "worlds"
(applications) as new active web pages.
The Lively Kernel uses only existing web standards. The implementation
and user language is JavaScript, known by millions and supported in
every browser. The graphics APIs are built upon SVG (Scalable Vector
Graphics), also available in major browsers. The network protocols
used are asynchronous HTTP and WebDav.
The Lively Kernel is being made available as Open Source software
under a GPL license. While it is not ready for use as a product, we
expect significant participation from adventurous developers and
academia.
About the speaker: Dan Ingalls is the principal architect of five
generations of Smalltalk environments, culminating in the release of
Squeak, an open-source Smalltalk system written in itself. He designed
the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976.
He invented BitBlt, the general-purpose graphical operation that
underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, and also pop-up
menus. He has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award for Outstanding
Young Scientist, and the ACM Software Systems Award.
Dan is currently at Sun Microsystems where he is working on the Lively
Kernel, a self-supporting computing kernel that lives on a web page
and requires no installation.
Dan Received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University, and his
M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
____________
SF BAY ACM TALK
on Wednesday, 16 January 2008, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
http://sfbayacm.org/
"Livescribe: Creating Paper-Based Computing"
Frank Canova & Dan Keller
Livescribe, Inc.
By developing a paper-based platform, Livescribe will fundamentally
change the way people capture, use and share information with pen and
paper, making the possibilities of pen and paper endless. Building on
top of licensed technology from Anoto Group AB that converts
handwriting into digital form, Livescribe has created a new mobile
computing platform an integrated system of smart pen, dot paper,
applications, and development tools.
About the Speakers: Frank Canova brings 20 years of expertise as an
innovator and manager at IBM, Cirrus Logic, Palm, Wheels of Zeus and
Reactrix. At IBM, Frank managed mobile products including the
award-winning ThinkPad laptop. For more than five years, Frank held
key positions at Palm, including vice president of worldwide product
engineering. Frank led hardware engineering for products including the
PalmPilot and managed product development of hardware and software
products for consumer and enterprise divisions, in addition to
managing Palm Labs as its director of technology. Prior to Livescribe,
Frank was vice president and CTO of Reactrix, where he was responsible
for creating systems that make media interactive through unique
displays and network infrastructure. Frank holds more than 30 patents
in mobile consumer products as well as wireless communication and was
dubbed Most Prolific Palm Inventor. Frank holds a bachelor's degree in
electrical engineering from Florida Institute of Technology.
Dan Keller has a 25-year track record for cultivating products and
delivering results for some of today's most successful technology
companies. Most recently, Dan served as senior engineering director
for WebLogic Workshop with BEA Systems. There he oversaw the company's
transition from proprietary software to eclipse-based tools and open
source involvement. Prior to his tenure at BEA, Dan spent four years
with Palm in roles ranging from vice president of European engineering
and vice president of software engineering to director of product
engineering. His knowledge and leadership enabled him to significantly
expand engineering operations world-wide and deliver three new Palm
operating system releases. Dan has also executed programs with
companies including Taligent, Apple and Hewlett-Packard. During his
12-year career at Apple, Dan formed an elite design team and
spearheaded the growth of a revolutionary integrated software
development product. He is also credited for leading and expanding
Apple's engineering organization in Japan, co-developing the workhorse
Macintosh software development tool set, and developing the desktop
human interface for the LISA computer. Dan holds a bachelor's degree
in computer engineering from the University of California , San Diego.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 17 January 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Computation as Grammaticalization"
John Kadvany
Policy and Decision Science
http://www.johnkadvany.com/
Almost regardless of one's linguistic theory, a natural problem is the
relationship between the linguistic and mathematical infinite, or that
between linguistic and mathematical recursion -- What depends on what?
This talk frames that problem as one of constructing mathematical
computation from weaker recursive patterns typical of natural
languages. A thought experiment is used to describe the formalization
of computational rules or arithmetical axioms using only orally-based
natural language capabilities, motivated by two accomplishments of
ancient Indian mathematics and linguistics. One accomplishment is the
expression of positional value using versified Sanskrit number words
in addition to orthodox inscribed numerals. The second is Panini's
invention, around the 5th century BCE, of a formal grammar for spoken
Sanskrit, and expressed in oral verse extending Sanskrit through its
own grammatical structure. Panini's formalism uses recursive methods
rediscovered in the 20th century by Emil Post, whose technique of
rewrite rules is now ubiquitous in programming language design and
generative linguistics. The Sanskrit positional number compounds and
Panini's formal system are construed as linguistic grammaticalizations
relying on tacit cognitive models of symbolic form. The thought
experiment shows that universal computation can be constructed from
natural language skills, and also suggests that intentional
capabilities needed for language use play a role in all computational
models. Thus mathematical computation is a cognitive technology
extending generic skills associated with language structure, usage and
change. The talk summarizes "Positional Value and Linguistic
Recursion," appearing in the Journal of Indian Philosophy December
2007.
About the speaker: John Kadvany received his PhD from the Group in
Logic and Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley with a thesis on the
work of Imre Lakatos. He has worked for many years on environmental
risk problems, first at Applied Decision Analysis in Menlo Park and
currently as an independent consultant with Policy and Decision
Science. Continuing his interests in the philosophy of science and
mathematics, in 2001 he published Imre Lakatos and the Guises of
Reason (Duke UP), mostly an intellectual history of Lakatos'
historicist ideas and their sources in Lakatos' Hungarian past. He has
also written on comparative risk, risk communication, and the
quantification of uncertainty. The ideas behind the CogSci talk form
part of a broader study of the infinite using linguistic theory and
cognitive science.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 17 January 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"More than Symbolic Systems for Advancing Research (Access)"
John Willinsky
Education, Stanford
A review of the Public Knowledge Project's efforts at increasing the
public and scholarly quality of research through the development of
open source software publishing systems and research on the impact of
extended access to academic sources of knowledge.
About the Speaker: John Willinsky is interested in Curriculum and
Instruction, English Education, Globalization, Higher Education,
Literacy, Literacy and Culture, Social Theory, Technology and Literacy
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 17 January 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 202
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Sparse graphical codes: MAX-XORSAT, compression and binning"
Martin Wainwright
UC Berkeley
Sparse graph codes and message-passing have reshaped the theory and
practice of error-control coding over the past decade. Despite these
impressive advances in channel coding, for many other problems in
communication and signal processing (e.g., compression, watermarking,
satisfiability etc.), there still remain gaps between current theory
and practice. In this talk, we discuss the use of sparse graph codes
for lossy data compression problems, as well as for performing
high-dimensional binning. Effective methods for binning are the
cornerstone of successful methods for many problems, including MIMO
communication, digital watermarking, and distributed source coding. We
describe methods for proving both upper and lower bounds on binary
rate-distortion (i.e., the MAX-XORSAT threshold), as well as for more
general rate-distortion functions. We also discuss a compound code
ensemble, and prove that it contains codes with bounded degrees that
simultaneously achieve the Shannon limits for binary channel and lossy
source coding.
Based on joint works with Alex Dimakis, Emin Martinian and Kannan
Ramchandran.
About the Speaker: Martin Wainwright joined the faculty at University
of California at Berkeley in Fall 2004, with a joint appointment
between the Department of Statistics and the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences. He received his Bachelor's degree
in Mathematics from University of Waterloo, and his Ph.D. degree in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), for which he was awarded the George
M. Sprowls Prize from the MIT EECS department in 2002. He is
interested in large-scale statistical models, and their applications
to communication and coding, machine learning, and statistical signal
and image processing. He has received an NSF-CAREER Award (2006), an
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship (2005), an Okawa
Research Grant in Information and Telecommunications (2005), the 1967
Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
of Canada (1996--2000), and several outstanding conference paper
awards.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 18 January 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"How good Google searchers get to be that way"
Dan Russell
Google
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Some searchers are very effective at finding stuff with search
engines, others seem to have trouble getting their questions
answered. Why are some searchers so good, and what do they do
differently than others? I'll talk about some of the differences
between searchers at different proficiency levels and what it means to
learn how to search and research and what the difference is. It's not
the same as what you might have learned in a library skills class 20
years ago.
About the Speaker: Daniel M Russell is a research scientist at Google
where he works in the area of search quality, with a focus on
understanding what makes Google users happy in their use of web
search. He studies how people do their searches, trying to understand
the most common traps and pathways to successful Google use. Dan has
been a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center, Apple's Advanced
Technology Group and Xerox PARC. He received his PhD from the
University of Rochester before there was a world-wide web, and
remembers a time when email addresses didn't end in .com or .edu. He
enjoys long distance running, making music and word play, becoming
disgruntled when he can't do all three in one day.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 18 January 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Computing Linguistically-based Textual Inferences"
Danny Bobrow, Cleo Condoravdi, Lauri Karttunen, Tracy Holloway King,
Valeria de Paiva, and Annie Zaenen
PARC Natural Language Group
In this talk we give an overview and a demo of PARC's Bridge system.
The particular task that we focus on is entailment and contradiction
detection (ECD), a more refined variant of the PASCAL RTE (Recognizing
Textual Entailment) challenge. Given a passage of text and a query,
does the query sentence follow from the text in the passage, is it
contradicted by it, or neither? Here are examples of all three cases:
Passage: Oswald assassinated Kennedy.
Query: Did Kennedy die?
Response: YES
Passage: Bill forgot to shave this morning.
Query: Did Bill shave this morning?
Response: NO
Passage: There is a cat in the yard.
Query: Is there a black cat in the yard?
Response: UNKNOWN
The entailment and contradiction detection algorithm operates on the
level of Abstract Knowledge Structure (AKR) without the need of
disambiguation. An AKR representation, derived from the syntactic and
semantic analyses of a sentence, is a flat set of facts that involves
concepts, roles, and contexts. Texts are parsed to produce packed
f-structures and these are rewritten and canonicalized, without
unpacking, into AKR. Canonicalization is determined both by the
structure of the representations and the lexical items involved. The
system includes knowledge about words and their relations between them
that are encoded in resources such as WordNet and VerbNet. It also
includes knowledge about lexically or constructionally triggered
presuppositions and entailments.
The ECD process first aligns context and concept terms and then computes
specificity relations between the aligned concept terms. Some special
case reasoners support identification of named objects, comparison of
specificity of WordNet synsets, and compatibility of cardinality
restrictions. All the query facts that are entailed by the corresponding
passage facts get removed. If no query facts remain, the system responds
YES. A conflict in the instantiation claims of two aligned terms marks a
contradiction. In this case the system responds NO. If some query facts
remain at the end, the response is UNKNOWN.
The linguistic phenomena we illustrate in this presentation include
lexical entailments (kill => die), relations between lexical predicates
or phrasal constructions and their embedded complements (forget that A
=> A, forget to A => not A, take the trouble to S => S, waste an
opportunity to S => not S), and inferring temporal relations from
temporal modifiers.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 18 January 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"MonetDB/X100: a (very) fast column-store"
Peter Boncz
CWI
MonetDB/X100 is a second-generation column-store prototyped at CWI,
targeted at analysis-heavy data management tasks such as data
warehousing and information retrieval.
In this overview talk I will outline the research challenges, novel
techniques and results from this project. The ideal is to close the
existing performance gap between hand-coded applications and database
systems using architecture-conscious techniques, and by carefully
exploiting the bandwidth strengths of modern hardware (and avoiding its
latency weaknesses).
The novel techniques presented encompass expressing relational
operators as vector operations, lightweight compression on the border
between CPU cache and RAM, sequential-access optimized database design
and I/O bandwidth sharing.
____________
SYNTAX WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 22 January 2008, 5:15pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
"Sluicing And Prepositions: A Connectivity Effect That Doesn't Work"
Joanna Nykiel
Stanford University/University of Silesia, Poland
An effect that signals syntactic involvement in sluicing (They knew
someone was approaching, but they didn't know who), and an underlying
full structure, is a choice to omit prepositions in languages that
allow preposition-stranding under wh-movement, as in (1).
(1) a. Peter was talking with someone, but I don't know (with) who.
b. Who was he talking with?
The choice is not available in non-preposition-stranding languages.
This observation, due to Merchant (2004, 2006, 2007), has not yet been
falsified, though various alternatives have been posited that argue
for no more structure than is visible in sluicing (cf. Ginzburg and
Sag 2000, Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, Stainton 2006).
Based on diachronic and synchronic data, I argue that Merchant's claim
has little support. Notice that Old English (OE) and Middle English
(ME) provide a good testing ground because wh-interrogatives cannot
strand prepositions until the 13c (cf. Grimshaw 1975, Allen 1980, Van
Kemenade 1987, Fischer 1992, Bergh and Seppaenen 2000). This means
that a difference in the use of prepositions could accompany the
transition. My OE and ME data shows no such difference, however; what
it shows is that ME prepositions are consistently retained where they
could be omitted. These results and a closer look at non-P-stranding
languages suggest that: (1) omission of prepositions in sluicing is
not sensitive to the availability of P-stranding, especially when both
merging and sprouting are brought into focus; (2) the final form of a
sluice may be, cross-linguistically, a function of how easy it is to
integrate it into the proposition expressed by its antecedent.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 23 January 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Adapting Systems by Evolving Hardware"
Jim Tørresen
University of Oslo, Norway
Tørresen will in this talk introduce computing architectures providing
hardware adaptation at run-time. This is based on evolutionary
computing and reconfigurable hardware technology. The talk will start
with introducing these technologies. Evolutionary computing is a
search algorithm based on the mechanisms of natural evolution and
survival of the fittest. It can be applied to problem solving in
general as well as more specifically to the design of hardware. The
approach is promising for applications where tradition methods are
limited regarding accuracy and speed like e.g. processing and
classification of images and signals.
In the work presented in the talk, hardware has been evolved for a set
of different applications including signal and image classification
tasks. The novel classification architecture to be presented provides
both high classification accuracy as well as high processing speed.
About the speaker: Jim Tørresen is a professor at the Department of
Informatics at the University of Oslo. His research is on
reconfigurable hardware and bio-inspired computation and the
application of these technologies to complex real-world applications.
Jim Tørresen received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer
architecture and design from the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology in 1991 and 1996, respectively.
He was employed as a senior designer at NERA Telecommunications
(1996-1998) and at Navia Aviation (1998-1999). At NERA he was involved
in designing hardware for a digital power line carrier
system. Hardware design was also undertaken at his position at Navia
Aviation, where a satellite-based flight landing system was
designed. Since 1999, he has been a professor at the Department of
Informatics at the University of Oslo (associate professor 1999-2005).
Jim Torresen has been a visiting researcher at Kyoto University, Japan
for one year (1993-1994) and four months at National Institute of
Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (form
Electrotechnical laboratory), Tsukuba, Japan (1997 and 2000). His
research interests at the moment include bio-inspired computing,
system-on-chip design, reconfigurable hardware and evolvable hardware
and applying this to complex real-world applications. Several novel
methods have been proposed. He has published 54 scientific papers (41
as the first author) in international journals, books and conference
proceedings. He is in the program committee of eight different
international conferences as well as a regular reviewer of a number of
international journals (mainly published by IEEE and IET). He also
acts as an evaluator for proposals submitted to several research
programs including the European Union Framework Programme (FP7). A
list and collection of publications can be found at
http://www.ifi.uio.no/~jimtoer/papers.htmls
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 24 January 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Two Kinds of Math?"
Keith Devlin
CSLI
Mathematics is often talked about - and taught - as if it were a
single subject, one way of thinking. I long ago reached the conclusion
this is not the case. From a cognitive perspective, I think that
mathematical thinking falls broadly into two very different categories
that utilize different mental capacities. One kind of mathematical
thinking is shared with other species, and virtually all humans are
capable of doing it. The other kind may not be accessible to all,
though for reasons you may not expect. If correct, my ideas have
major implications for mathematics education.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 25 January 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web:
Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO"
Ronny Kohavi
Microsoft
http://www.kohavi.com/
The web provides an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate ideas
quickly using controlled experiments, also called randomized
experiments or A/B tests. In this talk, I'll provide multiple
real-world examples of control experiments that were run at Microsoft
and Amazon, many with very surprising results. Significant learning
and return-on-investment (ROI) are seen when development teams listen
to their customers, not to the Highest Paid Person's Opinion
(HiPPO). I'll review the important ingredients of running controlled
experiments, and discuss their limitations (both technical and
organizational).
The talk is based partially on the following paper:
"Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your
Customers not to the HiPPO," http://exp-platform.com/stanford.aspx
which appeared in KDD 2007 (August 2007).
About the Speaker: Ronny Kohavi is the General Manager for Microsoft's
Experimentation Platform, a team whose mission is to build a platform
that will accelerate software innovation through trustworthy
experimentation. Controlled experiments, also called A/B tests, allow
evaluating ideas through randomized assignment of users to a Control
group or different Treatment groups. The methodology is practically
the only scientific method we know to establish causal relationships
between ideas and metrics of interest.
Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Ronny was the director of data
mining and personalization at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for
personalization, automation, search engine marketing (SEM), consumer
behavior / data mining, site experimentation, and automated e-mail.
His teams introduced several features estimated to be worth several
hundred million dollars in incremental revenue. Prior to Amazon, Ronny
was the Vice President of Business Intelligence at Blue Martini
Software, where he led the engineering group responsible for the data
collection, analysis, visualization, reporting, and campaign
management modules in Blue Martini's applications. Prior to joining
Blue Martini, Kohavi managed the MineSet product, Silicon Graphics'
award-winning product for data mining and visualization. MineSet was
based in part on MLC++, a machine learning library developed at
Stanford University.
Ronny received a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Stanford University
and a BA from the Technion, Israel. He was the General Chair for KDD
2004, he co-chaired KDD 99's industrial track with Jim Gray, and he
co-chaired the KDD Cup 2000. He was an invited speaker at Emetrics
2007, the SF ACM Data Mining SIG in 2006, Emetrics 2004, KDD 2001's
industrial track, the National Academy of Engineering in 2000.
____________
END MATERIAL
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