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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 23 January 2008, vol. 23:18
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
23 JANUARY 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 18
______________________________________________________________________
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 23 JANUARY 2008 TO 1 FEBRUARY 2008
WEDNESDAY, 23 JANUARY 2008
2:00pm Stanford Tech Briefing [23-Jan-08]
Turing Auditorium, Polya Hall
"Apple Presents: What's New From Apple"
Wyn Davies
Stanford's Apple Rep
http://techbriefings.stanford.edu/
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
11:30am CCRMA Hearing Seminar [24-Jan-08]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
"Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music That Makes Them Weep?"
David Huron
Ohio State
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
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/
4:00pm PARC Forum [24-Jan-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Facebook applications, mass persuasion, & world peace"
BJ Fogg & colleagues
Persuasive Technology Lab, CSLI, Stanford University
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [24-Jan-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Causation and Prediction Challenge"
Isabelle Guyon
http://www.clopinet.com/isabelle/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
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
"A Factor-Graph Approach to Universal Channel Decoding"
Pascal Vontobel
HP Labs
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
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 noon Speech Lunch [25-Jan-08]
Phonetics Lab
"User Simulation for Spoken Dialogue Systems"
Hua Ai
University of Pittsburgh
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
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [25-Jan-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Prospects for Institutional Repositories, 5 Years On"
Clifford Lynch
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
Available below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [25-Jan-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Rebecca Saxe (tentative)
MIT, Brain & Cognitive Sciences
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
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
Abstract below
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/
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 26 JANUARY 2008
all day Technology in Wartime Conference at Stanford [26-Jan-08]
Stanford Law School
http://www.technologyinwartime.org/
MONDAY, 28 JANUARY 2008
11:00am Media X Winter Lecture Series [28-Jan-08]
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160:124)
"Learning in the Metaverse"
Claudia L'Amoreaux
http://mediax.stanford.edu/events_calendar/calendar.html
Abstract below
12 noon Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium [28-Jan-08]
Terman 217
Title to be announced
Steve Whittaker
Sheffield University Information Science Department
http://dis.shef.ac.uk/stevewhittaker/
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
12:45pm CIS/SLATA [28-Jan-08]
Law School 280B
"The Digital Revolution, Defining the Consumer victory and
Defending the Public Interest in the 21st Century: Network
Neutrality, Digital Downloading, and Privacy in Online Advertising"
Mark Cooper
Consumer Federation of America
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Department Colloquium [28-Jan-08]
182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Diana Archangeli
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [28-Jan-08]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"How We Know What We're Doing: Intention, Belief, and
Knowledge Without Observation"
Sarah Paul
Stanford University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
TUESDAY, 29 JANUARY 2008
4:00pm Stanford Algorithms Seminar [29-Jan-08]
Gates 498
"Sparse Recovery Using Sparse Random Matrices"
Piotr Indyk
MIT
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aflb/
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [29-Jan-08]
Bldg. 420:048
"Finite Sets and Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems"
David Taylor, Grigori Mints, Jesse Alama, Solomon Feferman
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:15pm ENGR110/210: Perspectives in Assistive Technology [29-Jan-08]
Meyer Library 124
"From Alzheimers to Physical Disabilities:
Case Studies in Context Aware Access"
Ted Selker
MIT Media Laboratory
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engr110/
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [29-Jan-08]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Inventing Public Key Cryptography: A Fool's Errand: Act 2"
Martin E. Hellman
Stanford University
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
WEDNESDAY, 30 JANUARY 2008
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [30-Jan-08]
Gates B01
Title to be announced
Zhenan Bao
Chemical Engineering, Stanford
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [30-Jan-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Jesse Fink
Co-Founder, MissionPoint Capital Partners, (Co-Founder,Priceline)
Steve Blank
Stanford Professor and Serial Entrepreneur
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
THURSDAY, 31 JANUARY 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [31-Jan-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"New Trends in the Foundations of Mathematics"
Grigori Mints
Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [31-Jan-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Drew Perkins
Infinera
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
1:00pm Center for Internet and Society Talk [31-Jan-08]
Memorial Auditorium
"Final Free Culture Talk"
Lawrence Lessig
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [31-Jan-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not
Questions about Program Behavior"
Andy Ko
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [31-Jan-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization"
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
IBM Many Eyes
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/About_Many_Eyes.html
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [31-Jan-08]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Risk and Rationality"
Lara Buchak
Princeton University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [31-Jan-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Does consciousness occur in laterally-connected
input/integration layers in the brain's neuronal networks?"
Stuart Hameroff
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [31-Jan-08]
Packard 101
"On 3-receiver broadcast channel with degraded message sets:
The idea of indirect decoding and the capacity of a class of
broadcast channels"
Chandra Nair
Chinese University of Hong Kong
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [31-Jan-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Synapses and CNS disorders"
Morgan Sheng
MIT
http://web.mit.edu/picower/faculty/sheng.html
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon Ethics@Noon [1-Feb-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
"What You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About the Ethics of Stem
Cell Research"
Insoo Hyun
Case Western Reserve Dept of Bioethics
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12 noon Speech Lunch [1-Feb-08]
Phonetics Lab
"The Prosody of Student Confidence for Automatic Tutoring"
Bevan Jones
SJSU
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [1-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization"
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
IBM Many Eyes
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/About_Many_Eyes.html
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
(see abstract for PARC Forum on 31 January 2008)
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [1-Feb-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
To be announced
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [1-Feb-08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Aristotle and the Sophists"
Stephen Menn
McGill University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [1-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Michal Ben-Shachar
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [1-Feb-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"How do Languages Disappear?"
Louis Goldstein
USC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [1-Feb-08]
Gates B03
"The WAVE Project at UCSD"
Alin Deutsch
UCSD
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of all types but B+ 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.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
Call for Abstracts
9TH ANNUAL SEMANTICS FEST
Friday, 14 March 2007
The Construction of Meaning Workshop is pleased to sponsor the Ninth
Annual Stanford Semantics Fest. The Semantics Fest is intended to
promote discussion and collaboration among all those in the Stanford
community interested in the semantics and pragmatics of natural
language, as well as their interface with other modules of grammar.
We encourage contributions from all those who share these interests.
Abstracts are invited for 20 minute talks (plus 10 minutes discussion)
on any topic touching on semantics and pragmatics in natural language.
All abstracts should be submitted as plain text or pdf in 12 point
font and be no more than 1 page long; a second page may include
references. Abstracts are due by 5pm on Monday, February 4th. All
submissions should be emailed to nola .. stanford.edu. Notification
of acceptance will be made about two weeks later.
Organizing Committee: Scott Grimm, Beth Levin, Nola Stephens, and more
____________
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
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 24 January 2008, 11:30am
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
I'm happy to announce that we'll be talking about weeping at the next
CCRMA Hearing Seminar. :-)
Why is that some music makes us feel sad, and why do we listen to it?
We cover a lot of topics at the Hearing Seminar, but not often enough
do we talk about the connection between our hearing and our emotional
state. That is a pretty important part of music. David Huron, long-
time special friend of the seminar, will be leading the discussion
next Thursday. Dave always has a great way of tying music and
cognitive behavior together. I'm sure this discussion will be no
different.
Note, we're meeting at 11:30 this year so we can pick up some people
attending an earlier class. We'll have talks perhaps every other
week. Keep your calendars open. As always, sign up for the mailing
list by sending email to
hearing-seminar-request@ccrma.stanford.edu
Bring your ears, and I promise that this seminar will NOT make you
weep (or sleep :-)
- Malcolm Slaney
P.S. Parking is a mess at Stanford. I encourage those of you
driving to park in the pay lot near Tresidder. It's just below the
building on this map
http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=02-300
The parking machines take credit cards, so that makes things easy.
"Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music That Makes Them Weep?"
David Huron
Ohio State
Tearing of the eyes, nasal congestion, a constriction in your throat,
and erratic breathing: your doctor would conclude that you are
suffering from a severe allergic reaction. But in special
circumstances, music can evoke precisely such symptoms. How does
music evoke feelings akin to sadness or grief? And why do people
willingly listen to music that may make them cry? In this
presentation, I briefly survey some physiological, evolutionary, and
behavioral aspects of adult crying. I review four recent
correlational studies that identify auditory cues associated with
sadness, including lower overall pitch height, smaller melodic
intervals, slower tempo, lower dynamic level, darker timbres, and
legato tone onsets. In addition, I identify some auditory cues
associated with grief.
The hormone prolactin is normally associated with pregnancy and
lactation but is also released during episodes of weeping or incipient
weeping. Prolactin produces "consoling" hedonic effects that appear
to limit the experience of psychic pain normally caused by the
perception of loss. When weeping is provoked by sham loss, a
cognitive appraisal ultimately deems the sense of grief benign,
leaving only the consoling hedonic effect of the prolactin. The
result is that a listener can experience a cathartic, enjoyable, or
"good" cry. I suggest that the pleasure of musically-induced weeping
arises from cortical inhibition of the amygdala, linked with the
benign release of prolactin.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 24 January 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Facebook applications, mass persuasion, & world peace"
BJ Fogg & colleagues
Persuasive Technology Lab, CSLI, Stanford University
Just a few months ago, a new form of persuasion was born. In response,
I created the Facebook Class for Stanford, and a talented team joined
me. In the weeks that followed, our students used this new power --
what I call Mass Interpersonal Persuasion -- to reach over 16 million
people with their Facebook applications.
This new form of persuasion can make people rich, as we saw. But more
important, Mass Interpersonal Persuasion can solve global problems in
ways never before possible. On Thursday, for the first time, I will
share deeper insights into this new persuasion phenomenon. My talk
will connect the successes on Facebook with new trends in computerized
persuasion. To push the envelope even more, Ill share my Stanford labs
project on Peace Technology. Our goal: Global harmony in 30
years. Thanks to Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, this ambitious goal is
finally achievable (at least we think so). In some ways, the Facebook
Class was a proof of concept. Theres more to explain and most of it
is new (in other words, feedback welcome!). So if you're interested in
the power behind Facebook apps, mass persuasion, or world peace, then
join us on Thursday.
About the Speaker: Stanford University awarded Dr. BJ Fogg the Maccoby
Prize in 1998 for his research on computerized persuasion. He then
founded the Persuasive Technology Lab and began teaching at Stanford,
while also leading innovation projects for industry.
In Fall 2007, BJ taught a new class for Stanford (with Dave McClure)
about applications for Facebook. Their students' projects engaged over
16 million Facebook users in six weeks. BJ has identified a new form
of persuasion that makes such dramatic results possible. BJ is the
author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We
Think and Do. He is the co-editor of Mobile Persuasion: 20
Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change. He holds nine patents
and has an additional seven patents pending.
Dr. Fogg's life's work is to shape technology innovation to make
people happier, which includes his lab's current focus on Peace
Technology. He believes two principles are essential for achieving
these goals: designing for simplicity and building relationships of
trust.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 24 January 2008, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Causation and Prediction Challenge"
Isabelle Guyon
http://www.clopinet.com/isabelle/
We have organized a challenge on causality and will present its goals
and its design to stimulate participation and involve volunteers in
the organization of other upcoming events.
This challenge bridges the gap between data mining/machine learning
and causal discovery. Several datasets drawn from real data, or
emulating real data, are provided, with the goal of making predictions
under "manipulations". The setting is very similar to a usual machine
learning setting: We have a training set and a test set; a target
variable, whose values are concealed in test data, must be
predicted. But, the test data are not distributed like the training
data: some variables in test data are "manipulated" by an external
agent, i.e. set to given values instead of being drawn from the
"natural" distribution.
Such problems are encountered in many application domains: In medicine
to predict the effect of a new treatment, in economy or ecology to
predict the consequences of new issued policies, in marketing to
predict customer response to marketing campaigns. Feature selection
researchers should be particularly interested in that challenge. The
problems posed by the challenge require finding subsets of predictive
variables, taking into account whether such variables remain
predictive when manipulations are performed. We anticipate that this
should require the knowledge of causal relationships between variables
since acting on causes of the target may result in a response change
while acting on consequences should not.
Deadline April 30, 2008 http://www.causality.inf.ethz.ch/challenge.php
About the speaker: Isabelle Guyon is a researcher in machine learning
and an independent consultant. Prior to starting her consulting
practice in 1996, she worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she
pioneered applications of neural networks to pen computer interfaces
and invented Support Vector Machines (in collaboration with B. Boser
and V. Vapnik). Isabelle Guyon holds a Ph.D. degree in Physical
Sciences of the University Pierre and Marie Curie of Paris,
France. She is vice-president of the Unipen foundation, action editor
of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and competition chair of
the IJCNN conference.
____________
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.
About the Speaker: Dr. Keith Devlin is a Senior Researcher at CSLI and
its Executive Director, a Consulting Professor in the Department of
Mathematics, and a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network
and of the university's H-STAR institute. He is a World Economic Forum
Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media
to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also
works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence
analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information,
models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the
study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 26
books and over 75 published research articles. Recipient of the
Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint
Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. He is "the Math
Guy" on National Public Radio.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 24 January 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"A Factor-Graph Approach to Universal Channel Decoding"
Pascal Vontobel
HP Labs
In the last decade it has become more and more clear how one can
efficiently achieve reliable communication close to capacity when the
channel law is known. A very helpful tool in deriving such codes /
decoders has been the factor-graph / message-passing iterative
decoding framework.
In this talk we consider data communication over a discrete memoryless
channel where neither the sender nor the receiver knows the channel
law. The setup is universal in the sense that no training sequence is
allowed, i.e., no position of the channel code is allowed to be fixed
to a certain symbol. We discuss a variety of approaches for solving
this problem efficiently with the help of the factor graph /
message-passing iterative decoding framework.
It turns out that it is worthwhile to design decoders which try to
minimize the symbol error probability; this is in contrast to the more
common approach in universal channel decoding where the block error
probability is minimized.
(The talk is planned to be accessible to an audience with a general
background in decision and coding theory.)
About the Speaker: Pascal O. Vontobel received the Diploma degree in
electrical engineering in 1997, the Post-Diploma degree in information
techniques in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in
2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After being a postdoctoral
research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (visiting assistant professor),
and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the
Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in
Palo Alto, CA, in the summer of 2006 as a research scientist. For his
PhD thesis he was awarded the ETH medal.
Dr. Vontobel is interested in information theory and signal processing
in general. More specifically, for his diploma thesis he worked on
source coding. Since then, he has mainly looked at the construction of
LDPC and turbo codes based on algebraic principles, the calculation
and bounding of capacities and information rates of finite-state
machine channels, and connections between factor graphs, the
summary-product algorithm, and electrical networks. More recently, he
has worked towards an understanding and characterization of the
summary-product algorithm on factor graphs with cycles and its
connections to linear programming (LP) decoding.
____________
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.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 25 January 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
"Prospects for Institutional Repositories, 5 Years On"
Clifford Lynch
In 2003, I wrote an article arguing for the role of institutional (and
disciplinary) repositories as essential infrastructure for scholarship
in the digital age. At that time, actual deployment and operational
experience with such repositories was quite limited. Since then,
several different views of repositories have crystalized, and a great
deal of experience has been gained. Some institutions have begun to
mandate the use of repositories by faculty, and more recently funders
have begun to introduce such mandates, though often involving
disciplinary rather than institutional repositories. In this
presentation and discussion I'll outline these different viewpoints
about the role of repositories, review developments and experience and
discuss what I believe are the prospects and critical barriers to
progress for repositories.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 25 January 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"XML Access Modules:
Towards Physical Data Independence in XML Databases"
Ioana Manolescu
INRIA
The advent of XML and the standardization of the XQuery language has
lead to the development of numerous XQuery processing engines. XQuery
processing, however, still poses significant performance challenges to
current engines, which often scale poorly with the database size.
This talk describes XAMs, a new approach for improving XQuery
processing performance based on XML materialized views. At the core of
this work is the XML Access Modules (or XAM for short) language,
describing a large set of storage structures, indices, and
materialized views for XML. XAMs are extended tree patterns, including
mandatory and optional nodes, structure and value predicates, node
identifiers, and special identifier properties which enlarge the space
of rewritings.
Given a set of materialized views described by XAMs, and an XQuery
query, our rewriting approach proceeds in three steps: algebraic
extraction of query tree patterns (which are also XAMs), rewriting of
the query XAMs based on the view XAMs, and finally re-assembling the
rewritings into logical algebra query plans. We have considered
rewriting under a special set of XML structural constraints,
encapsulated in a Dataguide. Together, the expressive power of XAMs,
and the Dataguide constraints, allow finding more (and more
interesting) rewritings than in previous works.
The XAM project is joint work with: Andrei Arion (INRIA), Veronique
Benzaken (LRI), and Yannis Papakonstantinou (UCSD). More information
on XAMs on can be found at: http://gemo.futurs.inria.fr/projects/XAM/
About the Speaker: Ioana Manolescu is a researcher at INRIA Futurs, in
Saclay, France, since 2002. Her research work is centered around query
optimization for XML, in particular on algebraic optimization and in
view-based rewriting. Ioana is also working on languages and models
for distributed Web data management, in particular on algebraic
optimization for the ActiveXML language. She has also contributed to
the WebML project in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
____________
MEDIA X WINTER LECTURE SERIES
On Monday, 28 January 2008, 11:00am
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160:124)
http://mediax.stanford.edu/events_calendar/calendar.html
"Learning in the Metaverse"
Claudia L'Amoreaux
Claudia has been an intrepid Metaverse explorer and co-creator, diving
into her first networked, immersive world as a teenager in 1969 when
she read George Leonard's scenarios of the year 2000 in his heretical
book "Education and Ecstasy".
She had to wait longer than she'd expected for the vision to come to
life, but come to life it did, beginning with worlds like Worlds Chat
and Active Worlds. Meanwhile, she designed immersive learning
experiences with videoconferencing tools from the first B&W still cams
to CuSeeMe to the high-end Picture Tel system.
She created innovative learning environments using a wide range of
distance learning applications, from the early days of text-only
conferencing systems to failed experiments like the visionary platform
Convene. But it was in the user-created, immersive world Second Life
that her lived experiences finally surpassed the visions.
Explore with Claudia life and learning in the Metaverse.
Recommended reading:
http://mediax.stanford.edu/seminars/schomeNAGTY.pdf
http://mediax.stanford.edu/seminars/slccedu07proceedings.pdf
Attendance is open, subject to availability. The Wallenberg Learning
Theatre, Room 124, is located on the first floor of Wallenberg Hall in
the Stanford Main Quad.
____________
CIS/SLATA
on Monday, 28 January 2008, 12:45pm
Law School 280B
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
"The Digital Revolution, Defining the Consumer victory and
Defending the Public Interest in the 21st Century: Network
Neutrality, Digital Downloading, and Privacy in Online Advertising"
Mark Cooper
Consumer Federation of America
The digital revolution has empowered consumers and scrambled business
models across a wide range of media and communications sectors, yet
the consumer gains are under constant pressure from network operators
and copyright holders, who seek to reassert control over consumers and
the Internet. On the other side, some public interest advocates are
alarmed by the dramatic growth of online advertising with its threat
to privacy and its tendency toward concentration in the hands of a
small number of providers. A clear understanding of how the consumers'
gains were made and what the threats are is crucial to defining the
public and consumer interest in the 21st century.
About the Speaker: Dr. Cooper holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and
is a former Yale University and Fulbright Fellow. He is Director of
Research at the Consumer Federation of America, a Fellow at the
Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society and a Fellow at
The Donald McGannon Communications Center of Fordham University. He
has provided expert testimony in over 250 cases for public interest
clients including Attorneys General, People's Counsels, and citizen
interveners before state and federal agencies, courts and legislators
in almost four dozen jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada. He is the
author of five books and numerous articles and papers on media and
communications.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 29 January 2008, 4:15pm-6:05pm
Bldg. 420:048
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
"Finite Sets and Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems"
David Taylor, Grigori Mints, Jesse Alama, Solomon Feferman
Stanford
In the logic seminar meetings for January 22 and January 29 we will be
working through the paper, "Finite sets and Goedel's incompleteness
theorems," by S. Swierczkowski, in which a fully detailed proof is
given of both incompleteness theorems for a theory HF of finite sets
equivalent in strength to Peano Arithmetic, PA. The detailed proof of
the second incompleteness theorem, which is in principle mechanizable,
may be the first of its kind. In order to cover all the material in
this paper, we need to extend the time period of the seminar beyond
its usual length; the seminar will run till 18:05. Copies of the
paper will be made available to all participants. The presentation of
the material will be divided up according to the following schedule:
January 22 4:15-5:05 G. Mints Introduction, D. Taylor Appendices 1-3
5:15-6:05 G. Mints Sections 1-3, Appendices 4-6
January 29 4:15-5:05 J. Alama, Sections 4-7
5:15-6:05 S. Feferman Sections 8-10, conclusion
A PDF version of Swierczkowski's monograph (minus the table of contents,
which is available only in the paper version) can be found at
http://journals.impan.gov.pl/cgi-bin/dm/pdf?dm422-0-01
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"New Trends in the Foundations of Mathematics"
Grigori Mints
Stanford
A new emphasis on finitist methods and results in mathematics
indicates a turn toward foundations happening under the slogans of
HARD ANALYSIS and PROOF MINING. While previously non-constructive or
infinitistic methods were thought (by an influential minority) to be
philosophically defective, the revival of interest is caused by
mathematical needs. Some of the central results needed development of
new tools that turned out to be instances of well-known constructions
of proof theory. The finitist trend is called "hard analysis" by T.
Tao and contrasted with the ordinary or "soft" mathematical analysis.
The latter works without any restrictions on the abstract notions and
infinitistic methods. Proof mining initiated by G. Kreisel and
developed by U. Kohlenbach applies proof theoretic tools to get
essential strengthening of results proved in the mainstream
mathematics. We present some examples.
____________
CENTER FOR INTERNET AND SOCIETY TALK
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 1:00pm
Memorial Auditorium
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
"Final Free Culture Talk"
Lawrence Lessig
Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is
giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the
future of ideas.
After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the
world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture
movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and
setting his sights on corruption in Washington.
Lessig is giving a final talk at Stanford University on the subject,
and it is being recorded for the upcoming feature film "Basement
Tapes", an open source documentary (see
<http://www.opensourcecinema.org/>). Guests will also be treated to a
sneak preview of some upcoming scenes from Basement Tapes, and
re-mixed work from the Open Source Cinema website.
Please come and give Professor Lessig our appreciation and for a last
chance to witness this enlightening and provocative presentation.
Event is free to the public. Everyone is welcome.
You can RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8274187546
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not
Questions about Program Behavior"
Andy Ko
Carnegie Mellon University
Most software undergoes a brief period of rapid development, followed
by a much longer period of maintenance and adaptation. As a result,
software developers spend most of their time exploring a systems
underlying source code to determine the parts of the system that are
relevant to their tasks. Because these parts are often distributed
throughout a systems modules, and because they can interact in complex
and unpredictable ways, this process of understanding a program's
execution can be extremely difficult. The primary cause of this
difficulty is that developers must answer their questions about a
systems behavior by guessing. For example, a developer wondering, "Why
didn't this button do anything after I pressed it?" must form an answer
such as "Maybe because its event handler wasn't called" and then use
breakpoint debuggers, print statements, and other low-level tools to
verify the explanation. Not only is this process poorly supported by
current tools, but worse yet, there are many potential explanations
for a system's behavior, so developers rarely formulate a valid
explanation on the first attempt. To address this problem, I present a
new kind of program understanding tool called a Whyline, which allows
a developer to select "why did" and "why didn't" questions directly
about the symptoms of a systems behavior. In response, the Whyline
determines which parts of the system and its execution are related to
the symptom in question, while also identifying false assumptions the
developer might have about what occurred during the execution of the
program. By using this approach, developers need not guess about
potential causes of program behavior: they simply point to some
perceptible feature of the faulty behavior and the system identifies
the relevant code. Early prototypes of the Whyline for a simplified
educational programming language reduced debugging time by a factor of
8. I have since generalized the Whyline to support Java programs with
textual and graphical output, inventing several new incremental
algorithms to identify program-specific output, derive output-relevant
questions, and answer questions about a variety of output. A
preliminary study of the Java Whyline found that even people with no
program experience using the Whyline could isolate a bug 3 times
faster than experts with conventional debugging tools.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization"
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
IBM Many Eyes
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/About_Many_Eyes.html
Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite
in academia, business, and government. But in recent years web-based
visualizations--ranging from political art projects to news
stories--have reached audiences of millions. Unfortunately, while lay
users can view many sophisticated visualizations, they have few ways
to create them. In order to "democratize" visualization, we have built
Many Eyes, a web site where people may upload their own data, create
interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to
foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve
not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to
spur discussion and collaboration. We will provide an overview of Many
Eyes, patterns of usage on the site, and what those patterns suggest
about the future of visualization.
About the Speaker: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are research
scientists in IBM's Visual Communication Lab. Viégas is known for her
pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg's
visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered
internet classics. Both Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their
visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such
as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of
Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two
became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia,
leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing
nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the
power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis
it enables.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Does consciousness occur in laterally-connected
input/integration layers in the brain's neuronal networks?"
Stuart Hameroff
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
The brain appears to operate like a computer, with discrete
information states (bits) conveyed by firings (axonal action
potentials, or spikes) of individual neurons. Neuronal dendrites
receive and integrate spike-mediated synaptic inputs, and when
threshold is met, axonal spikes are fired as outputs. With variable
strength synapses, axonal-dendritic spike-mediated synaptic
computation can account for many nonconscious (auto-pilot) cognitive
functions and control of behavior. What about consciousness? The best
measure of consciousness is gamma synchrony EEG which correlates not
with axonal spikes/firings, but with sideways networks of synchronized
dendrites of neighboring neurons connected by gap junctions (dendritic
webs). In computer terms, dendritic webs are laterally-connected
input/integration layers embedded in feed-forward and feed-back
networks. Gap junction openings and closings evolve dendritic web
topologies able to move throughout the brains axonal-dendritic
networks. Within cytoplasmic interiors of dendritic web dendrites, it
is also proposed that quantum computations in microtubules underlie
consciousness (Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR model). The point here is that
synchronized dendritic webs can house the brains conscious pilot able
to move about, tune in and take over from habitual, nonconscious
auto-pilot modes. The proposal is testable and consistent with all
known neurocognitive science.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"On 3-receiver broadcast channel with degraded message sets:
The idea of indirect decoding and the capacity of a class of
broadcast channels"
Chandra Nair
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Are capacity regions of 3 or more receivers a straightforward
extension of the two receivers in general, or do we require new
techniques?
In this talk I shall show, using an important special case of degraded
message sets, that such straightforward extensions are not optimal. We
introduce a new technique, called indirect decoding, that can be
combined with existing techniques to improve the achievable region. We
prove the optimality of this technique in a few non-trivial special
cases (i.e. determine the capacity regions).
This is joint work with Prof. Abbas El Gamal and the relevant paper
can be downloaded from:
http://chandra.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/pub/publications.html
or reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3327
About the Speaker: Chandra Nair obtained his bachelors from Indian
Institute of Technology(Madras) in 1999 and his masters and PhD from
Stanford University in 2002 and 2005 respectively. He was a
post-doctoral researcher with the Theory Group at Microsoft research
till June 2007. He joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Fall
2007.
His current research interests concerns optimization problems in large
systems and multi-user information theory. In particular, he is
interested in the new and growing area where ideas and techniques from
statistical physics, computer science and probability theory are used
to develop theory and algorithms for optimization problems in large
systems; and also in applying these results to engineering problems
for attaining better performance than the traditional approaches. He
is also interested in multi-user information theory; in particular in
understanding and characterizing capacity regions for multi-user
channels.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 1 February 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"The WAVE Project at UCSD"
Alin Deutsch
UCSD
Modern Web applications are often powered by an underlying database
and generate their pages dynamically as a function of internal state,
database contents, as well as the user's actions (e.g. clicking on a
button/link, selecting an item from a menu, inputing text, etc.). The
resulting user interaction is governed by a workflow of considerable
complexity, with high bug potential, which is usually realized. To
boost both the developers' and users' confidence in the correct
behavior of the Web application, we developed WAVE, an automatic
design-time verifier for interactive, database-driven Web applications
specified using high-level modeling tools such as WebML.
WAVE allows the developer to specify desired properties of the
temporal evolution of the interaction with the user (aka "runs"). For
instance, "regardless of what the user does and regardless of the
database contents, book orders will be placed only if the correct
payment is received". WAVE is a sound and complete verifier for a
large class of properties and applications, i.e. it declares an
application correct if and only if for every database contents, every
corresponding run satisfies the properties. A counterexample database
and run are exhibited otherwise. For other applications, WAVE can be
used as an incomplete verifier, as commonly done in software
verification. Our experiments on four representative data-driven
applications and a battery of common properties yielded surprisingly
good verification times, on the order of seconds. This suggests that
interactive applications controlled by database queries may be
unusually well suited to automatic verification. They also show that
the coupling of model checking with database optimization techniques
used in the implementation of WAVE is extremely effective. These
findings are significant both to the database area and to automatic
verification in general.
This is joint work with Victor Vianu, Liying Sui and Dayou Zhou, all
from UCSD.
The talk assumes no prior model checking background.
____________
END MATERIAL
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