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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 13 February 2008, vol. 23:21
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
13 FEBRUARY 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 21
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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 13 FEBRUARY 2008 TO 22 FEBRUARY 2008
WEDNESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2008
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [13-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote"
Johnny Chung Lee
CS Department, Carnegie Mellon University
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [13-Feb-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Brett Crosby
Group PMM, Google Analytics
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [13-Feb-08]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"SILVIA:
A Practical Hybrid Approach for Conversational Intelligence"
Leslie Spring
CTO and Founder, Cognitive Code Corporation
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
(RSVP requested)
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon CIS/SLATA [14-Feb-08]
Tresidder Union, Cypress Room N-S
"The Ethics of Social Networking"
Panel
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [14-Feb-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Jon Peterson
NeuStar
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [14-Feb-08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Aristotle on Responsibility for One's Character"
Pierre Destrée
Université De Louvain
Co-sponsor: Classics
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [14-Feb-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Horseshoes and Dichotomies: Finding the hidden variables"
Susan Holmes
Stanford University
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [14-Feb-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"New Tools, New Rules: Protocols, Algorithms,and the Future of Work"
Stanley Rosenschein
CSLI
http://www.quindi.com/about.htm#s
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [14-Feb-08]
Packard 101
"Stability and asymptotic optimality of generalized MaxWeight policies"
Sean Meyn
University of Illinois
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [14-Feb-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Massive and Specific Dysregulation of Hippocampal Circuitry
in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy"
Douglas Coulter
http://www.med.upenn.edu/ins/faculty/coulter.htm
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon Speech Lunch [15-Feb-08]
Phonetics Lab
"Hidden Conditional Random Fields for Disfluency Detection"
Yun-Hsuan Sung
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [15-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Visualizations and Ambient Interfaces"
S. Joy Mountford
Yahoo!
http://www.idbias.com/people.html
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm GRAI Seminar [15-Feb-08]
Gates 104
"Shape estimation: computer vision meets computer graphics"
James Davis
UC Santa Cruz
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
Abstract below
2:00pm Stanford Tech Briefing [15-Feb-08]
Turing Auditorium, Polya Hall
"Drupal"
Tim Torgenrud, IT Services, joined by a panel of experts
http://techbriefings.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [15-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Allison Master
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [15-Feb-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Uniqueness Effects in Correlatives"
Adrian Brasoveanu
Stanford University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [15-Feb-08]
Gates B03
"Towards a Distributed Web Search Engine"
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Yahoo! Spain and Chile
http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2008 - University Holiday
TUESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2008
2:30pm NLP Reading Group [19-Feb-08]
Gates
"Jerry R. Hobbs, Mark Stickel, Paul Martin and
Douglas Edwards, 'Statistical Machine Translation for Query
Expansion in Answer Retrieval'"
Pi-Chuan Chang
http://nlp.stanford.edu/read/
3:45pm Talk [19-Feb-08]
Memorial Auditorium
"Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back"
Bill Gates
http://events.stanford.edu/
(free but restricted to Stanford affiliates)
4:00pm Media X Seminar: Workgroup Protocols and Algorithms [19-Feb-08]
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160)
"Solutions Network: A Proposal for a Continuously Improving,
Real World, Immersive Problem Solving Framework"
Neil Jacobstein
Teknowledge Corporation
http://mediax.stanford.edu/events_calendar/calendar.html
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [19-Feb-08]
Bldg. 60:119
"Consis(ZFVLIF) Implies Consis(NF)"
Sergei Tupailo
Stanford, Tallinn
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:15pm ENGR110/210: Perspectives in Assistive Technology [19-Feb-08]
Meyer Library 124
"Design Challenges in Assistive Technology"
Douglas F. Schwandt
Mechanical Engineer
"The Ethics of Research in Human Subjects:
Elements of Informed Consent"
Sandra L. Bardas
Stanford University Hospital & Clinics
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engr110/
WEDNESDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2008
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [20-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"How Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience"
Randy Gallistel,
Rutgers University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:00pm SCIEN Colloquium [20-Feb-08]
Packard 204
"The Evolution of Video Quality Measurement"
Stefan Winkler
Symmetricom
http://scien.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [20-Feb-08]
Gates B01
Title to be announced
John Nicholls
NVIDIA
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [20-Feb-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Mir Imran
Chairman of the Board, InCube Labs
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
THURSDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2008
2:00pm Berkeley International Computer Science Institute [21-Feb-08]
ICSI (UC Berkeley)
"ICSI BEARS Open House"
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/
Information below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [21-Feb-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"The Future Is Now: Architecture for a Semantic Net"
Sandy Klausner
CoreTalk Corp
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [21-Feb-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Enterprise 2.0: The State of an Art"
Andrew McAfee
Harvard Business School
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [21-Feb-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Sridhar Mahadevan
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mahdeva/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [21-Feb-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Adult engagement and the shaping of new meanings in
children's acquisition"
Eve Clark
Linguistics, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [21-Feb-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Circuits in the brain that coordinate action and perception"
Marc Sommer
University of Pittsburgh
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/faculty/sommer.shtml
http://med.stanford.edu/seminars/deptHome.do?department=77
7:00pm AAAI Event [21-Feb-08]
Sheraton Hotel Palo Alto
"Autonomous Robots Coming of Age: Directions and Futures"
Sebastian Thrun
Stanford
Red Whittaker
Carnegie Mellon
Hosted by Eric Horvitz, AAAI President
http://www.aaai.org/Membership/events.php
(open to non-AAAI members for $12, RSVP requested)
FRIDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon Ethics@Noon [22-Feb-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
"Ethics and Counterterrorism"
Martha Crenshaw
Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and
Senior Fellow at CISAC and FSI
http://fsi.stanford.edu/people/marthacrenshaw/
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12 noon Speech Lunch [22-Feb-08]
Phonetics Lab
"Perception of consonant length"
Olga Dmitrieva
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [22-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Supporting Studio Culture in Interaction Design Research"
Daniel Fallman
Umea University
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
2:15pm Stanford University Oral Examination [22-Feb-08]
Gates 104
"Incentives and Algorithms for Reputation Systems"
Rajat Bhattacharjee
Computer Science, Stanford University
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [22-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Brice Kuhl
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [22-Feb-08]
Gates B03
"ETL Scenarios: From Formal Specification to Optimization"
Timos Sellis
National Technical University of Athens
http://www.dblab.ntua.gr/~timos/
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [22-Feb-08]
Packard 101
"Cooperative wireless networking: from theory to practice"
Elza Erkip
Polytechnic University
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of all types. 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.
____________
UPCOMING
The sixth annual Media X meeting will be on 3-4 March 2008. See
http://mediax.stnaford.edu/ for more information.
The ninth annual Semantics Fest will be on 14 March 2008. See
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/eventschedule.html
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 13 February 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote"
Johnny Chung Lee
CS Department, Carnegie Mellon University
As of December 2007, Nintendo has sold over 20 million Wii consoles
worldwide. This significantly exceeds the number of tablet PCs used
today according to even the most generous estimates of tablet PC
sales. This makes the Nintendo Wii remote one of the most common input
devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most
sophisticated containing a 3-axis accelerometer and high-resolution
high-speed infrared camera. This is an incredible opportunity to
explore interaction techniques enabled by the Wii remote and to
develop new applications that could be instantly accessible to
millions of individuals around the world. Though only just a few weeks
old, the work I will present has received nearly 5 million unique
views and generated over 250,000 software downloads. In this talk, I
will show you how you can participate in these projects as well as
generate your own.
About the Speaker: Johnny Chung Lee is a PhD graduate student in
Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. His research
interests are in developing techniques that can significantly increase
the practicality and accessibility of technology to researchers,
developers, and end users. His previous work spans a wide range of
topics including projector-based augmented reality, brain-computer
interfaces, kinetic typography, haptics, multi-channel audio, tangible
interfaces, and filmmaking.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 13 February 2008, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
(RSVP requested)
"SILVIA:
A Practical Hybrid Approach for Conversational Intelligence"
Leslie Spring
CTO and Founder, Cognitive Code Corporation
http://www.cognitivecode.com/
This talk describes a top-down, product development oriented approach
to architecting a conversationally intelligent software
system. Cognitive Code's SILVIA platform is used as an example of a
system that is representative of this approach. The SILVIA platform
employs a number of known methods within its implementation. The
SILVIA platform also incorporates a number of new, unique methods, as
well as new applications of known methods. However, independent of
the platform's algorithmic components, the overall SILVIA architecture
and implementation was developed with an eye toward rapid product
prototyping and development. As such a system, SILVIA derives many of
its elements from disparate development disciplines such as game
engines and content management systems. It is proposed that a more
general hybrid system not only creates an environment conducive to
rapid development and deployment across multiple markets, but also may
exhibit the desirable property of emergent behavior via the
interaction of its integrated components.
About the Speaker: Leslie is the inventor and architect of Cognitive
Code's SILVIA platform. As CTO and Founder, he is responsible for the
technology and product development arm of the company. Leslie also
works with the company's other executives and fellow board members to
determine the overall direction and specific implementations of
Cognitive Code's business strategies. Leslie has been a professional
software developer since the early 80s, and has worked on everything
from hand coding machine-language 3d matrix transformations to
managing large-scale development efforts and software groups. Leslie
has been employed by and has consulted to videogame and entertainment
companies such as Electronic Arts, Disney, and Sony Pictures. His
responsibilities as Principal Engineer, Technical Director, and
Software Architect for various projects have included heading teams to
develop commercial products, as well as direct, hands-on development
of a variety of graphics algorithms, gaming systems, and integrated
development tools. More recently, he was responsible for creating the
software architecture of Screenblast, Sony's on-line content creation
and sharing service, and developed all of Screenblast's content
management systems and associated user tools. In addition, while at
Sony, Leslie developed four large-scale patented software technologies
and shepherded these technologies through the entire patent
process. At four years of age, Leslie saw the film, 2001: a Space
Odyssey. It was at that moment that Leslie began his lifelong interest
in and passion for artificial intelligence. It is that passion
combined with decades of experience in developing practical,
product-oriented systems that has culminated in the development of the
SILVIA platform, and the founding of Cognitive Code as a business.
____________
CIS/SLATA
on Thursday, 14 February 2008, 12 noon
Tresidder Union, Cypress Room N-S
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
"The Ethics of Social Networking"
Panel
Has "online privacy" become an oxymoron, or are we bound to develop
a "new privacy" concept that prioritizes nuanced control of personal
information? Is this new concept tenable? What are the benefits and
risks of the standardization of social networking? What impact does
social networking technology have on interpersonal virtues? Are we
witnessing the flattening of social landscape by online networks? And
can one be a college student without Facebook?
The Stanford Center on Ethics and the Stanford Center for Internet and
Society invite you to a discussion of a host of ethical and social
concerns generated by the evolving culture of social networking,
particularly by Internet users' habits and Web 2.0 sites' practices
and strategies just in time for Valentine's Day.
Moderated by Dean Eckles, a research scientist and designer at Nokia
Research Center.
Panelists include
Dr. BJ Fogg, Director of Research and Design at Stanford's Persuasive
Technology Lab, and lecturer at the Computer Science Dept;
Jia Shen, Co-Founder and CTO of RockYou;
Shannon Vallor, Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 14 February 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"New Tools, New Rules: Protocols, Algorithms,and the Future of Work"
Stanley Rosenschein
CSLI
http://www.quindi.com/about.htm#s
Over the last two decades, digital networks have grown in power, reach
and availability, bringing impressive productivity gains to the
workplace. These gains, however, are limited by traditional work
practices, which, when combined with new tools, often lead to rapid
saturation of human capacity. This talk asks what kind of human
protocols and work practices might be better suited to dynamic work in
a digital age, and can these protocols be explicitly designed, in
analogy with computer protocols and algorithms?
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 14 February 2008, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Horseshoes and Dichotomies: Finding the hidden variables"
Susan Holmes
Statistics, Stanford University
Classical multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a method for visualizing
high-dimensional point clouds by mapping to low-dimensional Euclidean
space. This mapping is defined in terms of eigenfunctions of a matrix
of interpoint dissimilarities. In this paper we analyze in detail
multidimensional scaling applied to a specific dataset: the 2005
United States House of Representatives roll call votes. MDS and kernel
projections output `horseshoes' that are characteristic of
dimensionality reduction techniques. We show that in general, a latent
ordering of the data gives rise to these patterns when one only has
local information. That is, when only the interpoint distances for
nearby points are known accurately. Our results provide a rigorous set
of results and insight into manifold learning in the special case
where the manifold is a curve, or two curves. We have further
questions about using extra information to supplement this analysis.
This is joint work with Persi Diaconis and Sharad Goel.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 14 February 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Stability and asymptotic optimality of generalized MaxWeight policies"
Sean Meyn
University of Illinois
It is shown that stability of the celebrated MaxWeight or back
pressure policies is a consequence of the following interpretation:
either policy is myopic with respect to a surrogate value function of
a very special form, in which the "marginal disutility" at a buffer
vanishes for vanishingly small buffer population. This observation
motivates the h-MaxWeight policy}, defined for a wide class of
functions h. These policies share many of the attractive properties of
the MaxWeight policy:
* Arrival rate data is not required in the policy.
* Under a variety of general conditions, the policy is stabilizing
when h is a perturbation of a monotone linear function, a monotone
quadratic, or a monotone Lyapunov function for the fluid model.
* A perturbation of the relative value function for a workload
relaxation gives rise to a myopic policy that is approximately
average-cost optimal in heavy traffic, with logarithmic regret.
The first results are obtained for a general Markovian network model.
Asymptotic optimality is established for a general Markovian
scheduling model with a single bottleneck, and homogeneous servers.
About the Speaker: Sean P. Meyn received the B.A. degree in
Mathematics Summa Cum Laude from UCLA in 1982, and the PhD degree in
Electrical Engineering from McGill University in 1987 (with
Prof. P. Caines, McGill University). After a two year postdoctoral
fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra, Dr.
Meyn and his family moved to the Midwest. He is now a Professor in the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research
Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of
Illinois. He is also an IEEE fellow.
Dr. Meyn has served on the editorial boards of several journals in the
systems and control, and applied probability areas. He was a
University of Illinois Vice Chancellor's Teaching Scholar in 1994; is
coauthor with Richard Tweedie of the monograph Markov Chains and
Stochastic Stability, Springer-Verlag, London, 1993; and received
jointly with Tweedie the 1994 ORSA/TIMS Best Publication In Applied
Probability Award. His new book, Control Techniques for Complex
Networks is published by Cambridge University Press.
He has held visiting positions at universities all over the world,
including the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore during 1997-1998
where he was a Fulbright Research Scholar. During his latest
sabbatical during the 2006-2007 academic year he was a visiting
professor at MIT and United Technologies Research Center (UTRC). His
research interests include stochastic processes, optimization, complex
networks, and information theory. Current funding is provided by NSF,
Motorola, DARPA, and UTRC.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 15 February 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Visualizations and Ambient Interfaces"
S. Joy Mountford
Yahoo!
http://www.idbias.com/people.html
Big companies with access to immense amounts of data can offer some
insights into how big the information world around us really is. Joy
will show a series of compelling visualizations that her Design
Innovation Groups at Yahoo, in SF, has produced. Her YHaus team has
created dozens of innovative, interactive feeds of real Yahoo!
data. These show flight segments from Y!Trip Planner turned into
dynamic parabolic trails of light, Yahoo Answers feeds showing key
words as animated word clouds, the extent of mail traffic reach and
topical search query bursts around the world. Some people have
described these applications as 'useful' art, but Joy thinks they may
be a start towards a different type of interface, an ambient one.
About the Speaker: S. Joy Mountford has been designing interfaces for
over 25 years for applications from aircraft to personal computers to
consumer devices. She has become an internationally recognized leader
in user-centered interaction design. She has led design efforts
creating interfaces to audio and visual devices, interfaces between
the electronic world and the physical world of printed materials, and
for toys, as well as for interactive music creation and generation. In
1990 she pioneered forming the Interface Design Project which sponsors
interdisciplinary design at universities around the world, and
continues to lead this effort for various sponsor companies. She
headed the Human Interface Group at Apple Computer for 8 years and
then moved to Interval Research for 6 years to lead a series of
consumer music product teams. She then led her own interaction design
company, idbias, consulting on creating interaction designs for a
range of client companies.
In 2005, Joy joined Yahoo Inc. Her initial focus was on leading a team
for re-designing for the most trafficked Web page, Yahoo's Front Page.
Currently she is leading the user experience and design efforts for
Yahoo's Communications and Community products. In addition she leads a
Design Innovation Group in San Francisco focusing on data
visualizations that are useful, as well as beautiful. Her project
interests center around building more extensive creative spaces to
position technology in an
appealing way.
____________
GRAI SEMINAR
on Friday, 15 February 2008, 2:00-3:30pm
Gates 104
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
"Shape estimation: computer vision meets computer graphics"
James Davis
UC Santa Cruz
This talk will survey some of my recent work on estimating the "shape"
of stuff in the real world. Today's sensing systems have a number of
limitations, and I'll discuss solutions to a few, and propose
challenges to you for the ones know one has figured out yet. Many
vision systems deal poorly with non-diffuse objects, so we'll talk
about an invariant for reasoning about non-Lambertian
scenes. Triangulation based 3D sensors are poor at estimating normals,
but great at position, while photometric stereo is just the reverse,
so we'll discuss combinging these methods. Finally, high quality
structured light scanners usually don't perform well with moving
objects, so we'll discuss viewpoint coded structured light.
The talk will be cast in a wider context, but the "meat" will roughly
be from the following papers:
"BRDF Invariant Stereo using Light Transport Constancy"
James Davis, Ruigang Yang, Liang Wang
IEEE International Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2005.
"Viewpoint-Coded Structured Light"
Mark Young, Erik Beeson, James Davis, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Ravi
Ramamoorthi
IEEE Conf. on Comp. Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2007.
"Efficiently Combining Positions and Normals for Precise 3D Geometry"
Diego Nehab, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, James Davis, Ravi Ramamoothi,
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 24(3), 2005.
About the Speaker: James Davis is an Assistant Professor in Computer
Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his
PhD from Stanford University in 2002, and was previously a senior
research scientist at Honda Research Institute. His research expertise
is in computer graphics, machine vision, and sensing systems for
building digital models of the real world, work that has resulted in
over 25 patents and peer-reviewed publications, received an ICRA 2003
Best Vision Paper, and an NSF CAREER award. His research has been
commercialization by companies including Sony, PrenticeHall, and Apple
Computer, and he now sits on advisory councils for a handful of
startups and nonprofits. He is additionally interested in applying
technology to address global social issues, and has developed an award
winning course around this theme.
____________
TECH BRIEFINGS
on Friday, 15 February 2008, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Turing Auditorium (Polya Hall)
(Tech Briefings are aimed at the Stanford Community)
http://techbriefings.stanford.edu/
"Drupal"
Tim Torgenrud
IT Services, Stanford
joined by a panel of experts
Drupal is a free, open-source modular framework and content management
system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. Drupal, like
many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to organize the
content, customize the presentation, automate administrative tasks,
and manage site visitors and contributors. Although there is a
sophisticated programming interface, most tasks can be accomplished
with little or no programming. Drupal is sometimes described as a "web
application framework", as its capabilities extend from content
management to enabling a wide range of services and transactions.
Join Tim Torgenrud (IT Services) and a panel of experts for a
discussion of how Drupal is being implemented on campus, and how it
might be of benefit to Stanford groups and departments.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 15 February 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Uniqueness Effects in Correlatives"
Adrian Brasoveanu
Stanford University
This talk discusses the interpretation of Hindi and Romanian
correlatives and argues that the variability of the uniqueness effects
exhibited by these constructions is due to their mixed referential and
quantificational nature. The account involves an articulated notion
of quantification, independently motivated by donkey anaphora and
quantificational subordination and consisting of both (discourse)
referential components and non-referential components (dynamic
operators over plural info states). The variable uniqueness effects
emerge out of the interaction between: (i) the semantics of
wh-indefinites, singular anaphors and habitual morphology and (ii) the
pragmatics of quantification, which allows for the selection of
different levels of 'zoom-in' on the quantified-over objects.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 15 February 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"Towards a Distributed Web Search Engine"
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Yahoo! Spain and Chile
http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/
In the ocean of Web data, Web search engines are the primary way to
access content. As the data is on the order of petabytes, current
search engines are very large centralized systems based on replicated
clusters. Web data, however, is always evolving. The number of Web
sites continues to grow rapidly (150 millions in November 2007) and
there are currently more than 20 billion indexed pages. On the other
hand, Internet users are above one billion and hundreds of million of
queries are issued each day. In the near future, centralized systems
are likely to become less effective against such a data-query load,
thus suggesting the need of fully distributed search engines. Such
engines need to maintain high quality answers, fast response time,
high query throughput, high availability and scalability; in spite of
network latency and scattered data. In this talk we present the main
challenges behind the design of a distributed Web retrieval system and
our past and on-going work in solving some of them, including
crawling, indexing and query processing.
About the Speaker: Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Yahoo! Research for
Europe and Latin America, leading the labs at Barcelona, Spain and
Santiago, Chile. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web
Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering
School of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor at the Dept. of
Technology of Univ. Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He is co-author
of the book Modern Information Retrieval, published in 1999 by
Addison-Wesley, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the
Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and
co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures,
Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 150 other publications. He has
received the Organization of American States award for young
researchers in exact sciences (1993) and with two Brazilian colleagues
obtained the COMPAQ prize for the best CS Brazilian research article
(1997). In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to
the Chilean Academy of Sciences.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 19 February 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 60:119
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
"Consis(ZFVLIF) Implies Consis(NF)"
Sergei Tupailo
Stanford, Tallinn
ZFVLIF stands for
ZF + V=L
+ \forall \al \exists \lambda > \al ["\lambda is inaccessible"]
+ "every symmetric partial order has a symmetric generic filter"
Starting with a model of this theory, I build a model of NF. A crucial
ingredient in this construction is a significant improvement of the
interpretation of NF given in [Boffa88]. Although the theory ZFVLIF
itself might be inconsistent (as well as some other theories in the
respected literature), I think the interpretation of NF I present has
more independent value. It remains a question whether symmetric
generic filters do exist, or whether I really need them.
References:
[Boffa88] Boffa, M. "ZFJ and the consistency problem for NF", Jarhbuch
der Kurt-Godel-Gesellschaft, vol. 1988, pp. 102-106.
____________
SCIEN COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 20 February 2008, 4:00pm
Packard 204
http://scien.stanford.edu/
"The Evolution of Video Quality Measurement"
Stefan Winkler
Symmetricom
With the ever-increasing complexity of digital video services, video
quality has become a critical issue. This encompasses not only the
Quality of Service (QoS) of the delivery network, but even more
importantly, the Quality of Experience (QoE) of the viewers. In this
talk, I'll give an overview of the current state of the art of video
quality assessment methods and summarize the main standardization
efforts in this area. I'll also take a closer look at emerging new
generations of quality metrics, in particular so-called "hybrid"
approaches combining network and content metrics for QoE measurement,
and discuss some aspects of audiovisual quality.
About the Speaker: Stefan Winkler is the Principal Technologist for
Symmetricom's QoE Assurance Division. Formerly, he was the Chief
Scientist and co-founder of Genista Corporation, a provider of quality
assurance solutions for IPTV and mobile media. He has also held
assistant professor positions at the National University of Singapore
(NUS) and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He has published
more than 40 papers on perceptual quality measurement and is the
author of the book, "Digital Video Quality." He has also been a member
and contributor of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) since its
foundation in 1997. Dr. Winkler holds a Master of Science in
Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Vienna,
Austria, and a doctorate from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
____________
BERKELEY INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
on Thursday, 21 February 2008, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Sixth Floor, Berkeley
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/
"ICSI BEARS Open House"
ICSI Research Staff
Schedule
* 2:00 Research Demonstrations and Posters
* 3:00 Feature Presentation: Robust Multimedia content analysis by
integrating sensor technologies and machine learning --a
partnership between Appscio and ICSI
* 3:30 Refreshments and continuation of Poster Session
Our feature presentation at 3:00 will be given by Jerry Schumacher,
Vice President of Professional Services at Appscio, Inc., and Gerald
Friedland, a postdoctoral fellow with the ICSI Speech Group. Appscio,
one of ICSI's newest industrial partners, offers a services platform
for building web-based video-centric applications and integrating them
into business operations and processes. Schumacher and Friedland will
discuss their collaboration in this area.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 21 February 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"The Future Is Now: Architecture for a Semantic Net"
Sandy Klausner
CoreTalk Corp
The Cubicon Platform: a radically simplified network architecture
enabling true semantic functionality for managing complexities of a
universal medium to facilitate data, information and knowledge
exchange.
Klausner will discuss the results of twenty years of groundbreaking
research in semantic computing and iconic programming. Learn about the
resulting 10 initial innovations that establish the essential
foundation for the Semantic Desktop and Web 3.0. This shared knowledge
substrate will enable humans to more effectively reflect, interpret
and structure information of their everyday work and play activities
as graph interrelations through their Semantic Desktop or mobile
device. Cubicon captures explicit thought articulations in suitable
representations (texts, icons and pictures) and enables exchange,
discussion and processing of such resources with other people across
social and organizational networks.
This radically simplified network architecture will help transform the
Web from a network of disparate silo applications and content
repositories to a seamless and interoperable Semantic Net with
countless advantages. This novel technology overcomes the many current
limitations of RDF and OWL to provide a graph overlay on the Web,
where associated knowledge is linked to content and services,
providing the prerequisite foundation for systems that can reason in a
human fashion.
This groundbreaking technology tackles fundamental issues of
performance, productivity, interoperability, agility, robustness,
security and mobility at Net-scale.
About the Speaker: Klausner founded Automated Intelligence Corporation
that developed the LOGIC ONE that is now Honeywells mainline
distributed building automation technology. He first applied this
bit-exact iconic notation to blueprint all dimensions of this advanced
control system.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 21 February 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Enterprise 2.0: The State of an Art"
Andrew McAfee
Harvard Business School
Professor Andrew McAfee will discuss Enterprise 2.0 - the use of Web
2.0 technologies and approaches by companies in pursuit of business
goals. He will describe the trends that have converged to make
Enterprise 2.0 an appealing reality now, illustrating them with
examples from both the Internet and Intranets. He will also frame the
benefits brought by Enterprise 2.0, and use case studies to show how
they address some longstanding challenges within organizations.
Finally, he will outline the substantial barrier s to successful
adoption of the new tools and approaches, and discuss appropriate
roles for general managers, IT departments, internal champions, and
other important constituencies.
About The Speaker: Andrew McAfee joined the faculty of the Technology
and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School (HBS) in
1998. His research investigates how managers can most effectively
select, implement, and use Information Technology (IT) to achieve
business goals. He was the recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy
Integrated Manufacturing Fellowship for his doctoral research, which
focused on the performance impact of enterprise information
technologies such as SAP's R/3. His current research falls into two
categories: (1) an exploration of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used
within the enterprise, and what their impact is likely to be; and (2)
a study of IT's impact over time on the structure of U.S. industries
and the nature of competition within them.
McAfee launched the first HBS faculty blog
<http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/>, which examines the impact of
IT on businesses and their leaders. He teaches the MBA course Managing
in the Information Age, and also teaches in various Executive
Education courses. Prior to coming to HBS, McAfee worked as a
consultant in operations management - advising clients in a range of
industries including aerospace, consumer electronics, white goods, and
OEM electronics. McAfee continues to consult, primarily on helping
companies formulate and execute IT strategies.
Awarded a Doctorate in Business Administration at HBS in 1999, McAfee
also holds dual M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Management
from MIT as a Leaders for Manufacturing fellow, and B.S. degrees in
Mechanical Engineering and in Humanities from MIT.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 14 February 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Adult engagement and the shaping of new meanings in
children's acquisition"
Eve Clark
Linguistics Department, Stanford
Adults shape the acquisition of meaning in young children in several
ways: (a) They offer children unfamiliar (new) words, words to which
children must assign some initial meaning in context. And (b) they
often offer additional information about new words, information that
licenses inferences on the children's part, and so allows them to set
up preliminary meanings. In doing this, adults often offer other terms
from the same semantic domain as well, and so help shape children's
semantic organization too.
____________
STANFORD UNIVERSITY ORAL EXAMINATION
on Friday, 22 February 2008, 2:15pm
Gates 104
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/
"Incentives and Algorithms for Reputation Systems"
Rajat Bhattacharjee
Computer Science, Stanford University
Reputation systems have come to play an important role in the social
and economic success of the Internet. However, they are unpredictable;
in particular, these systems are susceptible to Òpresentation biasÓ
and malicious spam, which distort the semantics of the reputation
under consideration. Therefore, reputation systems in use today can
give no guarantees about the reputations assigned. The thesis of this
dissertation is that the underlying economics of reputation systems
can be used to meaningfully ground the notion of reputation; further,
with the help of appropriate mechanisms, reputation systems can be
made robust to presentation bias and malicious spam.
We make a case for identifying the reputation or quality of an entity
with the potential revenue (or utility) the entity generates (or may
generate) for the system. The generic incentive structure, presented
in this dissertation, provides incentives to users for providing
useful feedback. Any inaccuracy in the system, presents an arbitrage
opportunity for the users. Since this arbitrage opportunity is
independent of the source of the inaccuracy, benign or malicious, we
argue that the system is robust to malicious spam as well.
In the setting of ranking systems, we use an idealized model (the
Inspect-Utilize model) to analyze various properties of our
system. Further, (under mild assumptions) our ranking algorithm, in
conjunction with the incentive structure, ensures that at any given
instance, the system gives the highest reward to the feedback which
causes the greatest reduction in the Kullback-Leibler divergence
between the feedback scores and the qualities of the entities. In
other words, it is most profitable for users to leave feedback which
provides the most additional information relative to the current state
of the system.
We generalize these mechanisms to recommender systems, to work
alongside collaborative filtering techniques. The key feature here is
the asymmetric treatment of feedback, which allows the users to
correct errors even in the presence of inaccuracies in the model,
generated using collaborative filtering techniques. We also consider
reputation systems used by retail/auction websites like eBay and
Amazon.com. Ballot stuffing is the phenomenon of sellers undertaking
fake transactions for the sake of fraudulent positive feedbacks. We
observe the importance of transaction costs in making these systems
robust to ballot stuffing.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 22 February 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"ETL Scenarios: From Formal Specification to Optimization"
Timos Sellis
National Technical University of Athens
http://www.dblab.ntua.gr/~timos/
In this talk we will present our work on a framework towards the
modeling of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes and the
optimization of ETL workflows. The goal of this research was to
facilitate, manage and optimize the design and implementation of the
ETL processes both during the initial design and deployment stage and
during the continuous evolution of a data warehouse.
In particular we will present our results which include:
The provision of a novel conceptual model for the tracing of
inter-attribute relationships and the respective ETL transformations
in the early stages of a data warehouse project along with a
methodology for its construction.
The provision of a novel logical model for the representation of ETL
processes with two main characteristics: genericity and customization.
The presentation of a methodology for the semi-automatic transition
from the conceptual to the logical model for ETL processes.
An attempt to use ontology-based mechanisms to semi-automatically
capture the semantics and the relationships among the various sources.
The tuning of an ETL workflow through several algorithms for the
optimization of the execution order of the activities.
Finally, we will discuss some issues on future work in the area that
we consider important and a step towards the incorporation of the
above research results to other areas as well.
About the Speaker: Prof. Timos Sellis received his diploma degree in
Electrical Engineering in 1982 from the National Technical University
of Athens (NTUA), Greece. In 1983 he received the M.Sc. degree from
Harvard University and in 1986 the Ph.D. degree from the University
of California at Berkeley, where he was a member of the INGRES group,
both in Computer Science. In 1986, he joined the Department of
Computer Science of the University of Maryland, College Park as an
Assistant Professor, and became an Associate Professor in 1992.
Between 1992 and 1996 he was an Associate Professor at the Computer
Science Division of NTUA, where he is currently a Full Professor.
Prof. Sellis is also the Director of the newly established Institute
for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS) of the "Athena -
Research and Innovation Center in Information, Communication and
Knowledge Technologies".
His research interests include data streams, peer-to-peer database
systems, data warehouses, the integration of Web and databases, and
spatio-temporal database systems. He has published over 140 articles
in refereed journals and international conferences in the above areas
and has been invited speaker in major international events; he has
also participated and co-ordinated several national and European
research projects.
Prof. Sellis is a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Young
Investigator (PYI) award given by the President of USA to the most
talented new researchers (1990), and of the VLDB 1997 10 Year Paper
Award for his work on spatial databases. He was the president of the
National Council for Research and Technology of Greece (2001-2003), a
member of the VLDB Endowment (1996-2000) and a member of the ACM
SIGMOD Advisory Board (2001-2005).
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 February 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Cooperative wireless networking: from theory to practice"
Elza Erkip
Polytechnic University
Wireless will be the dominant mode of internet access for end users in
near future. However, bandwidth limitations of the wireless channel,
interference from multiple users operating in the same band and
channel variations due to fading become bottlenecks for typical
multimedia applications that require high bandwidth and an error
resilient communication medium. Cooperative networking, by enabling
wireless terminals to assist each other in transmitting information to
their desired destinations, provides a promising technology for
improving the performance of wireless networks.
In this talk we provide an overview or cooperative wireless
networking, and summarize some of our recent research activities that
span multiple layers of the protocol stack. We describe the tradeoff
between reliability and rate (also known as the diversity-multiplexing
tradeoff) in cooperative systems. We suggest cooperative techniques
that improve the reconstructed signal quality in sensor and multimedia
applications. By incorporating the notion of user cooperation at the
medium access control (MAC) layer, we show how the benefits can be
realized in a large network. We also outline our current efforts in
building a large scale experimental cooperative networking testbed.
About the Speaker: Elza Erkip received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in
Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and the B.S. degree
in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical
University, Turkey. She joined Polytechnic University in Spring 2000,
where she is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering. She is currently on sabbatical leave at Princeton
University.
Dr. Erkip received the NSF CAREER award in 2001, the Communications
Society Rice Paper Award in 2004 and the ICC Communication Theory
Symposium Best Paper Award in 2007. She co-authored a paper that won
the ISIT Student Paper Award in 2007. She is an Associate Editor of
IEEE Transactions on Communications, a Publications Editor of IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory and a Guest Editor of IEEE Signal
Processing Magazine.
____________
END MATERIAL
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