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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 20 February 2008, vol. 23:23
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
20 FEBRUARY 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 22
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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 20 FEBRUARY 2008 TO 29 FEBRUARY 2008
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
"Computing in Transition"
Nick Tredennick
Gilder Publishing
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
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
5:30pm Stanford Psychology of Language Tea (SPLaT!) [21-Feb-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Visual processing of particle verbs in Dutch:
An experimental approach"
Victor Kuperman
MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/newsletter/
7:00pm AAAI Event [21-Feb-08]
Sheraton Hotel Palo Alto
"Autonomous Robots Coming of Age: Directions and Futures"
Sebastian Thrum
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
12:30pm 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/
Abstract below
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
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [22-Feb-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"The Structure of Location Based Information"
Bernt Wahl
"Reflections on Sharing Authority, Storytelling, and Annotation"
Clifford Lynch
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
Abstracts below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [22-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Brice Kuhl
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [22-Feb-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Selective pressures in sound change and phonological typology"
Alan Yu
University of Chicago
http://home.uchicago.edu/~aclyu/
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
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
MONDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2008
11:00am Media X Seminar: Workgroup Protocols and Algorithms [25-Feb-08]
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160)
"Creativity 2.0: Contrasts Between Multimedia and Language"
Neerja Raman
http://fromgoodtogold.blogspot.com
http://mediax.stanford.edu/events_calendar/calendar.html
12 noon Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium [25-Feb-08]
Terman 217
Title to be announced
Marc Smith
Community Technologies Group, Microsoft Research
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
12:45pm CIS/SLATA [25-Feb-08]
Law School 280B
"Digital Democracy -- a Look Back, a Look Ahead"
Kim Alexander
California Voter Foundation
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [25-Feb-08]
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
"Variation in the English Comparative
Matthew Adams
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
TUESDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 2008
2:30pm NLP Reading Group [26-Feb-08]
Gates
"Wong and Mooney. Learning Synchronous Grammars for Semantic
Parsing with Lambda Calculus. ACL 2007"
Bill MacCartney
http://nlp.stanford.edu/read/
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [26-Feb-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Subjective Mapping: Learning how to build a map without any
models of a robot's sensors or motion"
Michael Bowling
University of Alberta
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
4:15pm ENGR110/210: Perspectives in Assistive Technology [26-Feb-08]
Meyer Library 124
"Designing Beyond the Norm to Meet the Needs of All People"
Peter W. Axelson
Beneficial Designs, Inc.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engr110/
WEDNESDAY, 27 FEBRUARY 2008
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [27-Feb-08]
Gates B01
To be announced
John Nickolls
NVIDIA
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [27-Feb-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Sally Osberg
President, Skoll Foundation Mixer
Debra Dunn
Former HP Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
THURSDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 2008
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [28-Feb-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Feng Zhao
Microsoft
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:00pm PARC Forum [28-Feb-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Katie Delahaye Paine
The Measurement Standard
http://www.measuresofsuccess.com/About+Us/Who+we+are/default.aspx
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [28-Feb-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"The multiple systems hypothesis of decision-making:
a neuroscientific perspective"
Sam McClure
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~smcclure
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [28-Feb-08]
Packard 101
"Coding vs. queuing over multi-hop networks"
Sanjay Shakkottai
University of Texas at Austin
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 29 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon Ethics@Noon [29-Feb-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
Title to be announced
Josh Cohen
Political Science/Philosophy/Law
http://politicalscience.stanford.edu/faculty/cohen.html
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [29-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization"
Elaine Chew and Alexandre François
USC and Radcliffe Institute
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [29-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Vivienne Ming
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [29-Feb-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Michael Bowling
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [29-Feb-08]
Gates B03
"Maintaining Sample Synopsis of Evolving Datasets"
Wolfgang Lehner
Technische Universitat Dresden
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of all types except 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.
____________
UPCOMING
The sixth annual Media X meeting will be on 3-4 March 2008. See
http://mediax.stanford.edu/ for more information.
The ninth annual Semantics Fest will be on 14 March 2008. See
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/eventschedule.html
____________
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.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 20 February 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Computing in Transition"
Nick Tredennick
Gilder Publishing
Since shortly after its introduction, the microprocessor has dominated
the design of electronic systems. The success of the microprocessor,
sustained by the march of Moores law, stalled innovation in logic
design for more than thirty years because programming became a
substitute for hardware design. This was possible because the design
goal of the personal computer and other microprocessor-based systems,
representing the majority of the semiconductor market, was
cost-performance. The advent of the value PC and the burgeoning of
mobile devices have conspired to change the design goal to
cost-performance per watt. Traditional microprocessor-based design
cannot meet the challenge of the new design goal, so computing is in
transition. A host of multiprocessor configurations and a host of
reconfigurable systems vie for control of the next generation of
computing applications. Computing is in transition, but the outcome is
currently unpredictable.
About the Speaker: Nick Tredennick has the usual degrees from typical
universities and has held an uninspiring assortment of run-of-the-mill
jobs. For example, he has been a fry cook, Air Force pilot, janitor,
university professor, dishwasher, design engineer, truck driver, naval
officer, oil field worker, and corporate executive. He even helped
start a few companies, but was soon forced out.
However, despite an appalling lack of knowledge about programmable
logic and electronics in general, he was once chief scientist at
Altera, a leading maker of programmable logic devices. Through what
could only have been a monumental bureaucratic foul-up, he was also
once a Research Staff Member at IBM's prestigious Watson Research
Center. Tredennick has put considerable effort into finding something
he could do well. No luck so far.
He started his career as a working engineer (nerd), but moved to
management when he found watching people work was easier than
working. He moved to a university when he found talking about work was
even easier than watching it. He has finally reached the pinnacle of
his career in a position where he doesn't even have to talk about
work. He is a technology analyst for Gilder Publishing.
____________
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.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 February 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Supporting Studio Culture in Interaction Design Research"
Daniel Fallman
Umea University
The concept of studio-based work is central to education as well as
practice in traditional design disciplines such as architecture and
industrial design. Typical studio culture brings together a variety of
forms of knowledge to contrast the increased specialization of many
other professional settings, promoting creative, collaborate,
multidisciplinary, and interactive activities. The design studio
itself is typically quite material; walls are covered with
photographs, images, diagrams, sketches, and PostIt-notes. Newspaper
scraps, models in various stages of completion, and other seemingly
unrelated objects render it slightly chaotic from an outside
perspective but a highly creative environment for those involved.
During the last three years, I have been involved in building up a new
Ph.D. education in industrial design at Umea Institute of Design,
Umea University, Sweden, with a strong focus on interaction design,
creativity, and innovation. In this seminar, I will make a case for
also conducting design research as a studio activity, and support this
argument with examples of our current projects.
In our experience, the coexistence between design and research
activities comes to pose a number of pertinent questions and
challenges to design research. Is there a difference between design
and research? Of whom is design research in support? Who guarantees
the results?
To approach these issues, we have developed a simple triangular model
that we find useful as a tool for thinking, both in practical
situations as well as when discussing more theoretical and
foundational questions in the area of studio-based design research.
About the Speaker: Daniel Fallman is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Informatics at Umea University, Sweden, and Research
Director at Umea Institute of Design, where he leads Umea Design
Research group, a multidisciplinary design research studio seeking
confluence between industrial design, interaction design, and HCI.
Fallman's own research is focused on developing interaction design
research while keeping a strong design focus. Currently, he works with
developing a series of rapid sketching techniques for interaction
designers. His previous work has addressed the design, use, and
experience of mobile information technology through applying novel
interaction styles and service models more suitable in a mobile use
context. In this work, Fallman has a theoretical interest in the
concept of embodiment from phenomenological discourse.
____________
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 'presentation bias'
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.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 February 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
"The Structure of Location Based Information"
Bernt Wahl
The talk will outline different ways location data can be expressed
using a dynamic location based knowledge repository. Here I will talk
about ideas in which location data can be held and called upon for
different needs. I also hope to show the demographic work that has
been done in terms of local mapping.
"Reflections on Sharing Authority, Storytelling, and Annotation"
Clifford Lynch
I recently had the opportunity to attend part of a conference titled
"Sharing Authority", which dealt with topics such as public history
and oral history. After some comments on this conference, I'll relate
these issues to questions that I've been grappling with about
storytelling, annotation of public databases of historical resources,
and collective biography, some of which I summarized last semester.
Group discussion about research opportunities and prior art here would
be particularly welcome.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 22 February 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Selective pressures in sound change and phonological typology"
Alan Yu
University of Chicago
http://home.uchicago.edu/~aclyu/
Why are some sound patterns more prevalent than others? As common
cross-language sound patterns are found to have physical phonetic
origins, the rare occurrence of certain sound patterns has often been
attributed to the low probability of the corresponding phonetic
effects being phonologized through sound change (e.g., Ohala, 1993,
Blevins, 2004). Yet, given the wealth of articulatory and acoustic
evidence of systematic variation in speech, it remains a puzzle that
not all variations are phonologized into sound patterns or have
analogs in the diachronic domain (cf. Moreton, In press). As there
would be no change at all unless there were some structural or social
advantage, however small, in the new form, a theory of change and its
directionality must elucidate common, perhaps universal, selective
advantages that characterize the new variant (Kiparsky 1995).
In this talk, I identify four selective pressures (cognitive,
structural, social, and ecological) that affect the directionality of
variation and change. I argue for the centrality of speaker/listener's
evaluative strategies in modulating all non-ecological pressures.
Experimental results from three case studies will be presented in
support of this conclusion. Experiment 1 tests Cantonese speakers'
judgment of the wellformedness of syllables that are absent either
systematically or accidentally in Cantonese. Speakers' evaluation of
such unattested syllables is found to be gradient, contrary to the
predictions of classical theory of phonotactics and grammaticality;
speakers rely mainly on the lexical statistics of the language in
making their goodness judgments. Experiment 2 examines the role of
phonetic precursor robustness in explaining an apparent case of
differential phonologization (i.e. vowel-height-to-vowel-height
dependencies are more common than vowel height-consonantal voicing
dependencies; Moreton In press). Production results suggest that this
instance of typological asymmetry is best explained by differential
phonetic precursor robustness. That learners have more difficulties
with learning height-voicing dependencies than with height-height
dependencies (Moreton In press) can be explained by their lack of
experience in attending to phonetic dependencies between vowel height
and voicing. Experiment 3 tests the role perceptual compensation
plays in explaining the underphonologization of dependencies between
tone height and length in comparison to the overphonologization of
dependencies between contour tone and length. Experimental results
show that, while English speakers perceptually compensate for the
articulatory effect of pitch height on syllable duration, the effect
of pitch movement on duration is left unaccommodated. Speakers'
differential compensatory responses to phonetic variation might
explain the ubiquity of differential phonologization. Taken together,
the results of these experiments suggest that the way speakers deal
with linguistic inputs is heavily affected by the evaluative
mechanisms that "filter" the input. Thus in order to understand what
types of variation and change are possible, it is not enough to
identify the seed of variation, as it is traditionally done. Intrinsic
variation in speech production and perception provides only the
necessary but not the sufficient condition for change. Only through
the identification of the evaluative mechanisms that deal with these
new variants can the explanation of phonologization be complete.
____________
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.
____________
CIS/SLATA
on Monday, 25 February 2008, 12:45pm
Law School 280B
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
"Digital Democracy -- a Look Back, a Look Ahead"
Kim Alexander
California Voter Foundation
There is no question that computers, the Internet and technology have
had a significant impact on the political process. Technological
advancements have brought many changes, some of which have enhanced
democracy and public participation, and others that have negatively
impacted the public's interest.
For the past fifteen years, Kim Alexander has been on the front lines
of the digital democracy revolution. Through the California Voter
Foundation, a nonprofit she founded, Alexander works at the forefront
of numerous public policy issues where democracy and technology
intersect.
Her talk at Stanford will review several of these issues, such as the
movement toward Internet access to campaign finance data, the
escalation of computer technology in the voting process, and the
increasing use of voters' personal data by political campaigns.
About the Speaker: Kim Alexander is president and founder of the
California Voter Foundation (CVF), a nonprofit, nonpartisan
organization dedicated to advancing the responsible use of technology
in the democratic process. Through her work with CVF, Alexander has
engaged in a variety of issues where democracy and technology
intersect, working to ensure that democracy is enhanced, rather than
harmed through technological changes.
Under Alexander's leadership, CVF has pioneered and promoted good
technology and democracy practices and programs that benefit
California voters while also serving as an example for other
states. The effectiveness of this strategy has been repeatedly
demonstrated throughout the eleven years Alexander has led the
organization, with other states following California's lead in online
voter education, Internet disclosure of money in politics and voting
technology reform.
Alexander is the author of several articles and publications,
including CVF's California Voter Participation Survey report, a
comprehensive analysis of California voter participation barriers and
incentives, and Voter Privacy in the Digital Age, a nationwide,
50-state assessment of voter registration data gathering and
dissemination practices.
Kim Alexander is a 1988 graduate of the University of California,
Santa Barbara, with degrees in political science and philosophy. She
is a fifth-generation Californian, was raised in Culver City, and
resides in Sacramento.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 28 February 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"The multiple systems hypothesis of decision-making:
a neuroscientific perspective"
Sam McClure
Psychology, Stanford
Several lines of research in psychology have led to the conclusion
that human perception and decision-making depend on separate
processes. I will present fMRI data supporting this hypothesis in the
context of reward-based decision-making. I will discuss the
consequences of these findings in terms of furthering brain-based
models of human decision making.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 29 February 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization"
Elaine Chew and Alexandre François
USC and Radcliffe Institute
This talk introduces the project of our research cluster at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Our goal is to make
discerning listening of music accessible by offering interactive
visualizations of musical structures, captured and analyzed from music
streams in real-time. There are two components to the project: the
mathematical model and algorithms for tonal analysis, and the
underlying software architecture for enabling the real-time
interaction.
Our tonal analysis and visualization system, MuSA.RT, is based on
Chew's Spiral Array model, a geometric model with algorithms to
identify and track evolving tonal contexts. The system displays the
pitches played, and the closest triad and key, as the music piece
unfolds in a performance. The pitch spelling, chord, and key, are
computed by a nearest neighbor search in the spiral array, using two
centers of effect (CEs), which summarize the current short-term and
long-term contexts. The three-dimensional model dances to the rhythm
of the music, spinning smoothly so that the current triad forms the
background for the CE trails.
A challenge of building a system like MuSA.RT is that a human
performer can never play a piece the same way twice. Apart from
natural perturbations in timing from one performance to the next,
expert performers can deliberately use expressive devices, such as
pedaling or tempo variations, to highlight different structures so as
to produce different interpretations of the same piece. A system for
identifying and tracking evolving tonal structures must be robust to,
yet flexible enough to capture, such performance variations.
MuSA.RT was designed using François' Software Architecture for
Immersipresence (SAI), a general formalism for the design, analysis
and implementation of complex software systems. Based on a concurrent
asynchronous processing model, SAI defines primitives and organizing
principles that bridge the disconnect between mathematical models and
natural interaction. From its underlying principles to its graphical
notation and derived tools, SAI embraces a human-centered approach to
the design of computing artifacts.
About the Speaker: Elaine Chew is an Associate Professor of Industrial
and Systems Engineering and of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of
Engineering. She was the first honoree of the Viterbi Early Career
Chair. She earned PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research from MIT,
and a BAS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences and Music
Performance from Stanford University. Professor Chew also holds
diplomas and degrees in piano performance from the Trinity College,
London, and Stanford University.
Her research interests center on the computational modeling of music
and its performance. She founded and heads the Music Computation and
Cognition Laboratory at USC, where she conducts and directs research
on music and computing. She received the US National Science
Foundation Career Award and Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers for her research and education activities at
the intersection of music and engineering.
Professor Chew is on the founding editorial boards of the Journal of
Mathematics and Music, the Journal of Music and Meaning, and ACM
Computers in Entertainment. She has served on numerous program
committees for conferences in music and computing; this year, she is
Program Co-Chair for the International Conference on Music Information
Retrieval.
Professor Chew is on sabbatical in 2007-2008, during which she is the
Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study. At Radcliffe, she and her collaborator
Alexandre François form a research cluster on Analytical Listening
through Interactive Visualization.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 29 February 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"Maintaining Sample Synopsis of Evolving Datasets"
Wolfgang Lehner
Technische Universitat Dresden
Random sampling is an appealing approach to build synopses of large
data sets because random samples can be used for a broad spectrum of
analytical tasks. Current research mainly considers the database
static; in this setting, a sample created once remains valid for its
entire lifetime. In many applications, however, such a static view is
infeasible because it does not take into account the dynamic nature of
the underlying data. In this talk, I will briefly summarize recent
research on the problem of maintaining a random sample of an evolving
dataset. As an example for the challenges of sample maintenance and
the techniques required to solve them, I will discuss the problem of
maintaining a random sample from a sliding window a data stream
defined over a recent time interval. In this setting, the main
challenge is to guarantee an upper bound on the space consumption of
the sample while using the allotted space efficiently at the same
time. The difficulty arises from the fact that the number of items in
the window is unknown in advance and may vary significantly over time,
so that the sampling fraction has to be adjusted dynamically. Within
the talk, I will outline a novel sampling scheme called bounded
priority sampling (BPS), which requires only bounded space and quickly
adapts to changing data
____________
END MATERIAL
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