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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 26 March 2008, vol. 23:27
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
26 MARCH 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 27
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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 26 MARCH 2008 TO 4 APRIL 2008
THURSDAY, 27 MARCH 2008
4:00pm PARC Forum [27-Mar-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"FREE! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"
Chris Anderson
Wired magazine
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 29 MARCH 2008
all day Computational Learning Symposium [29-Mar-08]
Cordura Hall, CSLI
"Symposium on Computational Approaches to Creativity In Science"
If you would like to attend, please send email to:
scacs-08 (at) csli.stanford.edu
http://cll.stanford.edu/symposia/creativity
Abstract and schedule below
SUNDAY, 30 MARCH 2008
all day Computational Learning Symposium [30-Mar-08]
Cordura Hall, CSLI
"Symposium on Computational Approaches to Creativity In Science"
If you would like to attend, please send email to:
scacs-08 (at) csli.stanford.edu
http://cll.stanford.edu/symposia/creativity
Abstract and schedule below
MONDAY, 31 MARCH 2008
10:00am PPRS Lab Meeting [31-Mar-08]
G75 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? Or Even Knows What's Happening?"
Bill Banks
Abstract below
12:45pm CIS/SLATA [31-Mar-08]
Law School 280B
Mark Forman
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
3:00pm Joint WTO-SCANCOR Seminar [31-Mar-08]
"`Brown on Brown': The Institutional Conditioning
of Racial Conflict in an Urban High School"
Calvin Morrill, in collaboration with Michael Musheno
UC Irvine
http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4648
http://wapurl.co.uk/?37ZP5VY
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Working Group in Neuroscience and Philosophy [31-Mar-08]
3112 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
To be announced
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.html
WEDNESDAY, 2 APRIL 2008
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [2-Apr-08]
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"On being the right size: Scaling and psychological laws"
Nick Chater
University College London
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/people/profiles/chater_nick.htm
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 3 APRIL 2008
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [3-Apr-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Learning to Adapt in Dialogue Systems: Data-driven
Models for Personality Recognition and Generation"
Francois Mairesse
University of Cambridge
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/detail.php?id=242
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [3-Apr-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
Title to be announced
Pamela Hinds
Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
FRIDAY, 4 APRIL 2008
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [4-Apr-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Organizing Information Infrastructure for Academia: Lessons
from the Community's Past and Questions about Our Future"
Roger Schonfeld
Ithaka
http://www.ithaka.org/research
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [4-Apr-08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Thinking and Talking About the Self"
John Perry
Stanford
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O, A, B and AB-. 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.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 27 March 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
(directions at <http://www.parc.com/directions>)
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"FREE! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"
Chris Anderson
Wired magazine
The Web has become the land of the free. The idea that you can make
money by giving something away is no longer radical -- free has
emerged as a full-fledged economy. Not only is technology giving
companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their
markets, but anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the
effect of falling costs. In this Forum, Anderson will discuss the
rise of "freeconomics" and technologies driving the spread of free
business models across the economy. Between new ways companies have
found to subsidize products and the falling cost of doing business in
this digital age, the opportunities to adopt a free business model of
some sort have never been greater.
About the Speaker: Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Wired
magazine, a position he took in 2001. Since then he has led the
magazine to six National Magazine Award nominations, winning the
prestigious top prize for General Excellence in 2007 and in 2005, a
year in which he was also named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age
magazine. He is the author of New York Times bestselling book The
Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, which
was published in 2006, and runs a blog on the subject at
<http://thelongtail.com/>. In 2007, the book won a prestigious Loeb
Award as the best business book of the year and Anderson was named one
of the "Time 100" -- the newsmagazine's list of the 100 most
influential men and women in the world.
Previously, Anderson was at The Economist, where he served as
U.S. Business Editor, Asia Business Editor (based in Hong Kong), and
Technology Editor. He also started The Economist's Internet coverage
in 1994 and directed its initial web strategy. Anderson's media
career began at the science journals Nature and Science, where he
served in several editorial capacities. Prior to that he worked as a
researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory's meson physics facility
and served as research assistant to the Chief Scientist of the
Department of Transportation. Anderson holds a Bachelor of Science
degree in Physics from George Washington University and studied
Quantum Mechanics and Science Journalism at the University of
California at Berkeley.
____________
COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING SYMPOSIUM
"Symposium on Computational Approaches to Creativity in Science"
Cordura Hall
Center for the Study of Language and Information
Stanford University, March 29-30, 2008
Creativity manifests in several ways during scientific inquiry.
Investigators often need to carry forward the consequences of
established beliefs, to synthesize theory with measurements, to
explain observed phenomena, and to involve themselves in other
knowledge-driven activities. The computational metaphor provides
powerful tools both for understanding the creative process and for
supporting the environment in which it unfolds. This symposium brings
together philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists, and others
to address questions such as
What role does creativity play in different facets of the
scientific enterprise, and how can computational tools help in
each context?
When does background knowledge aid creativity in science and
when does it interfere with the discovery of creative solutions?
When do interactions among scientists increase creativity and
how can computational aids for interaction support this process?
The speakers will report and discuss their findings on scientific
creativity and the potential for computational creativity-support
tools. For more information about the symposium schedule and
presentations, see
http://cll.stanford.edu/symposia/creativity
The symposium will take place on Saturday, March 29, and Sunday,
March 30, just after the AAAI Spring Symposia, at Stanford
University's Center for the Study and Language and Information.
Attendance will be by invitation only, but there will be no
registration fee. Fifteen invited speakers will present their
research over two days and we will have space for a number of
non-presenting attendees. If you would like to attend, please
send email to
scacs-08 (at) csli.stanford.edu
with a paragraph describing your interest in scientific creativity
and your past work in relevant areas (e.g., reasoning, learning,
discovery) from the perspective of any discipline.
Meeting Schedule (tentative)
Saturday, March 29, 2008
8:15am Continental Breakfast
8:45am Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:00am Catherine Blake / Uncovering the Creative Processes in
Chemistry: Implications for Discovery System Design
9:45am Greg Trafton / Imagination and Scientific Visualizations
10:30am Morning Break
11:00am Neil Smalheiser / Re-Conceptualizing Literature-Based
Discovery
11:45am Ljupco Todorovski / Mathematical Modeling and Computational
Creativity
12:30pm Lunch (Provided)
2:00pm Michael E. Gorman / A Framework for Studying and
Facilitating Collaboration in Science and Technology
2:45pm Derek Sleeman / Supporting Creativity in Science:
Cooperative Knowledge Acquisition and Knowledge Refinement
Systems
3:30pm Afternoon Break
4:00pm Ermelinda DeLaVina / A Computer Program for Mathematical
Discovery
4:45pm Simon Colton / Combining Reasoning Systems for
Mathematical Discovery
5:30pm Open Discussion
6:00pm Buffet Dinner (Provided)
Sunday, March 30, 2008
8:30am Continental Breakfast
9:00am Robert Weisberg / Modeling Scientific Creativity: An
Historical Case Study of Watson and Crick's Creation of
the Double Helix
9:45am Christian Schunn / Analogies Between Science and Design:
What Models of Science Can Learn from Models of Design
10:30am Morning Break
11:00am Will Bridewell / Constraints: What Are They? Where Can
We Get Them? And How Can We Use Them?
11:45am Oliver Ray / Integrating Explanation-based and
Generalisation-based Reasoning for Scientific Discovery
12:30pm Lunch (Provided)
2:00pm Paul Thagard / Discovery and Neural Computation
2:45pm Ashok K. Goel / Computational Imagination and Scientific
Creativity
3:30pm Commentary and Discussion
4:00pm Symposium Ends
____________
PPRS LAB MEETING
on Monday, 31 March 2008, 10:00am
G75 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? Or Even Knows What's Happening?"
Bill Banks
The growing body of neurophysiological research on the question of
free will, or the lack thereof, originated with the finding of Libet,
et al. that the reported time of decision to make a simple action
comes at least 300 ms after the beginning of the readiness potential.
The readiness potential is a component of the EEG that precedes an
action by 1000 ms or more. Conscious will thus seems a latecomer in
the process of choice, not the instigator. We tested whether the
report of decision time marks an event in the brain, as is assumed, or
is rather a post-response inference as to when the decision to act
must have taken place. In Experiment 1 we used a delayed auditory
beep as feedback to make the act appear to happen later than it did.
The reported time of action moved forward in time proportionally to
the delay in feedback, in accord with the hypothesis that the judgment
of decision time is an intuitive inference of when the decision was
made. In a second experiment we had participants view a delayed video
image of their hands pressing the response button for the task. The
video delay was 120 ms. The video delay shifted the judged time of
decision by 40 ms. The fact that the shift in the inferred moment of
decision was less than the delay suggests that tactile cues as well as
visual ones contributed to the perception of when the response took
place. In the third experiment the participants watched a video of
button-pressing with the Libet clock in view behind the hand. The
participants were to report the clock time at which they thought the
person doing the pressing decided to press the button. The time
estimated to be the point of conscious decision was 137 ms before the
press, very close to the estimate for participants' report of their
own decision to press the button, whether they had previously served
in the experiment or were naive to it. The hypothetical time of
conscious decision, if it exists, must come before the response and
therefore could not be changed by any cue that makes the response seem
even later. The clear conclusion from the post-response effects on
judged decision time is that the subjective time of decision is
retrospectively inferred from the perceived time of response. This
finding strikes us as fundamentally changing the grounds of debate
about conscious will. For proponents of free will it could be cited
as a welcome disconfirmation of the finding that an unconscious brain
process determines the action before conscious choice. However, for
the same proponents it undermines the role of conscious choice in
action. For any theory of volition it shows that the conscious
representation of action does not reflect critical components of the
associated brain activity.
____________
CIS/SLATA
on Monday, 31 March 2008, 12:45pm - 1:45pm
Law School 280B
559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Mark Forman
Mark Forman is an accomplished Executive with more than 24 years of
professional work experience, including a Presidential appointment to
be the first U.S. Administrator for E-Government & Information
Technology. As the federal government's first Chief Information
Officer, he oversaw more than $58 billion in annual IT spending and
led the President's E-Government Initiative, one of the five Bush
management reforms to create a more productive, citizen-centric
government, & is widely credited with reforming the federal
government's use of IT. In addition, he led the development &
implementation of policies for information security, paperwork
elimination, IT sourcing & privacy. His definition & deployment of a
rigorous cybersecurity improvement process raised IT security from
less than 20% to about 80% in two years.
Mr. Forman has testified frequently before the U.S. Congress &
California State Senate on IT & management reform issues. He has
participated in on-line Q&A sessions hosted by the Whitehouse &
Washington Post, & written numerous papers & reports on government
management, e-business, e-government & defense economics issues.
Mr. Forman is currently the Practice Leader of the Federal Information
Technology Advisory service line, which includes IT strategy &
governance, capital planning & investment control (CPIC), information
security, privacy, architecture, IT sourcing & IT program performance.
In addition, Mr. Forman leads the Federal Civilian Advisory Services
organization, where he is responsible for KPMG's Advisory Services
work for Civilian agencies of the Fed. Government. Mr. Forman has
also been a Vice Pres. of e-business in Unisys Global Industries, a
Principal in IBM Global Services, the creator & leader of IBM's
Americas Public Sector e-business Consulting Services, the Senior
Professional Staff Member on the Majority Staff of the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee, & a manager with Defense Group Inc. &
The Analytic Sciences Corp. Topic Description:
The federal government is an information intensive enterprise, and
typically adopts new information technologies. As technology has
evolved from mainframes to client-server, internet, service oriented
architectures, and web 2.0, government has tried to take advantage of
advances. There has been an evolution of IT acquisition laws,
governance models, and information policies over the last 20 years.
The seminar will include a discussion of issues and trends that the
federal government has addressed, with a specific focus on the
governance structure and policies developed during Mr. Forman's
tenure. The seminar will also include a discussion of how the
governance framework addresses emerging technologies and issues.
____________
JOINT WTO-SCANCOR SEMINAR
on Monday, 31 March 2008, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
527 CERAS Building
485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
"`Brown on Brown': The Institutional Conditioning
of Racial Conflict in an Urban High School"
Calvin Morrill
UC Irvine
http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4648
http://wapurl.co.uk/?37ZP5VY
in collaboration with Michael Musheno
San Francisco State, UC Berkeley
We analyze an incident of collective youth violence that occurred in
an urban multi-ethnic high school and how it was conditioned by a
dramatic institutional transformation of the school modeled in the
vein of the "safe schools" movement of the late 20th and early 21st
century in the U.S. The incident -- which some students at the school
dubbed a "brown on brown" fight because it involved four U.S.-born
Chicanos and four Mexican-born youth -- resulted in multiple injuries
to the youths involved and mobilized security guards and teachers to
prevent further escalation. At the time of the incident, the school
was in the midst of institutional change that radically altered its
regulatory and physical architectures with the intent to improve
security and safety for its students, teachers and staff. Contrary
to these intentions, the incident, what we call an "institutional
accident" reveals how the school's transformation unsettled youth
culture in practice, including the ways that youth manage peer
conflict on their own terms, and reified and racialized social
boundaries among youth. We analyze the incident with field data
drawn from our multi-year project on youth conflict. Our paper has
implications for research on and policy relevance to youth culture
and conflict in schools, the institutional construction of racial
boundaries in schools, and the criminalization of schools.
About the Speaker: Calvin Morrill joined UCI Sociology in 2001
after a previous appointment at the University of Arizona where
he was Professor of Sociology, Psychology, Law, and Communication.
Dr. Morrill's research focuses on broad questions about the
relationships between social conflict, order, and change in
organizational and urban contexts. He is particularly interested in
decision making and collective action that unfolds behind the scenes
in private, public, and nonprofit bureaucracies. He primarily uses
qualitative fieldwork (ethnography) in his research, augmented by
social network analysis and experimental methods. He teaches courses
in organization theory, qualitative field methods, organizational
power and politics, law and society, social theory, youth culture
and justice, and introduction to sociology. His forthcoming books
include: Youth Conflict: Culture and Control in a Multiethnic High
School (co-authored with Michael Musheno; University of Chicago Press)
and Law and Policy in Society: Psychological and Sociological
Perspectives (co-authored with Bruce Sales and Peter English;
American Psychological Association Press).
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 4:00pm
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"On being the right size: Scaling and psychological laws"
Nick Chater
University College London
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/people/profiles/chater_nick.htm
A celebrated article by J. B. S. Haldane observed that scale is
important for many biological structures: the legs of a 10 foot spider
would collapse under its weight. Yet there are many biological
phenomena where scale does not seem to matter. Indeed, allometrics
and comparative anatomy have revealed many remarkable "scaling laws,"
akin to those ubiquitous in physics. This talk asks: what about
psychology? I report joint work with Gordon Brown, indicating that
(a) a good proportion of "psychological laws" follow immediately from
the assumption that scale does not matter; (b) interesting (and
sometimes familiar) models of simple behaviors can be generated purely
by assuming that scale is not important; (c) that, following Haldane's
line in biology, there should be particular theoretical interest in
cases where data and models indicate that scale does matter, as this
may reveal limits of and transitions between, underlying mechanisms.
About the Speaker: Nick Chater's research focusses on looking for
fundamental principles of cognition, which might apply across several
cognitive domains. He is particularly interested in problems of
uncertain inference, that arise in learning, reasoning, and
perception; and in models of judgement and decision making, based with
on cognitive principles. He also work on real-world applications of
the cognitive and decision sciences.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 3 April 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Learning to Adapt in Dialogue Systems: Data-driven
Models for Personality Recognition and Generation"
Francois Mairesse
University of Cambridge
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/detail.php?id=242
Most dialogue systems do not take linguistic variation into account
in both the understanding and generation phases, i.e. the user's
linguistic style is typically ignored, and the style conveyed by the
system is chosen once for all interactions at development time. We
believe that modelling linguistic variation can greatly improve the
interaction in dialogue systems, such as in intelligent tutoring
systems, video games, or information retrieval systems, which all
require specific linguistic styles. Previous work has shown that
linguistic style affects many aspects of users' perceptions, even when
the dialogue is task-oriented. Moreover, users attribute a consistent
personality to machines, even when exposed to a limited set of cues,
thus dialogue systems manifest personality whether designed into the
system or not.
Over the past few years, psychologists have identified the main
dimensions of individual differences in human behaviour: the Big Five
personality traits. We hypothesise that the Big Five provide a useful
computational framework for modelling important aspects of linguistic
variation. We explore the possibility of recognising the user's
personality using data-driven models trained on essays and
conversational data. We then test whether it is possible to generate
language varying consistently along each personality dimension in the
information presentation domain. We present PERSONAGE: a language
generator modelling findings from psychological studies to project
various personality traits. We use PERSONAGE to compare various
generation paradigms: (1) rule-based generation, (2) overgenerate and
select and (3) generation using parameter estimation models---a novel
approach that learns to produce recognisable variation along
meaningful stylistic dimensions without the computational cost
incurred by overgeneration techniques. We also present the first
human evaluation of a data-driven generation method that projects
multiple stylistic dimensions simultaneously and on a continuous
scale.
About the Speaker: Francois Mairesse is a researcher at Cambridge
University's Machine Intelligence Lab. He just completed his PhD at
the University of Sheffield (supervised by Marilyn Walker) on
personality-based modeling of individual differences in dialogue
systems, both for recognizing the user's personality and controlling
the personality of the system.
Note for Visitors to SRI: Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in
order to sign in and be escorted to the conference room. SRI is
located at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park. Visitors may park in
the visitors lot in front of Building E, and should follow the
instructions by the lobby phone to be escorted to the meeting room.
Detailed directions to SRI, as well as maps, are available from the
Visiting AIC web page.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 4 April 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
"Organizing Information Infrastructure for Academia: Lessons
from the Community's Past and Questions about Our Future"
Roger Schonfeld
Ithaka
http://www.ithaka.org/research
Questions of organizational design weigh heavily on our academic
community, where incentives sometimes misalign with community-wide
goals, yielding externalities. These misaligned incentives pose
challenges in the digital transition that is all around us in academia
today. This fundamental concern links together several issues we have
been working on recently, for example, in the dissemination of
scholarship; in storage and preservation of library resources; in
access to undergraduate education; and elsewhere. I plan to focus
briefly on a specific episode to organize shared library
infrastructure in the 1950s and use this as a jumping-off point to
consider organizational issues that we face, not only in the library
realm but in other aspects of the digital transition for higher
education as well.
About the Speaker: Roger Schonfeld is Manager of Research at Ithaka.
____________
END MATERIAL
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