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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 2 April 2008, vol. 23:28
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
2 April 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 28
______________________________________________________________________
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 2 APRIL 2008 TO 11 APRIL 2008
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
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [2-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"CMOS Process Variations: A 'Critical Operation Point' hypothesis"
Janak H. Patel
HP Laboratories and Stanford University (visiting)
On Sabbatical Leave from University of Illinois
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
7:00pm IEEE Robotics and Automation [2-Apr-08]
Moffett Field, Mountain View
"A Hackers Dissection of the Pleo Robot"
Kyle Wiens
Founder of iFixit
http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ras
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
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [3-Apr-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Learning to Rank - From Pairwise Approach to Listwise Approach"
Hang Li
Microsoft Research Asia
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [3-Apr-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Going Global: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work"
Pamela Hinds
Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [3-Apr-08]
Packard 101
"Fundamental bounds for physical-layer power consumption:
'waterslide curves' and the price of certainty"
Anant Sahai
EE, UC Berkeley
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 4 APRIL 2008
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [4-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"Technologies for collaborative democracy"
Beth Noveck
New York Law School
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [4-Apr-08]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less"
Barry Schwartz
Swarthmore College
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
2:00pm GRAI Seminar [4-Apr-08]
Gates 104
"Local Deformation Models for Monocular 3D Shape Recovery"
Mathieu Salzmann
Computer Vision Laboratory of EPFL Switzerland
http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~salzmann/
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
Abstract below
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.amherstlecture.org/ (paper)
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [4-Apr-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"A Coupled Oscillator Planning Model of Speech Timing and
Syllable Structure"
Louis Goldstein
Haskins Laboratories, USC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [4-Apr-08]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Where do correlations between neuronal activity and sensory
decisions originate?"
Bruce Cumming
Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, Bethesda, MD
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
4:10pm UC Berkeley Logic and the Methodology of Science [4-Apr-08]
60 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"Tarski on Categoricity and Completeness:
An Unpublished Lecture from 1940"
Paolo Mancosu
Philosophy, UC Berkeley
http://logic.berkeley.edu/colloquium.html
SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2008
10:00am Keynote Address [5-Apr-08]
Kresge Auditorium
"Global Poverty & Human Rights"
Amartya Sen
Nobel Prize in Economics, 1998
http://auroraforum.stanford.edu/
MONDAY, 7 APRIL 2008
12 noon UC Berkeley Developmental Talks [7-Apr-08]
3105 Tolman (Berkeley)
"Contributions of Behavioral Variability to Adult Song
Plasticity"
Michael Brainard
UCSF
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [7-Apr-08]
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
Title to be announced
Diana Archangeli
University of Arizona and CASBS
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Department Colloquium [7-Apr-08]
182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
"Are Creoles 'Exceptional' Languages?"
Derek Bickerton
University of Hawaii
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 8 APRIL 2008
12 noon Linguistics Department Colloquium [8-Apr-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Bastard Tongues: Creole Languages, and their Linguistic Significance"
Derek Bickerton
University of Hawaii
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
2:30pm Math Talk [8-Apr-08]
Gates 498
"A Proof of the Church-Turing Thesis"
Nachum Dershowitz
Tel-Aviv University and Microsoft Research
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Tanner Lecture [8-Apr-08]
Toll Room, Alumni House (Berkeley)
"How We Do Things with Abstract Nouns: Bacon, Locke, Williams"
Annabelle Patterson
Yale University
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/tanner/
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [8-Apr-08]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Electronic Voting Systems: How to Build for Trust"
John Sebes
Open Source Digital Voting Foundation
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
5:15pm Syntax Workshop [8-Apr-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Title to be announced
Joseph Sabbagh
UC Berkeley
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
5:30pm Stanford IEEE [8-Apr-08]
Packard 101
"How to Successfully Build a Startup: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"
Ben Keighran
Founder of Bluepulse
http://www.stanford.edu/group/ieee
7:30pm BayCHI [8-Apr-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Putting the Fun in Functional:
Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software"
Amy Jo Kim
ShuffleBrain
"Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library"
Christian Crumlish
Yahoo!
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstracts below
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2008
4:00pm UC Berkeley Cognition, Brain, and Behavior [9-Apr-08]
5101 Tolman (Berkeley)
"What Did You Say? Contrasting Auditory and Visual Attention"
Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
Boston University
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/news/colloquia.html
4:10pm UC Berkeley Tanner Lecture [9-Apr-08]
Toll Room, Alumni House (Berkeley)
"American Keywords: Marriage, Success, and Democracy"
Annabelle Patterson
Yale University
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/tanner/
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [9-Apr-08]
Gates B01
To be announced
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [9-Apr-08]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Learning Outside the Box and the Simplex: Efficient
Projection Algorithms for Sparse Representations"
Yoram Singer
Senior Research Scientist, Google Inc.
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
Abstract below
6:00pm Berkeley HPLMS Talk [9-Apr-08]
234 Moses (Berkeley)
"Rereading Tarski on Logical Consequence"
Mario Gomez-Torrente
UNAM
http://hplms.berkeley.edu/
THURSDAY, 10 APRIL 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [10-Apr-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"An Empirical Study of Errors in Translating Natural Language
into First-Order Logic"
David Barker-Plummer
CSLI, Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [10-Apr-08]
EJ228, SRI International
Title to be announced
Peter D Karp
SRI AIC
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [10-Apr-08]
Packard 101
"The Gaussian Erasure Channel: Theory and Applications"
Giuseppe Caire
USC
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [10-Apr-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"How Does Behavior Shape the Brain?"
Russell D. Fernald
Biological Sciences, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 11 APRIL 2008
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [11-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"Designing for Cuba: necessary in(ter)vention"
Gwendolyn Floyd and Joshua Kauffman
REGIONAL
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley ICBS Colloquium [11-Apr-08]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Leaky Rationality: How Research on Behavioral Decision Making
Challenges Normative Standards of Rationality"
Barry Schwartz
ICBS/Glushko Fellow and Swathmore College
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [11-Apr-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Bernd Frohmann
University of Western Ontario.
http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [11-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Gergely Csibra
Birkbeck College
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psyc/staff/academic/gcsibra
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [11-Apr-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Title to be announced
Diana Archangeli
Arizona/CASBS
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
____________
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.
____________
COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT
Math299: Mathematics of the Brain
Spring quarter 2007/08
TuTh 2:15:3:30pm, Building 380 - 380F
First lecture Thursday, April 3, 2008
Victor Eliashberg
Consulting Professor, EE, Stanford
The course is an overview of several levels of mathematics of the
brain with an emphasis on the problem of a universal learning computer
(ULC) with the basic cognitive characteristics similar to those of the
human brain. We present evidence that a brainlike ULC capable of
learning to simulate a broad range of human cognitive functions can
have a relatively short initial (untrained) representation. We examine
different hypotheses about the structure of this representation. The
course is oriented to graduate and advanced undergraduate students.
____________
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 focuses 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.
____________
IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION
on Wednesday, 2 April 2008, 7:00pm
CMU West, Moffett Field, Mountain View
http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ras
"A Hackers Dissection of the Pleo Robot"
Kyle Wiens
Founder of iFixit
Pleo is Ugobe's robotic dinosaur designed to emulate the appearance
and behavior of a week-old baby dinosaur. This talk will present a
hacker's view into Pleo's innovative and intricate guts.
About the Speaker: Kyle Wiens founded iFixit, a do-it-yourself Mac and
iPod repair company. iFixit is dedicated to helping people everywhere
keep their Macs, iPods, and iPhones running longer. He co-authored
the Fixit Guide series of step-by-step repair manuals for Apple
hardware. Kyle has a degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly and
tinkers with robots in his spare time.
____________
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.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 3 April 2008, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Learning to Rank - From Pairwise Approach to Listwise Approach"
Hang Li
Microsoft Research Asia
Learning to rank is a statistical learning task. The goal of it is to
automatically construct a ranking model (function) using training
data, such that the model can sort objects according to their degrees
of relevance, preference, or importance defined in a specific
application. Learning to rank has been receiving keen and growing
interest in machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, and
other fields in recent years, because of its importance, novelty, and
far-reaching implication. In this talk, I will introduce our recent
work on learning to rank, specifically the listwise approach to
learning to rank. First, I will give a survey on the topic, and
introduce the state-of-the-art pairwise approach. Next, I will point
out the necessity of adopting a listwise approach, and introduce our
proposed methods of ListNet and AdaRank, belonging to the category.
The former is an algorithm for learning a probabilistic model. The
latter is a Boosting algorithm for directly optimizing a listwise loss
function.
About the Speaker: Hang Li is a senior researcher and research manager
at Microsoft Research Asia. His research areas include natural
language processing, information retrieval, statistical machine
learning, and data mining. He graduated from Kyoto University and
earned his PhD from the University of
Tokyo. http://research.microsoft.com/users/hangli/
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 3 April 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Going Global: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work"
Pamela Hinds
Stanford
Many workers, particularly those involved in large, complex projects,
are now working with colleagues and team members spread around the
globe. Distributed work is often characterized by long periods of
time working apart, punctuated by face-to-face meetings and site
visits. In the study being presented today, we explore the interplay
between distant work and these collocated intervals in an attempt to
understand why site visits play such an important role in ongoing
collaboration. In an ethnographic study of 143 members of 9 software
development teams, we examine the relationship between site visits and
distant work and their effects on interpersonal dynamics and the
coordination of work. Our findings suggest that site visits promote
situated *knowing who* -- knowledge about distant colleagues that
is situated in context and intertwined with practice. During site
visits, people observe and interact with their distant colleagues in
these colleagues' context, thus gaining a deeper understanding of
their behavior within the social and physical context in which they
are situated. As they interact, they reconstitute collaborative
practices which further facilitates *knowing who*. After team members
return to their home site, some of these new collaborative practices
carry over to their work with distant colleagues and additional new
practices evolve as a result of the situated *knowing who *generated
during site visits. Overall, this work highlights why site visits
matter in global work.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 4 April 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Technologies for collaborative democracy"
Beth Noveck
New York Law School
Almost contemporaneously to the beginnings of the World Wide Web,
pundits heralded a new Periclean Golden Age of e-democracy. They
wrote about and designed software for online deliberation and the
public exchange of reason that would transform our political culture.
Software might make it possible to "do deliberation" and overcome the
problems complained of by 1950s sociologists, such as "groupthink"
where like-minded people fail to consider alternatives or debate
proposals sufficiently or "cascading" where members of the community
acquiesce in the opinions propounded by the loudest speakers. But,
with software, we could control who speaks when and induce everyone to
participate, rather than only those who are willing to speak up
face-to-face. Designed right, new technology could inculcate such
ideals as open discourse, equal participation, reasoned discussion and
diverse viewpoints into the practices of on-line deliberation. This
would make it possible not only to talk but also to truly deliberate
at a distance. The new era of cyber-democracy was just around the
corner, right?
It didn't happen.
We will discuss why, despite the deliberative potential of new
technologies, current political institutions have changed little in
response to Web 2.0. We will explore the role of visual and social
interfaces in producing better democracy and talk about the progress
of the Peer-to-Patent project, the first example of opening up federal
government decision-making to a self-selected network of scientific
experts. This talk will focus on how both law and technology might be
better deployed together to bring about not only deliberation but
collective action and a new kind of collaborative democracy that
connects institutions to networks.
About the Speaker: Beth Simone Noveck is professor of law and director
of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School
and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University,
Department of Communication. She teaches in the areas of intellectual
property, e-government/e-democracy, and First Amendment. Her work
lies at the intersection of technology and civil liberties and focuses
on how institutions democratize in response to networks. Professor
Noveck is the founder of the Democracy Design Workshop, an
interdisciplinary "Do Tank" <http://dotank.nyls.edu> dedicated to
deepening democratic practice through the application of both legal
code and software code. She is the designer of numerous civic
software projects. With the support of the MacArthur Foundation,
Omidyar Network, IBM, Microsoft, HP, GE, Intellectual Ventures and Red
Hat, she created "Peer to Patent" <http://www.peertopatent.org> a
cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to open
the patent examination process to online public participation for the
first time. Noveck is founder of the annual State of Play conference
on virtual worlds <http://www.nyls.edu/stateofplay> and editor of the
NYU Press Ex Machina book series on law, technology and society. She
(and her students) blog at <http://cairns.typepad.com>. Her book,
Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy
Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful will appear with Brookings Press
in 2009.
____________
GRAI SEMINAR
on Friday, 4 April 2008, 2:00pm
Gates 104
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
"Local Deformation Models for Monocular 3D Shape Recovery"
Mathieu Salzmann
Computer Vision Laboratory of EPFL Switzerland
http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~salzmann/
In this talk, we will present an approach to learning shape priors to
recover the 3D shape of a deformable surface from a single view. By
contrast with typical statistical learning methods that build models
for specific object shapes, we learn local deformation models, and
combine them to reconstruct surfaces of arbitrary global shapes. Not
only does this improve the generality of our deformation models, but
it also facilitates learning since the space of local deformations is
much smaller than that of global ones.
While using a texture-based approach, we will show that our models are
effective to reconstruct from single videos poorly-textured surfaces
of arbitrary shape, made of materials as different as cardboard, that
deforms smoothly, and much lighter tissue paper whose deformations may
be far more complex.
____________
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.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 4 April 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"A Coupled Oscillator Planning Model of Speech Timing and
Syllable Structure"
Louis Goldstein
Haskins Laboratories, USC
A fundamental problem in understanding speech production is how the
temporal coherence of the speech units associated with a given lexical
unit is maintained despite changes due to speaking rate, prosodic
embedding, and transient perturbations. To address this, a dynamical
model of temporal planning of speech has been developed (Nam &
Saltzman, 2003; Goldstein et al, 2006; Nam, in press). In this model,
each speech unit (constriction gesture) is associated with a planning
oscillator, or clock, and the oscillators within the ensemble
associated with a particular lexical item are coupled to one another
in a pattern represented as a coupling graph.
I will introduce this model and show how it is possible to account for
syllable structure in terms of intrinsic modes of coupling that
require no learning. Onset consonant gestures are hypothesized to be
coupled in-phase to the tautosyllabic vowel gesture (regardless of how
many consonants there are in an onset), while coda consonant gestures
are coupled in an anti-phase pattern. This hypothesis can account for
the universality of CV syllables, the relatively free combinatoriality
that onsets and rimes typically exhibit in languages, and the
seemingly paradoxical finding that single consonants are acquired by
children earlier in onset than coda, but consonant clusters are
acquired earlier in coda than in onset. In addition, the topology of
the coupling graph can account simultaneously for regularities in
relative timing and the patterns of stochastic variability that they
exhibit.
References
Goldstein, L., Byrd, D., and Saltzman, E. (2006) The role of vocal
tract gestural action units in understanding the evolution of
phonology. In M. Arbib (Ed.) From Action to Language: The Mirror
Neuron System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 215-249.
Nam, H. (in press). A competitive, coupled oscillator model of moraic
structure: Split-gesture dynamics focusing on positional asymmetry. In
Cole, J. and Hualde, J. (eds). Papers in Laboratory phonology
9. Berlin: Mouton deGruyter.
Nam, H. and Saltzman, E. 2003. A Competitive, Coupled Oscillator Model
of Syllable Structure. Proceeding 15th ICPhS 2003, Barcelona,
2253-2256.
____________
UC BERKELEY LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 7 April 2008, 4:00pm
182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
"Are Creoles 'Exceptional' Languages?"
Derek Bickerton
University of Hawaii
Recent work by Mufwene, DeGraff and others have challenged the status
of Creoles as "exceptional" languages, languages deserving of study
for properties peculiar to them. In their opinion, Creoles are simply
cases of language change. I review the arguments pro and con and show
that, while there is obviously only one language faculty, the
particular circumstances that gave rise to creoles license their
treatment as a category outside the range of "normal" language change,
which does not instantaneously introduce grammatical structures wholly
alien to the typology of the alleged "parent".
____________
MATH TALK
on Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 2:30pm
Gates 498
"A Proof of the Church-Turing Thesis"
Nachum Dershowitz
Tel-Aviv University and Microsoft Research
We propose a generic axiomatization of effective computation, adding a
condition on initial states to Gurevich's "Abstract State Machine"
postulates. Axiomatization in hand, we prove the Church-Turing
Thesis.
Joint work with Yuri Gurevich and with Udi Boker.
____________
BAYCHI
on Tuesday, 8 April 2008, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
"Putting the Fun in Functional:
Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software"
Amy Jo Kim
ShuffleBrain
Over the past few years, we've seen an explosion of interactive
services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web,
services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are
providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These
game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment,
and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They
share three key elements: user-generated content, community
infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, Ill review the
psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to
use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun,
compelling and addictive.
About the Speaker: Amy Jo Kim is an internationally recognized expert
on community architecture and social systems design. She has designed
products and services for AOL, Digital Chocolate, Electronic Arts,
eBay, Harmonix, MTV, Nokia, Square/Enix, and Yahoo! Amy Jo is the
author of Community Building on the Web, a design handbook (available
in seven languages) that's become required reading in game design
studios and university classes worldwide. She's currently working on
developing a collection of "smart games" for online social
environments.
"Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library"
Christian Crumlish
Yahoo!
Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media
aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social
features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and
members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social
relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty
"antipatterns"). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing
some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as
well as others that he has noted "in the wild." The newly redesigned
Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo's open design
pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out
a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be
gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.
About the Speaker: Christian Crumlish started designing and building
websites in 1994 after years of writing and publishing about
applications and user interfaces. Today he is the curator of the
Yahoo! pattern library and is director of technology for the
Information Architecture Institute. He studied philosophy at Princeton
and painting at the San Francisco School of Art. Christian is the
author of, most recently, The Power of Many: How the Living Web is
Transforming Politics, Business, and Everday Life (Wiley, 2004), and
he is working on a book about online presence and identity,
tentatively titled Presence of Mind. He lives in Oakland, California,
with his wife, Briggs, and his cat, Fraidy.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
"Learning Outside the Box and the Simplex: Efficient
Projection Algorithms for Sparse Representations"
Yoram Singer
Senior Research Scientist, Google Inc.
Many problems in machine learning are cast as constrained optimization
problems. The talk focuses on efficient algorithms for learning tasks
which are cast as optimization problems subject to L1 and box
constraints. The end result are typically sparse and accurate
models. We start with an overview of existing projection algorithms
onto the simplex. We then describe a linear time projection for dense
input spaces. Finally, we describe a new efficient projection
algorithm for very high dimensional spaces. We demonstrate the merits
of the algorithm in experiments with image and large scale text
classification.
About the Speaker: Yoram Singer is a senior research scientist at
Google Inc. From 1999 through 2007 he was an associate professor of
computer science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. From
1995 through 1999 he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T
Research. His work focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation
of machine learning algorithms.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 10 April 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"An Empirical Study of Errors in Translating Natural Language
into First-Order Logic"
David Barker-Plummer
CSLI, Stanford
Every teacher of logic knows that the ease with which a student can
translate a natural language sentence into first order logic depends,
amongst other things, on just how that natural language sentence is
phrased. This talk reports findings from a pilot data mining study of
a large scale corpus in the area of formal logic education, where we
used a very large dataset to provide empirical evidence for specific
characteristics of natural language problem statements that frequently
lead to students making mistakes. We developed a rich taxonomy of the
types of errors that students make, and implemented tools for
automatically classifying student errors into these categories. In
this talk, we focus on three specific phenomena that were prevalent in
our data: Students were found (a) to have particular difficulties with
distinguishing the conditional from the biconditional, (b) to be
sensitive to word-order effects during translation, and (c) to be
sensitive to factors associated with the naming of constants. The
paper concludes by considering the implications of this kind of
large-scale empirical study for improving an automated assessment
system specifically, and logic teaching more generally.
Joint work with Richard Cox, University of Sussex and Robert Dale,
Macquarie University.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 10 April 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"How Does Behavior Shape the Brain?"
Russell D. Fernald
Biological Sciences, Stanford
How do social encounters produce changes in the brain? Though we know
that the social environment influences the brain we don't know how
social information is transduced into cellular and molecular changes?
To understand this we study reproduction, the most important event in
an animals life using a model system in which socially dominant
animals can reproduce while non-dominant animals cannot. We now know
that social ascent regulates several neuronal properties including
neuron size, connectivity, receptor expression illustrating the
powerful role of social life on neural structures.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 11 April 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Designing for Cuba: necessary in(ter)vention"
Gwendolyn Floyd and Joshua Kauffman
REGIONAL
Cubans live in acute technological scarcity and political captivity
yet thrive off technological improvisation, the informal market and a
burgeoning Sneakernet that makes up for the lack of internet. The
reaction to the information on this Sneakernet has recently brought
Cubans a newfound sense of the possibility in political awareness and
engagement. To put it in historical context, Sneakernets in Russia
and Iran were vital in creating alternate dialogues and agendas.
Many thought that the recent succession in Cuban leadership would be
an opportunity to accelerate Cuba's liberalization and integration
into the global economy. Instead Cuba has shown that it is steadfast
in proceeding with an unconventional developmental pattern that has to
this point witnessed the emergence of technological revelations
spanning community-based sustainable agriculture, to leadership in
hardware and software development for the developing world.
This lecture shares REGIONAL's recent in-field Cuban research that
spans the socio-technological, the political, and the top-secret. It
will reveal how their research led to the design of a simple and
affordable digital device that would potentially accelerate Cuban
social change. And it discusses how an understanding of Cuba's
development in a technologically walled garden offers us the chance to
consider this closed-system metaphor for how the world is increasingly
accepting itself to be.
About the Speakers: REGIONAL performs and applies original analysis of
global society, culture and commerce, uncovering and developing
opportunities for profitable innovation and meaningful cultural
intervention. They have recently spent months in Cuba and China
researching emerging social and technological change, and have
recently spoken at Etech, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, UC San
Diego and the Institute for the Future.
Gwendolyn Floyd is an internationally recognized designer who
researches and consults on the frontiers of technology and design. Her
work is currently featured in "Design and the Elastic Mind" at New
York's MOMA, and in the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt's National Design
Triennale.
Joshua Kauffman is a globally-active advisor in technology-related
urban, social and consumer scenarios. He frequently facilitates
collaborative exploration and creation between global organizations
and independent experts, and lectures about geopolitics and strategic
design.
____________
END MATERIAL
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