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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 9 April 2008, vol. 23:29
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
9 April 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 29
______________________________________________________________________
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 9 APRIL 2008 TO 18 APRIL 2008
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2008
12 noon CCRMA Hearing Seminar [9-Apr-08]
801 Welch Road (Feel Library, Second Floor)
"Auditory Prosthesis with a Penetrating Nerve Array"
John Middlebrooks
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Abstract below
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
"Demonstration of Brain Computer Interface using the Emotiv Epoc"
Randy Breen
Emotiv Systems Inc.
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
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
"What Do Biofuels and Anti-Bacterial Drug Discovery Have in
Common? Bioinformatics Analysis of Metabolic Networks"
Peter D Karp
SRI AIC
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [10-Apr-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Reinventing Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning"
Eyal Amir
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
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
5:15pm CS302: TechLaw with Progressive Minds [10-Apr-08]
Landau Econ 140
"CodeX"
Michael Genesereth and Harry Surden
http://xenon.stanford.edu/~ruchika/
(rsvp requested)
FRIDAY, 11 APRIL 2008
10:00am Bay Algorithmic Game Theory Symposium [11-Apr-08]
Google Inc., 1300 Crittenden Lane, Mountain View, CA 94043
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/games/BAGT/meeting5/
11:00am 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/
Abstract below
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
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [11-Apr-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"A New Theory of Documentation for Information Studies"
Bernd Frohmann
University of Western Ontario.
http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
Abstract below
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
"Categories of sounds"
Diana Archangeli
Arizona/CASBS
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~dba/
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 14 APRIL 2008
12 noon Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium [14-Apr-08]
Terman 217
"More Tales From The Field"
John Van Maanen
Erwin H. Schell Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
http://wapurl.co.uk/?AUVMRDX
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
12:45pm CIS/SLATA [14-Apr-08]
Law School 280B
"Hold The Phone: Assessing the Rights of Wireless Handset
Owners and the Network Neutrality Obligations of Carriers"
Rob Frieden
Penn State University
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [14-Apr-08]
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
Title to be announced
David Teeple
UCSC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium [14-Apr-08]
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"From mysticism to mechanism in child phonology: Getting
closer to a psycholinguistically plausible model of
phonological development"
Lise Menn
University of Colorado
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Working Group in the Philosophy of Mind [14-Apr-08]
Tolman 3112 (Berkeley)
"What Is Reasoning Good For?"
Sherry Roush
Philosophy, UC Berkeley
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.html
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley Ear Club [14-Apr-08]
3105 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"The effect of experience on basic rhythmic processing"
John Iversen
Neurosciences Institute, San Diego
http://ear.berkeley.edu/ear-club-schedule.html
TUESDAY, 15 APRIL 2008
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [15-Apr-08]
Bldg. 80:115
"Review of 'Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects': Part I"
Grigori Mints, David Taylor
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
Abstract below
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [15-Apr-08]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Learning algorithms for applications involving attacks"
Ramarathnam Venkatesan (Venkie)
Microsoft Research
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
WEDNESDAY, 16 APRIL 2008
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [16-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"Beyond Imitative Learning: The Case for Natural Pedagogy
Evolutionary Mechanisms of Cultural Knowledge Transmission in
Humans"
George Gergely
HAS, Hungary
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [16-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"Spatial Computing in Proto"
Jonathan Bachrach
MIT CSAIL
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 17 APRIL 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [17-Apr-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"The Role of Shape in Object Recognition"
Geremy Heitz
Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
http://ai.stanford.edu/~gaheitz/
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [17-Apr-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Freebase: An open database of the world's information"
John Giannendra
Metaweb
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [17-Apr-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Boltzmann Brains"
Leonard Susskind
Physics Department
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [17-Apr-08]
Packard 101
"Programming Informational Molecules: Synthetic DNA Circuits
in a DNA World"
Erik Winfree
Caltech
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
5:15pm CS302: TechLaw with Progressive Minds [17-Apr-08]
Landau Econ 140
"Does Technology Really Matter at a Trial"
Rusty Day
Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder LLP
http://xenon.stanford.edu/~ruchika/
(rsvp requested)
FRIDAY, 18 APRIL 2008
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [18-Apr-08]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Seeing is a verb: a neurologist's perspective on visual awareness"
Robert Rafal
Psychology, Bangor University, Wales
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [18-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"Information foraging theory"
Peter Pirolli
PARC
http://web.mac.com/peter.pirolli/Professional/About_Me.html
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [18-Apr-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Spatial Analogies in Thinking about Documentation"
Michael Buckland
Title to be announced
Clifford Lynch
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [18-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Rui Mata
University of Lisbon and Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [18-Apr-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Maximizing Assertion: The Case of Verbs of Motion in Russian"
Olga Kagan
UCSC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Oxyopia Lecture [18-Apr-08]
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Spatial Updating for Perception and Motor Control"
J. Douglas Crawford
Psychology, Biology and Kinesiology & Health Science, York
University, Toronto
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
Abstract below
____________
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.
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 12 noon
801 Welch Road (Feel Library, Second Floor)
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
Gerald Popelka (Otolaryngology) and I are happy to welcome Prof. John
Middlebrooks to Stanford. John is best known for his work on binaural
hearing, but this week he'll be talking about new work to directly
stimulate the auditory nerve.
The usual approach to electrically restore hearing is to use
electrodes carefully slipped into the patient's cochlea. This is hard
to do, and it's even harder to understand how the current spreads, and
then there is the issue of how the mechanical sensors react to
electrical stimulation. Miracle of all, it works! But far from
perfectly.
John will talk about a new approach that skips the cochlea and
directly stimulates the auditory nerve. Sounds like it is a wonderful
idea (why didn't I think of it?)
This is a special Hearing Seminar talk in conjunction with the
Department of Otolaryngology. The talk will be held in the
Otolaryngology offices.
John is also an expert on spatial hearing and we initially intended to
have him speak on that topic too. However, most of the individuals at
Stanford who work on spatial hearing are out of town that day or
otherwise cannot attend. In addition, the usual colloquia and
seminars on campus that day are already scheduled as is our Australian
Conference. So, John will be giving only a single talk on cochlear
implants, though individuals working in spatial hearing may also be
interested.
Bring your auditory nerve to the Department of Otolaryngology. We
promise to stimulate it in a useful way.
--Malcolm Slaney
"Auditory Prosthesis with a Penetrating Nerve Array"
John Middlebrooks
We are testing in an animal model an array of stimulating electrodes
implanted directly in the auditory nerve. Compared to a conventional
cochlear implant, the nerve array provides activation of more-
frequency-restricted nerve populations, lower thresholds, reduced
interference among simultaneously-stimulated electrodes, and access to
the entire frequency range of hearing. I will discuss the potential of
nerve arrays for a new generation of auditory prostheses.
About the Speaker: John Middlebrooks's research addresses the
psychophysics and physiology of spatial hearing and the central
auditory responses to cochlear-implant stimulation. Physiological
studies of the auditory cortex have demonstrated that the spike
patterns of neurons vary systematically in spike probability and
latency according to the location of a sound source (in a
normal-hearing animal) or according to characteristics of
cochlear-implant stimulation (in a deafened animal). Computational
analysis of spike patterns of single neurons or small ensembles of
neurons permit estimates of stimulus identification that can be
compared with results from human and animal perceptual studies.
Psychophysical studies in normal-hearing human listeners are examining
the perceptual algorithms by which listeners interpret spectral cues
for sound localization.
____________
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.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Demonstration of Brain Computer Interface using the Emotiv Epoc"
Randy Breen
Emotiv Systems Inc.
Emotiv Systems will demonstrate the use of their brain computer
interface device. The following information and more can be founds at
www.emotiv.com[2].
Communication between human and machine has always been limited to
conscious interaction, with non-conscious communication -- expression,
intuition, perception -- reserved solely for the human realm. At
Emotiv, we believe that future communication between human and machine
will not be limited to the conscious communication that exists
today. Users will demand that non-conscious communication play a much
more significant role.
Emotiv's mission is to create the ultimate interface for the
next-generation of human-machine interaction, by evolving the
interaction between humans and electronic devices beyond the
limitations of conscious interface. Emotiv has created technologies
that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs
directly from your mind.
Applications for Emotiv technology spans numerous industries, however,
our immediate target market is entertainment, with a focus on the
electronic games industry.
The Emotiv EPOC(TM) now makes it possible for games to be controlled
and influenced by the player's mind. Engaging, immersive, and nuanced,
Emotiv-inspired game-play will be like nothing ever seen before. Based
on the latest developments in neuro-technology, Emotiv has developed a
new personal interface for human computer interaction.
The Emotiv EPOC uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals
naturally produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings
and expression. It connects wirelessly with all game platforms from
consoles to PCs. The Emotiv neuroheadset now makes it possible for
games to be controlled and influenced by the player's mind.
Using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG), it is possible to
observe each person's individual electrical brain activity. At Emotiv,
we've created a robust system and methodology for detecting and
classifying both human conscious thoughts and non-conscious
emotions. This revolutionary patent pending neural processing
technology makes it possible for computers to interact directly with
the human brain. By the detection of thoughts and feelings, our
technology now makes it possible for applications to be controlled and
influenced by the user's mind.
About the speaker: Randy Breen, Chief Product Officer, is a legend
within the electronic games industry. Prior to joining Emotiv, Randy
was the Vice President and Head of Development at LucasArts. Products
developed during Randy's tenure at LucasArts sold in record-breaking
numbers and received numerous honors including the Academy of
Interactive Arts and Sciences' Game of the Year award.
In 1986, Randy began working at Electronic Arts, where he was
responsible for the creation and production of the Road Rash(TM) game
franchise, which sold over four million units and played an important
role in the success of EA.
Over the span of his career, Randy has produced and managed over fifty
titles. As Emotiv's Executive Vice President and Chief Product
Officer, Randy's intimate knowledge of game development helps him
guide the direction of research and ensure the product reaches its
market potential. His industry contacts and knowledge of the
publishing business also play a vital role in establishing
partnerships within the game industry.
____________
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.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 10 April 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"What Do Biofuels and Anti-Bacterial Drug Discovery Have in
Common? Bioinformatics Analysis of Metabolic Networks"
Peter D Karp
SRI AIC
Although the human genome has received most of the press, to date the
genomes of more than 500 bacteria have had their DNA sequenced. These
organisms include many important bacterial pathogens, and potential
metabolic engineering hosts for biofuels efforts. The metabolic
network is a biochemical factory encoded by the genome of every
organism, and knowledge of the metabolic network can aid scientists in
designing new drugs against pathogens, and in engineering increased
biofuels production from other bacteria.
This talk will describe a 15-year effort by my group in developing
software and databases for metabolic pathway information. The talk
will describe algorithms for predicting the metabolic network of an
organism from its sequenced genome, which we have applied to 370
genomes and made available through the BioCyc.org Web site. We have
developed a hierarchical graph layout algorithm for visualizing
complete metabolic networks, as well as an algorithm for predicting
anti-microbial drug targets.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 10 April 2008, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Reinventing Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning"
Eyal Amir
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Many complex domains offer limited information about their exact state
and the way actions affect them. There, autonomous agents need to make
decisions at the same time that they learn action models and track the
state of the domain. This combined problem can be represented within
the framework of reinforcement learning in POMDPs, and is known to be
computationally difficult.
In this presentation I will describe a new framework for such decision
making, learning, and tracking. This framework applies results that we
achieved about updating logical formulas (belief states) after
deterministic actions. It includes algorithms that represent and
update the set of possible action models and world states compactly
and tractably. It makes a decision with this set, and updates the set
after taking the chosen action. Most importantly, and somewhat
surprisingly, the number of actions that our framework takes to
achieve a goal is bounded polynomially by the length of an optimal
plan in a fully observable, fully known domain, under lax conditions.
Finally, our framework leads to a new stochastic-filtering approach
that has better accuracy than previous techniques.
* Joint work with Allen Chang, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Stuart Russell,
Dafna Shahaf, and Afsaneh Shirazi
(IJCAI'03,IJCAI'05,AAAI'06,ICAPS'06,IJCAI'07,AAAI'07).
About the Speaker: Eyal Amir is an Assistant Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) since
January 2004. His research includes reasoning, learning, and decision
making with logical and probabilistic knowledge, dynamic systems, and
commonsense reasoning. Before UIUC he was a postdoctoral researcher at
UC Berkeley (2001-2003) with Stuart Russell, and did his Ph.D. on
logical reasoning in AI with John McCarthy. He received B.Sc. and
M.Sc. degrees in mathematics and computer science from Bar-Ilan
University, Israel in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Eyal is a Fellow of
the Center for Advanced Studies and of the Beckman Institute at UIUC
(2007-2008), was chosen by IEEE as one of the "10 to watch in AI"
(2006), received the NSF CAREER award (2006), and awarded the Arthur
L. Samuel award for best Computer Science Ph.D. thesis (2001-2002) at
Stanford 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.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 11 April 2008, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Leaky Rationality: How Research on Behavioral Decision Making
Challenges Normative Standards of Rationality"
Barry Schwartz
ICBS/Glushko Fellow and Swathmore College
For more than thirty years, decision making research has documented
that people violate various principles of rationality, some of which
are so fundamental that theorists of rationality rarely bother to
state them. This talk will argue that it is problematic to conclude
that these "violations" typically represent departures from
rationality. The very psychological processes that lead to
"irrational" decisions (e.g. framing, mental accounting) continue to
exert their influence when the results of the decisions are
experienced, making it very difficult to judge them as irrational.
That is, psychological processes that affect decisions may be said
also to "leak" into experience. The implication of this fact is that
formal principles of rationality do not provide a good enough
normative standard against which to assess decision making. Instead,
what is needed is a substantive theory of rationality-one that takes
subjective experience seriously, considers how particular decisions
fit into a life as a whole, and considers the effects of decisions on
others.
____________
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.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 11 April 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
"A New Theory of Documentation for Information Studies"
Bernd Frohmann
University of Western Ontario.
http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/
Documents have recently returned from their marginalized position in
information studies and in several other areas of the social
sciences. In this seminar I plan to give an overview of some of the
topics I'm pursuing in a grant-funded research project with the above
title. I'll identify some of the theoretical concepts that I have
found useful for thinking about documentation, extracted from
Wittgenstein, Latour, Foucault, and Deleuze. Examples are documentary
agency, authorless statements, assemblages, and documentality. If time
permits, I'll introduce some current work on the documentality of the
human body.
About the Speaker: Bernd Frohmann is at Berkeley for the semester as
Visiting Scholar in the School of Information. This talk extends ideas
in his book "Deflating Information: From Science Studies to
Documentation" (University of Toronto Press, 2004) which draws heavily
on social practices of science literature to re-theorize approaches to
library, information, and documentation studies.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 11 April 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Categories of sounds"
Diana Archangeli
Arizona/CASBS
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~dba/
In recent work, Mielke (2004) argues against universal distinctive
features, in favor of emergent features, with language acquirers
relying both on the phonetic properties of the sounds they hear and on
the phonological patterning to determine the relevant sound categories
in the language being learned. Blevins (2004) presents a model of how
phonological systems change over time, which relies heavily on
perception and production in determining how sound systems evolve.
This presentation supports the emergence hypothesis with respect to
features, and explores the implications of this hypothesis for
phonological theory, arguing in favor of a three-part strategy:
1. determining what must be said in order to account for a given
language pattern;
2. determining which parts can be a result of human cognitive
capabilities and human physiology;
3. examining the (possibly null) residue -- properties of human
language systems that cannot be derived from general human
cognitive strategies nor from physical properties of humans -- for
organizational principles specific to language.
Examples illustrate (i) crazy classes, where groups of segments that
are not definable in terms of standard definitions of distinctive
features; (ii) ambivalent segments, that is, segments that pattern as
[+F] in one language and as [-F] in another language; and (iii) covert
patterning: categorical patterning that is not shared in the speech
community.
____________
BERKELEY WORKING GROUP IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
on Monday, 14 April 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
3112 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/
"What Is Reasoning Good For?"
Sherry Roush
Philosophy, UC Berkeley
It is possible to have beliefs that are reliably correlated with the
world without being able to talk informatively about this fact. In
perception this may be the rule rather than the exception. Why then
should we have an ability to reason about our beliefs, and convince
ourselves that we are right about them? I argue that this reasoning
has a function that is also carried out at the basic perceptual level
through self-monitoring that does not use reasoning or consciousness.
This function is calibration, the attunement of one's degree of belief
in p to one's track record of reliability in making judgments about
p-like matters. I argue that the function of calibration, in turn, is
pre-emptive self-correction, the adjustment of your belief-states
before the world punishes you for being wrong.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 15 April 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 80:115
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
"Review of 'Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects': Part I"
Grigori Mints, David Taylor
Stanford
This is part one of a two-part presentation reviewing the book
"Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects" by Kit Fine. (The second part will
take place at the next seminar on April 22.) The book describes
modification of familiar semantics for first order logic suitable for
systems with existential instantiation rule: From (Ex)A(x) infer
A(b). The modification looks complicated, but can be clarified by
connecting with Skolem functions and epsilon symbols. We hope to
discuss philosophical implications of this semantics and its possible
connections with other work by Kit Fine.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Spatial Computing in Proto"
Jonathan Bachrach
MIT CSAIL
The computational landscape is drastically changing. Processing,
sensing, communication, and actuation are now affordable and
embeddable, allowing us to manufacture myriads of devices that can be
spread through space and placed in the world. The catch is that in
order to manufacture these devices economically in bulk, we must
accept faults, inaccuracies, and communication delays. If we were to
be able to robustly harness these devices, we could economically
develop systems with unparalleled power, grace, fidelity, and
pervasiveness. Example spatial computing domains are sensor networks,
smart materials, swarm robotics, biofilms, and modular robotics, to
name a few. Unfortunately, traditional engineering approaches do not
apply, and we must rethink our computing models, languages, and
practices. Typical solutions entangle robustness with coordination,
producing applications that do not scale well and modules that do not
compose well nor map easily over to other application domains. We
offer an alternate approach whereby the programmer controls a single
virtual spatial computer which fills the environment space. The
computations on this spatial computer are actually performed by a
large number of locally-interacting individual devices. This abstracts
the actual computational hardware behind the spatial computer
interface, and allows the programmer to focus on a single model of
global computation. We achieve this abstraction with two components: a
language that embodies continuous space and time semantics and a
runtime library that implements these semantics approximately. In this
talk, I will introduce our language, called Proto, using examples from
sensor networks, and hint at the generality of the approach, using
examples from distributed robotics.
About the speaker: Jonathan Bachrach is a research scientist at the
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) who
researches programming languages, spatial computing, and
robotics. Before MIT, he held postdocs at Stanford and UC Berkeley,
was a researcher at IRCAM in Paris, developing new musical platforms,
and a principle software engineer at Harlequin Inc (RIP), working on a
compiler and runtime for the Dylan programming language. He studied
cognitive science, computer science, and visual arts, receiving a B.S.
degree from the University of California at San Diego and MS and PhD
degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 17 April 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"The Role of Shape in Object Recognition"
Geremy Heitz
Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
http://ai.stanford.edu/~gaheitz/
Discriminative tasks, including object categorization and detection,
are central components of high-level computer vision. Shape is one
component of object classes that is often used to recognize or
localize instances from the class in question. Many existing methods
use implicit shape to guide the search for instances from various
object classes. In this talk, I will discuss the role of shape in
high-level computer vision, and in particular will focus on the case
where we are interested in more refined aspects of the object in an
image, such as pose or articulation. In these cases, a more explicit
representation of the shape is preferred. In this talk I will present
a method (LOOPS) for learning a shape and image feature model that can
be trained on a particular image class, and used to outline instances
of the class in novel images. While the training data consists of
uncorresponded outlines, the resulting LOOPS model contains
semantically consistent landmark points that can be localized in an
image. This localization facilitates a number of tasks beyond
localization, including classification along the shape axis, in which
a very small number of training instances are labeled. For example, we
might distinguish between cheetahs that are running and those standing
still. From this small number of labeled instances, we can use our
localized outlines together with a simple nearest neighbor classifier
to label novel test images with the label of interest.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 17 April 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"Programming Informational Molecules: Synthetic DNA Circuits
in a DNA World"
Erik Winfree
Caltech
Information can be stored in molecules and processed by molecular
reactions. Molecular information processing is at the heart of all
biological systems; might it soon also be at the heart of
non-biological synthetic chemical systems? Perhaps yes; one
technological approach comes from DNA nanotechnology and DNA
computing, where DNA is used as a non-biological informational polymer
that can be rationally designed to create a rich class of molecular
systems -- for example, DNA molecules that self-assemble precisely,
that fold into complex nanoscale objects, that act as mechanical
actuators and molecular motors, and that make decisions based on
digital and analog logic. This talk will focus on the design of
DNA-based circuits that may one day provide the general-purpose
information-processing core for programming the behavior of molecular
systems.
About the Speaker: Erik Winfree is an Associate Professor in Computer
Science, Computation & Neural Systems, and Bioengineering at
Caltech. Winfree is the recipient of the Feynman Prize for
Nanotechnology (2006), the NSF PECASE/CAREER Award (2001), the ONR
Young Investigators Award (2001), a MacArthur Fellowship (2000), and
MIT Technology Review's first TR100 list of "top young innovators"
(1999). Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech in 2000, Winfree was a
Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton,
and a Visiting Scientist at the MIT AI Lab. Winfree received a B.S. in
Mathematics w/ Computer Science from the University of Chicago in
1991, and a Ph.D. in Computation & Neural Systems from Caltech in
1998.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 18 April 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Information foraging theory"
Peter Pirolli
PARC
http://web.mac.com/peter.pirolli/Professional/About_Me.html
Information Foraging Theory is a theory of human-information
interaction that aims to explain and predict how people will best
shape themselves to their information environments, and how
information environments can best be shaped to people. The approach
involves a kind of reverse engineering in which the analyst asks (a)
what is the nature of the task and information environments, (b) why
is a given system a good solution to the problem, and (c) how is that
"ideal" solution realized (approximated) by mechanism. Typically, the
key steps in developing a model of information foraging involve: (a) a
rational analysis of the task and information environment (often
drawing on optimal foraging theory from biology) and (b) a
computational production system model of the cognitive structure of
task. This talk will provide a survey of models and applications
developed within the theory, including recent models of Web surfing,
exploratory search, and interaction with information visualizations,
as well as outlines of extension of the theory to social information
foraging.
About the Speaker: Peter Pirolli is a Research Fellow in the Augmented
Social Cognition Area at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where
he has been pursuing studies of human information interaction since
1991. Prior to joining PARC, he was an Associate Professor in the
School of Education at UC Berkeley. Pirolli received his doctorate in
cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He is
an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, the Association for Psychological Science, the National
Academy of Education, and the Association for Computing Machinery
Computer-Human Interaction Academy. His recent book is titled
"Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information.".
____________
UC BERKELEY OXYOPIA LECTURE
on Friday, 18 April 2008, 4:00pm
489 Minor Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://optometry.berkeley.edu/opt_txtpp/ce/oxyopias.html
"Spatial Updating for Perception and Motor Control"
J. Douglas Crawford
Psychology, Biology and Kinesiology & Health Science, York University, Toronto
We make rapid eye movements called saccades about 3-4 times per
second, and each one changes the spatial relationship between the
retinal and the world. This poses a computational problem both for
motor control (i.e., aiming movements toward objects that we viewed
from a previous eye position) and for perception (i.e., for
synthesizing visual information that was gathered from different eye
positions. More is known about how this 'spatial updating' problem is
solved for motor control, so this is where we will begin. After
presenting various theoretical models, I will show fMRI evidence which
suggests that parietal cortex updates visual space in eye-centered
coordinates for reaching movements and saccades. Then we will consider
various psychophysical / computational aspects of 'trans-saccadic
integration', the process of integrating visual features from
different visual fixations. Finally, I will present new evidence from
TMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) experiments which suggest
that perceptual integration taps into the same parietal updating
mechanisms that have been demonstrated previously in motor control.
____________
END MATERIAL
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