[Date Prev][Date Next][Date Index]
CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 23 April 2008, vol. 23:31
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
23 April 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 31
______________________________________________________________________
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 23 APRIL 2008 TO 2 MAY 2008
WEDNESDAY, 23 APRIL 2008
12 noon UC Berkeley IPSR colloquium [23-Apr-08]
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"Like Water, Like Stone: Dialectical Self Views and Their
Psychological Implications in Different Cultural Contexts"
Kaiping Peng
UC Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kppeng/
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/ipsr/colloquia.html
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Seminar [23-Apr-08]
508-20 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"Modeling the mechanisms underlying memory-related neural activity"
Mark Goldman
UC Davis
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [23-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"The Paradox of Choice"
Barry Schwartz
Swarthmore
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [23-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"A Head in the Cloud - The Power of Infrastructure as a Service"
Werner Vogels
CTO, Amazon.com
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
6:00pm Media X Spring Lecture Series [23-Apr-08]
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160:124)
"Virtual and Physical Synergies in Point-of-Purchase
Persuasion"
Martha Russell
Associate Director, Media X
http://mediax.stanford.edu/events_calendar/calendar.html
Abstract below
6:00pm Berkeley HPLMS Talk [23-Apr-08]
234 Moses (Berkeley)
"Consensus, Compromise and Judgment Aggregation"
Stephan Hartmann
Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science
http://hplms.berkeley.edu/
THURSDAY, 24 APRIL 2008
10:10am GTU/Berkeley Working Group on Cognitive Science and Religion[24-Apr-08]
3105 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"What do theologians and neuroscientists have to talk about?"
Howard Fields
Neurology and Physiology, UCSF
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
(contact info is apparently Mark Graves mgraves .. jstb.edu)
Abstract below
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [24-Apr-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"The Composition of Thoughts"
Robert May
Philosophy, UC Davis
http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/people/may/index.html
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [24-Apr-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"The Magitti Activity-Aware Leisure Guide: Opportunity
Discovery, Innovation and New Technology Platform Development
at PARC"
Victoria Bellotti and Bo Begole
Palo Alto Research Center
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [24-Apr-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"From Here to Sustainability: The Profit (and Pitfalls) of
Green Business Strategies"
Joel Makower
Greenbiz.com & Co-founder of Clean Edge
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [24-Apr-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Random Projection Trees and Low Dimensional Manifolds"
Sanjoy Dasgupta
UCSD
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [24-Apr-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Exploring Mass End-User Participation in the Design Process"
Mike Krieger
Symbolic Systems Program,
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [24-Apr-08]
Packard 101
"Inventing public key cryptography. A fool's errand: v 2.1"
Martin E. Hellman
Stanford University
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
FRIDAY, 25 APRIL 2008
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [25-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"Computational Textiles and the Democratization of Ubiquitous
Computing"
Leah Buechley
University of Colorado
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [25-Apr-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Informatization and Increased Demands on Knowledge and
Subjectivity"
Rudi Schmiede
Darmstadt, Germany
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [25-Apr-08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"The Rationality of Perceptual Judgments"
Anil Gupta
University of Pittsburgh
http://www.pitt.edu/~philosop/people/gupta.html
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [25-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Logan Grosenick
Stanford Neuroscience
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [25-Apr-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Acquiring meaning: From lexical content to pragmatic inference"
Anna Papafragou
Delaware
http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 28 APRIL 2008
12 noon Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium [28-Apr-08]
Terman 453
"The eScience of Work and the Work of eScience"
Kevin Crowston
Information Studies, Syracuse University
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
Abstract below
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [28-Apr-08]
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
"Introduction to Python scripting"
Anubha Kothari
Stanford University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Working Group in Neuroscience and Philosophy [28-Apr-08]
3112 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Terrence Deacon
Anthropology, UC Berkeley
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/deacon.html
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.html
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium [28-Apr-08]
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"Language influences perception in the left brain hemisphere
but not the right, or Is half a Whorf better than no Whorf at all?"
Paul Kay
UC Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
Abstract below
6:00pm Media X Spring Lecture Series [28-Apr-08]
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160:124)
"Business and Technology Architectures for the Social Enterprise"
Doug McDavid
IBM
http://mediax.stanford.edu/
TUESDAY, 29 APRIL 2008
11:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [29-Apr-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Hierarchical Lookahead for Automated Planning"
Bhaskara Marthi
MIT
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:15pm Wasow Visiting Scholar Lecture [29-Apr-08]
Bldg. 380:380C
"A Critique of Pure Vision"
Terrence J. Sejowski
UCSD, Salk Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [29-Apr-08]
Bldg. 80:115
"Operational Set Theory and 'Small' Large Cardinals"
Solomon Feferman
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 30 APRIL 2008
12 noon UC Berkeley IPSR colloquium [30-Apr-08]
5101 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
"The 'Working Through' Paradox: Distinguishing Reflective
Processing of Negative Emotions from Rumination"
Ozlem Ayduk
UC Berkeley
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/ipsr/colloquia.html
12:15pm Psychology Developmental Brownbags [30-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Neurodevelopmental underpinnings of preschollers' theory of mind"
Mark Sabbagh
Queen's University
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium [30-Apr-08]
Jordan Hall 420:041
"Looking at Others: Fear, Faces, and the Human"
Ralph Adolphs
Caltech
http://biology.caltech.edu/Members/Adolphs
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_colloquium.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [30-Apr-08]
Gates B01
"Distributed Systems: Computation With a Million Friends (and
a Few Foes)"
Adam L. Beberg
Computer Science, Stanford University
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 1 MAY 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [1-May-08]
Cordura Hall 100
Title to be announced
Ken Taylor
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
2:00pm Information Systems Seminar [1-May-08]
Packard 101
"Hybrid and explicit model predictive control"
Alberto Bemporad
Università di Siena
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
4:00pm PARC Forum [1-May-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Title to be announced
Ed Chi
Manager of PARC's Augmented Social Cognition area
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [1-May-08]
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
"Adaptive Algorithms for Online Convex Optimization"
Elad Hazan
IBM Research, Almaden
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ehazan/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [1-May-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Explaining explanation: why we answer "why?" the way we do"
Tania Lombrozo
Psychology, UC Berkeley
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
5:30pm Stanford Psychology of Language Tea (SPLaT!) [1-May-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Probability sensitive production at many levels of
linguistics representation"
Florian Jaeger
University of Rochester
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/newsletter/
FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2008
all day Fifth Annual QP Fest [2-May-08]
Cordura 100
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [2-May-08]
Gates B01
"Automatically Generating Personalized Adaptive User Interfaces"
Krzysztof Gajos
University of Washington
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [2-May-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Mobile Phones in Rural Uganda"
Jenna Burrell
"Progress Report"
Ryan Shaw.
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
Abstract for first talk below
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [2-May-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
"Perception"
Nick Davidenko
Stanford Neuroscience
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O, A, and B-. For an
appointment: <http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/> or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"A Head in the Cloud - The Power of Infrastructure as a Service"
Werner Vogels
CTO, Amazon.com
Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a
moment's notice can be a complicated and expensive task, but it's
essential in today's business landscape. This applies to an enterprise
trying to cut-costs, a young business unexpectedly saturated with
customer demand, or a start-up looking to launch. There are many
challenges when building a reliable, flexible architecture that can
manage unpredictable behaviors of today's internet business. This
presentation will review some of the lessons learned from building one
of the world's largest distributed systems; Amazon.com. The focus will
be on state management which is one of the dominating factors in the
scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of the
overall system.
About the speaker: Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief
Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving
the company's technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the
innovation on behalf of Amazon's customers at a global scale.
Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell
University where he was a principal investigator in several research
projects that target the scalability and robustness of
mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions
of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition
of academic technology into industry.
Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has
authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on
distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing
____________
MEDIA X SPRING LECTURE SERIES
On Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 6:00pm
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160:124)
http://mediax.stanford.edu/
"Virtual and Physical Synergies in Point-of-Purchase
Persuasion"
Martha Russell
Associate Director, Media X
Technology has helped shift the latest gold rush for advertisers and
media buyers from point-of-purchase to point-of-influence. When
advertisers and marketers create messages to persuade what shoppers
think and do, they also place bets on which medium is best for the
message. Results from new research strongly suggest that marketers
re-think their approach to the question. Point-of-purchase
advertising both virtual and physical formats has benefits for
shoppers, retailers and advertisers, but the payoff is different for
each and strategies for optimizing in-store media depend on which
benefits have the highest priority.
About the Speaker: Martha Russell's background spans consumer issues,
agricultural sciences, manufacturing, and microelectronic and
information sciences for companies such as Coca-Cola, Cargill, 3M and
Honeywell. Before joining Media X, Russell led programs to develop
technology leadership by bringing together interdisciplinary research
teams at the University of Minnesota and The University of Texas at
Austin. An interdisciplinary social science research agenda in high
bandwidth technologies was developed at the Internet2 Sociotechnical
Summit, organized by Dr. Russell. Her market research has provided
insights to reduce risks in management decisions, as well as to build
and sustain relationships.
____________
BERKELEY GTU/UCB WORKING GROUP ON COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND RELIGION
on Thursday, 24 April 2008, 10:10am
3105 Tolman Hall (Berkeley)
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
"What do theologians and neuroscientists have to talk about?"
Howard Fields
Neurology and Physiology, UCSF
http://www.galloresearch.org/site/fieldslab/
1) Evidence that Brain Activity Causes Conscious Activity: Is it a two
way street?
2) The role of expectancy in perception
3) Meaning in neuroscience and religion
Responding briefly to Howard Field's presentation are:
Kelly Bulkeley, Religion & Psychology Area, Graduate Theological Union (GTU)
Oliver Putz, Jesuit School of Theology, Graduate Theological Union (GTU)
Kelly Bulkeley teaches in the Religion & Psychology area at GTU and
is author of Wondering Brain: Thinking about Religion With and
Beyond Cognitive Neuroscience (Routledge 2004) and editor of Soul,
Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-
Mind Science (Palgrave 2005).
Oliver Putz holds a Ph.D. in biology from the Freie Universitat
Berlin, Germany, and has worked as a research biologist in the field
of reproductive and evolutionary biology both in Europe and in the
United States. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in systematic and
philosophical theology at GTU. His research focuses on the doctrine of
the imago Dei ("created in the image of God") vis-a-vis current
evolutionary and behavioral biology.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 24 April 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"The Composition of Thoughts"
Robert May
Philosophy, UC Davis
http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/people/may/index.html
(work by Richard Heck & Robert May)
What holds a proposition together? In this paper, we will be
discussing the Fregean take on this issue, where the question becomes:
What holds a thought together. Frege's perspective is distinctive, we
shall argue, in that it connects the composition of thoughts to their
semantic role; thoughts cohere by being simultaneously what is
expressed by sentences, and that which determines truth. Our narrative
will follow a roughly historical course, charting the consequences of
an initial tension in Frege's conception of the relation of content
(Inhalt) to composition, to its resolution with the identification of
content as sense and reference. The problem facing Frege is that he
must make good on an explanation of why "The Evening Star is a planet"
and "The Morning Star is a planet," have different contents; this is
required for the proper operation of the Begriffsschrift, that is, of
Frege's logic, which requires that we can discern that different
thoughts have been proven on the basis of their forms. Frege's insight
in providing the explanation - that the content of a sentence is not
to be identified with its meaning (truth-value) - is as profound today
as it was then. What Frege saw was that while the composition of one
part of content - reference - is functional (concepts are
characteristic functions), the composition of the other part - thought
- is, in effect, linguistic, consisting of constituents that have a
cognitive characteristic, i.e. modes of presentation. The explanation
then follows: thoughts composed of different parts are different
thoughts; contents that contain different thoughts are different
contents; thus, "The Evening Star is a planet" and "The Morning Star
is a planet," have different contents, as do, importantly, "2+2 = 4"
and "3+1 = 4". Although our exegesis will be Fregean, its relevance to
other conceptions of propositions and their coherence will be apparent
in the dialectic.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 24 April 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"The Magitti Activity-Aware Leisure Guide: Opportunity
Discovery, Innovation and New Technology Platform Development
at PARC"
Victoria Bellotti and Bo Begole
Palo Alto Research Center
In this presentation, we describe a project undertaken at PARC for Dai
Nippon Printing Co. Ltd., to assist them in developing a new business
opportunity beyond their traditional printing. The solution, codenamed
Magitti, was designed to be synergistic with DNPs existing strengths
in the publishing industry whilst incorporating the latest in context-
and activity-aware computing techniques to recommend published
content. We cover market and opportunity discovery fieldwork, as well
as the system components and user experience and, very briefly, an
early field evaluation in which users tested a prototype in Palo Alto
and surrounding neighborhoods in California.
Magitti is an electronic mobile leisure guide for when you are out and
about and want to know what a neighborhood has to offer. It presents
options for things to do, filtered by how well they match your current
activity and interests. You don't have to tell Magitti what you are
doing; it uses an inference engine to figure this out for itself. Your
interests are then inferred from your time, location, past behavior
and predicted activity type (i.e., dining, shopping, seeing or
doing). Taste profiles and preferences can be dynamically adjusted if
you wish to improve the recommendations further. For example, you can
tell Magitti that you prefer vegetarian food in general, but right now
you are looking for fast food. Each recommendation comes with user
reviews and ratings which also determine how likely it is that an item
will be recommended. Magitti always assumes that you want to see the
best offerings in each category first and over time it learns from
your behavior so that recommendations keep getting better.
About the Speakers: Victoria Bellotti is a Principal Scientist and
manager of the Socio-Technical and Interaction Research (STIR) group
at PARC. She studies people to understand their practices, problems
and requirements for future technology. She also designs and analyzes
systems, focusing on user needs and experience and is an inventor on
multiple patents and pending patent applications. Her past work
encompasses domains such as transportation, process control,
computer-mediated communication, collaboration and ubiquitous
computing. Victoria is best known for her research on personal
information management and task management. However, more recently,
she has been focusing on user-centered design of context- and
activity-aware computing systems.
Victoria received a B.S. in Psychology in 1982, an M.S. in Ergonomics
in 1983 from University College, London UK and a Ph.D. in Human
Computer Interaction from Queen Mary and Westfield College, London UK
in 1991.
Bo Begole is Manager of the Ubiquitous Computing Research Area at
PARC. He is an applied computer science researcher who invents
technologies for novel user-level applications. His past work includes
systems that provide synchronous collaboration of single-user
applications, computer-mediated communication, distributed
interpersonal awareness, sensor-based interruptibility detection,
temporal pattern modeling and prediction, media device
interoperability, and context-aware mobile systems. He is a co-Chair
of the 2008 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW
2008 http://www.cscw2008.org/), to be held in San Diego, CA, USA on
8-12 Nov 2008.
Bo received a B.S. in 1992 in Mathematics from Virginia Commonwealth
University, an M.S. in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1998 in Computer Science
from Virginia Tech. Prior to his studies, Bo served in the US Army as
an Arabic language translator specializing in Egyptian, Libyan and
Iraqi dialects.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 24 April 2008, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Soda Hall 405 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Random Projection Trees and Low Dimensional Manifolds"
Sanjoy Dasgupta
UCSD
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/
The curse of dimensionality has traditionally been the bane of
nonparametric statistics (histograms, kernel density estimation,
nearest neighbor search, and so on), as reflected in running times and
convergence rates that are exponentially bad in the dimension.
Recently the field has been rejuvenated by the realization that a lot
of data that seems high-dimensional in fact has low "intrinsic"
dimension in the sense of lying close to a low-dimensional
manifold. Many algorithms have been proposed for learning such
manifolds from data.
I'll exhibit a way to benefit from intrinsic low dimensionality
without having to go to the trouble of explicitly learning its
structure. Specifically, I'll present a simple variant of the
ubiquitous k-d tree (a spatial data structure) that is provably
adaptive to low dimensional structure. We call this a "random
projection tree" (RP tree).
Along the way, I'll discuss different notions of intrinsic dimension
-- motivated by manifolds, by local statistics, and by analysis on
metric spaces -- and relate them. I'll then prove that RP trees
require resources that depend only on these dimensions rather than the
dimension of the space in which the data happens to be situated.
This is work with Yoav Freund (UC San Diego).
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 24 March 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Exploring Mass End-User Participation in the Design Process"
Mike Krieger
Symbolic Systems Program
What would it mean for 10,000 people to be involved in a design
process for the next version of a product? My research explores when
and how we can involve masses of users in design. Building off the
idea of crowdsourcing -- offloading tasks to the wisdom of a crowd of
Internet users -- my colleagues in the Human-Computer Interaction
Group at Stanford and I have been probing the utility of mass
participation in three design stages: idea generation,
storyboarding/contextualizing, and late-stage tweaking/iteration. In
this talk, I will discuss the related work in this field, present
preliminary results from our first investigations, and discuss the
work that will constitute the remainder of my Master s program.
About the Speaker: Mike Krieger is a Master's student in the Symbolic
Systems Program at Stanford. His research focuses on mass end-user
participation in design, and how we can best leverage the wisdom of
the crowds in designing software and products. Originally from Sao
Paulo, Brazil, Mike has worked in the Human-Computer Interaction Group
at Stanford since his sophomore year as an undergraduate in Symbolic
Systems at Stanford.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 25 April 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Computational Textiles and the
Democratization of Ubiquitous Computing"
Leah Buechley
University of Colorado
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/
Computational textile researchers weave, solder and sew electronics
into cloth to build soft, flexible and wearable computers.
Computational textiles or "e-textiles" is a young discipline, and
developments in the field have so far been relegated almost
exclusively to research labs in industry and academia. This talk will
present advancements that make the designing and building of e-
textiles accessible to new audiences, describing developments in
engineering, design and applications that are helping to democratize
creative ubiquitous computing. It will:
* detail techniques that enable researchers (and others) to integrate
electronics with cloth, including a method for creating printed
circuit boards on fabric
* provide demonstrations of several novel e-textile designs, including
a programmable beaded bracelet, and
* discuss educational applications of e-textiles.
The discussion of educational e-textiles will focus on the development
of the commercially-available LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit that
enables novices to build their own soft computers by sewing
microcontroller, sensor, and actuator modules together with conductive
thread. The construction kit was developed through an iterative design
process that involved several user studies, and preliminary results
indicate that the kit could provide a powerful means to engage diverse
audiences in ubiquitous computing, and computer science and electrical
engineering more generally.
About the Speaker: Leah Buechley received her PhD in Computer Science
from the University of Colorado at Boulder in December 2007 and is
currently a postdoctoral researcher there, where she works with the
Craft Technology group. Her research explores the intersection of
ubiquitous computing, human computer interaction and education. It
investigates these topics primarily through computational textiles or
e-textiles--soft, flexible, fabric-based computers. Her work was the
recipient of the best paper award at the 2006 International Symposium
on Wearable Computers and has been featured in Popular Science, the
Boston Globe, CRAFT Magazine, the Journal of Architectural Design, the
Denver Post, and the Taipei Times. She holds MS and PhD degrees in
Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA
in Physics from Skidmore College.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 25 April 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
"Informatization and Increased Demands on Knowledge and Subjectivity"
Rudi Schmiede
Darmstadt, Germany
Informatization and the increased role of knowledge in modern
processes of production or organization are often equalized or seen as
two successive stages of development as might be seen in the usage of
the terms "informations society" and "knowledge society". I want to
argue the thesis that the two relate to each other in a complex
relationship of complementarity and contradiction.
To do so I want to formulate a theoretically rich concept of
informatization which, on one hand, shows substantial extensions of
formalized processes and structures, but, on the other hand, the
parallel growth and re-birth of limits to this formalization; for this
reason permanent approaches to contextualize and re-contextualize
these formalization processes and its results by human knowledge are
necessary. This presupposes more flexible, often more demanding, the
subjective side of work and employment including forms of work
practice. In industrial sociology the debates on the enhanced role of
subjectivity in work (in German language the term "subjectification"
was coined to describe that), on the dimensions of flexibilization and
the erosion of boundaries between work and life reflect this
tendency. New forms of risk, new health dangers, the increase of what
Sennett calls "drift", but also new chances to shape reality and
possibilities of freedom result from this development.
About the Speaker: Rudi Schmiede is Professor of Sociology at the
Darmstadt University of Technology and is engaged in a variety of
projects relating to society and ICT through its Research Group on
Work, Technology, and Society including: "(Web) Service Oriented
Architectures and Organization," "Tacit Knowledge and its Implications
for Knowledge Management," and "Labor Flexibility and ICT." See
<http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schmiede.ppt>
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 25 April 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Acquiring meaning: From lexical content to pragmatic inference"
Anna Papafragou
Delaware
http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/
Much research in linguistic theory seeks to uncover how semantic
information and pragmatic inference jointly contribute to the way
humans interpret utterances in context. Until recently, however,
little was known about how the ability to integrate lexically encoded
and contextually inferred aspects of meaning develops during language
learning. In this talk I begin to address this question focusing on
scalar implicatures (SIs), one of the best-studied cases of pragmatic
inference (Some circles are blue -> Not all circles are blue). I
report the results from a series of experiments which investigated
preschoolers' understanding of SIs in environments involving
quantifiers ('some'), numerals ('two') and aspectual verbs ('start').
I present an explanation for children's successes and failures with
SIs, and discuss implications of this work for the development of the
semantics/pragmatics interface. I also argue that asymmetries within
the scalar class revealed by the developmental data can bear on
current theories of the semantics of scalars in the adult grammar.
____________
WORK, TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATION COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 28 April 2008, 12 noon - 1:15pm
Terman 453
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
"The eScience of Work and the Work of eScience"
Kevin Crowston
Information Studies, Syracuse University
eScience, defined as "scholarly and scientific research activities in
the virtual space generated by the networked computers and by advanced
information and communication technologies" (Nentwich 2003, p. 22), is
being promoted as a revolutionary new approach to the work of
science. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the concepts of
eScience, give an example of the application of eScience ideas to my
own research on free/libre open source software development, and then
discuss two intersections of eScience with the study of work,
technology and organizations: first, as an application of eScience
(technology to support research on WTO) and second as a venue (studies
of the application of eScience technologies to the work and
organization of science).
About the Speaker: Professor Crowston is a Professor of Information
Studies at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (aka
the iSchool). Prior to moving to Syracuse, he taught for five years at
the University of Michigan Business School. He received his
A.B. (1984) in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard
University and a Ph.D. (1991) in Information Technologies from the
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His current research interests focus on new ways of organizing made
possible by the use of information technology. This work approaches
the issue in several ways: empirical studies of coordination-intensive
processes in human organizations (especially virtual organization);
theoretical characterizations of coordination problems and alternative
methods for managing them; and design and empirical evaluation of
systems to support people working together. He has published articles
and book chapters in the area of information technology and new
organizational forms. His Ph.D. dissertation, Towards a Coordination
Cookbook: Recipes for Multi-agent Action, won the International Centre
for Information Technology (ICIT) Thesis Prize for best dissertation
in Information Systems in 1991 and was a runner-up for the
International Conference on Information Systems thesis prize in 1992.
For more information on Professor Crowston, please
visit <http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/%7Enlevina/> his website
<http://crowston.syr.edu/crowston/Kevin_Crowston>.
____________
UC BERKELEY LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 28 April 2008, 4:00pm
182 Dwinelle (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
"Language influences perception in the left brain hemisphere
but not the right, or Is half a Whorf better than no Whorf at all?"
Paul Kay
UC Berkeley
Earlier work has established that categorical perception for color
correlates with differences in color naming across
languages. ('Categorical perception' refers to the tendency to make
finer perceptual discriminations at category boundaries than in the
interior of categories.) It is known that the right and left visual
fields project to the left and right brain hemispheres, respectively,
and that the left hemisphere is primarily responsible for language
processing. The research reported here shows that categorical
perception for color is restricted to the right visual field, hence to
the left (or language) hemisphere and strongly implicates language in
the perceptual discrimination of color: the "lateralized Whorf"
effect. The broad implication of the restriction of categorical
perception to the right visual field is that at every moment half of
our visual perception is influenced by language and half not so
influenced.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Tuesday, 29 April 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Hierarchical Lookahead for Automated Planning"
Bhaskara Marthi
MIT
Hierarchical structure in actions has long been considered an
important source of leverage in solving large sequential decision
problems. Approaches such as HTNs and MAXQ are all based on
identifying high level actions (HLAs), which are decomposed into lower
level actions, and eventually into primitive actions that can actually
be performed in the world. But previous approaches have not answered
the question of what it means to have a transition model for an HLA,
thus restricting the algorithms that can be used. In recent work, we
have proposed an "angelic semantics" for high level actions. This
opens the door to a number of a new offline and online planning
algorithms that are able to safely commit to or reject plans at the
high level. I will also briefly describe an application to robotic
motion planning, where our semantics allows a principled combination
of a symbolic high-level planner with roadmap-based methods at the low
leve l.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 29 April 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 80:115
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
"Operational Set Theory and 'Small' Large Cardinals"
Solomon Feferman
Stanford
"Small" large cardinal notions in the language of ZFC are those large
cardinal notions whose existence is consistent with V = L. We have
the original (1) and analogues (2-7) of small large cardinal notions
in:
1. Classical set theory
2. Admissible set theory
3. Admissible recursion theory
4. Constructive set theory
5. Explicit mathematics
6. Constructive type theory
7. Recursive ordinal notation systems for proof theory.
The long term aim is to develop a common language for small large
cardinal notions to include 1-7. This is a program in progress; at
present it is shown how to cover 1-3 in an expansion of the language
of set theory to allow us to talk about general set theoretical
operations (possibly partial); the large cardinal notions in question
are then formulated in terms of operational closure conditions. This
is a partial adaptation of Explicit Mathematics notions to the
set-theoretical framework. The approach is illustrated for
inaccessibles, Mahlo cardinals and weakly compact cardinals. An open
problem is to formulate a general reflection principle from which
these and other standard "small" large cardinal statements follow.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 30 April 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Distributed Systems:
Computation With a Million Friends (and a Few Foes)"
Adam L. Beberg
Computer Science, Stanford University
The largest distributed systems involved the art of gathering vast
amounts of computing resources from many people and organizations to
channel them into something that is often not practical by other
means. At the intersection of software, economics, and sociology, they
involve both exciting technology, and the complexities of human
motivation and interaction. While currently centralization and
consolidation rule the buzzword space, distributed systems provide
powerful capabilities to those willing to embrace the uncertainty
involved. This talk will explore the current methods for constructing
these systems, the 35 years of history they draw upon, and active work
integrating massive storage and on-demand post-processing into a
volunteer-powered system dubbed Storage@home to augment Folding@home.
About the Speaker: Adam L. Beberg has been building distributed
systems since 1990. He founded Mithral Communications & Design in
1995, which is the home of the Cosm distributed computing tools. In
1997 he was a founder and president of distributed.net until 1999,
during which RC5 was cracked once and DES was cracked twice - the
second time in 22 hours with the additional help of the EFF's Deep
Crack. In 1999 he met Vijay Pande and collaborated on Folding@home,
leading to the use of Cosm as the network library in Folding@home. He
was also honored as one of MIT Technology Review's TR100 top young
innovators of 1999. He has worked and spoken extensively in the areas
of distributed computing, storage, and computer security. With a B.S.
in Computer Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, he has
been at Stanford since 2004 working on a PhD in Vijay Pande's lab
working on next generation distributed computing methodologies, after
which he will find a nice day job in academia and start his epic quest
for tenure.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 2 May 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Automatically Generating Personalized Adaptive User Interfaces"
Krzysztof Gajos
University of Washington
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/kgajos/
User Interfaces delivered with today's software are usually created in
a one-size-fits-all manner, making implicit assumptions about the
needs, abilities, and preferences of the "average user" and the
characteristics of the "average device." I argue that personalized
user interfaces, which are adapted to a persons devices, tasks,
preferences, and abilities, can improve user satisfaction and
performance. In this talk, I focus on the portion of my research,
which demonstrates how this approach benefits people with motor
impairments. I present three concrete systems:
-- SUPPLE, which uses decision-theoretic optimization to automatically
generate user interfaces adapted to a persons device;
-- ARNAULD, which allows optimization-based systems to be adapted to users
preferences; and
-- SUPPLE++, a system that first performs a one-time assessment of a
persons motor capabilities and then automatically generates user
interfaces adapted to that user.
My experiments show that these automatically generated, personalized
user interfaces significantly improve speed, accuracy, and
satisfaction for users with motor impairments compared to
manufacturers' default interfaces.
About the Speaker: Krzysztof Gajos is a doctoral candidate in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
Washington, working with professors Daniel Weld and Jacob
Wobbrock. His research interests include human-computer interaction,
artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He was a recipient of
a Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship and he has also been a
visiting faculty member at the Ashesi University in Ghana where he
designed and taught an introductory course in artificial
intelligence. Krzysztof received his B.Sc. and M.Eng. degrees in
Computer Science from MIT. Prior to attending University of
Washington, he was a research scientist at the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, where he managed The Intelligent Room
Project.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 2 May 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
"Mobile Phones in Rural Uganda"
Jenna Burrell
I'll be talking about the two directions my mobile phone research is
taking and about my plans for additional fieldwork this summer. The
first is about the moral economy of the mobile phone. This focuses on
the mobile phone as a gift, as a device for transferring money, and as
a shared community resource. I ask, how are the benefits of mobile
phone access distributed in rural communities? The second focus is on
the concept of 'information' and to what extent it translates between
different languages and cultures. In rural Uganda there was the
possibility for new mobile phone services to deliver everything from
market prices to football scores. However, what information was needed
and under what circumstances it could be acted upon are some key
unanswered questions.
"Progress Report"
Ryan Shaw.
no abstract
____________
END MATERIAL
The CSLI Calendar appears weekly on most Wednesdays throughout the
year. Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in
the Calendar should be submitted to the editor, who reserves the right
to decide what does or does not go in the calendar
mailto:incalendar@csli.stanford.edu
Requests to be added to the mailing list should be sent to
sympa@lists-csli.stanford.edu. With the lines in the body of the text
of either
subscribe csli-calendar
for the long form or
subscribe csli-short-calendar
for the short form (i.e., no abstracts). You will be asked to confirm
the subscription in either case. To unsubscribe use the word
unsubscribe instead of subscribe. Problems with subscribing or
unsubscribing should be sent to incalendar@csli.stanford.edu
The full current issue is at
http://cslicalendar.stanford.edu/current.shtml
and the archives at
http://cslicalendar.stanford.edu/Archive/
People on many of the CSLI computers can type 'help csli-calendar' to
see the current issue.
The CSLI Calendar is also posted each week to the su.events usenet
newsgroup (only available from computers on the Stanford network)
Information about CSLI's research program is available at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
For maps to the Stanford University rooms see
http://cslicalendar.stanford.edu/locations.shtml