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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 28 May 2008, vol. 23:36
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
28 May 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 36
______________________________________________________________________
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 28 May 2008 TO 6 JUNE 2008
WEDNESDAY, 28 MAY 2008
12 noon Psychology Developmental Brownbags [28-May-08]
Jordan Hall 420:102
"Individual differences in social cognitive development in
infancy: From genes to beliefs"
Susan Johnson
Psychology
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_developmental.html
12 noon Berkeley Redwood Seminar [28-May-08]
508-20 Evans Hall (Berkeley)
"Translation of sensory neural code across the retinothalamic synapse"
Xin Wang
USC
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/seminars.php
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [28-May-08]
Gates B01
"The Search for Jim Gray"
Panel discussion
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
5:30pm Wesson Lectures on Problems of Democracy [28-May-08]
Bldg. 370:370
"Rethinking Justice for Multilingual Entities"
Philippe Van Parijs
Universite catholique de Louvain
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/homepage.html
6:30pm Stanford Talk [28-May-08]
Bldg. 524, 451 Panama Mall
"The Art of Tangible Bits"
Hiroshi Ishii
MIT Media Lab
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/
http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/Resources/Ishii%20Flyer.jpg
THURSDAY, 29 MAY 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [29-May-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"Partial Orders of Similarity Invariant between Brain and
Perceptual Representations of Language"
Pat Suppes
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/~psuppes/
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [29-May-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Fabio Maino
Cisco
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
3:30pm SRI AI Seminar Series [29-May-08]
Enterprise Room, Bldg. E, SRI International
"There Aren't Any Real BDI Theories/Models Out There"
David J Israel
SRI
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [29-May-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"The Magitti Activity-Aware Leisure Guide: Opportunity Discovery,
Innovation and New Technology Platform Development at PARC"
Bo Begole and Victoria Bellotti
Palo Alto Research Center
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [29-May-08]
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"Discrete Denoising with Shifts"
Taesup Moon
Stanford University
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [29-May-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels"
Hiroshi Ishii
MIT Media Lab &
Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [29-May-08]
Packard 101
"Erasure networks: Capacity, impact of feedback and secrecy"
Sriram Vishwanath
University of Texas at Austin
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
5:30pm Stanford Psychology of Language Tea (SPLaT!) [29-May-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"You can guess where this talk is going:
Discourse-driven expectations in sentence processing"
Hannah Rohde
Linguistics, UC San Diego
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/newsletter/
Abstract below
5:30pm Wesson Lectures on Problems of Democracy [29-May-08]
Bldg. 370:370
"Institutional Design for Multilingual Democracies"
Philippe Van Parijs
Universite catholique de Louvain
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/homepage.html
FRIDAY, 30 MAY 2008
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [30-May-08]
Gates B01
"Tangible Media for Design and Inspiration"
Hiroshi Ishii
MIT Media Lab
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
1:00pm Wesson Lectures on Problems of Democracy [30-May-08]
Bldg. 460:426
Discussion seminar
Philippe Van Parijs
Universite catholique de Louvain
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/homepage.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [30-May-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Angela Kessell
Stanford Cognition
http://psychology.stanford.edu/~akessell/
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [30-May-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Undergraduate honors presentations"
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Information below
SATURDAY, 31 MAY 2008
all day Tribute to Jim Grey [31-May-08]
Zellerbach hall (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/JimGrayTribute/
all day Philosophy Workshop [31-May-08]
Cordura 100
"Epistemology Meets Logic, Informally"
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/fmep/
Information below
SUNDAY, 1 JUNE 2008
all day Philosophy Workshop [1-Jun-08]
Cordura 100
"Epistemology Meets Logic, Informally"
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/fmep/
Information below
MONDAY, 2 JUNE 2008
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [2-Jun-08]
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
Title to be announced
Olga Dmitrieva
Stanford University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
TUESDAY, 3 JUNE 2008
12 noon UC Merced Cognitive Animation Workshop [3-Jun-08]
Yosemite National Park
http://graphics.ucmerced.edu/coganim/
(registration required)
Information below
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [3-Jun-08]
Bldg. 80:115
"A Refined Proof of Euler's Polyhedron Formula"
Jesse Alama
Stanford
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
Abstract below
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [3-Jun-08]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Traitor Tracing for Anonymous Attack in AACS Content Protection"
Hongxia Jin
IBM Almaden
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
WEDNESDAY, 4 JUNE 2008
all day UC Merced Cognitive Animation Workshop [4-Jun-08]
Yosemite National Park
http://graphics.ucmerced.edu/coganim/
(registration required)
Information below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [4-Jun-08]
Gates B01
"The Role of Accelerated Computing in the Multi-Core Era"
Chuck Moore
AMD
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
7:00pm IEEE Robotics and Automation [4-Jun-08]
Moffett Field, Mountain View
"Adaptive Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles"
Conor McGann
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) / Willow Garage
http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ras
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 5 JUNE 2008
4:00pm PARC Forum [5-Jun-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Powerset: Deep natural language processing for consumer search"
Ronald M. Kaplan
Powerset
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [5-Jun-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Annual Presentation of Honors Theses"
Senior Honors Program Students
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Information below
5:30pm Computer Musings [5-Jun-08]
Skilling Auditorium
"Fun With Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs)"
Don Knuth
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 6 JUNE 2008
____________
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, 28 May 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"The Search for Jim Gray"
Panel discussion
When Jim Gray, a noted computer scientist and Turing award winner,
disappeared at sea, a massive effort was mounted to find him, an
effort that including both traditional and non-traditional
approaches. In this Colloquium meeting, a panel of speakers will touch
on both the technical approaches employed in the search and on the
social side where the community organized a massive effort quickly and
efficiently. We expect audience participation, questions, comments,
and story telling.
Reminder: A Tribute to Jim Gray and a Technical Symposium is scheduled
at UC Berkeley for Saturday, May 30th. Registration is required for
the technical symposium. See Jim Gray Tribute
<http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/JimGrayTribute/> for information.
About the speakers: Panel participants include Donna Carnes, Mike
Olson, and David Swatland.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 29 May 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Partial Orders of Similarity Invariant between Brain and
Perceptual Representations of Language"
Pat Suppes
Philosophy, Stanford
http://www.stanford.edu/~psuppes/
The idea of a hierarchical structure of language constituents of
phonemes, syllables, words, and sentences is robust and widely
accepted. Empirical similarities at every level of this hierarchy have
been collected and analyzed in the form of confusion matrices for many
years. By normalizing such data so that similarities are represented
by conditional probabilities, simple orderings of similarities can be
constructed. The intersection of two such orderings is an invariant
partial ordering with respect to the two given orders. Such invariant
partial orderings, especially between perceptual and brain orderings,
but also between brain images of words generated by auditory or visual
presentations, are the focus of this lecture. Data from four
experiments are analyzed, with reasonable success in finding
conceptually significant invariants.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 29 May 2008, 3:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"There Aren't Any Real BDI Theories/Models Out There"
David J Israel
SRI
"Plans and Resource-Bounded Practical Reasoning," by Martha Pollack,
Michael Bratman and myself was recently honored as one of two
influential papers in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent
Systems by the International Foundation for AAMAS. This is a deeply
gratifying award, .... on the other hand.... and here's where I look
this particular gift-horse in the mouth.
I assume that the paper is considered influential for being one of the
first fairly clear arguments for and statements of the BDI approach to
autonomous agents. And certainly there has been a large body of work
advertising itself as in the BDI line, much of it citing our
paper. But, I think much of that is false (though not dishonest!)
advertising. In my mind, at least, "BDI" was and still is to be parsed
as "(BD)I"; that is, though we argued for the insufficiency of
Decision Theory (BD-theory), we did not at all argue for its
non-necessity. My starting point then and now was (some form or other
of) Decision Theory, a theory of action choice under uncertainty with
outcomes at the very least ordered by desirability. But much of the
work in the so-called BDI tradition deals only flat-out beliefs and
flat-out goals. If we call flat-out beliefs "acceptances", then we
can say that much of this work is really in a AGI tradition. Maybe
that is the tradition to be working in, but AGI ain't BDI.
The talk will even include a sketch of a (Heaven Help Us!) BADI
account.
N.B. Just as my co-authors were largely responsible for the clarity
and felicity of the prose of the original paper and most of the good
ideas, as well, I am wholly responsible for this take on our work and,
as the French would say, on its Re-ception.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 29 May 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
(directions at <http://www.parc.com/directions>)
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"The Magitti Activity-Aware Leisure Guide: Opportunity Discovery,
Innovation and New Technology Platform Development at PARC"
Bo Begole and Victoria Bellotti
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 DNP's 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 Speaker: 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 scientist who creates
technologies for novel end-user 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 information retrieval. 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. Bo is glad he switched careers when he did.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 29 May 2008, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rakhlin/cis-seminar
"Discrete Denoising with Shifts"
Taesup Moon
Stanford University
Recovery of discrete data corrupted by discrete noise is an
increasingly encountered problem in contexts as diverse as digital
communications, bio-molecular sequence analysis, and the
Internet. Perfect recovery is sometimes possible but, more generally,
performance is measured under a given fidelity criterion.
This talk will focus on the often realistic scenario where the
corruption mechanism is a "discrete memoryless channel", meaning that
the components of the corrupted data are independent given the
underlying clean data. I will introduce an algorithm for this setting
which performs essentially as well as a genie that has access, in
addition to the noisy data, also to the underlying clean data, and can
choose to switch between "sliding-window" denoisers in a way that
optimizes the overall performance. This will be shown to be the case
in several strong statistical senses, within a "semi-stochastic"
setting where the underlying clean data are deterministic and the only
randomness is due to the noise. Further, when the clean data form a
piecewise stationary stochastic process or field , the algorithm
achieves the optimum distribution-dependent performance. These
performance guarantees are contingent on a certain growth rate
condition that must be imposed on the number of switches, which is
necessary in the sense that any scheme fails to compete in the above
senses when the condition does not hold.
The key issue in implementing our scheme is to efficiently learn the
best segmentation of the data and the associated denoisers that the
genie is using, based solely on the noisy data. We will describe our
approach to this problem, which results in a practical algorithm:
implementable with complexity (time and memory) growing linearly with
the data size and the number of switches. Preliminary experimental
results suggest that the new scheme has the capacity to improve on
prior art in applications where the nature of the data abruptly
changes in time (or space), as is often the case in practice. I will
conclude with a discussion of some remaining challenges.
Joint work with Professor Tsachy Weissman (Stanford University).
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 29 May 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels"
Hiroshi Ishii
MIT Media Lab &
Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/
Where the sea meets the land, life has blossomed into a myriad of
unique forms in the turbulence of water, sand, and wind. At another
seashore between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now
facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenships in the
physical and digital worlds. Windows to the digital world are confined
to flat square ubiquitous screens filled with pixels, or "painted
bits." Unfortunately, one can not feel and confirm the virtual
existence of this digital information through one's body.
Tangible Bits, our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), seeks
to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information,
and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital
information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Guided
by this vision, we are designing "tangible user interfaces" which
employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments
of digital information. These involve foreground interactions with
graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses
of touch and kinesthesia. We are also exploring background information
displays which use "ambient media." Here, we seek to communicate
digitally-mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of
human awareness. Our goal is to realize seamless interfaces taking
advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills
developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world.
In this talk, I will present the design principles and a variety of
tangible user interfaces the Tangible Media Group has presented in
Media Arts, Design, and Science communities including ICC, Ars
Electronica, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale, ArtFutula, IDSA, ICSID,
AIGA, ACM CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, CSCW.
____________
STANFORD PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE TEA (SPLAT!)
on Thursday, 29 May 2008, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/newsletter/
"You can guess where this talk is going:
Discourse-driven expectations in sentence processing"
Hannah Rohde
Linguistics, UC San Diego
Most models of sentence processing focus on how comprehenders combine
words to form a sentence. However, for successful language
comprehension, comprehenders must also combine sentences to form
larger discourse structures. This talk addresses the question of
whether or not comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming
discourse continuations, and furthermore whether those expectations
have an impact on sentence-internal phenomena such as coreference and
the resolution of syntactic ambiguity. For example, consider (1):
(1) Mary scolded Jane. She kicked her.
Several different relationships can be inferred to hold between the
two sentences in (1), and the different relationships in turn yield
different interpretations of the two pronouns. In the case of (1), an
'Explanation relation' supports the reading in which Jane kicked Mary
while a narrative 'Occasion relation' supports the reading in which
Mary scolded Jane and then, on top of that, Mary also kicked her. In
this talk, I identify several factors that influence comprehenders'
expectations about what the operative intersentential coherence
relation is likely to be in a given passage. For an example like (1),
the presence of a so-called 'implicit-causality' verb (scold)
contributes to the likelihood of an Explanation relation, which in
turn supports the pattern of pronoun interpretation in which it was
Jane who kicked Mary.
The results fit within a larger picture of expectation-driven
processing in language comprehension: Previous work has shown that
comprehenders are sensitive to statistical regularities at the level
of sounds, words, and syntactic structures; the experiments presented
here provide the first evidence of expectation-driven processing at
the discourse level as well.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 30 May 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Tangible Media for Design and Inspiration"
Hiroshi Ishii
MIT Media Lab
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/
Our vision of Tangible Bits is carried out through an artistic
approach. Whereas today's mainstream Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
and Design research address functional concerns -- the needs of users,
practical applications, and usability evaluation -- Tangible Bits is a
vision driven by concepts. This is because today's technologies will
become obsolete in one year, and today's applications will be replaced
in 10 years, but true visions -- we believe -- can last longer than
100 years. Tangible Bits seeks to realize seamless interfaces between
humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving
physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable
and perceptible. Our goal is to invent new design media for artistic
expression as well as for scientific analysis, taking advantage of the
richness of human senses and skills -- as developed through our
lifetime of interaction with the physical world -- as well as the
computational reflection enabled by real-time sensing and digital
feedback. Tangible Bits is an artistic vision that seeks to transform
the way we see and interact with the world. I will present examples of
Tangible Bits projects that were at once inspired by Art and are
inspiring artists. They were presented and exhibited in Media Arts,
Design, and Science communities including ICC, Ars Electronica, Centre
Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, Venice Biennale, ArtFutula,
IDSA, ICSID, AIGA, ACM CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, CSCW.
About the Speaker: Hiroshi Ishii founded the Tangible Media Group at
the MIT Media Lab in the end of 1995.He is a co-director of Things
That Think (TTT) consortium and a project leader of Digital Life (DL)
consortium at the MIT Media Lab. He has done extensive research on
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI). His team at NTT Human Interface Laboratories
invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. He has been active in a
variety of academic, industrial design, and media art communities
including ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, IDSA, and Ars Electronica.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 30 May 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"Undergraduate honors presentations"
David Hall
"Tracking the Evolution of Science"
Symbolic Systems Program
Advisor: Dan Jurafsky
Karl Beck Pichotta
"Phrasal Implicatives and Paraphrases in the Bridge System"
Symbolic Systems Program
Advisor: Lauri Karttunen
Mackenzie Price
"Tinky & Foxy Revisited: A Study on Change in African American
Vernacular English Over Time"
Linguistics
Advisor: John R. Rickford
____________
PHILOSOPHY WORKSHOP
on Saturday and Sunday, 31 May and 1 June 2008, all day
Cordura 100
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/fmep/
"Epistemology Meets Logic, Informally"
The Stanford University Philosophy Department is planning an informal
event where philosophers and logicians will gather to discuss a
variety of issues in epistemology. The goal of the meeting is to
provide an opportunity for fruitful interaction between 'formal' and
'mainstream' epistemologists. Besides general talks on the use of
formal tools (epistemic logic, proof theory, probability) in
epistemology, we will focus on the following themes:
* Justification, evidence, and proofs
* Information dynamics and action
* Interfaces between probability and logic
* Connections of epistemology with other disciplines
We hope that by focusing on these themes with discussion-oriented
talks by logicians and epistemologists from Stanford and congenial
places elsewhere, the workshop will become a catalyst for
collaboration between researchers using formal and non-formal methods
to study similar epistemic issues.
Saturday, May 31 2008
9:15 - 9:30: Coffee
9:30 - 9:40: Opening
Morning session: Justification, evidence and proof
9:40 - 10:20 Bryan Renne, CUNY
"Reasoning About Evidence in Hypothetical Situations"
10:25 - 11:05 Sherrilyn Roush, UC Berkeley
TBA
11:10 - 11:50 Branden Fitelson, UC Berkeley
"Epistemological Critiques of 'Classical' Logic:
Two Case Studies"
11:55 - 12:25 Discussion led by Johan van Benthem, Stanford/UvA
Lunch
Afternoon session: Probability and logic
14:00 - 14:40 Alistair Isaac, Stanford
"Diachronic Dutch Book Arguments for Bounded
Rationality, case study: Sleeping Beauty"
14:45 - 15:25 Kenny Easwaran, UC Berkeley
TBA
15:30 - 16:10 Brian Skyrms, Stanford/Irvine
"Signals:Adaptive Dynamics and the Flow of information"
16:15 - 16:45 Discussion led by Persi Diaconis, Stanford
Dinner Reception at CSLI (starting at 17:30)
Sunday, June 1 2008
9:15 - 9:30: Coffee
Morning session 1: Information dynamics and action
9:30 - 10:10 Tomohiro Hoshi, Stanford
"Merging frameworks for interaction"
10:15 - 10:55 Eric Pacuit, Stanford
Morning session 2: Information dynamics and action
11:30 - 12:10 Alexandru Baltag, Oxford
"Belief Change, Information Merge and the Nature of
`Knowledge': A Social-Dynamic-Logical View on Epistemology"
12:15 - 12:55 John Perry, Stanford
"Epistemic Possibility and Reflexive Content"
13:00 - 13:30 Discussion led by David Israel, SRI International
13:30 - 13:40 Closing
Lunch Reception (starting at 13:45)
Supporting Organizations
- CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information)
- Stanford Logic Group
- Stanford Philosophy Department
Advisory Committee
- Johan van Benthem (Stanford/Amsterdam, Philosophy, johan..csli.stanford.edu)
- Krista Lawlor (Stanford, Philosophy, klawlor..stanford.edu)
- John Perry (Stanford, Philosophy, john..csli.stanford.edu)
- Yoav Shoham (Stanford, CS)
Organizational Committee
- Tomohiro Hoshi (Stanford, Philosophy, thoshi..stanford.edu)
- Eric Pacuit (Stanford, CS, epacuit..stanford.edu)
- Assaf Sharon (Stanford, Philosophy, assafsh..stanford.edu)
____________
UC MERCED COGNITIVE ANIMATION WORKSHOP
on Tuesday and Wednesday, 3 and 4 June 2008, all day
Yosemite National Park
http://graphics.ucmerced.edu/coganim/
(registration required)
Animated characters appear in a wide range of digital media, including
websites, video games, information kiosks, educational software, etc;
and they have been extensively applied to training and simulation.
More and more, scientists are seeking ways to create realistic
animated characters that can simulate human movement and interact with
the environment autonomously and naturally. In the past decade,
computer scientists and engineers have made tremendous advances in the
areas of humanoid robotics and character animation. Likewise,
cognitive scientists have notable advances in human animation,
especially the brain functions that drive motor control and motion
perception. Though many important discoveries have emerged in research
on humanoid and human animation, rarely do the groups interact.
The aim of the Cognitive Animation workshop is to address these
issues, in particular focusing on computational models of motion
intelligence for 3D humanoid characters and their applications in
industry.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 3 June 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 80:115
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
"A Refined Proof of Euler's Polyhedron Formula"
Jesse Alama
Stanford
A formal proof of Euler's polyhedron formula (EPF) was recently
carried out by the presenter in the MIZAR proof checking system.
MIZAR is based on Tarski-Grothendieck set theory (TG), a rather strong
first-order theory of sets (its characteristic axiom implies the
existence of infinitely many strongly inaccessible cardinals). But
the simple combinatorial content of EPF makes it rather plausible that
the same proof could be carried out in theories weaker than TG. In
this presentation we discuss our efforts to whittle away at TG and to
identify such weaker theories.
____________
IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION
on Wednesday, 4 June 2008, 7:00pm
CMU West, Moffett Field, Mountain View
http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ras
"Adaptive Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles"
Conor McGann
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) / Willow Garage
This talk describes the application of AI planning to adaptively
control an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in pursuit of greater
understanding of dynamic ocean processes
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) are mobile robotic platforms used
by the oceanographic community for exploration in diverse environments
from the seafloor to the ocean surface. The extensive payload capacity
and operational versatility of AUV's offer a cost-effective
alternative to traditional ship-based oceanographic measurements for
advancing ocean research. Existing mission control practices rely on
manually scripted plans produced prior to mission execution. Mission
scripts are prone to error and do not afford adaptability of the
vehicle to unanticipated events. Such adaptability is critical to
maximize science utility from the limited time, energy and sampling
opportunities available for a mission. To address these issues, we
have developed and deployed an Adaptive Control System that integrates
Planning and Probabilistic State Estimation in a goal-directed hybrid
executive, enabling scientists to detect, survey and sample events of
an unpredictable nature. The system developed for ocean science is
general purpose and adaptable to other ocean going and terrestrial
platforms.
About the Speaker: Conor McGann hails from Dublin, Ireland. He
received his Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Trinity College,
Dublin in 1990 and his Phd in Computer Science from that same
institution in 1995. Subsequently, he co-founded Cunav Technologies, a
Dublin based software company which he lead as CEO for 3 years. In
1998 Conor married a Texan and emigrated to the US where he joined the
supply-chain company, i2 Technologies, and became the Chief Architect
for their Customer Management Product Group.
In 2002 Conor joined the Planning and Scheduling Group at the NASA
Ames Research Center where he lead the development of the EUROPA-2
constraint-based temporal planning library which has been used for
ground based and onboard planning in a wide range of applications. In
November 2006 Conor turned to inner space when he joined the embryonic
Autonomous Systems Group of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute.
In May, 2008, Conor returned to the Bay Area to join Willow Garage, a
robotics company located in Menlo Park. He continues to collaborate
with NASA and MBARI and pursue his interests in autonomous systems.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 5 June 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
(directions at <http://www.parc.com/directions>)
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Powerset: Deep natural language processing for consumer search"
Ronald M. Kaplan
Powerset
Google, Yahoo, and other conventional search engines have been
remarkably successful at making vast amounts of information available
to ordinary users. They achieve robustness and scale by creating
efficient bag-of-words indexes of the terms they extract from
unstructured text and by encouraging users to specify their
information needs with keywords that are well-suited to bag-of-words
retrieval. These methods suffer from errors of both precision and
recall. Undesired results are returned because the systems do not
index and cannot filter according to the semantic relations that the
user has in mind, and desired results are missed because keyword
matches cannot identify passages that use different terms and
different syntactic constructions to express semantically equivalent
concepts.
It is not a novel idea that these precision and recall problems can be
addressed--in principle--by using deep natural language processing to
extract underlying semantic concepts and relations both from text and
from queries. Powerset is a start-up company that is attempting to
address these problems in practice. In a continuing collaboration with
PARC researchers, we are extending PARC's fairly mature natural
language technologies and combining it with carefully tuned indexing
and retrieval components to build a large semantic index for a natural
language search engine.
In this talk I'll point out why search is a particularly good
application for natural language processing, outline some of the
factors that justify this effort, and describe some of the
technologies that make it possible. I'll also show examples from
Powerset's recently launched Wikipedia search system to illustrate not
only how semantic indexing solves some of the keyword recall and
precision problems but also how we are using semantic information to
provide new tools for exploring and understanding the information that
comes back from a search.
About the Speaker: Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientific Officer at
Powerset, Inc. Prior to joining Powerset, he was a Research Fellow at
the (Xerox) Palo Alto Research Center where he created and directed
the Natural Language Theory and Technology research group. He is also
a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford
University.
He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University,
where he investigated how explicit computational models of grammar
could be embedded in models of human language performance. He has made
many contributions to computational linguistics and linguistic
theory. These include the notions of consumer-producer and
active-chart parsing, the design of the formal theory of Lexical
Functional Grammar and its initial computational implementation, and
the mathematical, linguistic, and computational concepts that underlie
the use of finite-state phonological and morphological descriptions.
Kaplan is a past President of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, a co-recipient of the 1992 Software System Award of the
Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the ACM. He has
also been a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds over 30
patents in computational linguistics and related areas.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 5 June 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Annual Presentation of Honors Theses"
Senior Honors Program Students
4:15pm David Ho,
"Neural Network Models of Recognition Memory"
(Advisor: Jay McClelland, Second Reader: Anthony Wagner)
4:25pm Jieun Oh,
"Resolving Conflicting Linguistic and Musical Cues in Metric &
Beat-Strength Perception of Songs"
(Advisor: Jonathan Berger, Second Reader: Lera Boroditsky)
4:35pm Jason Robinson,
"The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in Creativity and Artistic
Expression"
(Advisor: John R. Perry, Second Reader: Krista Lawlor)
4:45pm Karl Pichotta,
"Phrasal Implicatives and Paraphrases in the Bridge
Question-Answering System"
(Advisor: Lauri Karttunen, Second Reader: Tracy King)
4:55pm David Hall,
"Tracking the Evolution of Science"
(Advisor: Dan Jurafsky, Second Reader: Chris Manning)
5:05pm Julie Finkelstein,
"I know you are, but what am I?: The effects of anonymity and
gender on educational interaction in Second Life"
(Advisor: Jeff Shrager, Second Reader: Jeremy Bailenson)
5:15pm Joel Lewenstein,
"When It's OK to Steal: Three Intentions Being Prototyping
Using External Code Resources"
(Advisor: Scott R. Klemmer, Second Reader: Joel Brandt)
5:25pm Rachel Yong,
"Developing Voting Software to Calculate the 2008 ASSU
Election Results Using Alternate Preference Aggregation
Methods"
(Advisor: Marc Pauly, Second Reader: Greg Watkins)
5:35pm Refreshments
____________
COMPUTER MUSINGS
on Thursday, 5 June 2008, 5:30pm
Skilling Auditorium
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html
"Fun With Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs)"
Don Knuth
Computer Science, Stanford
I'll discuss some of the adventures I've had during the past year
while reading hundreds of papers and writing dozens of programs that
relate to the fascinating family of data structures called BDDs. With
these tools I've been able to answer questions that I never before
thought I'd able to resolve in a reasonable amount of time. For
example: There are exactly 301,312,268,736 ways to color a map of the
48 continental United States using four colors, with 12 states of each
color (and of course with no adjoining states the same color). BDDs
make it possible to determine this number in a few seconds, after
making only about 150 million accesses to computer memory. Then we can
readily find uniformly random map colorings, optimum colorings, and
solve other related problems without explicitly listing all the
possibilities.
If time permits, I will also disclose the answer to the following
riddle: In what major world city are shirts of size XL smaller than
shirts of size L?
____________
END MATERIAL
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