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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 4 June 2008, vol. 23:37
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
4 June 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 37
______________________________________________________________________
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 4 JUNE 2008 TO 15 JUNE 2008
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 in last week's calendar
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
10:00am Stanford University Oral Examination [6-Jun-08]
Clark Center, room S360
"Motion Planning for Legged and Humanoid Robots"
Kris Hauser
Computer Science, Stanford
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/
Abstract below
12 noon Seminar on Science, Technology and Society [6-Jun-08]
Encina Hall East, rm E207
"Reflections on the Post-Scientific Society"
Chris Hill
George Mason University
http://www.stanford.edu/group/STS
Abstract below
MONDAY, 9 JUNE 2008
TUESDAY, 10 JUNE 2008
1:00pm CS376: HCI Student Research [10-Jun-08]
Wallenberg 124
"Project Presentations"
students
http://cs376.stanford.edu/
Information below
7:30pm BayCHI [10-Jun-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Making Emotion Work for You: A Case Study of Collaboration
Between Design and Research in Building the Halo Video Game Franchise"
August de los Reyes and Dennis Wixon
Microsoft
http://www.baychi.org/program/
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 11 JUNE 2008
12:15pm CS194: Computer Science Senior Projects [11-Jun-08]
Wallenberg Hall
"Software Faire"
students
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs194/
Information below
12:30pm NASA Demonstration [11-Jun-08]
CREST Facility, Bldg. 538c, NASA Ames, Moffet Field
"Spoken Dialog Systems"
Beth Ann Hockey and students/partners
UC Santa Cruz
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jchristi/LING160/demonstration.pdf
Abstract below
5:00pm Neuroscience, Law and Society Interest Group [11-Jun-08]
Location ??
"The Dynamic Mind: Neurochemical Modulation of Decision Making"
Molly Crockett
Cambridge University
http://stanfordlawneuroscienceandsociety.pbwiki.com/
ermurphy .. stanford.edu
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [11-Jun-08]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Automated Dependency Discovery of Hosts and Network Services
in Distributed Systems"
Moises Goldszmidt
Microsoft Research
http://sfbayacm.org/dmsig.php
THURSDAY, 12 JUNE 2008
FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2008
SUNDAY, 15 JUNE 2008
9:30am Stanford Commencement [15-Jun-08]
Stanford Stadium
Speaker is Oprah Winfrey
http://commencement.stanford.edu/
open to the public, no tickets needed
____________
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.
____________
NOTE
Best wishes to Stanford student taking exams and/or graduating.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
THE SUMMER INSTITUTE AT WALLENBERG HALL 2008
presented by Media X, Stanford University, California
http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/
Wallenberg Hall is pleased to announce its 2008 Summer Institute, a
unique forum in which industry leaders, researchers, educators, and
practitioners explore critical issues at the crossroads of learning,
collaboration and technology. The Institute staff has designed
interactive, hands-on sessions that offer peers a chance to connect in
a small group setting on the Stanford University campus.
Program Description:
In 2008, the Institute will offer several independent but related one
and two-day workshops over three weeks between July 28 and August 15;
participants register for each workshop independently. Depending on
your area of interest. You can attend just one, or several! Attendance
is capped in each session, guaranteeing a personal learning experience
for all.
Here is a sample of the topics we plan to cover this year:
Social Media Classroom - July 31-August 1, 2008
Virtual Collaboration and Team Effectiveness - July 31-August 1, 2008
Mobile Video Stories and Narration - August 1, 2008 (one day)
Monetizing Audience Engagement in New Media - August 4-5, 2008
Global Collaboration, Interactive Work Places and Spaces, and
Telepresence - August 4-5, 2008
Workgroup Protocols for Networked Teams - August 5, 2008 (one day)
Covering Innovation - August 5, 2008
Social Media Collaboratory - August 7-8, 2008
Knowledge Management in Virtual Worlds - August 7-8, 2008
Tools for Digital Ethnographies - August 11-15, 2008
Cost: Discounts are available for Media X affiliate members, academic
staff and faculty attendees, and for students. See workshop
descriptions for details. Stanford participants can use STAP funds.
More Information: Enquiries welcome. Please contact Amy Atkinson at
amy.atkinson@stanford.edu or Adelaide Dawes at adelaide@stanford.edu.
We hope you will join us this summer on the beautiful Stanford
University campus, located in the heart of Silicon Valley and close
to the wonderful city of San Francisco, California.
____________
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?
____________
STANFORD UNIVERSITY ORAL EXAMINATION
on Friday, 6 June 2008, 10:00am
Clark Center, room S360
http://cs.stanford.edu/calendar/
"Motion Planning for Legged and Humanoid Robots"
Kris Hauser
Computer Science, Stanford
Legged vehicles have attracted interest for many high-mobility
applications, such as military troop support and logistics in rocky,
steep, and forested terrain, scientific exploration of cliffs,
mountains, and volcanoes on earth and other planets, and search and
rescue. Humanoid robots have additional applications in homes and
offices as personal assistants. But they are not easily controlled,
because dozens of joints must be coordinated to maintain balance while
executing a task. This is particularly difficult in extremely uneven,
steep, or cluttered terrain -- precisely where legs are an advantage.
I present a legged locomotion planner that reasons with the physical
and operational constraints in the vehicle's high dimensional
configuration space, producing motions that are guaranteed to avoid
collision and remain balanced. This planner works on a variety of
terrain, ranging from flat ground to steep and rocky cliff faces, and
has been applied to three very different robots: NASA's six-legged
lunar vehicle ATHLETE, AIST Japan's biped humanoid robot HRP-2, and
Stanford's four-limbed rock climbing robot Capuchin.
The planner must simultaneously 1) search a graph to find a sequence
of contacts to make and break, and 2) plan single-step motions using
probabilistic roadmap planners (PRMs). I prove that a "fuzzy search",
where PRM planning is interleaved between candidate steps, has
theoretical completeness properties, and a running time not strongly
affected by configuration space dimension. The planner can also
produce natural-looking motions given a small number of high-quality
example motions (motion primitives) that bias the search toward
similar paths. These techniques can be applied to other hybrid
systems, and I present a manipulation planner that enables the Honda
ASIMO humanoid robot to push objects on a table.
____________
SEMINAR ON SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
on Friday, 6 June 2008, 12 noon
Encina Hall East, rm E207
http://www.stanford.edu/group/STS
"Reflections on the Post-Scientific Society"
Chris Hill
George Mason University
The United States is blessed with an extraordinarily successful system
for the generation and application of innovation. However, radical new
challenges and opportunities suggest that the United States is on the
threshold of a new era in the development of advanced societies, the
post-scientific society. This society will have several key
characteristics, the most important of which is that innovation
leading to wealth generation and productivity growth will be based
principally on world-leading mastery of the creative powers of, and
the basic sciences of, individual human beings, their societies, and
their cultures. This paper argues that while advanced scientific and
engineering research will remain important, the leading edge of
innovation will move from the workshop, the laboratory, and the office
to the studio, the think tank, the atelier, and cyberspace. The
globalization of research and innovation means that the United States
faces a host of effective new competitor nations with the capability
of doing fundamental research and achieving scientific advance in many
fields. Success in innovation in the post-scientific society will
demand not only excellence in research but also deep understanding of
other cultures, other markets, and other ways of doing business.
About the Speaker: Christopher T. Hill has been Professor of Public
Policy and Technology in the School of Public Policy at George Mason
University since 1994. After formal education and experience in
engineering, Dr. Hill has spent more than three decades in practice,
research, teaching and consulting in science and technology policy,
focusing on the history, design, evaluation, and politics of federal
policies to stimulate commercial technological innovation. From 1997
to 2005, he was Vice Provost for Research at Mason. He was a Public
Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
in 2005-2006. Earlier, he was with RAND, the National Academies, the
Congressional Research Service, MIT, the Office of Technology
Assessment, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Uniroyal
Corporation. As a Principal in Technology Policy International, he
has consulted extensively with Japanese government agencies regarding
industrial competitiveness and reform of R&D funding and higher
education systems. He has a B.S. from the Illinois Institute of
Technology and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, all
in chemical engineering.
RSVP: Please bring a bag lunch. Light refreshments will be provided, so
please RSVP to <connors@stanford.edu> by Wednesday.
____________
CS376: HCI STUDENT RESEARCH
on Tuesday, 10 June 2008, 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Wallenberg 124
http://cs376.stanford.edu/
"Project Presentations"
This is a great chance to meet PhD, Masters, and undergraduate
students in Human-Computer Interaction. This is a great chance to meet
a select group of students includes the designers, programmers, and
evaluation specialists of the future.
Here are some of the exciting areas that students are investigating:
* The possibility of "crowdsourcing" the brainstorming process
* New interaction techniques for groupware systems with one shared
display and tens of mice
* Design of voice agents for multiple in-car technologies
* New interfaces for interactive programming
* Mobile and social interfaces for news reading
* Attentional issues surrounding mobile phone use while driving
* Tools for collaborative software development and code sharing
* Speech-based controls' affect on enjoyment in online multi-player
games
* Design of user interfaces to help evaluate trustworthiness of
Wikipedia pages
* Increasing collaboration among owners of small farms by improving
online forums
For more information about this year's course, please visit:
http://cs376.stanford.edu
____________
BAYCHI
on Tuesday, 10 June 2008, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.baychi.org/program/
"Making Emotion Work for You: A Case Study of Collaboration
Between Design and Research in Building the Halo Video Game Franchise"
August de los Reyes and Dennis Wixon
Microsoft
The competitive environment for technology for consumers is changing.
Capabilities, features, functions are no longer sufficient. Emotional
engagement and compelling experiences will distinguish the successful
consumer products of the future. Companies can adapt or die. Designing
successful products for this new world requires we change the way we
think about people and products. We also need to rethink techniques
and processes we use of design and product research. This presentation
provides a brief overview of a counter-intuitive (and therefore,
controversial) design approach with the goal of eliciting positive
irrational response. The primary focus will be a classic but
innovative theory of human emotion that has simple and practical
implications for both design and research. We will show how this
approach has helped shape some of the most successful products in
recent history. We will also present a new way of thinking about
product design. Our aim is to change the way you think about product
design, user research, and human emotion.
About the Speakers: Dennis Wixon directs research at Microsoft Games
studios which is recognized as a leader in applied methodology.
Previously, Dennis was usability manager in the Software Usability
Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation, where methods such
as usability engineering and contextual inquiry were developed. He
co-edited a book Field Methods Case Book for Software Design with
Professor Judy Ramey of the University of Washington. Dennis holds a
PhD. in social psychology from Clark University.
August de los Reyes works as the experience architect for Microsoft
Surface. As the former creative director for the Windows Platform
Core Innovation Group, he also researched emotional design as a member
of the Advanced Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate
School of Design. Additionally, August is a PhD candidate in
Industrial Design under the research initiative on Emotion and Design
at the Technische Universiteit Delft in the Netherlands. This year,
August is a visiting associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the
University of Oxford.
____________
CS194: COMPUTER SCIENCE SENIOR PROJECTS
on Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 12:15pm-3:15pm
Wallenberg Hall
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs194/
"Software Faire"
students
What is the Software Faire?
In CS194, Stanford's Senior Project Course, student teams design and
implement a significant software project of their own choosing. It is
the capstone course--a chance for them to show us what they have
learned and demonstrate that they can work with the intensity that
will be required after graduation.
At the end of the quarter, we hold a Software Faire. It's like a small
trade show, with nonstop demonstrations of all the projects. It's a
fun event, with lots of people and prizes for the best projects. The
students get very excited about showing off their work, especially to
visitors from industry.
Who is invited?
Everyone is invited to attend the Faire. This is a great opportunity
for people outside of Stanford to see what our seniors in Computer
Science are capable of producing in a short 10 weeks!
What are the projects like?
The projects cover a very wide range of topics. Please visit
<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs194/> for a brief description of last
year's projects, as well as previous quarters.
____________
NASA CREST DEMONSTRATION
on Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 12:30pm-2:00pm
CREST Facility, Bldg. 538c, NASA Ames, Moffet Field
"Spoken Dialog Systems"
Beth Ann Hockey and students/partners
UC Santa Cruz
http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/people/index.php?ID=8116
What happens when Linguistics students tackle Computer Science?
* Making robots move with the sound of your voice!
* Learning English through language immersion...in a virtual world!
* Student tools---assignment calendars, self-quizzing---using your
cell phone!
Project partners are:
* Qtech, which produces the ReQall telephone based reminder system
<http://www.reqall.com/>
* Paideia Computing, which works on language teaching in virtual
worlds <http://01f6616.netsolhost.com/contactus.html>
* Dr. Christoper Kitts, of Associate Professor at Santa Clara
University <http://www.scu.edu/engineering/me/people/kitts.cfm>,
and director of The Center for Robotic Exploration and Space
Technology (CREST) <http://www.crestnrp.org/>.
____________
END MATERIAL
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