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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 8 October 2008, vol. 24:6
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
8 October 2008 Stanford Vol. 24, No. 6
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 8 OCTOBER 2008 TO 17 OCTOBER 2008
WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER 2008
4:00pm Berkeley School of Information Distinguished Lecture [8-Oct-08]
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Blue Smoke, No Mirrors: Confessions of an Information User"
Alan Kantrow
Monitor Group
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley International Computer Science Institute [8-Oct-08]
ICSI Lecture Hall, 1947 Center Street, Suite 600 (UC Berkeley)
"Highlights of the First 20 Years of Algorithms research at ICSI"
Richard M. Karp
ICSI Algorithms Group
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [8-Oct-08]
Gates B03
"Excubate: A new model of new technology business development"
Ted Selker
Media Lab, MIT
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Data Mining SIG [8-Oct-08]
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
"Evaluating Similarity Measures: A Large-Scale Study in the
Orkut Social Network"
Ellen Spertus
Google Research
http://www.sfbayacm.org
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 9 OCTOBER 2008
3:30pm Symposium of Undergraduate Research and Public Service [9-Oct-08]
McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center
Poster session on undergraduate research
http://ual.stanford.edu/OO/research_opps/SURPS.html
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [9-Oct-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"3-D Audio Capture and Reproduction"
Aaron J Heller
SRI AI
http://www.ai.sri.com/~heller
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [9-Oct-08]
Soda Hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
"EM Works for Pronoun-Anaphora Resolution"
Eugene Charniak
Brown University
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CITRIS Distinguished Speaker [9-Oct-08]
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
"The Brain-like Vision"
Edgar Koerner
Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/brain-vision
http://www.citris-uc.org/
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [9-Oct-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Thomas Cover
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~cover/
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
6:00pm Swedish and Norwegian Poetry Evening [9-Oct-08]
Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater Lounge 127, Wallenberg Hall
Ingvild Burkey, Li Li
For information, contact Adelaide Dawes <adelaide .. stanford.edu>
FRIDAY, 10 OCTOBER 2008
10:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [10-Oct-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"The Role of Appearance in Mapping and Navigation"
Derik Schroeter
University of Oxford
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [10-Oct-08]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Pronunciation variation as a tool for psycholinguistic research"
Susanne Gahl
Linguistics and Cognitive Science Program, UC Berkeley
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [10 Oct 08]
Cordura 100
"A survey of voting procedures and paradoxes"
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/lmh/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [10 Oct 08]
Gates B01
"Visualizing Voice"
Karrie Karahalios
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [10 Oct 08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"The Evolving Concept of 'Digital Libraries'"
M. Buckland, R. Larson and C. Lynch
Also a report from guest Niels Windfeld Lund, University of
Tromso, Norway
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [10 Oct 08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Knowledge, Chance, and Safety"
Tim Williamson
University of Oxford
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
Abstract below
3:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [10 Oct 08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Or Constructions: Meaning and Use"
Mira Ariel
Tel Aviv
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2008
4:15pm Cognition and Language Workshop [13-Oct-08]
Cordura 100
"Language, thought and color: Recent developments"
Paul Kay
Berkeley Linguistics, International Computer Science Institute
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2008
2:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [14-Oct-08]
Bldg. 160:319
"The syntax of object specification in higher dimensional
categories"
Victor Harnik
Haifa
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
Abstract below
3:30pm Townsend Working Group in Neuroscience and Philosophy [14-Oct-08]
Dennes Room, 234 Moses Hall (UC Berkeley)
"The book of Hebb"
Discussion
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.html
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2008
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [15-Oct-08]
Gates B03
Title to be announced
Guido van Rossum
Google
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
6:30pm SF Bay ACM Chapter Meeting and Talk [15-Oct-08]
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
"The Intimate Integration of Photonics and Electronics"
Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy
Sun Microsystems Microelectronics Physical Sciences Center
http://sfbayacm.org/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 16 OCTOBER 2008
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [16-Oct-08]
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Rich Zemel
University of Toronto
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
FRIDAY, 17 OCTOBER 2008
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [17-Oct-08]
Cordura 100
Title to be announced
Michel Balinski
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/lmh/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [17-Oct-08]
Gates B01
"The elements of user experience"
Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
4:00pm PARC Forum [17-Oct-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Elliptic Curves"
Kenneth A. Ribet
Dept. of Mathematics, UC Berkeley
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Santa Cruz Linguistics Colloquium [17-Oct-08]
Humanities One Bldg, room 210 (UC Santa Cruz)
"More ado about Nothing: Sluicing, Copular Clauses and Case"
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
Hogeschool-Universiteit, Brussel and NYU
http://ling.ucsc.edu/news_events/rss.php
____________
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.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
Speech Lunch
Fridays, 12 noon
Jordan 065
This is a general info announcement about Speech Lunch. I would like
to encourage anyone interested in anything speechy to attend Speech
Lunch. Every Friday throughout the academic year, a bunch of students
and faculty get together to discuss papers or projects. This is an
informal venue which you can feel comfortable discussing any aspect of
a project -- potential topics, design, analysis, or data. Speech
Lunch is here for you to both benefit from a lively audience and to
become informed about research others are doing.
We meet every Friday from 12:00pm - 1:00pm in the Linguistics Lab
(basement of Jordan Hall, Room 065, behind the Thai Cafe). I am
including a list of dates available for anyone who is interested in
informally talking about their project(s). Please let me know which
date you would like to take :o)
October 10 - first meeting
October 17
October 24
October 31
November 7
November 14
November 21
December 5
From this point on, all correspondence about Speech Lab will be
administered via the Speech Lunch mailing list. If you would like to
receive future messages about this group, please subscribe to our
email list. To do this, send a blank email message to
speech-lunch-join .. lists.stanford.edu
-- Meghan Sumner, sumner .. stanford.edu
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
Fall 2008 Tanner Lectures
October 29-31, 2008
Stanford
"Origins of Human Cooperation"
Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Lecture I: Wednesday, October 29, 5:30pm-7:00 pm
Levinthal Hall, Humanities Center
"Ontogenetic Origins of Human Altruism"
Discussion I: Thursday, October 30, 10:00am-12:00 noon
Landau Economics Bldg, SIEPR A
Carol Dweck, Stanford Psychology
Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard Psychology
Lecture II: Thursday, October 30, 5:30 - 7:00 pm
Levinthal Hall, Humanities Center
"Phylogenetic Origins of Human Collaboration"
Discussion II: Friday, October 31, 10:00am - 12:00 noon
Landau Economics Bldg, SIEPR A
Joan Silk, UCLA Anthropology
Brian Skyrms, Stanford Philosophy
For more information on this series and to read the abstracts, visit:
http://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu/ethics-events/tanner-lectures/
____________
BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
on Wednesday, 8 October 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
202 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
"Blue Smoke, No Mirrors: Confessions of an Information User"
Alan Kantrow
Monitor Group
Much of the information that professionals (and professional advisors)
deploy to shape and deliver their service offerings suffers from
defects in orientation, focus, and framing, as well as from
sloth. This "report from the front lines" takes a frustrated user's
eye view of these problems, explores their roots and their
consequences, and reflects on the research agenda needed to help set
things right.
About the Speaker: Alan M. Kantrow is a senior partner and the Chief
Content Officer of Monitor Group, a closely-linked global family of
content-driven and competitiveness-focused professional services
firms, as well as the Dean of Faculty of Monitor University.
Previously, he was for a decade Monitor's Chief Knowledge Officer. At
present, he is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the firm's
Monitor Technology and eMonitor business units --- the former, a
network of external scientific and technical experts; the latter, a
designer and developer of both content and delivery platforms for
on-line learning, knowledge management, professional development, and
real-time performance support. Alan holds a Ph.D. from Harvard
University in the History of American Civilization, where he was a
Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, and an A.B. from Harvard College in
Anthropology (summa cum laude), where he was a Phi Beta Kappa.
____________
BERKELEY INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
on Wednesday, 8 October 2008, 4:00pm
Main Lecture Hall, Suite 600, ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/
"Highlights of the First 20 Years of Algorithms research at ICSI"
Richard M. Karp, Group Leader
ICSI Algorithms Group
Hundreds of computer scientists have visited the Algorithms Group,
including a stream of outstanding young theoreticians from Germany. In
the early years Michael Luby and Lenore Blum, along with Richard Karp,
were the mainstays of the group, and the emphasis was on combinatorial
algorithms, complexity theory and cryptography. In the period 1995-98
Michael Luby led the development of Tornado Codes, a remarkable tool
for bulk transfer of data over the Internet. From 1999 onward there
the Algorithms Group worked closely with ICSI's networking researchers,
with striking advances in peer-to-peer networks. More recently Eran
Halperin has led groundbreaking activity in statistical genetics, and
Richard Karp, in collaboration with outstanding visitors from Israel,
has investigated the pathways and networks that regulate the
activities of living cells.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS LAB COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 8 October 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Excubate: A new model of new technology business development"
Ted Selker
Media Lab, MIT
Innovation cultures exist in self funded and venture funded
entrepreneurial activities, universities, and large research
labs. What are the various values and strengths of the different
models for innovation business development ? This the talk will
expand beyond the problems of open innovation and offer a new
entrepreneurial investment model which can increases innovation's
chances for success.
Excubation will support ideas and people though competitions to reduce
risks of starting new technology companies. A prototyping team will
create competing new ideas to find ones that could make great
companies. The successful ideas then become part of open funded
competitions to test market viability and teams that might take the
company forward. The original prototyping team and serious business
experts are part of evaluating and mentoring the participants to
create successful technology companies.
About the Speaker: Dr. Ted Selker develops and tests new user
experiences. He spent ten years as an associate professor at the MIT
Media Laboratory where he ran the Context Aware Computing group,
co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed
the Counter Design Intelligence: product design of the future
project. His work is noted for creating demonstrations of a world in
which human intentions are recognized and respected in complex
domains, such as kitchens, cars, on phones, and in email. Ted's work
takes the form of prototyping concept products supported by cognitive
science research.
Prior to joining the MIT faculty in November 1999, Ted was an IBM
fellow and directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research Lab. He has
served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, worked at
Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs, and taught at Hampshire College,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Brown University.
Ted's research has contributed to products ranging from notebook
computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the
TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device is currently used in many
notebooks, his visualizations have been responsible for performance
and usability improvements in products, and his adaptive help system
has been part of many IT products as well. Ted's work has resulted in
numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in
the press. He was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader
Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004 and the American Association
for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting
technology in 2006.
____________
SF BAY ACM DATA MINING SIG
on Wednesday, 8 October 2008, 6:30pm - 9:00pm
SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
http://www.sfbayacm.org
"Evaluating Similarity Measures:
A Large-Scale Study in the Orkut Social Network"
Ellen Spertus
Google Research
FREE and open to all who wish to attend ; RSVP with
Venky<rvenky4 .. yahoo.com?subject=RSVP:%20DM%20SIG%20%2810/8%29%20>
Online information services have grown too large for users to navigate
without the help of automated tools (i.e. collaborative filtering),
which makes recommendations to users based on their collective past
behavior. While many similarity measures have been proposed and
individually evaluated, they have not been evaluated relative to each
other in a large real-world environment. We present an extensive
empirical comparison of six distinct measures of similarity for
recommending online communities to members of the Orkut social
network. We determine the usefulness of the different recommendations
by actually measuring users' propensity to visit and join recommended
communities. We also examine how the ordering of recommendations
influenced user selection, as well as interesting social issues that
arise in recommending communities within a real social network.
About the speaker: Ellen Spertus is a research scientist at Google,
where she works on social networks, and an associate professor of
computer science at Mills College (on leave). She received her
bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in computer science from
MIT and has done research in computer architecture, Internet search,
and online communications and community.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 9 October 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Soda Hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
"EM Works for Pronoun-Anaphora Resolution"
Eugene Charniak
Brown University
EM (the Expectation Maximization Algorithm) is a well known technique
for unsupervised learning (where one does not have any hand labeled
solutions available, but instead one must learn from the raw
text). Unfortunately EM is known to fail to find good solutions in
many (most?) applications on which it is tried. In this talk we
present some recent work on using EM to learn how to resolve
pronoun-anaphora: determining that "the dog" is the antecedent of "he"
and "his" in "When Sally fed the dog he wagged his tail". For this
application EM works strikingly well, determining tens of thousands of
parameters and resulting in a program that advances the current state
of the art.
About the Speaker: Eugene Charniak is University Professor of Computer
Science at Brown University and past chair of the department. He
received his A.B. degree in Physics from University of Chicago, and a
Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. He has published four books the
most recent being Statistical Language Learning. He is a Fellow of the
American Association of Artificial Intelligence and was previously a
Councilor of the organization. His research has always been in the
area of language understanding or technologies which relate to
it. Over the last 15 years years he has been interested in statistical
techniques for many areas of language processing including parsing,
discourse and anaphora.
____________
UC BERKELEY CITRIS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
on Thursday, 9 October 2008, 4:00pm
290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building (UC Berkeley)
http://www.citris-uc.org/
"The Brain-like Vision"
Edgar Koerner, President
Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/brain-vision
Intelligence is a technology and a strategy for robust and flexible
problem solving in complex environments (both natural and artificial)
under the constraints of limited resources (e.g. time, energy).
Understanding essential principles of how the brain controls behavior
may enable us to provide our technical artifacts at least with some
aspects of its performance we admire. Our approach is based on the
assumption that the essence of brain computing is not in the local
processing or learning algorithm but in the way the brain organizes
processing.
For visual scene analysis, a dynamic system of active processes in
brain-inspired architecture is studied that can rapidly configure
themselves under the control of static information both sensory and
previously acquired, and then allow themselves to hand over control to
changing sensory signals. That cluster of visual routines provides
with attention, fixation, tracking the necessary prerequisite that the
subsystem modeled according to the ventral pathway can deal with a
sequence of still frames in the focus of attention to acquire visual
experience by on-line learning. This active vision system is being
implemented into the behavior control system for autonomous
interaction of our humanoid robot, ASIMO.
As always, these talks are free, open to the public and broadcast live
online at mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast. Please send
questions to Yahoo IM: CITRISevents. Sponsored by Infineon
Technologies.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 10 October 2008, 10:00am
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"The Role of Appearance in Mapping and Navigation"
Derik Schroeter
University of Oxford
The use of appearance information in robotics has experienced a
renaissance in recent years, largely due to significant advances in
the machine vision community. In particular, the availability of fast
and robust interest point detectors and descriptors has paved the way
to ever more complex machine vision tasks being routinely integrated
into robotic systems. This progress has led to the emergence of new
and exciting opportunities while at the same time changing our notion
of classic robotics challenges. In particular, appearance-based
techniques developed in the computer vision domain have emerged as a
valuable complement to state-of-the-art SLAM solutions. A prime
example is the robust closing of large loops in a vehicles trajectory
using an appearance-based visual loop-closing engine. The salient
point here is that the data-association problem can be addressed
without metric reasoning considering what things look like as opposed
to where they appear to be. Further, combined with efficient machine
learning techniques, appearance information is paving the way to ever
more abstract semantic representations of sensor data an area of
increasing importance for autonomous operations in complex outdoor
environments.
This talk aims to illustrate the impact of appearance-based methods on
robotics by outlining three distinct applications. The first part
considers the creation of large-scale topological maps of an
environment using a generative probabilistic approach. In the second
part we describe an appearance-based method of navigating such a
topological map. Finally, we describe the appearance-based extraction
of semantic labels from sensor data of outdoor urban environments.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 10 October 2008, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Pronunciation variation as a tool for psycholinguistic research"
Susanne Gahl
Linguistics and Cognitive Science Program, UC Berkeley
Tokens of the same word or sentence will usually sound slightly
different, due to variations in speaking rate, voice quality, and a
myriad of other linguistic and non-linguistic factors. Research in the
Linguistics department's Psycholinguistics lab uses variation in
pronunciation as a window on the mechanisms underlying language
production. A particular focus of our research is on ways in which
pronunciation variation reveals the probabilistic and malleable nature
of linguistic knowledge. A working hypothesis guiding our research is
that probabilities at all levels of linguistic structure affect
language production and comprehension. Pronunciation variation in
part reflects these probabilities. This talk will describe several
studies examining the sources and theoretical implications of
pronunciation variation.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 10 October 2008, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Visualizing Voice"
Karrie Karahalios
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Audio communication research to date has been primarily dominated by
work in the areas of speech recognition, transmission and compression,
synthesis, computer music theory, and some music information
retrieval. Looking at many research laboratories and universities, we
tend to find audio processing groups focusing exclusively on the above
areas.
In the area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), research in audio is
in the minority. For example, there are several textual search
engines and even image search engines, yet barely a voice browser for
public use. One reason is that a voice or audio browser relies
heavily on speech recognition and audio classification which are not
very accurate in general use scenarios. Given different speakers and
different speaking environments, the problem becomes increasingly more
difficult.
In this talk, we are taking a step back and looking at voice from a
simpler perspective. We will show examples of conversational
dynamics, retreaval through the use of a real time voice visualization
on a tabletop, and examples of new interactions by using this
interface as a social mirror.
About the Speaker: Karrie Karahalios is an assistant professor in
computer science at the University of Illinois where she heads the
Social Spaces Group. Her work focuses on the interaction between
people and the social cues they perceive in networked electronic
spaces. Of particular interest are interfaces for pubic online and
physical gathering spaces such as chatrooms, cafes, parks, etc. The
goal is to create interfaces that enable users to perceive
conversational patterns that are present, but not obvious, in
traditional communication interfaces.
Karrie completed a S.B. in electrical engineering, an M.Eng. in
electrical engineering and computer science, and an S.M. and Ph.D in
media arts and science at MIT.
____________
PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 10 October 2008, 3:15pm
Building 90, room 92Q
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
"Knowledge, Chance, and Safety"
Tim Williamson
University of Oxford
About the speaker: Timothy Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor
of Logic at Oxford since 2000. His main research interests are in
philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of
language. He is the author of Identity and Discrimination (Blackwell
1990), Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford
2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Blackwell 2007) and over 120
articles. Williamson on Knowledge, edited by Patrick Greenough and
Duncan Pritchard (Oxford forthcoming) contains fifteen critical essays
on his work and his replies.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 10 October 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Or Constructions: Meaning and Use"
Mira Ariel
Tel Aviv University
Meaning and use are two sides of the same linguistic coin (Ariel,
2008). Meaning enables and restricts use, and use reinforces old
meanings and motivates new ones. It's a vibrant circle. Yet, the two
remain apart. Semanticists and pragmatists tend to focus on meaning,
ignoring or remaining naive about use. Ignoring use in natural
conversation has led pragmatists to imagine how natural use "must be",
based on "armchair" functional explanations (Horn, 1972 and onwards,
Levinson, 2000). Functionalists, on the other hand, tend to privilege
use over meaning. They have too often been seduced by the frequent
discourse pattern, ignoring infrequent uses. But speakers don't ignore
the infrequent.
Linguists (of all stripes) have taken the most salient feature of
disjunctions to be the distinct alternatives they seem to
present. Here's an example of a classical case:
1. STEPHANIE: it was either Funniest Home Videos,
or they were filming a fi- a movie, (SBC: 035).
Note that each disjunct here presents a distinct alternative, the
reading is exclusive (the alternatives are incompatible with each
other), no other relevant alternatives are entertained by the speaker,
and so, exactly one of the alternatives must be true. Note also that
each disjunct contains a complete, indicative sentence, and the fact
that (1) contains not just or but also either is considered
irrelevant. Alas, such "well-behaved" disjunctions and interpretations
are extremely rare in conversation, as evidenced in the Santa Barbara
Corpus of Spoken American English. I will argue that natural
discourse shows a whole variety of interpretations associated with
disjunctive constructions, and that what form the disjunction takes
matters to its interpretation. Either X or Y; X or rather/instead Y; X
or contra realis Y (X or I'm a monkey's uncle); X or undesired Y (do
or die); X or X (Am I right, or am I right?); X or not X (to be or not
to be); and X or something must each receive a separate constructional
analysis. Intonation contour, Intonation Unit boundaries, and
sentential versus phrasal disjunctions are all relevant to how we use
and interpret disjunctions.
But the most dramatic finding is that the basic X or Y construction is
not all that different from the X or something (like that)
construction, in that very often, only one general concept is proposed
by the speaker, despite the fact that two (or more) alternatives are
mentioned explicitly. Consider:
2. NORA: Wonder who was the ruler.
in nineteen ten.
DIANE: Who was the king or queen? (SBC: 023)
Diane does not think that Nora is interested in finding out `either
who the king was, or else who the queen (who could be the king's wife)
was'. Rather, the king or queen are intended as instances of a larger
concept, that of the primary monarch, which the addressee needs to
construct. I will argue that this is the basic function of X or Y
constructions in discourse. Although the meaning of the disjunction
specifies two (or more) alternatives (each disjunct describing an
objectively distinct state of affairs in the world), discoursally,
many disjunctions serve to introduce only one concept, and to support
a single discourse point. The semantic meaning commonly assumed,
namely, that at least one disjunct must be intended by the speaker,
will be questioned too. In sum, my analysis revises both the semantic
meaning and the pragmatic functions in discourse that are to be
attributed to or.
References
Ariel, Mira. 2008. Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 1972. On the semantic properties of the logical operators
in English. Mimeo, Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of
generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
____________
COGNITION AND LANGUAGE WORKSHOP
on Monday, 13 October 2008, 4:15pm
Cordura 100
"Language, thought and color: Recent developments"
Paul Kay
Berkeley Linguistics, International Computer Science Institute
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/
Color naming and color perception have served as the locus classicus
of empirical investigation into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according
to which language differences create differences in thought and/or
perception. This paper will report on research which shows that (1)
there are universal tendencies in color naming across languages that
are probably the result of our internal representation of color (the
shape of color space) and (2) the differences in color naming between
languages that do exist probably do influence color perception -- but
in the right visual field, which projects to the left (language) brain
hemisphere, only. There will be an additional, surprise finding for
those who stay to the end.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 14 October 2008, 2:15pm - 5:30pm
Bldg. 160:319
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/logic-seminar.html
"The syntax of object specification in higher dimensional categories"
Victor Harnik
Haifa
An n-dimensional category (in short, n-category) has, for every
k <= n, k-dimensional objects that are called k-cells. For k > 0,
each such cell has a domain and a codomain which are (k-1)-cells. The
cells can be combined with the help of composition operations. The
concept of n-category generalizes the familiar notion of category
(which is the same as 1-category).
We describe two formal languages, based on different sets of
operations, having terms that specify composed cells. Each of the two
languages has its advantages. Their comparison is facilitated when we
construe them as free mathematical structures.
If time permits, I will outline the problem of defining the concept of
weak higher dimensional category. This is the broader context in
which our subject came up.
This is joint work with Michael Makkai and Marek Zawadowski.
____________
TOWNSEND WORKING GROUP IN NEUROSCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
on Tuesday, 14 October 2008, 3:30pm
Dennes Room, 234 Moses Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://neurophilosophy.berkeley.edu/meetings.html
"The book of Hebb"
Discussion
We will be discussing a paper by Terry Sejnowski entitled "The book of
Hebb", which is a review of Donald Hebb's influential book "The
Organization of Behavior" and surveys some of the influence Hebb's
ideas have had on experimental and theoretical neuroscience. A link
to the paper is on the website.
Refreshments and snacks will be served.
____________
SF BAY ACM CHAPTER MEETING AND TALK
on Wednesday, 15 October 2008, 6:30pm
Hewlett Packard, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room
http://sfbayacm.org/
"The Intimate Integration of Photonics and Electronics"
Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy
Sun Microsystems Microelectronics Physical Sciences Center
We review the progress made in the intimate integration of photonics and
electronics, discuss the current state of the art, and discuss the future
directions and potential for CMOS-to-photonics integration from a technology
and applications perspective.
Refreshments at 6:30, talk begins at 7:00, FREE.
About the speaker: Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy currently serves as
Distinguished Engineer and Director with the Sun Microsystems
Microelectronics Physical Sciences Center in San Diego. Prior to that
he was with AraLight as its President and CTO as part of a Lucent
spinout, where he was responsible for leading product design and
development for AraLight's optical interconnect products. He also
served as entrepreneur-in-residence at Lucent's New Venture group, and
as a member of technical staff in the Advanced Photonics Research
Department of Bell Labs where he investigated methods of integrating
optical devices to Silicon VLSI circuits. He received the BS in
Engineering (Honors) from the California Institute of Technology, the
MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern
California, and the Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the University of
California, San Diego.
Dr. Krishnamoorthy serves on the technical advisory board for several
optical technology start-ups and venture funds, and as a distinguished
lecturer for LEOS. He holds 35 US Patents and has contributed 150
technical publications in optoelectronics, 5 book chapters and
presented over 45 invited talks at international technical
conferences. For his contributions to optoelectronics, and his
service to technical societies, the Eta Kappa Nu society named him an
Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer in 1999. He was awarded the
2004 International Prize in Optics by the ICO for his technical
contributions to optics. He has also won several team awards,
including Computerworld's 2005 Horizon Award for Innovation.
Recently, he received the 2006 Chairman's award for Innovation by Sun
Microsystems for his work on optical interconnects.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Friday, 17 October 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
(directions at <http://www.parc.com/directions>)
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Elliptic Curves"
Kenneth A. Ribet
Dept. of Mathematics, UC Berkeley
Elliptic curves hit the front page of the New York Times in June, 1993
when Andrew Wiles announced a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In the
proof stitched together by Wiles, elliptic curves played a starring
role. Amazingly, elliptic curves have been prominent in mathematics
literally for millennia - and they continue to post simple-looking
problems whose solutions continue to elude us. Perhaps most
notoriously, a general conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, for
which the Clay Math Institute has offered a $1,000,000 reward, remains
unsolved even for elliptic curves. A proof of this conjecture in this
case would settle the Congruent Number Problem, a problem about
triangles that has been studied intensively at least since the tenth
century.
In my talk, I will discuss some of the ways that elliptic curves have
intervened in the field of cryptography. Although I am by no means an
expert in this subject, I will give a course to Berkeley
undergraduates on cryptography next spring and expect to be lecturing
about elliptic curves at various points during the semester.
About the speaker: Kenneth Ribet studied at Brown University and
Harvard University. He received his PhD in 1973 from Harvard, where
his advisor was John Tate. After three years of teaching in Princeton
and two years of research in Paris, Ribet joined the Berkeley faculty
in 1978. He received his department's Distinguished Teaching Award in
1985.
Prof. Ribet is known for his work in number theory and algebraic
geometry. He played a prominent role in the proof of Fermat's Last
Theorem by showing that this statement was a logical consequence of a
conjecture about elliptic curves. (Andrew Wiles proved this
conjecture in 1995, thereby obtaining Fermat's Last Theorem as a
corollary.) Prof. Ribet is a member of the scientific advisory board
of the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics at UCLA and a member
of the editorial boards of the following three Springer book series:
Graduate Texts in Mathematics, Universitext, Undergraduate Texts in
Mathematics. He serves also on the editorial boards of Mathematische
Annalen, the Annales de l'Institut Fourier, the Journal of Number
Theory and Mathematics Research Letters.
Prof. Ribet was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2000. He was awarded
the Fermat Prize in 1989 and received an honorary from Brown
University in 1998. In 1988 he was inducted as a Vigneron d'honneur
by the Jurade de Saint Emilion.
____________
END MATERIAL
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