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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 15 October 2008, vol. 24:7
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
15 October 2008 Stanford Vol. 24, No. 7
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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 15 OCTOBER 2008 TO 24 OCTOBER 2008
WEDNESDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2008
2:00pm Berkeley International Computer Science Institute [15-Oct-08]
ICSI Conference Rm 5A, 1947 Center St., Suite 600 (UC Berkeley)
"Context and Situations in Location-based Services"
Agnes Voisard
Visiting Scientist, ICSI
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu
Abstract below
3:30pm SRI CCB Seminar Series [15-oct-08]
AE201, SRI International
"The National Center for Biomedical Ontology: Building
a Virtual Community of Ontology Developers and Users"
Mark A. Musen
Stanford University
http://bmir.stanford.edu/people/view.php/mark_a_musen
http://bioontology.org
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Colloquium [15-Oct-08]
Gates B01
"Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games"
Jane McGonigal
Institute for the Future
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
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)
"Learning image segmentation and recognition with
weakly labeled data"
Rich Zemel
University of Toronto
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [16-Oct-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Multilingual Text: a glimpse below the surface"
Kamal Mansour
Monotype Imaging
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm US-ATMC Seminar [16-Oct-08]
Skilling Auditorium
"Open Innovation in Asia: The Changing Role of India"
Dr. Sridhar Jagannathan and possibly a colleague
Intuit Inc.
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 17 OCTOBER 2008
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities [17-Oct-08]
Cordura 100
"The Majority Judgement: A New Theory and Method of Voting"
Michel Balinski
Ecole Polytechnique/CNRS
http://ceco.polytechnique.fr/jugement-majoritaire.html
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/lmh/
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [17-Oct-08]
Gates B01
"Aurora: Envisioning the Future of the Web"
Jesse James Garrett
Adaptive Path
http://adaptivepath.com/aboutus/jjg.php
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [17-oct-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
Short Reports:
"Creating an event-based analysis of biographical texts"
Aurelie Benard, Univ of Paris
"TimeMap -- Displaying Geotemporal Data Online"
Nick Rabinowitz
"Designing an Event Directory for Irish History"
Ryan Shaw
"Trip report -- Tromso and Uppsala"
Michael Buckland
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
Abstract below
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
MONDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2008
12 noon Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium [20-Oct-08]
Terman 217
"Sensemaking and Emotions in Organizations"
Sally Maitlis
University of British Columbia
http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/
TUESDAY, 21 OCTOBER 2008
All day Berkeley School of Information [21-Oct-08]
110 South Hall (Berkeley)
Open classes for prospective students
Open House information session 5:30pm - 6:30pm
RSVP admissions .. ischool.berkeley.edu
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
4:00pm Stanford Algorithms Seminar [21-Oct-08]
Gates 498
"Multi-Armed Bandits in Metric Spaces"
Alex Slivkins
http://theory.stanford.edu/~aflb/
WEDNESDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2008
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Colloquium [22-Oct-08]
Gates B01
"Scalable Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing:
a gathering Perfect Disruption"
Carl Hewitt
MIT (emeritus)
http://carlhewitt.info
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 23 OCTOBER 2008
11:30am CCRMA Hearing Seminar [23-Oct-08]
CCRMA Seminar Room, The Knoll
Title to be Announced
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/hearing-seminar
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar [23-Oct-08]
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
"On the Complexity of Linear Prediction:
Risk Bounds, Margin Bounds, and Regularization"
Ambuj Tewari
Toyota Technological Institute
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [23-Oct-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"How Democracy Resolves Conflict in Difficult Games"
Steven J. Brams
New York University
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2008
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [24-Oct-08]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"The geometry of neural similarity spaces studied with fMRI"
Geoffrey Aguirre
University of Pennsylvania
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [24-Oct-08]
Gates B01
"Information foraging theory"
Peter Pirolli
PARC
Peter.Pirolli at sign parc.com
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [24-Oct-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Representing Indigenous Knowledge"
Geoffrey Bowker
University of Santa Clara
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [24-Oct-08]
Minor 489 (Berkeley)
"Geometric and photometric constraints in the perception
of contours, surfaces and materials."
Bart Anderson
University of Sydney
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [24-Oct-08]
Packard 101
Title to be announced
Helmut Boelcskei
ETH
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
____________
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 INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER SCIENCE INSTITUTE
on Wednesday, 15 October 2008, 2:00pm
ICSI Conference Room 5A, Suite 600, ICSI, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/
"Context and Situations in Location-based Services"
Agnes Voisard
Visiting Scientist, ICSI
Location-based services, which answer queries such as "Where is the
nearest subway station?" or "What are the exhibitions in this city
today?" are currently receiving a great deal of interest from many
communities. Given the dynamics inherent to mobile applications,
handling the user demand -- being explicit or implicit -- goes beyond
profile understanding. It requires in particular the consideration of
the user's current context, such as his or her location, but also
current activity, connectivity, and planning. Context thus needs to be
captured in a highly dynamic manner along many dimensions. The context
gathered in a particular time interval determines a situation. For
instance, when the situation of a user is "driving" he or she would
like to be kept updated on the (current) traffic or weather conditions
in some area and notified if there is congestion on his or her route or
the risk of a storm. Situations are derived from basic sensors but also
from more elaborate concepts such as histories or planned activities.
This simple yet powerful concept helps designers to abstract from raw
contextual information.
This talk will present a situation model that handles efficiently the
multi-dimensional context of mobile entities. We will also show how
the model has been applied in several projects of the Location-based
Services department of Fraunhofer ISST in Berlin.
____________
SRI CCB SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 15 October 2008, 3:30pm - 5:30pm
AE201, SRI International
"The National Center for Biomedical Ontology: Building
a Virtual Community of Ontology Developers and Users"
Mark A. Musen
Stanford University
http://bmir.stanford.edu/people/view.php/mark_a_musen
http://bioontology.org
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) is one of seven
National Centers for Biomedical Computing supported by the NIH Roadmap
initiative. The goal of the NCBO is to develop technology to assist
the scientific community in accessing, evaluating, and disseminating
biomedical ontologies for purposes of data annotation, semantic data
integration, natural-language processing, and decision-support
applications. At the center of our work is BioPortal, a Web-based
system that allows members of the biomedical community to browse
ontologies, comment on the ontologies via threaded discussion lists,
and map ontologies to one another. BioPortal provides a model for the
publication and dissemination of electronic content, and offers an
opportunity to experiment with community-based peer review of
ontololgies. Building BioPortal has raised surprising controversy
within the biomedical ontology community, including questions of
central control versus democratic control of the repository, of top ?
down peer review versus community-based peer review of ontologies, and
of the philosophical matter of what constitutes an appropriate
ontology for biomedicine in the first place. I will discuss the role
of BioPortal in generating a virtual community of ontology developers
and users, and the way in which BioPortal might serve as a model for
disseminating formalized knowledge structures in other domains of e-
science.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 15 October 2008, 4:15pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games"
Jane McGonigal
Institute for the Future
Jane McGonigal, PhD takes play seriously. She is the director of game
research and development at the Institute for the Future, where she
studies how the games we play today might change the way we do real
work and live our real lives in the coming decade. She has spent the
past year developing a new platform at IFTF: massively multiplayer
forecasting games, which aim to apply crowdsourcing theory and mass
collaboration strategies to imagine and engineering a best-case
scenario future. The first version of the platform -- a game called
Superstruct -- launched October 6, 2008. Her talk will explore the
theory behind MMFGs and the design principles of Superstruct -- and
reveal the most interesting insights from the first 10 days of live
gameplay!
About the speaker: In addition to her work at IFTF, Jane is the
founder of Avant Game and has designed numerous award-winning games,
most recently The Lost Ring, in which she invented a new sport for the
Summer 2008 Olympics, and World Without Oil, a collaborative
simulation -- or historical pre-enactment -- of a global oil
shortage. Her academic research includes articles on how to design
games that create collective intelligences, how to architect
massively-scaled community, and how to develop scoring algorithms that
motivate collaboration.
____________
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.
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 16 October 2008, 4:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
"Learning image segmentation and recognition with weakly labeled data"
Rich Zemel
University of Toronto
A fundamental problem in computer vision is to simultaneously segment
and recognize images. We can cast this problem as image labeling,
where the aim is find coherent regions in image, and assign a class
label to each region. I will describe the most successful approaches
to this problem, which involve inducing a set of latent features that
encode contextual relations in the images. We extend the
state-of-the-art in this area by developing a framework that can learn
a novel context representation by capturing joint patterns in image
and labels. Our approach can benefit from a variety of conditions
across the labeled images in a training set, where the labels may come
from different levels of specificity, may be noisy, or missing
entirely.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 16 October 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Multilingual Text: a glimpse below the surface"
Kamal Mansour
Monotype Imaging
We will briefly explore four diverse writing systems (Latin, Arabic,
Devanagari, Japanese) that each serve a population of more than 100
million. By examining a few of their distinctive attributes, we will
gain insights into their similarities and differences, their digital
representation, as well as their differing requirements from keyboard
entry to display.
____________
US-ATMC SEMINAR
on Thursday, 16 October 2008, 4:15 - 5:30 pm
Skilling Auditorium
"Open Innovation in Asia: The Changing Role of India"
Dr. Sridhar Jagannathan and possibly a colleague
Intuit Inc.
At Intuit, Dr. Jagannathan is responsible for defining Intuit's
engineering execution, partnerships and technology M&A. Earlier,
Sridhar was responsible for alternate business models and partnerships
at Intuit's Small Business Division and Product Development Leader for
Quicken Windows, QN Mac and QB Mac. He was formerly the Managing
Director for Symantec's India Development Center for consumer products
and set up offshore engineering operations and created new models of
engineering partnerships.
Earlier, Sridhar was Vice President of Technology for Softbank
Emerging Markets, a $200M fund focused on early stage investments in
emerging markets. Prior to joining SoftBank, Sridhar was Chief
Technology Officer and co-founder of Adatom.com, Inc., an ecommerce
marketplace. Earlier, Sridhar was Technical Director for Internet &
eCommerce at Oracle Corporation, where he was in charge of technology
strategy, product evolution for ecommerce and implementation. He was
also instrumental in setting up Oracle's Applications Center of
Excellence.
Sridhar actively mentors entrepreneurs and participates in early stage
startups. He has worked with venture funds (Global Asset Capital,
Viventures) and was a Technology Advisor to the International Finance
Corporation, the private funding arm of the World Bank. Sridhar is
the author of an ecommerce book ("Internet Commerce Metrics and
Models," Prentice Hall, 2001) and has taught courses at Stanford
University, U.C. Berkeley and IIT, Madras. Sridhar has a doctorate in
engineering from University of California, Berkeley, a Master's degree
(Sloan Fellow) from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and
B.Tech (Hons) from IIT, Kharagpur.
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 17 October 2008, 12 noon - 1:15pm
Cordura 100
http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/lmh/
"The Majority Judgement: A New Theory and Method of Voting"
Michel Balinski
Ecole Polytechnique/CNRS
http://ceco.polytechnique.fr/jugement-majoritaire.html
The traditional model of social choice fails for two reasons. Its
logical implications: The Condorcet paradox, Arrow's paradox, ...,
more fundamentally of course, Arrow's and Gibbard-Satterthwaites
impossibility theorems, and aberrations. Its inadequacy as a model of
reality: It assumes that the voters of an electorate or judges of a
jury have rank-orders in their minds. This is false as practice and
experimentation proves.
A more realistic model leads to possibility theorems and the
characterization (in many different ways) of the majority judgement as
the unique mechanism that satisfies almost all of the desirable
properties identified over the years and where it does not, it does the
best possible.
A brief exposition of this thesis will be presented, together with a
complete description of the mechanism itself (US patent pending).
(Joint work with Rida Laraki, Ecole Polytechnique and CNRS, Paris)
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 17 October 2008, 12:30pm - 2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Aurora: Envisioning the Future of the Web"
Jesse James Garrett
Adaptive Path
http://adaptivepath.com/aboutus/jjg.php
Jesse James Garrett provides an inside look at the process of creating
Aurora, a concept video depicting one possible future user experience
for the Web. Learn about the technology trends that will shape the
future Web, discover the challenges of designing a future product, and
go behind the scenes at the creation of the Aurora concept video.
About the speaker: Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of
Adaptive Path, is one of the world's most widely recognized technology
product designers. At Adaptive Path, Jesse supports the company's
designers and strategists with creative guidance and helps them
advance the company's thought leadership position.
Every day, product designers around the world depend on Jesse's tools
and concepts, which have been published in more than a dozen
languages. His book, The Elements of User Experience, has been called
"brilliant" and "essential" and is considered one of the seminal works
on user-centered design. In 2005, Jesse gained worldwide attention
for coining the term Ajax and defining the concepts behind this
emerging trend in Web technology. Since then, Ajax has become one of
the driving forces in Web product design, and Jesse's leadership role
in this trend has been featured in publications such as The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.
Jesse is the recipient of WIRED Magazine's 2006 Rave Award for
Technology. He has been named one of the "50 Most Important People on
the Web" by PC World magazine, one of the "Top 100 Most Influential
People in IT" by eWeek magazine, and one of the top 100 technology
industry leaders by Software Development Times magazine.
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 17 October 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
Short Reports:
"Creating an event-based analysis of biographical texts"
Aurelie Benard, Univ of Paris
Entries in biographical dictionaries chronicle the events in peoples'
lives but not in a structured way. Can be events be used as an
analytical device for adding useful structure to biographical texts?
Experience in creating an event analysis will be presented and the
difficulties briefly discussed.
"TimeMap -- Displaying Geotemporal Data Online"
Nick Rabinowitz
The TimeMap Javascript library is an Open Source project that ties
together Google Maps and MIT's SIMILE Timeline tool to display data
that has both a geographic and a temporal element. I will present
several example implementations and discuss further work and potential
areas of application.
"Designing an Event Directory for Irish History"
Ryan Shaw
I will explain the notion of an "event directory" web service and the
kinds of applications it is intended to enable, and will present
initial steps toward developing an event directory for use with the
Digital Library of Core E-Resources on Ireland.
"Trip report -- Tromso and Uppsala"
Michael Buckland
Highlights of a Document Academy seminar at the University of Tromso,
Norway, and a NORSLIS course for doctoral students in Uppsala, Sweden,
on "Public Libraries and the Nordic Welfare States."
____________
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.
____________
EE380: COMPUTER SYSTEMS COLLOQUIUM
on Wednesday, 22 October 2008, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Gates B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
"Scalable Privacy-Friendly Client Cloud Computing:
a gathering Perfect Disruption"
Carl Hewitt
MIT EECS (emeritus)
http://carlhewitt.info
Organizations of Restricted Generality (ORGs) is an architecture
providing foundations for the development of privacy-friendly Internet
applications by incorporating cloud computing into clients. Clients
range from single chip sensors, handhelds, notebooks, desktops, and
entertainment centers to huge data centers. ORGs are well suited for
the issues posed by, what I call, a "Perfect Disruption":
* New Hardware Paradigm: Multicore architecture
* New Software Paradigm: Privacy-friendly client cloud computing
* New Applications Paradigm: Scalable semantic integration (e.g.
search & discovery)
The "Perfect Disruption" is rapidly gathering strength and no one
knows the outcome. Clearly, it will significantly impact big players
like AMD, ARM, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP,
Yahoo!, and Via. How can basic research help them respond to the
disruption? By addressing fundamental questions like the following:
* How much of concurrent computation is reducible to deduction?
* How can large-scale systems be practically specified, analyzed,
and tested?
* Are the laws of thought consistent?
* Is "recovering rapidly" a more viable policy goal than "maintaining
consistency"?
About the speaker: Speaker Photo Carl Hewitt is Emeritus in the
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work
on concurrency theory, concurrent programming languages, automatic
storage reclamation and relocation (garbage collection), participatory
semantics, and strongly paraconsistent logic.
He can often be found at the Stanford Logic Group meetings at NOON on
Wednesdays in the Gates Bldg. 2A Open Area. You can look him up at
____________
UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 23 October 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Soda Hall 310 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/seminars/seminars.html
"On the Complexity of Linear Prediction:
Risk Bounds, Margin Bounds, and Regularization"
Ambuj Tewari
Toyota Technological Institute
Prediction using linearly parametrized function classes is a topic of
fundamental importance to machine learning. The study of the
generalization properties of linear prediction occupies an important
place within this topic. In this talk, I will present sharp
Rademacher and Gaussian complexity bounds for a large family of
linearly parametrized function classes. These complexity measures
play a key role in deriving generalization bounds. These bounds are
derived using conjugate duality, a key tool from convex analysis.
They make short work of providing a number of corollaries including:
risk bounds for linear prediction (including settings where the weight
vectors are constrained by either L_2 or L_1 constraints), margin
bounds (including both L_2 and L_1 margins, along with more general
notions based on relative entropy), a proof of the PAC-Bayes theorem,
and L_2 covering numbers (with L_p norm constraints and relative
entropy constraints). In addition to providing a unified analysis,
these results provide some of the sharpest risk and margin bounds
(improving upon a number of previous results by logarithmic factors).
Interestingly, our results show that the uniform convergence rates of
empirical risk minimization algorithms tightly match the regret bounds
of online learning algorithms for linear prediction (up to a constant
factor of 2).
(Joint work with Sham M. Kakade and Karthik Sridharan)
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 23 October 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"How Democracy Resolves Conflict in Difficult Games"
Steven J. Brams
New York University
Democracy resolves conflicts in difficult games like Prisoners'
Dilemma and Chicken by stabilizing their cooperative outcomes. It
does so by transforming these games into games in which voters are
presented with a choice between a cooperative outcome and a
Pareto-inferior noncooperative outcome. In the transformed game, it
is always rational for voters to vote for the cooperative outcome,
because cooperation is a weakly dominant strategy independent of the
decision rule and the number of voters who choose it. Such games are
illustrated by 2-person and n-person public-goods games, in which it
is optimal to be a free rider, and a biblical story from the book of
Exodus.
(joint work with D. Marc Kilgour)
____________
BERKELEY INFORMATION ACCESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 24 October 2008, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
"Representing Indigenous Knowledge"
Geoffrey Bowker
University of Santa Clara
The new tools of the information society have largely been created by
and for the developed world. In this talk, I discuss the significance
of and difficulties with representing other ways of knowing. I will
conclude by describing two new projects in this area.
____________
END MATERIAL
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