The Symbolic Systems Program offers a variety of events each quarter: forums, film series, faculty dinners, presentations, and (of course) parties. You can subscribe to the mailing list symsys-events (at the list info page) to get event announcements as we send them out. Or you can just check this page, which is continually updated.

Click here for a schedule of Symbolic Systems Forum talks this quarter.

• SSP Forum: Jim Gemmell Dec 3, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://totalrecallbook.com Posted on Oct 20, 2009. Last updated on Nov 17, 2009 by Conal Sathi .

  Event Description:

  
  Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
  
  Jim Gemmell
  Microsoft Research
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  What if you never had to forgot anything? Trends in storage, sensing and computing will bring about an e-memory revolution in the next 10 years that will enable you to record as much of your life as want, in previously unimaginable detail. Everything you see and hear, every step you take, every heartbeat, all of it could be captured digitally. You could have Total Recall. Total Recall will revolutionize our health, our learning, and our productivity. It will change the story we pass on to posterity, taking us to a level of “digital immortality.” The consequences to society will be profound: some good and some bad. But good or bad, our experience with the MyLifeBits research project and the CARPE research community has convinced us that the e-memory revolution is inevitable.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Kwabena Boahen Mar 4, 2010 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 6, 2009. Last updated on Nov 6, 2009 by Clayton Ellis Mellina .

  Event Description:

  Title TBA
  
  Kwabena Boahen
  Bioengineering Department

  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Will post later.
  

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• SSP Forum: Rachel Habbert Apr 8, 2010 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 18, 2009. Last updated on Nov 18, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Title TBA
  
  Rachel Habbert
  M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Will be posted later.
  

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• SSP Forum: Mehran Sahami Apr 15, 2010 at 04:15 AM Event Location: Posted on Nov 3, 2009. Last updated on Nov 3, 2009 by Jimmy Chen .

  Event Description:

  
  Title TBA
  
  Mehran Sahami
  Computer Science Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Will be posted later.

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• SSP Forum: Joel Brandt Apr 22, 2010 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 11, 2009. Last updated on Nov 11, 2009 by Jimmy Chen .

  Event Description:

  Title TBA
  
  Joel Brandt
  Computer Science Department

  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Will post later.
  

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• SSP Forum: Steven Dow May 6, 2010 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 11, 2009. Last updated on Nov 11, 2009 by Jimmy Chen .

  Event Description:

  Title TBA
  
  Steven Dow
  Computer Science Department

  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Will post later.
  

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• Symbolic Systems Forum May 13, 2010 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Posted on Nov 17, 2009. Last updated on Nov 17, 2009 by Zavain Dar .

  Event Description:

  Professor Tim Roughgarden

• SSP Forum: Christos Papadimitriou Nov 19, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.logicomix.com/en/ Posted on Oct 13, 2009. Last updated on Nov 18, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  The Logicomix Tour!
  
  Christos Papadimitriou
  Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Christos Papadimitriou is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of EECS in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley.
  His academic work is centered around the theory of algorithms and complexity, and their application to databases,
  optimization, AI, networks, and game theory. However, most recently he co-authored the best selling Logicomix - a
  graphic novel about the life of Bertrand Russell and his search of mathematical truth - which he will be speaking
  about at the forum. Read more about the book at http://www.logicomix.com/.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Byron Reeves Nov 12, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 13, 2009. Last updated on Oct 28, 2009 by Jimmy Chen .

  Event Description:

  
  Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
  
  Byron Reeves
  Communication Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Every week, millions of people spend hours playing multi-player online games with a level of engagement they don’t bring to work and other serious contexts. These aren’t just adolescent video games—they involve rich narrative quests with 3-D environments, cool avatars, and compelling goals and rewards. Imagine the value if you could transfer key ingredients of game design—and the gamer excitement and focus that come with it—to the office. What if employees could solve customer problems, design new software, or configure better shipping routes—working inside a game environment at work? We'll review Stanford research about why games are engaging, and case studies of the use of serious games to increase productivity and change behavior. Possible application areas include the use of games in call centers, medical diagnosis, national security and in-home energy efficiency.

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• SSP Forum: John L. Mumma Nov 5, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 13, 2009. Last updated on Nov 2, 2009 by Zavain Dar .

  Event Description:

  
  Geometric Diagrams as Proof Symbols
  
  John L. Mumma
  Philosophy Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Diagrams have not been standardly thought to function as legitimate symbols of mathematical proof. In this talk I present recent work in which they do play such a role. I first describe the standard view of rigorous mathematical proof, and explain how by it diagrams can only be understood as external to the reasoning. I then present Eu, a formal analysis of Euclid's Elements where diagrammatic symbols form a part of geometric proofs. Specifically, I discuss the principles behind Eu's analysis, the structure of Eu as a formal system, and finally the way in which Eu ensures the generality of inferences drawn from particular diagrams.
  

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• SSP Forum: Chris Potts Oct 29, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 13, 2009. Last updated on Oct 13, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  The Language of Sentiment Expression and Group Cohesion
  
  Chris Potts
  Linguistics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  My students and I aim to build predictive models of the ways in which linguistic choices convey information about group cohesion, shared knowledge and goals, sentiment, and emotional states. In this talk, I'll provide an overview of some of our corpus and human-subjects experiments and the results they've led us to, and I'll point out some ways in which the work is relevant to cognitive psychology, social network analysis, artificial intelligence, and linguistic theory.

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• SSP Forum: Oct 8, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://filmakers.com/index.php?a=filmDetail&filmID=1498 Posted on Oct 4, 2009. Last updated on Oct 14, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Monks in the Laboratory (2006, Delphine Morel), followed by discussion
  
  
  
  DESCRIPTION (From the distributor's website):
  
  Directed by Delphine Morel, ARTE
  
  Why are Western researchers turning to Eastern spiritual practitioners for illumination on the workings of the mind? Buddhists have studied the nature of the mind for 2500 years. Now scientists at Princeton, University of California, and University of Wisconsin are investigating what happens to the brain during the different stages of meditation. They want to learn how meditation affects attention and consciousness, how it controls the emotions, and how compassion develops. The Tibetan Buddhists involved in this project were pleased to participate in these studies.
  
  In the early 1990’s the Mind and Life project was started at the University of California, Davis. With the support of the Dalai Lama, scientists were doing field research in India on yogis to discover ways of reducing stress. Psychologist Paul Ekman has made a study of facial movements, with regard to how they reflect emotion. He points out how unaware most people are of the emotional impulses that lead to action. Self awareness is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism; scientists feel that developing this would help people in their everyday lives.
  
  At the University of Wisconsin scientists explore how to cultivate compassion.They have located the emotion in the networking between the pre-frontal and the parietal cortex. The hope is that the cooperation of the spiritual and scientific community can add to the understanding of human nature and the cultivation of positive life skills.
  
  Refreshments will be served.

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• SSP Forum: Summer interns Oct 1, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2009. Last updated on Sep 28, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  What We Did This Summer
  
  Summer Internship Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 Daniel Schwarz, ""Social Influences in Common Value Auctions" (joint work with John Lyman) (supervisor: Sam McClure)
  
  4:20 Justine Kao, "Sensitivity to Information and its Effect on Style" (supervisor: Michael Ramscar)
  
  4:25 Rob Ryan, Title TBA (supervisor: Michael Ramscar)
  
  4:30 Douglas Morrison, "Neural Network Models for Sentence Production" (supervisor: Jay McClelland)
  
  4:35 Melissa Schwarz and Alana Glassco, "Parallel Design: How Parallel Creation and Feedback Affect Design" (supervisors:
  Steven Dow and Scott Klemmer)
  
  4:45 Mike Mellenthin, Title TBA (supervisors: Victor Kuperman and Tom Wasow)
  
  4:50 David Kettler, "Processing Difficulty, Acceptability Judgments, and Universal Grammar" (supervisor: Ivan Sag)
  
  4:55 Nat Hillard, "Toward developing an HPSG grammar for Mandarin Chinese" (supervisor: Dan Flickinger)
  
  5:00 Kyle Noe, "Tracking Existence" (supervisors: Annie Zaenen and Cleo Condorovdi)
  
  5:05 Clayton Mellina (virtually), "Adaptive Tutoring System for Army Battle Captains" (supervisors: Liz Bratt and Stanley
  Peters)
  
  5:10 Dana Sittler, "CALO Project, SemLab Summer 2009" (supervisors: Matthew Frampton, Trung Bui, and Stanley Peters)
  
  5:15 Evan Rosen, "Stanford Topic Modeling Toolbox: Adventures in Trustworthy Unsupervised Summarization" (supervisors:
  Dan Ramage and Chris Manning)
  
  5:20 Joseph Marrama, "Deme - An Online Content Sharing Framework" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  5:25 Nicole Fernandez, "The Invisible Influence: the Effect of Agent and Source on Tastes and Preferences" (supervisors:
  Dean Eckles and Cliff Nass)
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Senior Honors Presentations May 28, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Mar 29, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Annual Presentation of Honors Theses
  
  Senior Honors Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Will be posted later.

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• SSP Forum: Vinod Menon May 21, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 19, 2009. Last updated on May 20, 2009 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  Recent advances and controversies in the cognitive neuroscience of mathematical reasoning
  
  Vinod Menon
  Psychiatry & Behavioral Science, Bio-X
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  I will discuss recent studies from my lab in three areas of mathematical cognition: (1) Functional Heterogeneity of Inferior Parietal Cortex during Mathematical Cognition (Wu et al. 2009, Cerebral Cortex), (2) Neural Basis of Rapid Learning during Mathematical Cognition: Repetition Suppression or Repetition Enhancement? (Salimpoor et al. 2009, J Cognitive Neuroscience), and (3) Gender differences in the functional and structural neuroanatomy of mathematical cognition (Keller and Menon, 2009, NeuroImage). I will discuss recent controversies in the three areas and point out how our findings not only help to resolve them, but also point to new avenues for research in each domain.

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• SSP Forum: Jeff Heer May 14, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Apr 3, 2009 by Jason Robinson .

  Event Description:

  
  Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Social Data Analysis and Visualization
  
  Jeff Heer
  Computer Science Department
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Interactive visualizations leverage human visual processing and cognition to increase the scale of information with which we can effectively work. However, most visualization research to date focuses on a single-user model, overlooking the social nature of visual media. Visualizations are used not only to explore and analyze, but to communicate findings. People may disagree on how to interpret data and contribute contextual knowledge that deepens understanding. Furthermore, some data sets are so large that thorough exploration by a single person is unlikely. Such scenarios arise regularly in scientific collaboration, business intelligence, and public data consumption.
  
  In this talk, I will present a number of novel visualization techniques and software tools for creating and customizing interactive visualizations. I will then discuss our work recasting interactive visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces supporting collective data analysis. I'll discuss the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. User studies of the system reveal emergent patterns of social data analysis, cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

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• SSP Forum: Jason Robinson May 7, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Apr 29, 2009 by Jason Robinson .

  Event Description:

  
  Data(base) Visualization: Using Kiviat Graphs to experience Biomedical Knowledge
  
  Jason Robinson
  M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  The pharmaceutical industry is in trouble. Even before the international markets begin sliding last Fall, Big Pharma's future was clouded by the Pharma-Innovation Gap -- a recent drop in the amount of new drugs produced by their research labs despite steady increases in funding for R&D. With cash cow patents reaching the end of their patent life, there has been increased focus on why experimental treatments have such a high rate of failure during clinical trials and how the industry can improve its return on investment.
  
  In this talk, I will present the perspectives of experienced research executives at local pharmaceutical companies on why the failure rate of drug discovery has escalated over the last two decades. Also, I will introduce the prototype of a novel visualization tool that targets pain points in decision-making during the drug development process. Finally, I would to open a discussion with the audience about the immediate future of the pharmaceutical industry as well as the American healthcare system in general.

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• SSP Forum: Dan Jurafsky Apr 30, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 18, 2009. Last updated on Apr 16, 2009 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  Automatically Extracting Social Meaning from Speed Dates
  
  Dan Jurafsky
  Linguistics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Automatically extracting social meaning and intention from spoken
  dialogue is an important task for social computing and for dialogue
  systems. We describe a system for detecting elements of interactional
  style: whether a speaker is awkward, friendly, or flirtatious. We
  create and use a new spoken corpus of 991 4-minute speed-dates.
  Participants rated their interlocutors for these elements of style.
  Using rich dialogue, lexical, and prosodic features, we are able
  to detect flirtatious, awkward, and friendly styles in noisy natural
  conversational data with up to 75% accuracy, compared to a 50%
  baseline. We describe simple ways for extracting relatively rich
  dialogue features. Among our findings: speakers are labeled as
  friendly (and also, only for men, as flirtatious) when they use
  `collaborative conversational style': laughter, collaborative
  completions, appreciations, questions, and second person pronouns.
  We analyze which features performed similarly for men and women and
  which were gender-specific. This talk describes joint work with
  Dan McFarland (School of Education) and Rajesh Ranganath
  (Computer Science Department).

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• SSP Forum: Eric Pacuit Apr 23, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 29, 2009. Last updated on Apr 21, 2009 by Jimmy Chen .

  Event Description:

  
  Interactive Epistemology
  
  Eric Pacuit
  Philosophy Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  In this talk, I will discuss the "epistemic program" in game theory. The goal of this program is to provide epistemic conditions on the players (e.g., common belief in rationality) that lead to various solution concepts (e.g., Nash equilibrium, iterated dominance, backwards induction). This literature on the epistemic foundations of game theory uses a variety of mathematical models to formalize talk about players' beliefs about the game, beliefs about the rationality of the other players, beliefs about the beliefs of the other players, beliefs about the beliefs about the beliefs of the other players, and so on. Examples include Harsanyi's type spaces, interactive belief structures, knowledge structures plus a variety of logic-based frameworks. I will discuss the main technical and conceptual issues that arise in this literature.

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• SSP Forum: Eyal Ophir Apr 16, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Apr 13, 2009 by Brenden Manker Lake .

  Event Description:

  
  Multitaskers and Multitasking
  
  Eyal Ophir
  M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  With different forms of media becoming more and more readily available, media multitasking - the simultaneous consumption of multiple media streams by a single user - is becoming ubiquitous. When we use a computer application, rarely do we use it in isolation; more often than not, we have multiple browser windows open in the background, email, chat, and other applications. In fact, many of us may also be listening to an iPod, or talking on the phone, with the television on, and even have a book or two open. Yet human cognition does not seem optimized for parallel processing: we find it difficult to process multiple distinct stimuli, and to handle multiple complex tasks, at once. So how do habitual multitaskers cognitively handle this load? We'll look at the differences in cognitive control processes between heavy and light media multitaskers to begin to answer this question, as well as at how different HCI design strategies may facilitate or influence multitasking.

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• SSP Forum: Brenden Lake Apr 9, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Mar 30, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Modeling Unsupervised Perceptual Category Learning
  
  Brenden Lake
  M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  During the learning of speech sounds and other perceptual categories, category labels are not provided, the number of
  categories is unknown, and the stimuli are encountered sequentially. These constraints provide a challenge for models,
  but they have been recently addressed in the Online Mixture Estimation model of unsupervised vowel category learning
  [Vallabha et al., PNAS, 2007, 104:13273-13278]. The model treats categories as Gaussian distributions, proposing both the
  number and parameters of the categories. While the model has been shown to successfully learn vowel categories, it has
  not been evaluated as a model of the learning process. We account for several results: acquired distinctiveness between
  categories and acquired similarity within categories, a faster increase in discrimination for more acoustically
  dissimilar vowels, and gradual unsupervised learning of category structure in simple visual stimuli.
  
  
  

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• Wasow Scholar Lunch Seminar: Margaret Boden Apr 3, 2009 at 12:00 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Mar 30, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Turing and Artificial Life
  
  Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Lecture
  
  Maggie Boden
  Cognitive Science, University of Sussex
  Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems at Stanford
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  In his 1950 paper in MIND, in which he introduced the Turing Test, Alan Turing mentioned two ideas that would
  eventually be hugely important in A-Life. These were evolutionary computing, and the fourfold classification of
  computational systems that was later clarified by Stephen Wolfram. However, he merely remarked on these in
  passing, while setting out his (hugely prescient) manifesto for a future AI. With respect to A-Life, his last
  published paper, on "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" (1952) was much more important. He showed there how a
  homogeneous source, such as an undifferentiated ovum, could spontaneously self-organize, producing new forms of
  order where none existed before. This could happen by way of familiar physical laws, or "reaction-diffusion
  systems", wherein chemicals diffuse and inter-react so as to generate patterns of concentration that could act as
  the basis of anatomical/morphological structures (e.g. stripes and dappling, or petals/tentacles/segments). Over
  thirty years later, computer power (and computer graphics) had advanced enough for Turing's equations to be
  explored beyond the very simple examples that he could deal with in the early 1950s, and for generating novel
  patterns out of pre-existing patterns (as opposed to homogeneity).
  
  
  

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• SSP Forum and Distinguished Speaker Lecture: Margaret Boden Apr 2, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 29, 2009. Last updated on Mar 30, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Creativity and Computers
  
  Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Lecture
  
  Maggie Boden
  Cognitive Science, University of Sussex
  Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems at Stanford
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising, and valuable. It doesn't happen by
  magic, but involves psychological processes that can be described by science. There are three ways of generating
  creative ideas: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. Each of these can be modelled, at least up to a point, in computers. Surprisingly, perhaps, combinational creativity is the least easy to model. Also
  surprisingly, the main problem in modelling transformational creativity is not generating the transformations, but
  evaluating the results. Computational concepts can help us to understand how creativity is possible. But no
  scientific psychology (with or without neuroscience) could predict every new idea--nor even explain every one in
  detail, post hoc.
  
  
  

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• SSP Forum: David Hall Mar 12, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 3, 2008. Last updated on Mar 10, 2009 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Unsupervised Part of Speech Tagging with Product of Experts
  
  David Hall
  Master's Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  The past twenty years has seen the success of data-driven approaches
  to natural language processing using supervised machine learning.
  However, supervised learning for language requires large amounts of
  data that are often unavailable for minority languages. Recently, new
  methods for unsupervised or "minimally supervised" learning require
  far less annotated data to learn the same structure. In this
  presentation, we discuss current approaches to unsupervised part of
  speech tagging. We also present our work on a new method that
  generalizes earlier models to incorporate arbitrary linguistic
  features.
  

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• SSP Forum: Larry Leifer Mar 5, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c Posted on Jan 7, 2009. Last updated on Feb 9, 2009 by Jason Robinson .

  Event Description:

  Larry Leifer
  Director of the Center for Design Research (CDR)
  
  Title:
  
  Dancing with Ambiguity: design thinking in practice and theory
  
  Abstract:
  
  Over the past thirty years, a powerful methodology for innovation has emerged. It integrates human, business and technical factors in problem forming, solving and design: "Design-Thinking." This human-centric methodology integrates expertise from design, social sciences, business and engineering. High performance project teams are capable of simultaneously applying these different points of view. It creates a vibrant interaction environment that promotes iterative learning cycles driven by rapid conceptual prototyping. This methodology has proven successful in designing innovative products, systems, and services. Design-thinking works. Industry is subscribing to boot camps and executive education workshops. Teams of industry, government and education experts are tackling complex problems and finding powerful solutions. The time is right to apply rigorous academic research to understand how, when and why design-thinking works. It is time to create next generation design thinking and the tools to support it.
  

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• SSP Forum: Kalanit Grill-Spector Feb 26, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 2, 2008. Last updated on Dec 13, 2008 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  Plasticity in high level visual cortex: Insights from adaptation and development
  
  Kalanit Grill-Spector
  Psychology, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract TBA

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• SSP Forum: Victor Kuperman and Hal Tily Feb 19, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 3, 2008. Last updated on Feb 14, 2009 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  How Communication Shapes Language Structure
  
  Victor Kuperman and Hal Tily
  Linguistics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Human language can only be an optimal solution to communication over a
  noisy channel if it minimizes the amount of effort that speakers and hearers
  exert, while keeping the chance of miscommunication low.
  There is a growing body of evidence that human language demonstrates
  rational behavior in that it optimizes communication efficiency, satisfying (potentially opposing)
  demands for concise and error-free communication. In three
  cross-linguistic case studies we show that these demands extend beyond
  on-line language use, and in fact shape the actual lexical and
  phonological structures that make up human languages. Our first study
  demonstrates that humans disfavor very long and very short sound
  sequences: long sequences are effortful for the speaker, and overly
  short sequences make accurate perception difficult. Our second study
  suggests that the distribution of word lengths is co-determined by the
  contextual predictability of those words, so that less articulatory
  effort is wasted on words that could be predicted more easily by the
  hearer. Finally, we discuss the fact that lexical stress tends to occur
  in the syllables that are most informative about word's identity. We
  discuss the link between these findings and current research on
  efficiency and self-organization in language.

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• SSP Forum: Peter Stone Feb 12, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c Posted on Dec 2, 2008. Last updated on Dec 2, 2008 by Jane Huang .

  Event Description:

  
  Arbitrary Selection and Random Selection
  Peter Stone
  Political Science, Stanford University
  
  
  
  When decision-makers run out of reasons for selecting between the options they face, they are often said to be "just picking" something, or acting "arbitrarily," or choosing "at random." This manner of speaking, however, elides important the fact that there are important differences between different forms of non-reasoned decision-making. I shall call two of these forms "arbitrary selection" and "random selection," and argue that the latter has desirable normative properties that the former does not. Arbitrary selection involves appeal to a process about which information is lacking. Random selection involves appeal to a process about which information is present, where that information suggests that all outcomes are equiprobable. Random selection, but not arbitrary selection, can sanitize decision-making by ensuring that no option is favored over any other.

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• SSP Forum: Tsvi Achler Feb 5, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 22, 2009. Last updated on Feb 1, 2009 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  Hybrid Classification and Symbolic-Like
  Manipulation Using Self-Regulatory Feedback Networks
  
  Tsvi Achler
  Computer Science Department, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Challenges remain in developing symbolic connectionist networks that maintain dynamic relationships between symbols-representations within different tasks or contexts.
  
  Three major issues underlie both symbolic and recognition systems: 1) controlling and manipulating recognition based on symbolic processing 2) binding 3) addressing combinatorially impractical scenarios given simultaneous patterns.
  
  Networks incorporating self-regulatory feedback or 'network homeostasis' (where cells inhibit their own inputs) perform recognition and offer better symbolic control. This structure is motivated by pre-synaptic inhibition found overwhelmingly throughout the brain.
  
  I will focus on why this structure is critical towards building a robust, combinatorialy plausible, 'active and behaving' symbolic-like recognition system.

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• SSP Forum: Dave Barker-Plummer Jan 29, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 27, 2009. Last updated on Jan 27, 2009 by Mike Alfred Mellenthin .

  Event Description:

  During the 1990s, Barwise and Etchemendy developed the theory of formal heterogeneous deduction: logically valid inference that involves information expressed using multiple different representations. The Hyperproof program was developed as an implementation of that theory, and permitted deductions using sentences of first-order logic and blocks world diagrams. At CSLI's Openproof Project, we have since been generalizing both the theory and the implementation to allow applications in a wide variety of domains. On the theoretical side, we have identified features of heterogeneous reasoning which occur in everyday domains, but which do not correspond to logical deductions. Examples here include applications in design, where a desired design may not be a logical consequence of some initial information, but rather is preferred based on notions of aesthetics, cost or other non-logical features of the design domain. The architecture that we developed for Hyperproof generalizes to these situations and permits the modeling of this kind of reasoning. The notion of a logically valid inference is generalized to a justified modification, where the justification may be a piece of text written by the user, a calculation of the cost of materials in a design, or any other rationale that the user finds appropriate to the domain at hand. The general principles of information flow through a structured argument remain the same in both contexts.
  
  On the implementation side, we have designed the Openproof architecture, an application framework for building heterogeneous reasoning systems which permits "plug-ins". Individual developers can provide components to the architecture which are guaranteed to work with other existing components to create heterogeneous reasoning environments in a flexible manner. A researcher interested in Venn diagrams, for example, might implement components for this representation, and use them together with our first-order logic components to construct a proof environment for those representations. This frees researchers and developers from the tasks of developing proof management facilities, and permits a focus on the properties of the representations themselves. In this talk we will describe our generalized theory of heterogeneous reasoning motivated by examples from design and by problems taken from GRE and SAT tests. We will demonstrate a variety of applications based on the Openproof framework to show the range of heterogeneous reasoning applications which may be built using the system.

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• SSP Forum: Mark Musen Jan 22, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c Posted on Jan 7, 2009. Last updated on Jan 8, 2009 by Jason Robinson .

  Event Description:

  The Craze Over Bio-Ontologies: Creating a Structure for E-Science
  
  Ontologies: They're not just for Philosophers Anymore
  
  Mark A. Musen, M.D., Ph.D.
  Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics Research) and Computer Science
  Principal Investigator, The National Center for Biomedical Ontology
  Stanford University
  
  At the heart of building any symbolic system is the problem of encoding a description of the entities and the relationships among entities in the world in which the system must operate. These descriptions are known as ontologies. Ontologies form the basis of systems that perform semantic data integration, natural-language processing, and decision support. They thus are essential for current work to build computer-based applications for e-science. In this talk, I will discuss the general problems of engineering ontologies, and will discuss new technology under development by the National Center for Biomedical Ontology to aid scientists who work in biomedical informatics and computational biology.

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• SSP Forum: Gary Cottrell Jan 15, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c Posted on Dec 10, 2008. Last updated on Jan 9, 2009 by Brenden Manker Lake .

  Event Description:

  SUN: A Model of Visual Salience Using Natural Statistics
  
  Gary Cottrell
  Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego
  
  Abstract:
  
  As a result of having a foveated retina, we actively move our eyes in order to direct our highest resolution of visual processing towards interesting things. In fact, we move our eyes about three times a second; it is a decision we make about 172,000 times a day. How do we decide where to look?
  
  Most computational theories of overt visual attention assume there is a salience map that is computed from both exogenous and endogenous sources. Exogenous sources of salience tend to be visually “busy” locations in the world. Endogenous sources of salience derive from task-relevant considerations, such as those involved in my most vexing task of the day, finding my glasses. We have developed a Bayesian model of salience that naturally leads to components corresponding to these two influences. Our model differs from most other models in assuming that for exogenous influences on salience, the statistics of the visual world are learned through experience and then applied to new stimuli, as opposed to being computed directly from new stimuli. The model has been applied to standard datasets and can account for eye fixations as well or better than any other model in the literature, is able to be computed in real time due to its computational efficiency, and is able to explain several visual search asymmetries.

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• SSP Forum: Rebecca Slayton Jan 8, 2009 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c Posted on Dec 2, 2008. Last updated on Dec 2, 2008 by Jane Huang .

  Event Description:

  Disciplined Projections: Physics, Computing, and the “Star Wars” Debate
  
  Rebecca Slayton
  Science, Technology and Society, Stanford University
  
  
  "Will it work?" This inscrutable and often ill-defined question is common to levees in New Orleans, solar power farms, high speed rails, and missile defenses. How do experts assess the future of complex technological systems, as they confront us with uncertainties that are simultaneously political and technological? This talk addresses the question by showing how scientists and engineers confronted U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s call to render “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Popularly known as the “Star Wars” missile defense program, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative launched a world-wide debate that continues to echo today. I argue that experts used disciplined projections – predictions based on generally accepted, mathematical rules of scientific disciplines – to produce certainty and authority about the future of SDI. Importantly, different disciplines highlighted distinctive aspects of SDI, and generated different kinds of political authority. Physicists analyzed idealized systems and mobilized a form of disciplinary objectivity. By contrast, computer experts analyzed complex, faulty systems, and made their arguments persuasive by appealing to common sense. The differences in the debates surrounding these groups reveal key aspects of U.S. political culture.

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• SSP Forum: Donald Saari Dec 4, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 17, 2008. Last updated on Dec 3, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Mathematics of Voting and Social Choice
  
  Donald Saari
  Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, UC Irvine
  A joint event with the Seminar in Logical Methods in the Humanities: The Logic and Mathematics of Voting
  Procedures, and the Mathematics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Mathematics has been used to understand the source of voting problems probably since the work of the mathematician J.C Borda back in 1770. While progress has been made, so many puzzles remain -- enough so that one should worry whether election outcomes really reflect the views of the voters. In this talk, which assumes no expertise in the area, it will be shown how mathematics explains a wide number of problems including Arrow's famous result, all of those voting paradoxes, and how extensions of these ideas provide insight into concerns ranging from engineering to multiscale analysis issues.
  

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• SSP Forum: Kenneth Arrow Nov 20, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 25, 2008. Last updated on Dec 3, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  The Subject-Matter of Social Choice Theory
  
  Kenneth Arrow
  Economics Department
  A joint event with the Seminar in Logical Methods in the Humanities: The Logic and Mathematics of Voting
  Procedures
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  More questions will be asked than answers given. Social choice theory has both normative and descriptive implications. The normative viewpoint is itself complicated. (1) If individuals are rational, "normative" and "descriptive" overlap. (2) Can rationality be ascribed to collectivities? (3) How is social choice theory related to political philosophy?
  
  Descriptively, one can apply social choice thinking to elections (where intransitivities can sometimes be inferred), to legislation (agenda control), or to judicial procedures.
  

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• SSP Forum: Ge Wang Nov 13, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ge/ Posted on Sep 25, 2008. Last updated on Oct 22, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  At the Intersection of Music and Computer Science:
  ChucK, Live Coding, and Laptop Orchestras
  
  Ge Wang
  Music Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  We present ChucK, a new programming language and paradigm for precise and rapid experimentation of computer audio/music for composition, performance, and pedagogy. The tenets of ChucK include a "strongly-timed" programming model, and support for live coding - a way to rapidly experimenting with audio programs (i.e., as they run). Overall, the framework provides a different way of thinking about how to create, explore, and work with sound and music via code.
  
  In this context, we describe our adventures with the "laptop orchestra", a new type of large-scale, computer-mediated music ensemble and classroom. The laptop orchestra consists of twenty sets of laptops, humans, special hemispherical speakers, sensors, and software. It presents new challenges and opportunities in instrument design, programming, composition, performance, and learning about computing and music. We present our ongoing adventures with the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), and discuss the laptop orchestra's potential to serve as a unique and naturally integrated platform for research in computing, as well as musical expression and exploration.
  
  All audiences welcome!
  
  ---
  Bio
  
  Ge Wang received his B.S. in Computer Science in 2000 from Duke University, PhD in Computer Science (advisor Perry Cook) in 2008 from Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). His research interests include interactive software systems for computer music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music information retrieval, new performance ensembles (e.g., laptop orchestras) and paradigms (e.g., live coding), visualization, interfaces for human-computer interaction, interactive audio over networks, and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is the chief architect of the ChucK audio programming language. He was a founding developer and co-director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), the founder and director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk). Ge composes and performs via various electro-acoustic and computer-mediated means.
  

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• SSP Forum: Robot Stories (film) Nov 6, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.robotstories.net/ Posted on Nov 5, 2008. Last updated on Nov 5, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Robot Stories
  
  A film by Greg Pak
  2004
  
  
  ABOUT THE MOVIE:
  Winner of over 30 awards, "Robot Stories" is science fiction from the heart, four stories starring Tamlyn Tomita ("Joy Luck Club," "Babylon 5") and Sab Shimono ("The Big Hit," "Suture") in which utterly human characters struggle to connect in a world of robot babies and android office workers. The stories include: "My Robot Baby," in which a couple must care for a robot baby before adopting a human child; "The Robot Fixer," in which a mother tries to connect with her dying son by completing his toy robot collection; "Machine Love," in which an office worker android learns that he, too, needs love; and "Clay," in which an old sculptor must choose between natural death and digital immortality. John Petrakis of the Chicago Tribune calls the film "one of the most moving pieces I've seen all year" while Entertainment Insiders calls it "the kind of science fiction sophisticated audiences crave and deserve."
  (from http://www.robotstories.net/)

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• SSP Forum: Todd Davies Oct 30, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.whovoted.net Posted on Oct 21, 2008. Last updated on Oct 29, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Web Access to Voting Records: Motivations and Issues
  
  Todd Davies
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  I will describe the thinking behind Who Voted?, a new website where voter histories that are legally available to the public can be uploaded and viewed by anyone with an Internet connection. The Who Voted site complements advocacy aimed at ensuring auditable paper ballots, addressing the aspect of secret ballot election integrity that relies on verification of the list of those who voted. It also aims to promote voting, by making the list of those who voted (but not who they voted for) easier to see. The road to producing this site was long, and provoked criticism from some privacy advocates, which in turn affected the design of the site and what information it makes available. I will review the reasoning behind the site, and describe the issues it raises as well as how it addresses them. One issue is that voter histories for some but not all states can be posted legally on the Internet, but even those states where the information is public generally do not post it on the Web. I will discuss why this is so, and describe the case for Web access to voting records. (Joint work with Jeffrey Gerard, Gordon Lyon, and Reid Chandler)

---

• SSP Forum: Steven Brams Oct 23, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/lmh/voting-topics.html Posted on Sep 25, 2008. Last updated on Dec 3, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  How Democracy Resolves Conflict in Difficult Games
  
  Steven J. Brams
  Politics Department, New York University
  A joint event with the Seminar in Logical Methods in the Humanities: The Logic and Mathematics of Voting
  Procedures
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  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 free rider, and a biblical story from the book of Exodus. (joint work with D. Marc Kilgour)
  
  Note: For background reading, see items 4 and 5 on this website.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Kamal Mansour Oct 16, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 25, 2008. Last updated on Oct 8, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Multilingual Text: a glimpse below the surface
  
  Kamal Mansour
  Monotype Imaging
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  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.
  

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• SSP Forum: Summer Interns Oct 2, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 25, 2008. Last updated on Sep 25, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  What We Did This Summer
  
  Summer Internship Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 Introduction - Todd Davies
  
  4:20 Rachel Habbert, "Concrete Thinking and its Impact on Decision Making" (supervisor: James Gross)
  
  4:25 Mike Mellenthin, "Human Robot Interaction" (supervisor: John Fry)
  
  4:30 Jonathan Kass, "Cognitive Load Measurement in Varying Note-taking Interfaces" (supervisors: Patrick Ehlen and
  Stanley Peters)
  
  4:35 Conal Sathi and Jane Huang, "Coaching Dialogue" (supervisors: Elizabeth Owen Bratt and Stanley Peters)
  
  4:45 Kevin Leung, "A Feasibility Study of Transfer Learning in Football Play Design" (supervisors: Kamal Ali and Dan
  Shapiro)
  
  4:50 Steven Bills and Mike Mintz, "Relation Discovery" (supervisors: Dan Jurafsky and Rion Snow)
  
  5:00 Ben Kessler Reynolds, "A Bit of This, a Lot of 'That': Grammaticality Judgments of Native English Speakers"
  (supervisors: Ivan Sag and Tom Wasow)
  
  5:05 Reid Chandler, "Modality Choice" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  5:10 Anna Schapiro, "Modeling Semantic Knowledge in the Anterior Temporal Lobes" (supervisors: Jay McClelland and Matt
  Lambon Ralph [University of Manchester])
  
  5:15 Brenden Lake, "Semi-Supervised Learning in People" (supervisor: Jay McClelland)
  
  5:20 Anna Ravenscroft, "Development of Therapeutic Learning Environments for Children with Executive Function Disorder"
  (supervisors: David Wilkins and Victor Carrion)
  
  Refreshments will be served
  

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• SSP Forum: Senior Honors Presentations Jun 5, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Apr 5, 2008. Last updated on Jun 4, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Annual Presentation of Honors Theses
  
  Senior Honors Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 David Ho, "Neural Network Models of Recognition Memory" (Advisor: Jay
  McClelland, Second Reader: Anthony Wagner)
  
  4:25 Jieun Oh, "Resolving Conflicting Linguistic and Musical Cues in Metric &
  Beat-Strength Perception of Songs" (Advisor: Jonathan Berger, Second Reader:
  Lera Boroditsky)
  
  4:35 Jason Robinson, "The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in Creativity and
  Artistic Expression" (Advisor: John R. Perry, Second Reader: Krista Lawlor)
  
  4:45 Karl Pichotta, "Phrasal Implicatives and Paraphrases in the Bridge
  Question-Answering System" (Advisor: Lauri Karttunen, Second Reader: Tracy
  King)
  
  4:55 David Hall, "Tracking the Evolution of Science" (Advisor: Dan Jurafsky,
  Second Reader: Chris Manning)
  
  5:05 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)
  
  5:15 Joel Lewenstein, "When It's OK to Steal: Three Intentions Being
  Prototyping Using External Code Resources" (Advisor: Scott R. Klemmer, Second
  Reader: Joel Brandt)
  
  5:25 Rachel Yong, "Developing Voting Software to Calculate the
  2008 ASSU Election Results Using Alternate Preference Aggregation
  Methods" (Advisor: Marc Pauly, Second Reader: Greg Watkins)
  
  5:35 Refreshments
  

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• SSP Forum and Wasow Scholars Lecture: Hiroshi Ishii May 29, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://tangible.media.mit.edu/ Posted on Apr 5, 2008. Last updated on May 19, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels
  
  Hiroshi Ishii
  Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Where the sea meets the land, life has blossomed into a myriad of unique forms in the turbulence of water, sand, and
  wind. At another seashore between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling
  our dual citizenships in the physical and digital worlds. Windows to the digital world are confined to flat square
  ubiquitous screens filled with pixels, or "painted bits." Unfortunately, one can not feel and confirm the virtual
  existence of this digital information through one's body.
  
  Tangible Bits, our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), seeks to realize seamless interfaces between humans,
  digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly
  manipulable and perceptible. Guided by this vision, we are designing "tangible user interfaces" which employ physical
  objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. These involve foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. We are also exploring background information displays which use "ambient media." Here, we seek to communicate digitally-mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of human awareness. Our goal is to realize seamless interfaces taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world.
  
  In this talk, I will present the design principles and a variety of tangible user interfaces the Tangible Media Group has presented in Media Arts, Design, and Science communities including ICC, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, Venice
  Biennale, ArtFutula, IDSA, ICSID, AIGA, ACM CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, CSCW.
  
  
  

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• Ben Shneiderman Lecture 4: Science 2.0: The Design Science of Collaboration May 23, 2008 at 12:30 PM Event Location: Gates B01 Posted on Apr 3, 2008. Last updated on May 18, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  Note: this is part 4 of Ben Shneiderman's lecture series as part of the Wasow Visiting Scholars program.
  
  Studying individual sense-making, collaborative discovery, and social creativity require new forms of science. The traditional sciences of the natural world (let’s call them Science 1.0) have brought astonishing advances during the past 400 years. Science 1.0 will continue to be important, but many modern interdisciplinary problems such as emergency/ disaster response, healthcare, environmental protection, energy sustainability, and international development are resistant to traditional reductionist thinking. Science 2.0 focuses on the human-designed world in which the dynamics of trust, privacy, responsibility, and empathy are determinants of success. Advancing Science 2.0 will require a shift in priorities to promote intense collaboration, integrative thinking, teamwork-based education/training, and case study ethnographic research methods. Science 2.0 will reduce the gulf between basic and applied research, while bringing theory and practice closer together. This talk lays out an ambitious vision that will impact research funding, educational practices, and democratic principles.
  

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• Ben Shneiderman Lecture 3: Creativity Support Tools: Individual and Social May 22, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Apr 3, 2008. Last updated on May 18, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  Note: this is part 3 of Ben Shneiderman's lecture series as part of the Wasow Visiting Scholars program.
  
  Improved user interfaces are empowering individuals and groups in the sciences and arts to go beyond productivity and be more creative. Web-based systems have harnessed the giga-contribs of dedicated individuals and the peta-collabs of emergent social creativity to produce remarkable successes such as Wikipedia, FaceBook, and flickr. Enhanced interfaces enable more effective Googling of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces also provide potent support in goal setting, speedier exploration of alternatives, improved sense-making through visualization, and faster dissemination of results. This talk describes theories of creativity and suggests how they lead to design guidelines for creativity support tools and to novel research methods.

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• Ben Shneiderman Lecture 2: Visual Analytics for Collaborative Knowledge Discovery May 21, 2008 at 12:00 PM Event Location: 420-041 Posted on Apr 3, 2008. Last updated on May 18, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  Note: this is part 2 of Ben Shneiderman's lecture series as part of the Wasow Visiting Scholars program.
  
  As information visualization gains acceptance, the integration with efficient data mining algorithms supports collaborative knowledge discovery. Statistical methods enable users to find key features such as trends, clusters, gaps, and outliers in large databases. The Hierarchical Clustering Explorer (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce) lets users chose ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, so they can locate desired features in higher dimensional spaces. This strategy of integrating statistics with visualization is applied to network data in SocialAction that extends the force-directed layout method (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction) and in NVSS that promotes the novel approach of semantic substrates with fixed node locations based on node attributes (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/nvss). Case studies of Supreme Court citations, U.S. Senate voting patterns, terror networks, and bibliographic citations will be shown.

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• Ben Shneiderman Lecture 1: Information Visualization for Insight & Communication May 20, 2008 at 07:00 PM Event Location: Annenberg Auditorium (in Cummings Art Building) Posted on Apr 3, 2008. Last updated on May 18, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  **Distinguished Speaker Lecture**
  
  Note: this is part 1 of Ben Shneiderman's lecture series as part of the Wasow Visiting Scholars program.
  
  The rise of interactive information visualization tools provides researchers and analysts with remarkable capabilities to support discovery and communication. They begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. The growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com are only the start. Research prototypes for large time series data are being applied to financial, medical, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher). At the same time, data sharing websites such as ManyEyes or Swivel and journalistic triumphs, such as the excellent interactive presentations of the New York Times, are helping to promote widespread interactive visual literacy.
  
  7:00-7:30pm Tea, Coffee, Socializing, Joining BayCHI
  7:30-9:00pm Information Visualization for Insight & Communication

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• SSP Forum: Jeremy Bailenson May 15, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 10, 2008. Last updated on May 7, 2008 by Julie Finkelstein .

  Event Description:

  
  Virtual Identity and Social Transformation
  
  Jeremy Bailenson
  Department of Communication
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones,
  email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences.
  Similarly, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further change the nature of
  remote interaction. CVEs are systems which track verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants
  and render those signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations of people in a shared
  digital space. In this talk, I describe a series of projects that explore the manners in which CVEs
  qualitatively change the nature of remote communication. Unlike telephone conversations and
  videoconferences, interactants in CVEs have the ability to systematically filter the physical appearance
  and behavioral actions of their avatars in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or
  suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These transformations
  have a drastic impact on interactants? persuasive and instructional abilities.
  Furthermore, using CVEs, behavioral researchers can use this mismatch between performed and
  perceived behavior as a tool to examine complex patterns of nonverbal behavior with nearly perfect
  experimental control.

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• SSP Forum: Mike Genesereth and Harry Surden May 8, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Apr 7, 2008. Last updated on May 2, 2008 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Computational Law
  
  Mike Genesereth and Harry Surden
  CodeX: The Stanford Center for Computers and Law
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Computational Law is that branch of legal informatics concerned with the mechanization of legal reasoning. While the idea of automated legal reasoning is not new, its prospects are better than ever due to a convergence of technological trends - including the growth of the Internet, the proliferation of embedded computer systems, and progress in knowledge representation and automated reasoning. In this presentation, we examine the concept of Computational Law, we summarize its prospects and problems, and we examine its philosophical and legal implications.
  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Wasow Scholars Lecture: Terrence J. Sejowski May 6, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Mathematics Corner) Posted on Apr 5, 2008. Last updated on Apr 23, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Google Brain
  
  Terrence J. Sejnowski
  Professor of Biology, UCSD
  Professor of Biology, Salk Institute
  Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  The brain is not just a computing device: It is also a
  powerful communication network, with the total bandwidth
  of signaling between neurons comparable to that of the entire
  World Wide Web. How is all the traffic between brain areas
  regulated? How does the brain "google" itself? The answers
  to these questions are being sought in the temporal coherence
  of brain signals on a global scale.
  

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• SSP Forum: Tania Lombrozo May 1, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 1, 2008. Last updated on Apr 23, 2008 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  Explaining explanation: why we answer "why?" the way we
  do
  
  Tania Lombrozo
  Berkeley Psychology Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Many scientific and everyday inferences involve the generation and
  evaluation of candidate explanations. Does Mercury trace epicycles around
  the earth or follow an elliptical orbit around the sun? Is your congestion
  due to allergies or an imminent cold? One proposal from philosophy and
  psychology is that in cases such as these, we make an "inference to the best
  explanation": we evaluate the quality of explanations as a way to assess
  their probability. In this talk I'll present evidence for the role of
  inference to the best explanation in human cognition. Specifically, I'll
  suggest that simpler explanations are regarded as better and more probable
  than complex alternatives. This has the consequence that disproportionate
  probabilistic evidence is required before a complex explanation is preferred
  over a simpler alternative. I'll present data from adults and from children,
  and will consider how inference to the best explanation relates to normative
  accounts of probabilistic inference.

---

• Wasow Scholars Lecture: Terrence J. Sejowski Apr 29, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Mathematics Corner) Posted on Apr 5, 2008. Last updated on Apr 23, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  A Critique of Pure Vision
  
  Terrence J. Sejnowski
  Professor of Biology, UCSD
  Professor of Biology, Salk Institute
  Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  Thomas A. Wasow Visiting Scholar in Symbolic Systems
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Vision is the best understood sensory system in mammalian brains.
  It is generally assumed that the purpose of the visual system is
  to create a detailed internal representation of three-dimensional
  visual scenes. Evidence suggests instead that the brain only
  creates a partial internal model of the scene for the purpose of
  guiding motor actions. This interactive view of vision will
  be illustrated with a new task in which the subject must find a
  hidden target -- in the absence of an image.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Mike Krieger Apr 24, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 3, 2007. Last updated on Apr 13, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  
  Exploring Mass End-User Participation in the Design Process
  
  Mike Krieger
  Symbolic Systems Program (M.S. Candidate)
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  What would it mean for 10,000 people to be involved in a design process for the next version of a product? My research explores when and how we can involve masses of users in design. Building off the idea of “crowdsourcing” — offloading tasks to the wisdom of a crowd of Internet users — my colleagues in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford and I have been probing the utility of mass participation in three design stages: idea generation, storyboarding/contextualizing, and late-stage tweaking/iteration. In this talk, I will discuss the related work in this field, present preliminary results from our first investigations, and discuss the work that will constitute the remainder of my Master’s program.
  
  Bio:
  Mike Krieger is a Master’s student in the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford. His research focuses on mass end-user participation in design, and how we can best leverage the “wisdom of the crowds” in designing software and products. Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Mike has worked in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford since his sophomore year as an undergraduate in Symbolic Systems at Stanford.

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• SSP Forum: Leonard Susskind Apr 17, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Building 380, Room 380C http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/people/faculty/susskind_leonard.html Posted on Feb 19, 2008. Last updated on Apr 11, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Boltzmann Brains
  
  
  Leonard Susskind
  Felix Bloch Professor in Physics
  Stanford University
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  In 2002, Leonard Susskind co-authored a paper in the Journal of High
  Energy Physics titled "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological
  Constant". A recent New York Times article
  (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html) credited this
  paper with helping to set off a debate about the concept known as
  "Boltzmann brains": free-floating conscious entities arising from random
  fluctuations in energy. According to the Times article, the Boltzmann
  brain hypothesis "could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction
  in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that
  you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary
  fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person
  with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly
  star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around
  you are illusions." In this talk, Professor Susskind, a who is also one
  of the fathers of string theory, will discuss the concept of Boltzmann
  brains and their role in contemporary physics.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Russell Fernald Apr 10, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 14, 2008. Last updated on Apr 7, 2008 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  How does behavior shape the brain?
  
  Russell D. Fernald
  Professor
  Department of Biological Sciences
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  How do social encounters produce changes in the brain? Though we know that the social environment influences the brain we don’t know how social information is transduced into cellular and molecular changes? To understand this we study reproduction, the most important event in an animals life using a model system in which socially dominant animals can reproduce while non-dominant animals cannot. We now know that social ascent regulates several neuronal properties including neuron size, connectivity, receptor expression illustrating the powerful role of social life on neural structures.
  
  
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Pamela Hinds Apr 3, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 13, 2008. Last updated on Apr 2, 2008 by Julie Finkelstein .

  Event Description:

  
  Going Global: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work
  Pamela Hinds
  Associate Professor
  Co-Director- Center for Work, Technology, and Organization
  Management Science and Engineering
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Many workers, particularly those involved in large, complex projects, are now working with colleagues and team members spread around the globe. Distributed work is often characterized by long periods of time working apart, punctuated by face-to-face meetings and site visits. In the study being presented today, we explore the interplay between distant work and these collocated intervals in an attempt to understand why site visits play such an important role in ongoing collaboration. In an ethnographic study of 143 members of 9 software development teams, we examine the relationship between site visits and distant work and their effects on interpersonal dynamics and the coordination of work. Our findings suggest that site visits promote situated knowing who – knowledge about distant colleagues that is situated in context and intertwined with practice. During site visits, people observe and interact with their distant colleagues in these colleagues' context, thus gaining a deeper understanding of their behavior within the social and physical context in which they are situated. As they interact, they reconstitute collaborative practices which further facilitates knowing who. After team members return to their home site, some of these new collaborative practices carry over to their work with distant colleagues and additional new practices evolve as a result of the situated knowing who generated during site visits. Overall, this work highlights why site visits matter in global work.

---

• SSP Forum: Aurelie Beaumel Mar 13, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 3, 2007. Last updated on Feb 28, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Placebo effects, price, and consumption utility: How price can change the taste of wine
  
  Aurelie Beaumel
  Symbolic Systems Program (M.S. Candidate)
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Despite the ubiquitous presence of marketing in consumers~R lives, the knowledge of the psychological mechanisms
  by which marketing actions influence consumer behavior remains limited. A recent neuroeconomics study showed that
  increasing the price of a wine increases reported taste pleasantness of the wine and neural activity in the brain
  areas known to encode pleasure. In this presentation, I will propose a theory explaining the psychological
  underpinnings of this effect, arguing that price influences quality expectations, which in turn influences
  experienced pleasantness. To support this hypothesis, I will also present studies showing that the effect of price
  on experienced pleasantness can be increased by making the price-quality relationship more salient, and decreased
  by providing information that weakens beliefs in the price-quality relationship.
  

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• SSP Forum: Jean-Pierre Dupuy Mar 6, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Posted on Nov 11, 2007. Last updated on Feb 8, 2008 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Truth in Fiction
  
  Jean-Pierre Dupuy
  French Department and, by courtesy, Political Science Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Why is it that for many of us some fictional characters have more reality and play a more important role in our lives than real persons? In some extreme cases, it may seem to us that our very life is inscribed in such or such fiction that has impressed us most.
  
  One thing is certain: you won’t find the answers to these disturbing questions in the seminal paper published by David K. Lewis in 1983, “Truth in Fiction”, which remains the Bible of analytic philosophy of fiction. Lewis analyzes the kind of convention that binds the narrator and the reader (or spectator). He admits to the existence of cases in which the narrator breaks the convention. About those cases, which represent arguably the essence of literature (or film), Lewis has, by his own admission, no solution to offer.
  
  The talk will propose a radically different interpretation of truth in fiction, illustrated by the analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’ Fictions, Camus’ The Stranger, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and a few other classic masterpieces.
  
  The talk will be self-contained, even for those who haven’t read or seen the classics in question. They must promise not to be mad at the speaker for spoiling their pleasure if, on hearing the talk, they rush out to buy the books or the DVDs.
  
  
  BIO:
  
  Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris, and founding director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, and Full Professor (1/3rd time), Departments of French and, by courtesy, Political Science, Stanford University. He is also a Stanford C.S.L.I. Researcher, and is affiliated with the Stanford Science, Technology, and Society Program, the Symbolic Systems Forum, the Anthropology Department, and the Religious Studies Department. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology.

---

• "Innovation Goes Public" by Bruce Perens Mar 6, 2008 at 12:00 PM Event Location: 420-041 Posted on Feb 22, 2008. Last updated on Feb 22, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Innovation Goes Public
  by Bruce Perens
  Thursday March 6th from 12-1:30
  Location Jordan Hall (Psych building), 420-041 (Stanford Main Campus)
  
  Abstract:
  
  Open Source provides much of the software infrastructure for many of
  the world's largest companies and organizations: Merrill Lynch,
  Google, Pixar, Amazon, the City of New York, and probably you -
  although you might not know it. Innovative products like Linux,
  Firefox, and Apache are the market-leaders in their sectors, but there
  are tens of thousands of Open Source programs, used for just about
  everything. But the economics of Open Source are non-intuitive: how
  can you make money by giving software away? Why did IBM de-emphasize
  AIX, after spending Billions, in favor of Linux, the product of a
  loose collaboration of programmers that it can never control? How can
  the world's greatest city trust Open Source to help manage its jails?
  
  Perens will show how Open Source is often the most effective strategy
  for creating and utilizing new innovation. He will explain the
  economics of Open Source and how it works for profit-generating
  companies. His talk will be clear to beginners yet informative even
  for Open Source pros.
  
  --
  Biography:
  
  Bruce Perens is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source
  community. He advises large corporations and several national
  governments on Open Source policy. He is creator of the Open Source
  Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software.
  Perens is a vice president at Sourcelabs, a venture-funded company
  that provides Open Source services to Wall Street. He is a visiting
  researcher at Agder University in Norway, funded by a national grant.
  He was HP's first Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source,
  and was Senior Research Scientist for Open Source with George
  Washington University's Cyber Security Policy Research Institute. The
  Bruce Perens' Open Source Series from Prentice Hall published 24
  titles with Perens as series editor. Perens previously spent 20 years
  in the computer graphic animation industry, 12 of them at Pixar
  Animation Studios. He has a credit on the films A Bug's Life and Toy
  Story II.
  --
  
  This talk is co-sponsored by the ATS program, Symbolic Systems and IT
  Services.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Sam McClure Feb 28, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 18, 2007. Last updated on Feb 28, 2008 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  The multiple systems hypothesis of decision-making: a neuroscientific perspective
  
  Sam McClure
  Psychology Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Several lines of research in psychology have led to the conclusion that human perception and decision-making depend on separate processes. I will present fMRI data supporting this hypothesis in the context of reward-based decision-making. I will discuss the consequences of these findings in terms of furthering brain-based models of human decision making.
  

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• SSP Forum: Eve Clark Feb 21, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Posted on Nov 27, 2007. Last updated on Feb 11, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  
  "Adult engagement and the shaping of new meanings in children's acquisition"
  Eve Clark - Psychology Department
  
  Adults shape the acquisition of meaning in young children in
  several ways: (a) They offer children unfamiliar (new) words,
  words to which children must assign some initial meaning in
  context. And (b) they often offer additional information about
  new words, information that licenses inferences on the children's
  part, and so allows them to set up preliminary meanings. In doing
  this, adults often offer other terms from the same semantic domain
  as well, and so help shape children's semantic organization too.
  

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• SSP Forum: Stanley Rosenschein Feb 14, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.quindi.com/about.htm#s Posted on Jan 10, 2008. Last updated on Jan 23, 2008 by Aman Ishaan Kumar .

  Event Description:

  
  New Tools, New Rules: Protocols, Algorithms, and the Future of Work
  
  Stanley J. Rosenschein
  Quindi and the Center for the Study of Language and Information
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Over the last two decades, digital networks have grown in power, reach and availability, bringing impressive productivity gains to the workplace. These gains, however, are limited by traditional work practices, which, when combined with new tools, often lead to rapid saturation of human capacity. This talk asks what kind of human protocols and work practices might be better suited to dynamic work in a digital age, and can these protocols be explicitly designed, in analogy with computer protocols and algorithms?

---

• SSP Forum: Alexis Burgess Feb 7, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 10, 2008. Last updated on Jan 26, 2008 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  Meta-Metaphysics
  Or: On What There Isn't
  Alexis Burgess
  Assistant Professor - Philosophy - Stanford University
  
  
  Metaphysics is supposed to be the most general study of "what there
  is". Thus debates in metaphysics often take the following form.
  Professor X asserts that something exists (or some things exist).
  Professor Y denies that that thing exists (or those things exist).
  Argument ensues. Sometimes a consensus emerges among the
  philosophical community about which side is right; more often, though,
  as one would expect in philosophy, agreement proves elusive. Yet
  there is a striking degree of agreement among contemporary analytic
  philosophers about what such pairs of professors are saying; and in
  particular, about what we mean by the word 'existence'. According to
  the orthodoxy derived from the work of W. V. Quine, existence is just
  what's expressed by the so-called existential quantifier of
  first-order logic. It is a primitive, unanalyzable notion.
  Unfortunately, the orthodoxy offers no compelling solution to a
  problem that has frustrated philosophers since antiquity, and which,
  ironically, Quine himself brought to the fore in his seminal essay 'On
  What There Is'. The problem is that it is hard to see how Professor Y
  could ever be right. For how can we deny the existence of something
  without referring to that thing, thereby presupposing its existence in
  our very denial? In this presentation, I'll outline some famous
  attempts to answer this meta-metaphysical challenge to the coherence
  of metaphysical debate, present the arguments against them, and then
  begin to develop a novel way out of the problem: what might be called
  Defeatism about intuitively true, negative existential statements.

---

• SSP Forum: Stuart Hameroff Jan 31, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Posted on Nov 17, 2007. Last updated on Jan 17, 2008 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  Does consciousness occur in laterally-connected input/integration
  layers in the brain's neuronal networks?
  
  Stuart Hameroff
  Professor Emeritus, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology,
  Director, Center for Consciousness Studies
  The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  The brain appears to operate like a computer, with discrete information states (‘bits’) conveyed by firings (axonal action potentials, or spikes) of individual neurons. Neuronal dendrites receive and integrate spike-mediated synaptic inputs, and when threshold is met, axonal spikes are fired as outputs. With variable strength synapses, axonal-dendritic spike-mediated synaptic computation can account for many nonconscious (‘auto-pilot’) cognitive functions and control of behavior. What about consciousness? The best measure of consciousness is gamma synchrony EEG which correlates not with axonal spikes/firings, but with ‘sideways’ networks of synchronized dendrites of neighboring neurons connected by gap junctions (‘dendritic webs’). In computer terms, dendritic webs are laterally-connected input/integration layers embedded in feed-forward and feed-back networks. Gap junction openings and closings evolve dendritic web topologies able to move throughout the brain’s axonal-dendritic networks. Within cytoplasmic interiors of dendritic web dendrites, it is also proposed that quantum computations in microtubules underlie consciousness (Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR model). The point here is that synchronized dendritic webs can house the brain’s ‘conscious pilot’ able to move about, tune in and take over from habitual, nonconscious auto-pilot modes. The proposal is testable and consistent with all known neurocognitive science.

---

• SSP Forum: Keith Devlin Jan 24, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/ Posted on Dec 3, 2007. Last updated on Jan 16, 2008 by Benjamin Newman .

  Event Description:

  Two Kinds of Math?
  
  Mathematics is often talked about - and taught - as if it were a single subject, one way of thinking. I long ago reached the conclusion this is not the case. From a cognitive perspective, I think that mathematical thinking falls broadly into two very different categories that utilize different mental capacities. One kind of mathematical thinking is shared with other species, and virtually all humans are capable of doing it. The other kind may not be accessible to all, though for reasons you may not expect. If correct, my ideas have major implications for mathematics education.

---

• SSP Forum: John Willinsky Jan 17, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 28, 2007. Last updated on Jan 15, 2008 by Julie Finkelstein .

  Event Description:

  More than Symbolic Systems for Advancing Research (Access)
  
  A review of the Public Knowledge Project's efforts at increasing the public and scholarly quality of research through the development of open source software publishing systems and research on the impact of extended access to academic sources of knowledge.

---

• SSP Forum: John C. Mitchell Jan 10, 2008 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://theory.stanford.edu/people/jcm/ Posted on Dec 5, 2007. Last updated on Jan 8, 2008 by Benjamin Newman .

  Event Description:

  Online Identity Theft and Internet Fraud
  
  Computers and the Internet have changed business, education, entertainment and recreation dramatically over the past two decades. However, the rise of web transactions and electronic commerce have presented opportunities for criminal activities such as online identity theft and fraud. In this lecture and discussion, we will look at some of the recent trends in phishing, fraud, bot networks, and prevention techniques.

---

• SSP Forum: David C. Wilkins Dec 6, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C www.stanford.edu/~dwilkins Posted on Oct 18, 2007. Last updated on Dec 2, 2007 by Aman Ishaan Kumar .

  Event Description:

  
  Learning to Recognize Facial Emotions:
  
  Psychologists vs. Artists
  
  
  David C. Wilkins
  Symbolic Systems and CSLI
  www.stanford.edu/~dwilkins
  
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Psychologists and Artists have adopted very different approaches to the cognitive task of learning to recognize facial emotions. Psychologists teach mainly by showing classified example of faces, e.g., www.PaulEkman.com. Artists teach by the immersive experience of drawing live models, e.g., www.DrawTheFeeling.org. Which is better? This talk presents these different approaches and describes our efforts to identify metrics and design experiments to quantify the differences. A Symbolic Systems course on this topic is offered next quarter, and is described at www.stanford.edu/~dwilkins/symbsys210.pdf

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• SSP Forum: Jeff Shrager Nov 29, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 2, 2007. Last updated on Nov 15, 2007 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  How Science Thinks: The Science and Engineering of Science and Engineering
  
  Jeff Shrager
  Associate Professor in Symbolic Systems, CommerceNet
  
  
  For over three decades cognitive scientists have been studying how science works and how scientists think. What have we learned about scientific cognition and about science as a human activity? How has this informed cognitive science more generally? How has it helped us build semi-automated discovery systems and better tools to support scientific practice and facilitate discovery? How does this all play with the Web 24.0 vision? (**) In this talk I'll use some of my own, and a lot of other people's research to lead a guided tour to some partial answers to these interesting question.
  
  Jeff Shrager is consulting associate professor of Symbolic Systems. His work spans human and machine learning and development, and both computational and "wet" marine biology and drug discovery. He current leads the Health Care Initiative at CommerceNet which is using Web 24.0 technology (**) to build Virtual Pharmaceutical Companies to address rare and orphan diseases.
  
  (** If Web 1.0 is the current web, Web 2.0 the social web, Web 3.0 the semantic web, and Web 4.0 the programmable web, then Web 24.0 (1*2*3*4) is be the programmable social semantic web. I just made this term up for this talk, but it's actually rather appropriate, as you'll see!)

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• SSP Forum: Brian Knutson Nov 15, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 17, 2007. Last updated on Oct 25, 2007 by Anna Schapiro .

  Event Description:

  
  Expected Value and the Neural Prediction of Decisions
  
  Brian Knutson
  Psychology Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  The past decade has introduced revolutionary advances in scientists' understanding of the neural mechanisms that support human decision making, in part due to advances in the spatiotemporal resolution of brain imaging. I will describe brain imaging research from our laboratory designed to: (1) localize brain regions whose activation correlates with expected value in the absence of choice, and (2) use activation from those regions to predict choice. Such research may have practical applications to the study of financial risk taking and purchasing. The findings also theoretically imply that a revealed preference account of human decision making, while useful, is incomplete.

---

• SSP Forum: Ron Goldman Nov 8, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 17, 2007. Last updated on Oct 25, 2007 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  What Everyone Should Know About Open Source
  
  Ron Goldman
  Sun Microsystems Laboratories
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Open source is an important software development methodology. It can
  also be an important part of business strategy. In this talk Ron
  Goldman, a Sun Microsystems researcher, will describe how open source
  works and discuss why a company might want to participate. He will touch
  on open source business models, building community, licensing, and
  common mistakes. Also covered is why open source is important to
  computer professionals, educators and regular people.
  
  
  bio:
  
  Ron Goldman is a researcher working at Sun Microsystems Laboratories on alternative software development methodologies
  and new software architectures. He is currently a member of the Sun SPOT's project that is investigating the use of Java
  on small embedded, wireless devices. Ron was instrumental in defining the vision and details for the java.net website and
  helped start the Javapedia project. He has advised many Sun open source projects including OpenSolaris, NetBeans,
  OpenOffice, and Jini. He is the co-author of the book "Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy"
  published in April 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann.
  
  Prior to Sun, he developed a program to generate and manipulate visual representations of complex data for use by social
  scientists as part of a collaboration between NYNEX Science & Technology and the Institute for Research on Learning. He
  has a continuing interest in the design of programming languages and has developed various programming environments
  (IDEs). He has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University where he was a member of the robotics group.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Baba Shiv Nov 1, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 9, 2007. Last updated on Oct 12, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Are Emotions Beneficial or Detrimental for Human Decision Making?
  
  Baba Shiv
  Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  For centuries, philosophers and thinkers have debated whether emotions are beneficial or detrimental to human decision making. The general consensus viewpoint that pervaded the centuries was that emotions are like wild-horses that need to be reined in, that good decisions are those that are made devoid of emotion. Our recent understanding of the working of the human brain points to a diametrically opposite viewpoint, that emotions not only exert important influences on decision making but also might actually be essential for and fundamental to making advantageous decisions. In this presentation, Professor Shiv will (1) highlight some of the startling and counter-intuitive insights being unraveled on the workings of the human brain and then (2) get to the “so what?” of these findings for individual decision making.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Oliver Selfridge Oct 25, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 24, 2007. Last updated on Oct 3, 2007 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Let's Improve Machine Learning
  
  Oliver Selfridge
  MIT Media Lab and BBN Technologies
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Today, in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning is a vigorous
  and flourishing field. I believe that we can and ought to do more. My
  overall recommendation for ML is that now we should find out how to
  produce cognitive software that can be at least partly educated instead
  of having to be carefully programmed. The software must be able to
  learn not only how to accomplish the top level desired task, but also
  how to check and improve its performance on a continuing basis at many
  different levels.
  
  There are four main topics in human learning that are mainly not even
  considered in most of ML. The first is what I have termed purpose
  structure; which means that software should care! The idea of purpose
  structures is to build software out of modules each of which has a
  success function, so that changes in them can be assessed to assure
  continuing improvement. The second topic is: how are the conclusions of
  ML in a piece of cognitive software to be remembered, so that what has
  been learnt can be applicable again in later and perhaps different
  circumstances? The third topic is that anything learnt by people is
  rarely handled as an isolated and independent piece of knowledge;
  rather, it is embedded in a structure of some conceptual models. The
  fourth topic is: how are the conclusions of ML in a piece of cognitive
  software to be shared with other cognitive agents?...what kind of
  languages should be used? ~W for most of what we know we learnt from
  others, not from our own experiences.
  
  None of those general topics has been much faced in AI, let alone in
  ML. On top of that, the cognitive software must work in environments
  that are continually changing at all levels, including the overall
  standards of success. We need to analyze those points and put them in
  some kind of order so as to be able to analyze and attack them. Then we
  can propose a program that will diverge ~E and then we can take the one
  less traveled by~E perhaps that will make all the difference! And
  perhaps we can then break new boundaries in AI.
  

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• SSP Forum: Oct 18, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/ Posted on Oct 17, 2007. Last updated on Oct 17, 2007 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Video: The Great Robot Race
  dir: Joseph Seamans (2006, 60 mins.)
  
  From the videos's website:
  
  Join NOVA for an exclusive backstage pass to the DARPA Grand Challenge—a raucous race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the Pentagon, which awards a $2 million purse to the winning team. Armed with artificial intelligence, laser-guided vision, GPS navigation, and 3-D mapping systems, the contenders are some of the world's most advanced robots. Yet even their formidable technology and mechanical prowess may not be enough to overcome the grueling 130-mile course through Nevada's desert terrain. From concept to construction to the final competition, "The Great Robot Race" delivers the absorbing inside story of clever engineers and their unyielding drive to create a champion, capturing the only aerial footage that exists of the Grand Challenge.
  
  It would seem that the essentials to road racing are clear—a fast car and talented driver, right? Wrong. The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) turns this assumption on its head with its Grand Challenge, a contest solely for autonomous vehicles that go relatively slowly. Following its success with unmanned aircraft, DARPA is pushing for the same on-ground advantage to keep soldiers out of harm's way. Private Jessica Lynch's ambush in Iraq might well have been avoided if the U.S. Army could have had a robotic supply truck to carry out missions in dangerous zones.
  
  The program begins with a look back at the first DARPA Grand Challenge, held in March 2004, an event notable for the sheer number of things that went wrong. Highlighting the intense complexity of the task, 15 robots qualified to race, but most barely made it out of the starting gate. These off-road vehicles applied the term too literally—pummeling into barriers that protected the crowd, flipping into ditches, or moving painstakingly forward only to stop inexplicably when confronted with rocks or brush.
  
  From the time the second race is announced, NOVA immerses itself in the prerace planning and production. This one-of-a-kind contest draws bright individuals to a tough technical problem: the design and construction of thinking machines that read and adjust to unpredictable terrain without any guidance from their creators. Nearly 200 teams from around the globe enter, yet only 23 of them survive the qualifying rounds. Their creations boast names such as "TerraMax," "Bad Ricky," and "Cajunbot". Behind-the-race footage takes viewers into the workshops and onto the field (see Meet the Teams).
  
  Headlining the film is Carnegie Mellon University's "Red Team," led by Red Whittaker, an ambitious and relentless innovator with world-renowned expertise in the field of robotics. Under his leadership, 50 students and professionals give up their personal lives and outside distractions for an intensive all-out devotion to not one but two robots—"Sandstorm" and "H1ghlander" (the latter named for its H1 Hummer body). Pittsburgh's miserable winter weather makes for long, cold field tests, and 16-hour days are cushioned by brief bouts of sleep. Through it all, viewers witness firsthand what Whittaker calls the "violent and wretched time of birthing a new machine." (See an outtake of the Red Team racing in the desert.)
  
  Each team faces the same major tasks, and each goes about them in its own unique way. An electromechanical system is needed to steer and brake, and sensors—video, laser, or otherwise—to "see." The machines must have a software "brain" to process information, avoid obstacles, and follow the course. Eye-popping race footage and 3-D animation bring the complex technology to life and provide a robot's-eye view of the world. (Go to What Robots See for more on this.)
  
  Not all the race entrants are high-end machines built by large corporate-sponsored teams. Taking on the powerhouse Red Team are many dedicated underdogs, surviving on bare-bones budgets and sheer determination. "Ghostrider," the only motorcycle entrant, is the wobbly creation of a lone Berkeley grad student. The cycle's ingeniously designed ability to right itself after a fall will have viewers rooting for The Ghost! "Team DAD" consists of two eclectic brothers who have competed on TV's "Battlebots" and who placed an impressive third in the first Challenge. Outfitted with a truck, laptop, and video camera, they are confident that simplicity will serve them well. NOVA also meets "Stanley," produced by Stanford University, the contestant most likely to give Carnegie Mellon's "Sandstorm" and "H1ghlander" a run for their money.
  
  No autonomous vehicles have ever driven so far so fast. As the race unfolds, NOVA captures the crashes, pitfalls, frustration, fun, excitement, dirt, determination, and an eventual victory as one robot wins and several others make it all the way through the punishing desert course.
  
  Discussion to follow, with refreshments.

---

• SSP Forum: Summer Interns Oct 4, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jul 18, 2007. Last updated on Oct 4, 2007 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  What We Did This Summer
  
  Summer Interns
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 General Intro - Todd Davies
  
  4:20 David Ho, "Can representation sharpening protect memories against interference?" (supervisor: James McClelland)
  
  4:25 Brenden Lake, "A model of discrimination change due to unsupervised category learning" (supervisor: James McClelland)
  
  4:30 Anna Schapiro, "Phase Transitions in a Connectionist Model of the Balance Scale Task" (supervisor: James McClelland)
  
  4:35 Jonathan Drucker, "The Effects of Stimulus Similarity on Perceived Familiarity and Repetition Suppression in the Medial Temporal Lobe" (supervisor: Anthony Wagner)
  
  4:40 Te Thamrongrattanarit, "Financial Risk Taking Behavior Across Lifespan" (supervisor: Brian Knutson)
  
  4:45 Jessica Humprhreys, "The result on synapse density of the Ca channel TS mutation" (supervisor: Ricardo Dolmetsch)
  
  4:50 Karl Pichotta and Matt Paden, "Calculating Textual Entailments and Paraphrases in a Large-Scale Natural Language Processing System" (supervisors: Lauri Karttunen and Tracy King)
  
  5:00 Kiefer Katovich (supervisor: Patrick Langley)
  
  5:05 Michael Morgan (supervisor: Patrick Langley)
  
  5:10 Dana Sittler, "The Importance of Understanding Metrics in Persuasive Technology" (supervisor: B.J. Fogg)
  
  5:15 Discussion and refreshments
  

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• EduCamp Sep 15, 2007 at 09:00 AM Event Location: Building 300, Stanford University http://educamp.pbwiki.com/ Posted on Jul 18, 2007. Last updated on Jul 19, 2007 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  EduCamp will be held September 15-16. See the camp wiki for details.

---

• SSP Forum: Honors Students Jun 7, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 16, 2006. Last updated on Apr 12, 2007 by Benjamin Newman .

  Event Description:

  
  Annual Presentation of Honors Projects
  
  Senior Honors Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  Will be posted later.

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• SSP Forum: Margaret Johnson May 31, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 30, 2007. Last updated on May 11, 2007 by Marni Alyse Gasn .

  Event Description:

  
  What You Need to Know about Intellectual Property - and How to Stay Out of Trouble!
  
  Margaret Johnson
  Computer Science Department and Google
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  In this talk, we present the basics of trade secrets and copyright law focusing in particular on what you need to know as you venture out to industry. We look at important cases that helped define the law, and at current trends.

---

• SSP Forum: Johan van Benthem May 24, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 26, 2007. Last updated on May 23, 2007 by Benjamin Newman .

  Event Description:

  
  Logic and Reasoning: Do the Facts Matter?
  
  Johan van Benthem
  Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, University of Amsterdam
  Stanford Department of Philosophy
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Wilkie Collins(The Moonstone, 1868):
  
  "Facts?" he repeated. "Take a drop more grog, Mr. Franklin, and you'll get over the weakness of believing in facts! Foul play, sir!"
  
  Logic arose in Antiquity from two sources: the study of argumentation in the dialectical tradition, and that of axiomatic proof patterns in scientific inquiry. Over the centuries that followed, the discipline turned highly mathematical. Is logic still about human reasoning? Or is it about eternal propositions, firmly cleansed from any stains, smells, or sounds that human inferences might have -- and therefore also of their colors, and tantalizing twists and kinks? We will discuss some (non-)contacts between logic and psychology in the 20th century, including the famous 'Barrier Thesis' by Frege, Russell and others, that logic is by definition disjoint from psychology. But then, we discuss some recent exciting connections between the two disciplines which suggest otherwise -- showing that logic, psychology and cognitive science have a lot of common
  ground in the study of reasoning, rational agency, and intelligent interaction.
  
  * References
  
  J. van Benthem [download from http://staff.science.uva.nl/~johan
  under Research:]
  (a) 'Cognition as Interaction',
  (b) 'Logic and Reasoning: do the Facts Matter?'
  Also check (c) H. Hodges, W. Hodges & J. van Benthem, eds., 'Logic and Psychology', special issue of the journal "Topoi", May 2007: http://www.springer.com/west/home?SGWID=4-102-70-35662888-0&changeHeader=true&SHORTCUT=www.springer.com/11245
  Background (d) ESF Eurocores program 'Modeling Intelligent
  Interaction',
  http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/logiccc.html

---

• SSP Forum: Mike Genesereth May 17, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 15, 2007. Last updated on Apr 3, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  General Game Playing
  Mike Genesereth
  Logic Group
  Computer Science Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  A general game playing system is one that can play arbitrary games based solely on formal game descriptions supplied at "runtime". Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue and Chinook, general game players do not rely on algorithms designed in advance by their programmers for specific games; instead, they utilize general information processing technologies, based on research in areas like knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and rational decision making. General Game Playing has theoretical value as a microcosm within which to study theories and mechanisms of intelligence. It also has practical value; general game playing techniques have value in a variety of areas, including enterprise management, electronic commerce, and semantic web integration.
  
  BIO:
  
  Michael Genesereth is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He received his Sc.B. in Physics from M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Genesereth is most known for his work on Computational Logic and applications of that work in Enterprise Management and Electronic Commerce. He is one of the founders of Teknowledge, CommerceNet, and Mergent Systems. He is the current director of the Logic Group at Stanford and the founder and research director of CodeX - The Stanford Center for Computers and Law. He likes to play games.

---

• SSP Forum: Dean Eckles (M.S. Candidate) May 10, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 16, 2006. Last updated on May 1, 2007 by Tina Chen .

  Event Description:

  
  Mobile Persuasion Technology and Disclosive Behavior Change
  
  Dean Eckles, M.S. Candidate
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Interactive technology can be designed to persuade -- and mobile devices are uniquely equipped and situated to change user behavior in many domains. This talk has two parts. First, I consider how mobile persuasive technology reshapes the contours of persuasion and influence; I introduce the idea of persuasive faculties. Second, I report on the new experimental study of strategies for changing the self-disclosure behavior of mobile users. Both different influence strategies and ways of representing the requester are studied. This and on-going work has implications for the design of interactive systems and understanding influence -- in persuasive technology and more generally.

---

• SSP Forum: Christian Romming May 3, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Apr 26, 2007. Last updated on Apr 30, 2007 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Geometric Approaches to Polyphonic Music Similarity
  
  Christian Romming, M.S. Candidate
  Computer Science Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  As the amount of digitally encoded symbolic music increases, methods for content-based retrieval become more important. The first algorithms developed for this purpose used ideas from the text retrieval paradigm, but more recently methods involving geometric representations and algorithms have become more popular. We present the basics of geometric representation of symbolic music, as well as work in progress on retrieval algorithms.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Jonathan Berger Apr 26, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 11, 2007. Last updated on Apr 9, 2007 by Tina Chen .

  Event Description:

  
  
  The Ghost of Johannes Brahms
  
  Jonathan Berger
  The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  A tantalizing and frustrating audio recording of Johannes Brahms performing at the piano is analyzed and reconstructed to reveal the composer's performance traits which depart surprisingly from tradition. From a symbolic systems standpoint the work involves a method of segregating noise from coherent (music) signal, a glimpse at historical performance practice and its departure from the symbolic representation of the musical score, and computational aspects of stylistic reconstruction.

---

• SSP Forum: Anna Rafferty (M.S. Candidate) Apr 19, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 16, 2006. Last updated on Apr 9, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Understanding Students' Learning from Computerized Tutors: Incorporating Individual Differences in Computational Models
  
  Anna Rafferty, M.S. Candidate
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Cognitive tutors that allow students to interact with a computer for practice in a particular subject, such as math, are increasingly appearing in student classrooms. These computer tutors use cognitive models to track what skills students are learning and what skills require more practice in order to select future problems; often, these models must contain relatively few individualized student parameters due to computational concerns. I will discuss a hybrid approach emphasizing tractability and customization that can be used to balance the need for computable cognitive models and more flexibility to reflect learner characteristics. By using stereotypic student groups, it is possible to model learning at a level of granularity intermediate to individual students and the entire population of students. Additionally, I will examine how particular algorithms can be used to show that these groups do require different cognitive models that have greater expressivity than the original model and what consequences emerge from these differences in models.
  

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• Thinking about professional graduate schools? Apr 18, 2007 at 07:00 PM Event Location: The Greenberg Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (bldg. 460, rm 126) Posted on Apr 2, 2007. Last updated on Apr 4, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  Event Description:
  
  Attention Symbolic Systems students, alumni, and faculty
  
  ARE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT...
  
  What kinds of academic paths Sym Sys students follow after graduation?
  
  How a Sym Sys degree prepares students for different professional schools?
  
  How Sym Sys students get into and survive these schools?
  
  COME FIND OUT! ANNOUNCING...
  
  ** From Symbols to Reality: **
  ** A Symbolic Systems Professional Schools Panel **
  
  April 18, 2006, 7:00 - 9:00 pm
  
  Greenberg Room, Margaret Jacks Hall
  (Building 460, Room 126)
  
  Join 5 alumni of the Symbolic Systems Program who have continued on to professional schools (law, education, journalism, business) while they discuss their experiences with choosing and attending these schools. Come for the informal dinner and stay for the panel discussion. Have your burning questions answered by those who have been there and done that! Panelists include:
  
  - Ryan Blitstein, Journalism @ Columbia, SSP '01
  - Ben Davidson, Law @ Stanford, SSP '04
  - Lyen Huang, Medicine @ Stanford, SSP '00
  - Uma Karmarkar, Marketing-Consumer Behavior phD @ Stanford Business School, Neuroscience phD @ UCLA, SSP '98
  - Renee Trochet, Education @ Stanford, SSP '06
  
  
  Don't miss this unique opportunity to find out what to expect from professional schools -- and what they expect from you!
  
  This is the latest in our occasional series, "From Symbols to Reality" - relating Symbolic Systems to career paths.

---

• SSP Forum: Peter Sells Apr 12, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 26, 2007. Last updated on Mar 28, 2007 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  
  Blocking and the System of Grammar
  
  Peter Sells
  Linguistics and Asian Languages
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  'Blocking' is the name often given to a well-known phenomenon where one linguistic form appears to pre-empt the use of another. In English, 'bigger' is often used in preference to 'more big', even though both intuitively mean the same; as linguists, we say that the synthetic form
  'bigger' blocks the analytic form 'more big' in certain contexts. With other words, the situation is different: the conditions on '-er' suffixation a putative word like 'substantialer' is a highly dispreferred form, and hence 'more substantial' would be used in (almost) all grammatical contexts. In other languages, we often find that a particular inflected synthetic form blocks the more analytic form with absolute regularity, and I will mention a few cases in my talk.
  
  Hence, blocking of this kind is about the relation between the linguistic duty that a word performs relative to the duty that a phrase performs, when both intuitively express the same content. Recently, there has been some focus on this in the theoretical linguistic literature -- what the conditions are which allow a blocking relationship, what the nature of the blocking relationship is, and what grammar must be like, to have those properties. In the talk I will
  discuss some conclusions that can be drawn about the nature of grammar, in terms of what architecture it has and what kinds of mechanisms it has within that architecture.

---

• SSP Forum: Bill Newsome Apr 5, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 4, 2006. Last updated on Mar 14, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Reward, Value and Choice: A Perspective on the Neurobiology of Decision Making
  
  Bill Newsome
  Neurobiology Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Mammals have evolved highly sophisticated mechanisms for efficient harvesting of rewards in an uncertain environment. An animal's recent history of choices and rewards permits near-optimal estimates of the "value" of a particular choice or action in terms of the probability of acquiring an associated reward. To study the neural mechanisms underlying this behavior, we trained rhesus monkeys on a version of Hernnstein's classic "matching" task. Quantitative analysis of the behavior permits a precise characterization of the computation that the monkeys use to estimate reward probability, and neurophysiological recordings have revealed potential neural substrates. We are currently engaged in neuroimaging studies (fMRI) to identify additional brain regions that are likely to contribute to value computations. The current studies are central to an emerging neurobiology of decision making.

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• SSP Forum: Gorkem Ozbek (M.S. Candidate) Mar 15, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 16, 2006. Last updated on Mar 5, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Toward a Translation Model for English to Turkish Machine
  Translation
  
  Gorkem Ozbek, M.S. Candidate
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Since its initial formulation by IBM researchers in the early
  1990's, statistical machine translation (SMT) has grown
  considerably as a research field. Today SMT systems consistently
  outperform rule-based techniques in formal evaluations. However,
  many researchers in the field believe that there is something to
  be gained by enriching the strictly statistical approach with
  linguistics. The benefits become particularly noticable in the
  task of translating English text into a language with sufficiently
  different word / sentence structure. Accuracy of English to
  Turkish machine translation, for example, can be improved
  significantly by incorporating into the statistical skeleton
  components that model the important differences in morphology and
  morphosyntax between English and Turkish.
  
  I will begin the talk by providing an overview of the
  state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation. I will
  discuss the two essential components of every system, the
  language model and the translation model, and suggest how the
  quality of the latter can be improved by modeling phrase
  structure differences between the languages. I will go on to
  analyze the main such differences in the case of Turkish:
  agglutinative morphology and morphosyntax. I will present
  results from preliminary experiments that consider word
  structure, and conclude by discussing how to extend this
  approach in future work to apply at the phrasal level, using
  both generative and discriminative techniques.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Ivan Sag Mar 8, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 17, 2007. Last updated on Mar 1, 2007 by Benjamin Newman .

  Event Description:

  
  
  Reflections on Competence and Performance
  
  Ivan Sag
  Linguistics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  There is little doubt that Chomsky's distinction between linguistic
  `competence' (our tacit, internalized knowledge of a language) and
  `performance' (the external observables of language, marred by the
  effects of interacting factors) has significantly enhanced our
  understanding of the complex and abstract nature of human language.
  Yet many of the competence grammar principles that have been proposed
  in the literature of generative grammar are based on data sets where
  `filler-gap' dependencies penetrate complex grammatical
  structures. The baseline processing difficulty of these structures has
  never been precisely calibrated and there has been no systematic
  control of the many orthogonal factors that contribute to processing
  difficulty.
  
  In this informal presentation, I will suggest, building on recent and
  ongoing experimental research in our WH-Processing Group, that we
  should let increased processing difficulty take on a much larger role
  in explaining `island' effects. The shift of the explanatory burden to
  the theory of `performance', allows us both to simplify competence
  grammars and to maximize the extent to which the explanation of
  linguistic phenomena is grounded in terms of more general cognitive
  considerations.

---

• SSP Forum: Daphne Koller Mar 1, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 17, 2007. Last updated on Jan 27, 2007 by Marni Alyse Gasn .

  Event Description:

  
  Probabilistic Models for Structured Domains:
  From Cells to Bodies
  
  Daphne Koller
  Computer Science Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT: Many domains in the real world are richly structured, containing a diverse set of objects, related to each other in a variety of ways. For example, a living cell contains a rich network of interacting genes, that come together to perform key functions. A robot scan of a
  physical environment contains classes of objects such as people,vehicles, trees, or buildings, each of which might itself be a structured object. However, most applications of machine learning aim to simplify the problem by considering objects in the domain as independent instances from a single distribution. In this talk, I aim to show that one can gain from modeling both the dependencies
  arising from the relationships between objects, and the rich structure of the similarities and differences between them. The first part of the talk will describe a rich language, based on probabilistic graphical models, which allows us to model the rich network of dependencies
  between related objects; we show how to learn such models from data and how to use the learned model both for knowledge discovery and for reasoning about new instances. The second part of the talk focuses on
  methods for learning the similarities and differences between related yet diverse classes of objects (such as different types of animals), so as to allow information learned for one class to transfer to another. I will describe applications of this framework to two main tasks:
  modeling objects in the physical world, and recognizing them in laser range scans and in images; and inferring a network of regulatory interactions in a cell, and how this network is perturbed by individual
  genotype.
  
  
  BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
  
  Daphne Koller received her BSc and MSc degrees from the Hebrew University of
  Jerusalem, Israel, and her PhD from Stanford University in 1993. After a
  two-year postdoc at Berkeley, she returned to Stanford, where she is now an
  Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department. Her main research
  interest is in creating large-scale systems that reason and act under
  uncertainty, using techniques from probability theory, decision theory and
  economics. Daphne Koller is the author of over 100 refereed publications,
  which have appeared in venues spanning Science, Nature Genetics, the Journal
  of Games and Economic Behavior, and a variety of conferences and journals in
  AI and Computer Science. She was the co-chair of the UAI 2001 conference,
  and has served on numerous program committees and as associate editor of the
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and of the Machine Learning
  Journal. She was awarded the Arthur Samuel Thesis Award in 1994, the Sloan
  Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in
  1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
  (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the Cox
  Medal for excellence in fostering undergraduate research at Stanford in
  2003, and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004.

---

• SSP Forum: Penny Eckert Feb 22, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 30, 2006. Last updated on Feb 7, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Got Style? The Linguistic Construction of Social Meaning
  
  
  Penelope Eckert
  Department of Linguistics
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  While semanticists are busily trying to figure out how words mean, there are sociolinguists who are out trying to figure out how the sounds that make up those words mean. While phonemes themselves have no meaning, variability in the pronunciation of phonemes can carry social meaning. This talk will offer data from ethnographic work with adolescents and preadolescents to show how phonological variation serves as a resource to construct social meaning - how individualvariables carry meanings and how those meanings in turn interact toconstitute styles that index social categories.
  

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• SSP: Robert McGinn Feb 15, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 13, 2006. Last updated on Jan 30, 2007 by Tina Chen .

  Event Description:

  Ethics and Nanotechnology: Views of Researchers
  
  
  Robert McGinn
  Science, Technology and Society
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Nanotechnology is an burgeoning field of cutting-edge science and engineering research that for
  the last decade has been the focus of persistent conflict over its social and ethical implications.
  Some partisans believe it to be the next great technological revolution, one that will usher in a wide
  range of important benefits. Others believe nanotech to be a field hyped and funded so amply that
  the country -- including government, industry, and academia -- has jumped on board the gravy train
  and failed to seriously consider the ethical and social issues it raises. Against the backdrop of a polarized
  debate between supporters and opponents of nanotechnology, the speaker will discuss the findings of a large-scale
  survey has has conducted over the last three years of a large group of nanotechnology researchers at
  thirteen facilities in the U.S. The focus of the survey was the beliefs of these front-line researchers
  about ethical issues related to their work. The speaker will present the most interesting findings derived
  from the survey and discuss what they reveal about how nanotech researchers view ethics as it relates
  to their work.

---

• SSP Forum: Dan Gillette Feb 8, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 6, 2006. Last updated on Jan 23, 2007 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  
  User Centered Design and Autism
  
  Dan Gillette
  Institute for Urban and Regional Design, UC Berkeley
  
  
  In this talk, Dan Gillette will discuss his experience conducting collaborative, field-based, user-centered design in cultures that
  include individuals with severe autism. He will also give examples from the work of other designers that show why it is critical to
  employ user-centered design practices in developing products for individuals with autism. Time permitting, Dan will also describe some of the exciting new projects being funded by the Cure Autism Now Innovative Technology for Autism Initiative.
  
  Bio
  
  Dan Gillette is the director of the Education and Behavioral Healthcare Initiative at the Greenleaf Institute, and is a lead designer in behavioral medicine at Greenleaf Medical. Additionally, Dan is chair of the Innovative Technology for Autism Board at Cure
  Autism Now, and regularly consults and conducts research in education, psychology, product design, and disability studies. Dan
  has held research and teaching positions at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Mills College, and CSU Monterey Bay. Additionally, Dan has extensive experience as a learning specialist and administrator at the middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Before getting into educational psychology and product design, Dan had a ten-year career as a musician and composer, as well as a stint as a bicycle courier.
  
  Dan holds a B.A. in human development from the Lesley College Graduate School, and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he concentrated in cognitive science, psychology, and instructional design.
  
  Dan can be reached at: info@gillettedesign.com

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• SSP Forum: James McClelland Feb 1, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2006. Last updated on Jan 26, 2007 by Gabriel Louis Recchia .

  Event Description:

  
  Development and Disintegration of Conceptual Knowledge: A Parallel-Distributed Processing Approach
  
  James L. McClelland
  Psychology Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  As a new member of the Stanford faculty I will take this opportunity to introduce my overall research program. After a brief overview of some of the topics we consider in my lab, I will focus the body of the talk on one recent project that is continuing in my laboratory.
  
  This project centers on a model of human semantic cognition, based on the ideas of distributed representation and gradual incremental learning inherent in the Parallel-Distributed Processing (PDP) framework. The model addresses progressive differentiation of conceptual knowledge in child development and progressive disintegration of conceptual knowledge in semantic dementia, a rare condition affecting the temporal lobes.
  
  I will also use the model to addresses phenomena that some have taken as supporting the idea that human semantic knowledge takes the form of naive, implicit domain theories, including category coherence effects, differential importance of different properties for different domains, and reorganization of conceptual knowledge in development. It suggests how domain specific constraints on the interpretation of new information may arise from prior experience, providing an alternative to nativist approaches to the origins of such constraints on cognition.

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• SSP Forum: Bonnie John Jan 25, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 16, 2006. Last updated on Jan 17, 2007 by Marni Alyse Gasn .

  Event Description:

  
  Cognitive Crash Dummies: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?
  
  Bonnie John
  Human Computer Interaction Institute
  Carnegie Mellon University
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Crash dummies in the auto industry save lives by testing the physical safety of automobiles before they are brought to market. “Cognitive crash dummies” save time, money, and potentially even lives, by allowing computer-based system designers to test their design ideas before implementing those ideas in products and processes. This talk will review the uses of cognitive models in system design and the current state of research and practice. I will also present some exciting new research directions that promise to make predictive human performance modeling even more useful. Along the way, I will discuss the role of applications in driving science and validity v. useful approximation.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Don Norman Jan 18, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 29, 2006. Last updated on Jan 9, 2007 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Cautious Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens: Apply Cognitive Science to Everyday Life
  
  
  Donald Norman
  Nielsen Norman Group
  Northwestern University
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Cautious cars? We already have them. Cantankerous kitchens? Not yet, but they are coming. Our products are getting more intelligent and more demanding. Not only do they tell us what routes to take when we drive, but also how to drive. In fact, if they don’t like our driving, they are starting to take control. When one model of the Lexus senses a potential collision, it looks at the driver through its TV camera on the steering column and, if the driver is not paying attention to the road, it brakes.
  
  The future is one of increasing encroachment of automation into our lives, especially in the home and automobile. But the machines are not intelligent; the intelligence is in the minds of the designers, people who are not present when the unexpected happens. There is a way to build systems so as to maximize utility and pleasure while minimizing the dangers and frustrations.
  
  In this talk I will explore how principles from Cognitive Science can be used to make devices that fit better into our lives.
  
  BIO:
  
  Don Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, Professor at Northwestern University, and former VP of Apple Computer. He was the founding chair of the department of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, a founder of the Cognitive Science society, where he served as Chair and editor of its journal. He serves on many advisory boards, including Chicago’s Institute of Design, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the department of industrial engineering in Korea’s KAIST. In 2006 he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He has honorary degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the Technical University Delft (the Netherlands) and is the author of “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design.” His newest book, “The Design of Future Things,” discusses the role that automation will play in such everyday places as the home, and automobile. He lives at www.jnd.org, which is located in Palo Alto half the year, Evanston IL the other half.
  

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• Arroyo dinner guest: Cliff Nass Jan 16, 2007 at 06:00 PM Event Location: Wilbur East Dining Hall Posted on Dec 7, 2006. Last updated on Dec 7, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Cliff Nass will join interested students and faculty for a dinner at Wilbur East Dining Hall. Come at 6 pm to get a guest pass for dinner.

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• SSP Forum: Branden Fitelson Jan 11, 2007 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://fitelson.org Posted on Dec 7, 2006. Last updated on Dec 7, 2006 by Mike Krieger .

  Event Description:

  Branden Fitelson
  Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley
  
  "Comparative Probability, Comparative Confirmation, and the
  `Conjunction Fallacy'"
  
  The “conjunction fallacy” has been a key topic in
  discussions and debates on the quality of human reasoning performance
  and its limitations, yet the attempt of providing a satisfactory
  account of the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we propose a
  new analysis, suggesting that the fallacious probability judgments
  experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of
  confirmation (or evidential support) relations. The proposed analysis
  is shown robust (i.e., not depending on various alternative ways of
  measuring degree of confirmation), consistent with available data,
  and prompting further empirical investigations. The present approach
  emphasizes the relevance of the notion of confirmation in the
  assessments of the relationships between the normative and
  descriptive study of inductive reasoning. All requisite historical,
  philosophical, and psychological background will be provided during
  the talk. [Note: this is joint work with psychologists Vincenzo Crupi
  and Katya Tentori at the University of Trento.]

---

• SSP Forum: Jim Gray Dec 7, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2006. Last updated on Oct 3, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  eScience -- A Transformed Scientific Method
  
  Jim Gray
  eScience Group, Microsoft Research
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  I have been working for the last decade to get all scientific data and literature online and cross-indexed. Progress has been astonishing, but the real changes will happen in the next decade. First, the funding agencies are forcing peer-reviewed science literature into the public domain and peer-reviewed science literature is being curated in new ways -- cross-indexed to the data that produced it. Scientific data has traditionally been hoarded by investigators (with notable exceptions). The forced electronic publication of scientific literature and data poses some deep technical questions: just exactly how does anyone read and understand it? How can we preserve so that it will be readable in a century? Incidental to this, each intellectual discipline X is building an X-informatics and computational-X branch. It is those branches in collaboration with Computer Science that are faced with solving these issues. I have been pursuing these questions in Geography (with http://TerraService.Net), Astronomy (with the World-Wide telescope -- e.g. http://SkyServer.Sdss.org and http://www.ivoa.net/) and more recently in bio informatics (with portable PubMedCentral http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ppmcsupport/).
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Tom Wasow Nov 30, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2006. Last updated on Nov 21, 2006 by Marni Alyse Gasn .

  Event Description:

  
  Selecting Among Paraphrases
  
  Tom Wasow
  Linguistics and Philosophy Departments
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT: What leads speakers to select one way of saying something over another way of expressing the same thought? This lecture proposes four general strategies of utterance production that influence the choice
  among alternative formulations:
  - Contiguity - Minimize interruptions internal to syntactic and semantic units;
  - Procrastination - Postpone producing complex units;
  - Brevity - Keep what is predictable short; and
  - Audience Design - Let your audience know when you are having difficulty.
  It also argues against the widely held assumption that ambiguity avoidance is a major factor in the choice among syntactic alternatives.
  
  Evidence for these strategies will be drawn from corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments, with special attention to the following five alternations in English:
  - Heavy NP Shift: "They take too many dubious assumptions for granted" vs. "They take for granted too many dubious assumptions"
  - Dative Alternation: "We gave a bone to a dog" vs. "We gave a dog a bone"
  - Verb Particle Placement: "You figured out the problem" vs. "You figured the problem out"
  - Relativizer Optionality: "This is the book that I was reading" vs. "This is the book I was reading"
  - Complementizer Optionality: "I think that it is raining" vs. "I think it is raining"
  
  While each strategy is quite simple and intuitive in itself, the interactions among them lead to some subtle and surprising results.

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• SSP Forum: Dean Baker Nov 16, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2006. Last updated on Nov 6, 2006 by Aurélie Mei-Hoa Beaumel .

  Event Description:

  
  Beyond Copyright: Supporting Creative Work in the Internet Age
  
  Dean Baker
  Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C.
  
  
  Copyright is a relic of the Medieval guild system. It is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce with digital technology and the Internet. However, it remains the main mechanism for supporting the production of creative and artistic work. This talk will point out the ways in which copyright is becoming increasingly inefficient and describe the concept of “Artistic Freedom Vouchers (AFV),” as an alternative mechanism for financing creative and artistic work.
  
  The AFV is modeled after the charitable tax deduction, with the difference that the AFV would be a credit for a small amount (e.g. $75-$100) which could only be used to support creative and artistic work. Writers, artists, musicians and other creative workers, along with intermediaries, would register to be eligible to receive this funding in the same way that charitable and non-profit organizations register to be eligible for tax deductible contributions. Recipients of AFV funds would not be eligible to receive copyright protection for their work, all of which would remain in the public domain.
  

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• Allison Fine, author of Momentum Nov 15, 2006 at 07:00 PM Event Location: 460-126 http://www.momentumthebook.com/ Posted on Nov 14, 2006. Last updated on Nov 14, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Allison Fine—Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age
  
  POWERING THE EDGES an interactive conversation with Allison Fine author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age Jointly presented by:
  PlaNetwork
  Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
  and The Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford
  
  
  Momentum outlines a new, open way of working, what Allison calls in her book "working side-to-side" that allows citizens and volunteers to participate in meaningful ways like never before. "To succeed," Allison writes, "we don't have to get bigger, just smarter, more agile, and more open. We need not become techies to do this, just more connected."
  
  For the first part of the evening Allison will talk about some of the key themes in her book:
  · Move power to the edges. Power is shifting away from institutions towards individuals in this new Connected Age. Fine shows how, civic leaders put the power for public sanitation into the hands of beachgoers by removing every trash can from a filthy New England beach, which led to pristine conditions that last;
  · Replace top-down with a more democratic, side-to-side style. Fine tells how, when a broadcast giant planned to air an attack documentary, a swarm of bloggers sparked 150,000 calls to advertisers. Its stock fell; the screed never aired.
  For the second part of the evening the audience will engage in small group conversation around the themes raised by Allison's talk:
  
  1. What are the roles of institutions and organizations in the Connected Age and for social change?
  2. How can we build trust across networks?
  3. How can we sustain social change efforts?
  

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• SSP Forum: Cliff Nass Nov 9, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 5, 2006. Last updated on Oct 31, 2006 by Marni Alyse Gasn .

  Event Description:

  
  Wired for Speech
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT: Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship
  
  Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. I will present a series of experiments, including new unpublished studies, which demonstrate that people are "voice-activated": people respond to voice technologies as they respond to actual people and behave as they would in any social situation. Among the questions I will address are: Can the emotion of a car’s voice improve driving performance? Will people automatically attempt to imitate a computer’s language? If a person’s voice and body are separate, where will the listener think the person “is”? When should a computer-based voice say “I”? Should people be able to choose a voice interface’s voice? For each question, I will discuss the basic theory, the experiment(s) and its results, and implications for design.
  
  
  Clifford Nass (Ph.D., Sociology, Princeton University) is the Thomas M. Storke Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He has courtesy appointments in computer science; science, technology, and society; sociology; and symbolic systems. He is director of the CHIMe (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab and the co-Director of the Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory. He is the co-author of two books, The Media Equation and Wired for Speech, and over 100 papers concerning human-technology interaction. He has consulted on the design of over 200 information products and services for companies including Microsoft, Toyota, Nissan, Philips, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Charles Schwab.
  

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• SSP Forum: Jerry Feldman Nov 2, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.m2book.org Posted on Oct 3, 2006. Last updated on Oct 3, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science
  
  Jerry Feldman
  Computer Science Division and Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, UC Berkeley
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  The neural revolution in cognitive science, which was always inevitable, is well under way. There is already enough known about how our brains process information to render many traditional theories obsolete and a unified neurally-based cognitive science is emerging. Linguistics and Philosophy have, for both historical and technical reasons, been slow to integrate even the most basic neuroscience. Much of fundamental neuroscience is done with animals and, since only people use language, there has been no easy way to extend animal findings to human thought and language.
  
  The talk is based on a new book that is a systematic attempt to show how human language and thought arise as an extension of the physiology and experiences that people share with other animals. Integrating findings from all the cognitive sciences yields a foundation for an explicitly neural theory of language that is an integral part of contemporary science. Many, but not all, of the fundamental issues about brain and mind become clearer in a Unified Cognitive Science

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• SSP Forum: Eleanor Selfridge-Field Oct 26, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2006. Last updated on Oct 19, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Issues in Music Copyright from the Perspective of Musical Data Representation
  
  Eleanor Selfridge-Field
  Music Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  The study of systems of music representation verifies that there is no complete, universal, or entirely logical system of representation for music. Questions of best practice have been constantly debated since the dawn of computer applications in music in the 1960s. These debates have brought to light many issues that are of prospective value in clarifying current issues in music copyright.
  
  Publicized issues in music copyright have heavily emphasized architectures for file sharing and exclusive licenses, but these questions are, from the point of view of the music itself, quite simple in relation to the vexing issues that can be expected to arise from continuous development of musical data and its malleability.
  
  Potential issues arising from the use of musical data of various qualities and levels of completeness will be discussed in relation to agency, ontology, cognition, and collective authorship. Recent cases of a related nature will also be described.
  

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• SSP Forum: Stuart Shieber Oct 19, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 26, 2006. Last updated on Oct 3, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Resurrecting the Turing Test
  
  Stuart Shieber
  Computer Science, Harvard University
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his eponymous test of machines -- based on verbal indistinguishability from humans -- which he intended as a replacement for the question "Can machines think?" Since then, the primary philosophical question concerning the Turing Test is whether or not it is well-founded as a sufficient condition for intelligence. The state of play on the question has led to the following stalemate: On one hand, conventional wisdom among philosophers is that the Test is conceptually flawed as a sufficient condition for intelligence; Ned Block's "Aunt Bertha Machine" thought experiment is the crispest argument for this view. On the other hand is the overwhelming sense that were a machine to pass a real live full-fledged Turing Test, it would be a sign of nothing but our orneriness to deny it the attribution of intelligence; this, roughly speaking, is Daniel Dennett's view. In this talk, we present the background for the debate, and apply ideas from theoretical computer science and physics in novel ways in order to cut this Gordian knot.
  

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• Fall Barbecue Oct 13, 2006 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Wilbur Hall East barbecue area Posted on Oct 6, 2006. Last updated on Oct 6, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Alumni, students, and faculty are invited to the Symbolic Systems Fall Barbecue at Wilbur Hall East barbecue area, 5-8 pm on the Friday of Reunion/Homecoming Weekend. Come celebrate the new SSP Focus House in Wilbur: Arroyo!

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• SSP Forum: Summer Interns Oct 5, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 26, 2006. Last updated on Oct 3, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  What We Did This Summer
  
  Student Summer Interns, 2006
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 Adnan Majid (supervisor: Vinod Menon)
  
  4:20 Gabe Recchia "Spoken Syntax Lab" (supervisors: Joan Bresnan, Arto Anntila, and Tom Wasow)
  
  4:25 Lea Simon, "Learning to Listen Ahead: The Cost of Slow Language Processing" (supervisor: Anne Fernald)
  
  4:30 Leo Perry, "Putting Deme on Rails" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  4:35 Julie Finkelstein, "Helping Make GradeGrinder More Teacher Friendly" (supervisor: Dave Barker-Plummer)
  
  4:40 Jieun Oh, "Action Item Detection in Multiparty Spoken Discourse" (supervisors: Stanley Peters, Patrick Ehlen, John Niekrasz and Matthew Purver)
  
  4:45 Rachel Levy "Gestures and Diagram Collaboration" (supervisor: Barbara Tversky)
  
  4:50 Anthony Krumeich (supervisor: Tirin Moore)
  
  4:55 Michael Morgan, "Creating an A.I. Driving Simulation" (supervisor: Patrick Langley)
  
  5:00 Matt Janes (supervisor: Patrick Langley)
  
  5:05 Laura O'Laughlin, "Technology and Community Engagement" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  5:10 Jessi Humphreys, "Embodiment-focused Cognitive Psychology: The Color of Age" (supervisor: Lera Boroditsky)
  
  5:15 Eric Boromisa (supervisor: Stephen Baccus)
  
  5:20 Hassan Abudu (supervisor: Jonathan Berger)
  
  5:25 Perry Rosenstein (supervisor: Ivan Sag)
  

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• Autumn Orientation and Welcoming Party Sep 28, 2006 at 04:00 PM Event Location: Linguistics Courtyard Posted on Sep 22, 2006. Last updated on Sep 28, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Symblic Systems Program Autumn Orientation and Welcoming Party
  for students, faculty, and staff
  Thursday, September 28, 2006
  Linguistics Courtyard (between buildings 420 and 460)
  4-6 pm (with brief orientation remarks at 5:15)
  

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• BarCamp Stanford Aug 25, 2006 at 06:00 PM Event Location: See the BarCampStanford wiki http://barcamp.org/BarCampStanford Posted on Aug 17, 2006. Last updated on Aug 17, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Join us for BarCamp at Stanford the weekend of August 25-27, beginning with a kickoff party on Friday evening at 6 pm. Sign up on the wiki and spread the word!

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• SSP Forum: Itamar Rosenn (M.S. candidate) Jun 8, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 14, 2005. Last updated on May 30, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  "Truth-Value Intuitions, Natural Language Quantifiers, and Existential Import
  
  Itamar Rosenn
  M.S. candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  My work addresses the issue of whether and in what manner natural language
  quantifiers (for example, "every", "some", "most", "several", "a large
  amount") carry existential requirements. In other words, the issue in
  question is whether and how the meaningful use of a natural language
  quantifier expression in an utterance requires that the quantifier's domain
  set is non-empty. Linguistic intuition, as well as casual observation of
  normal linguistic usage, suggests that human beings judge sentences with
  empty-domain quantifiers to be anomalous in some way, indicating the
  presence of existential requirements. My work is concerned with determining
  why these anomalous reactions are present, and identifying the linguistic
  and/or psychological mechanisms that are responsible for this oddness.
  
  In this talk, I will review the relevant aspects of this debate,
  including:
  (1) A brief overview of generalized quantifier semantics.
  (2) An introduction to the semantic and pragmatic explanations of
  existential requirements in natural language quantifiers.
  (3) Issues in the Philosophy of Language that are raised by these
  explanations.
  (4) Ideas for future Psycholinguistic tests that will evaluate the
  plausibility of these explanations.
  
  Refreshments will be served afterward.
  

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• SSP Forum: Senior Honors Students Jun 1, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 14, 2005. Last updated on May 23, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Annual Presentation of Senior Honors Theses
  
  Senior Honors Program Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 Michael Bernstein, "Taskpose: A Dynamic Task-Based Window Management Aid" (Honors Advisor: Jeff Shrager, Symbolic Systems; Second Reader: Terry Winograd, Computer Science)
  
  4:30 Mike LeBeau, "Driven to Distraction: A Study of the Distracting Effects of Driving on Cognition and Learning in Voice User Interfaces" (Honors Advisor: Jeff Shrager, Symbolic Systems; Second Readers: Cliff Nass, Communication, and Mike Cohen, Symbolic Systems) [presentation read by Todd Davies]
  
  4:45 Gigi Lundblad, "Augmented Social Perception During Collaboration in Virtual Environments" (Honors Advisor: Jeremy Bailenson, Communication; Second Reader: Margaret Johnson, Computer Science)
  
  Refreshments will be served afterward.
  

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• SSP Forum: Chris Chafe May 25, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c Posted on Mar 7, 2006. Last updated on Mar 8, 2006 by Ro-el Rio Cordero .

  Event Description:

  Tapping into the Internet as an Acoustical / Musical Medium
  
  Chris Chafe
  Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
  Stanford University
  
  Abstract:
  
  Recent work in network audio transport transforms advanced networks
  into a new kind of acoustical medium in which sound waves propagate as if
  traveling through air, water, or solids. Waves sent through the medium
  are reflected or altered as they bounce between hosts. Propagation
  delays are used to create echo chambers and build the resonances for
  "distributed musical instruments." As a side-effect, tones created by
  network resonances can be used to monitor the quality of the underlying
  network.
  
  The presentation presents three areas of research:
  1) auditory methods for monitoring QoS, especially for networks
  supporting real-time, interactive, bidirectional flows
  2) remote musical collaboration using professional-quality, low-
  latency audio
  3) empirical study of human factors affected by some unique acoustical
  properties of the medium
  
  Network latency, jitter and delay asymmetry affect the speed of sound
  and are never uniform. By creating distributed virtual sound objects
  like instruments and rooms and by studying distributed ensembles,
  we can begin to understand this new sound world. Some effects have been
  measured empirically and the results contain some surprises. For
  example, latencies can be low enough that musicians at opposite
  ends of a path are essentially in the same room, and echo cancellation becomes unnecessary. Multi-channel "echo construction" can be designed to
  enrich the experience. For audio use, the new territory that is opening is
  unlike any previous telecommunications medium.
  
  Bio:
  
  Chris Chafe is a composer/ cellist / researcher with an interest in
  computer music and interactive performance. The Duca Family
  Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, he has been a long-term denizen of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics where he directs the center and teaches computer music courses. His doctorate in music composition was completed at Stanford in 1983 with prior degrees in music from the University of California at San Diego and
  Antioch College. His areas of research involve methods for computer
  sound synthesis based on physical models of musical instrument
  mechanics and "SoundWIRE," which explores musical collaboration and network evaluation using next-generation internets for high-quality sound. He has performed his music in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and composed
  soundtracks for documentary films. From 2001, numerous collaborations
  with artist Greg Niemeyer have included "Ping" (SFMOMA, Parc de la
  Villette, Paris and online via the Walker Art Center), "Oxygen Flute"
  (San Jose Museum of Art, UC's Kroeber Museum), the disc "Extrasensory
  Perceptions" with music from both installations, and most recently
  "Organum" which is a synthetic animation taking place in an invented
  world of larynx creatures (DVD) and led to the "Organum Play Test" for
  collaborative game play.

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• SSP Forum: Brendan O'Connor (M.S. candidate) May 18, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 14, 2005. Last updated on May 8, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Does belief revision go wrong?
  Bayesian rationality and confirmation bias
  
  Brendan O'Connor
  M.S. candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  When I look at news editorials, I like to read what I already agree with.
  When I do experiments I select samples that favor my hypothesis. I find
  support for my beliefs everywhere. Psychologists might say I am exhibiting
  confirmation or evidence assimilation bias -- a tendency to seek out
  evidence in favor of one's currently held beliefs, or overinterpret evidence
  as favoring them. These biases have large implications for human
  rationality.
  
  This totally unbiased talk will review several classic experiments, and
  discuss cognitive and affective explanations for why confirmation bias
  occurs. Some relevant connectionist, cognitive dissonance, and behavioral
  economics models will be presented, along with an introduction to Bayesian
  probability theory -- a model for rational belief revision -- which, it will
  be argued, can help define and empirically test how confirmation bias works.
  
  

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• SSP Distinguished Speaker: Nick Bostrom May 15, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 420-040 http://www.nickbostrom.com/ Posted on Apr 26, 2006. Last updated on Apr 26, 2006 by Renee Christine Trochet .

  Event Description:

  Are you living in a computer simulation?
  
  Nick Bostrom
  Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute
  Oxford University
  
  

  Abstract:
  
  I argue that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result will be discussed.
  
  Speaker Bio:
  
  Dr. Nick Bostrom is a University Fellow in the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the University of Oxford. He is also the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Cross College. His research interests include philosophy of science, foundations of probability theory, moral philosophy, bioethics, implications of future technologies for humanity, and global catastrophic risk.
  
  Originally from Sweden, Dr. Bostrom earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Gothenburg. He received master's degrees in philosophy and physics at the University of Stockholm and wrote a master's thesis in computational neuroscience at King's College, London, before being awarded PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics in 2000. His thesis, "Observational Selection Effects and Probability," was selected by Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick for inclusion in the Routledge series Outstanding Dissertations. Before attaining his current professorship, Dr. Bostrom was a Lecturer at Yale University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University.
  
  The author of over 100 articles, Dr. Bostrom has published in journals such as the Synthese, Bioethics, Mind, and Astrophysics & Space Science. He has authored one book, Anthropic Bias (Routledge), and co-edited two forthcoming volumes from Oxford University Press. Dr. Bostrom chairs the World Transhumanist Association and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, both of which he co-founded.

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• Singularity Summit at Stanford May 13, 2006 at 09:00 AM Event Location: Memorial Auditorum http://sss.stanford.edu Posted on Apr 28, 2006. Last updated on Apr 28, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Singularity Summit at Stanford, cohosted by the Symbolic Systems Program and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, in conjunction with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, will bring together leading futurists and thinkers to examine the implications of the "Singularity" -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades. This event is the latest in the newly named series Symposiums on Symbolic Systems and Society, wich began in 2000.
  
  The keynote speaker will be Ray Kurzweil, author of the best-selling The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005).
  
  Noted speakers at the event will also include cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach; nanotechnology pioneers K. Eric Drexler and Christine L. Peterson; science-fiction novelist Cory Doctorow; philosopher Nick Bostrom; futurist Max More; Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, research fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence; Acceleration Studies Foundation president John Smart; PayPal founder and Clarium Capital Management president Peter Thiel; Steve Jurvetson, a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and Sebastian Thrun, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory director and Project Lead of the Stanford Racing Team (DARPA Grand Challenge $2 million winner). In addition, author Bill McKibben will participate remotely from Maine via Teleportec, a two-way, life-size 3D display.
  
  Summit details are available at the website, http://sss.stanford.edu. Note that registration is required to attend - register by May 6 to claim one of the tickets reserved for Stanford affiliates.
  

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• SSP Spring Barbecue May 12, 2006 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Gibbons Grove (across from Storke, by Terman) Posted on May 3, 2006. Last updated on May 3, 2006 by Renee Christine Trochet .

  Event Description:

  Please join Symbolic Systems students, alumni, and faculty for our annual SSP Spring Barbecue! Meet and mingle with new and old affiliates of the program.
  
  Starting at 5 PM, we'll be offering the usual barbecue accoutrements (vegetarian options, too) at Gibbons Grove, located right across from the Storke Building, until around 8 PM on Friday, May 12. Please stop by at any point for anywhere between 5 minutes (just to say hello) and an hour (to hang out and eat some dinner)!
  
  Directions: Here's a link to the area on a map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=02-650. The highlighted building is Storke, and Gibbons Grove is east of it across the pathway. If you're driving from off campus, parking is available in the nearby Roble and Tressider lots in any A or visitor parking space. You can find a parking map at http://transportation.stanford.edu/images/05-06_Parking-Map.pdf.
  
  As usual, email us at ssp-af at csli dot stanford dot edu with any questions. We hope to see you there!

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• SSP Forum: David Dill May 11, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 27, 2006. Last updated on Feb 27, 2006 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  I Think I Voted: E-Voting vs. Democracy
  
  David Dill
  Professor, Computer Science Department
  Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract:
  
  Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal
  memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of
  secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polls there is no way anyone
  can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter intended.
  Why should voters trust these machines?
  
  In January 2003, I drafted a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" stating
  that every voting system should have a "voter verifiable audit trail,"
  which is a permanent record of the vote that can be checked for
  accuracy by the voter, and which is saved for a recount if it is
  required. I posted the page with endorsements from many prominent
  computer scientists. At that point, I became embroiled in a
  nationwide battle for voting transparency that has continued now
  for three years.
  
  In this talk, I will discuss the basic principles and issues in
  electronic voting, and some of the history of what has happened over
  the last few years.
  
  Brief bio:
  
  David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford
  University, where he has been on the faculty since 1987. His primary
  research interest is formal verification of systems, the goal of which
  is to find design errors in systems, or prove that they are correct.
  He has authored over 100 academic publications on this subject, and is
  listed as a highly cited author by ISI. He is a Fellow of the
  Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow
  of the Association for Computing Machinery.
  
  Prof. Dill is the author of the "Resolution on Electronic Voting",
  which has been endorsed by many computer technologist as well as
  political scientists, lawyers, and other individuals. He served on
  the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Committee on Touch Screen
  Voting, the DRE Citizen's Oversight Committee for Santa Clara County,
  California, and the IEEE P1583 voting standards committee. He has
  testified before the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election
  Reform, the U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and the
  U.S. Election Assistance Commission. He received the Electronic
  Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" in 2004 for his work on
  electronic voting. He is the founder of VerifiedVoting.org and the
  Verified Voting Foundation, non-profit organizations that champion
  reliable and publicly verifiable elections in the United States, and
  a member of the National Committee for Voting Integrity
  (www.votingintegrity.org).
  

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• SSP Forum: Grigori Mints May 4, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 31, 2006. Last updated on Apr 23, 2006 by Matthew Xavier Etchemendy .

  Event Description:

  
  Effective Proofs and Existence in Mathematics
  
  Grigori Mints
  Professor, Philosophy Department
  
  
  The distinction between effective (algorithmic, constructive) and
  non-effective existence proofs goes back to ancient Greece and is
  important both in theory and practice. After a survey of debates
  around constructivity a relatively new approach called proof mining
  is briefly outlined.

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• SSP Forum: Francine Chen Apr 27, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 31, 2006. Last updated on Apr 24, 2006 by Gorkem Ozbek .

  Event Description:

  
  Multiple Similarity Measures and Source Pair Information for Improving Story Link Detection
  
  Francine Chen
  FX Palo Alto Laboratory
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  State-of-the-art story link detection systems, that is, systems that
  determine whether two stories are about the same news event, are usually
  based on the cosine-similarity measured between two stories. I will
  first present an overview of a cosine-similarity-based link detection
  system and then describe a method for improving the performance of a
  link detection system by using a variety of similarity measures and
  source-pair specific statistical information. The utility of a number
  of different similarity measures, including cosine, Hellinger, Tanimoto,
  and clarity, both alone and in combination, are examined; and several
  machine learning techniques for combining the different types of
  information are compared. The techniques investigated were SVMs, voting,
  and decision trees, each of which makes use of similarity and
  statistical information differently. Experimental results indicate that
  the combination of similarity measures and source-pair specific
  statistical information using an SVM provides the largest improvement in
  estimating whether two stories are linked.

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• SSP Forum: David Beaver Apr 20, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 7, 2006. Last updated on Apr 17, 2006 by Renee Christine Trochet .

  Event Description:

  Confused, You Will Be: "Before" and "After"
  
  David Beaver
  Professor, Linguistics Department
  
  Abstract:
  "Confused? You will be after this week's episode..." as the famous tagline went. But suppose that before there is any confusion, you hear my talk. It then follows that there is no confusion before you hear it. Indeed on this premise you might avoid confusion altogether. But suppose instead that after there is some confusion, you hear my talk. Unfortunately there may still be confusion after you hear it. Furthermore, in this case confusion at some point is unavoidable. "Before" and "after" seem to lead to quite different inferences.
  
  And long after there is *any* really serious confusion about these puzzling inference patterns, you might ask yourself why the so-called Negative Polarity Item "any" is licensed in this sentence, a word which normally shows up in negative contexts such as that produced by a negation (consider e.g. "?I like any of them" vs. "I don't like any of them"). Up to now there has been no satisfactory account of why words like "any" are sometimes licensed in "after" clauses, and sometimes not.
  
  I will discuss the compositional semantics and pragmatics of the temporal prepositions "before" and "after", and offer solutions to puzzles like those above, puzzles discussed in the work of Anscombe, Linebarger and Heinemaki. The presentation will be based on joint work with Cleo Condoravdi, and builds on a previous paper (Beaver and Condoravdi 2003). I will assume basic familiarity with linguistics and first order logic, but no specific knowledge of temporal semantics.
  
  Speaker Bio:
  David Beaver works on formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language. His major interests are presupposition and intonational meaning, and I also work on anaphora resolution, temporal connectives and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. Further interests include computational linguistics, especially computational semantics and what he calls "computational evolutionary linguistics" -- the study of emergent language and communication in artificially simulated systems. A frequent contributor to Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ ), he published Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics (CSLI Publications) in 2001. Professor Beaver is the author of numerous book chapters, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Theoretical Linguistics and the Journal of Logic, Language and Information.

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• SSP Forum: Hank Greely Apr 13, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Posted on Feb 26, 2006. Last updated on Apr 12, 2006 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  NeuroEthics: Science, Ethics, and Law
  Hank Greely
  Professor, Stanford University Law School
  
  
  
  Abstract:
  Neuroscience is in the midst of a revolution that is transforming our knowledge of the human brain and how it works. Our ability to predict future mental illness, neurological disease, or personality characteristics is expanding dramatically. We seem likely to be able to use devices to "read minds," by directly detecting brain activity that is correlated with various mental states. And drugs and devices, developed to help the injured or ill, hold out the possibility of "enhancing" human brains with unprecedented powers. This talk will describe those advances and the legal, ethical, and social issues they pose.
  
  

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• Thinking about a PhD? Apr 12, 2006 at 06:00 PM Event Location: The Greenberg Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (bldg. 460, rm 126) Posted on Apr 8, 2006. Last updated on Apr 8, 2006 by Gorkem Ozbek .

  Event Description:

  Attention Symbolic Systems students, alumni, and faculty
  
  ARE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT...
  
  What kinds of academic paths Sym Sys students follow after graduation?
  
  How a Sym Sys degree prepares students for different Ph.D. programs?
  
  How Sym Sys students get into and survive graduate school?
  
  COME FIND OUT! ANNOUNCING...
  
  ** From Symbols to Reality: **
  ** A Symbolic Systems Graduate Studies Panel **
  
  April 12, 2006, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
  
  Greenberg Room, Margaret Jacks Hall
  (Building 460, Room 126)
  
  Join 8 alumni of the Symbolic Systems Program who have continued on to PhD's while they discuss their experiences with choosing and attending graduate school. Come for the informal dinner and stay for the panel discussion. Have your brightly burning questions answered by those who have been there and done that! Panelists include:
  
  - Dylan Arena, Education @ Stanford, SSP '01
  - Jeff Cooper, Psychology @ Stanford, SSP '02
  - Davie Yoon, Psychology @ Stanford, SSP Honors '04
  - Brian Milch, Computer Science @ UC Berkeley, SSP '0
  - Marc Pauly, Logic @ University of Amsterdam, SSP '96
  - Erica Robles, Communication @ Stanford, SSP '01
  - Matt Kaufman, Neuroscience @ Stanford, SSP '05
  - David Danielson, Communication @ Stanford, SSP '02
  
  
  Don't miss this unique opportunity to find out what to expect from graduate school -- and what graduate school expects from you!
  
  This is the latest in our occasional series, "From Symbols to Reality" - relating Symbolic Systems to career paths.

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• SSP Forum: Arto Anttila Apr 6, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 6, 2006. Last updated on Mar 31, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  MODELING LANGUAGE VARIATION
  
  Arto Anttila
  Linguistics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Linguists have always recognized that languages exhibit variation: one
  meaning can be expressed in multiple ways. Variation is rarely completely
  free: one variant may be quantitatively preferred over another or the
  variants may have subtle differences in meaning. Variation may signal
  change in progress, but it can also linger for generations without much
  change. Variation is remarkably easy for humans, but a source of problems
  for natural language processing systems. Despite all its interesting
  properties, variation has played a surprisingly marginal role in the
  development of formal linguistic theory. In this talk, I will present an
  optimality-theoretic approach to language variation and show how it fares
  in the face of naturalistic usage data. The talk will feature some recent
  collaborative work with Curtis Andrus (Stanford Mathematics and Computer
  Science).
  

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• SSP Forum: Tanya Breshears (M.S. candidate) Mar 16, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 14, 2005. Last updated on Mar 7, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Language and Cognition: Do Japanese Speakers Think
  Differently than English Speakers?"
  
  Tanya Breshears
  M.S. candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Language is pervasive. Every society uses language ~V to teach, to
  communicate, to persuade. The correctly chosen word may sway an
  opponent, while another may cause diplomatic disaster. Clearly
  language can affect opinion, but can language affect perception or
  cognition? Can words alter people's understanding of situations and
  events? And even more significantly, do people who speak different
  languages think differently?
  
  In this talk, I will focus particularly on Japanese and English, and
  how differences between these languages may affect speakers'
  perceptions and understanding. For example, how do humans
  conceptualize the personalities of the people they meet? Speakers
  often use adjectives, but in Japanese many adjectives carry tense,
  while English adjectives do not. I will discuss evidence that these
  differences affect people's perception of personality and the
  judgments they make.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Henry Lowood Mar 9, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 13, 2006. Last updated on Jan 13, 2006 by Tina Chen .

  Event Description:

  Community Players: Gameplay as Public Performance and Cultural Artifact
  
  Henry Lowood
  Science, Technology, and Society Program
  Stanford University
  
  Players of computer and video games are remarkably creative. More than spectators or fans, they are proving that media consumers can also produce, whether by posting their opinions and replays, or by making mods and movies. These activities are becoming the basis for virtual communities of players and fans attracted to games as a mode of performance. In this lecture, I will recall how game culture’s community players came to be, reflect on their artistic and social practices, and speculate about how archives of these performances can give voice not just to community players, but to communities of players.

---

• SSP Forum: Tony Tulathimutte (M.S. candidate) Mar 2, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 14, 2005. Last updated on Feb 15, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Menu-Based Video Games: Principles of
  Design and Interaction
  
  Tony Tulathimutte
  M.S. candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Menus are a familiar construct in computer interfaces, designed to maximize
  user performance by structuring and minimizing user interaction. It would
  seem that, as a medium that often prioritizes unstructured action and
  interactivity, computer gaming would have little use for menus; however,
  their persistence as a means of issuing play commands, enacting dialogue,
  efficiently conveying semantically complex commands, and structuring
  narrative decisions suggests that when menus are properly designed to
  accommodate playfulness, they can provide a practical and unique form of
  gameplay. In my lecture I will broadly discuss the nature of menu-based game
  interaction: how the need for playfulness impinges on menu design, how menus
  provide a basis for structuring interactive narrative, and how the
  definition of a menu must be adapted to the peculiarities of the medium.
  

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• SSP Forum: John McCarthy Feb 23, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Bldg. 380-380C Posted on Jan 17, 2006. Last updated on Feb 7, 2006 by Gorkem Ozbek .

  Event Description:

  
  Simple Deterministic Free Will
  
  John McCarthy
  Computer Science Department, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract:
  
  A common feature of free will is that a person has choices among alternative actions and chooses the action with the apparently most preferred consequences. In a determinist theory, the mechanism that makes the choice among the alternatives is determinist. The sensation of free will comes from the fact that the mechanism that generates the choices uses a non-determinist theory as a computational device and that the stage in which the choices have been identified is introspectable. The present formalism is based on work in artificial intelligence (AI).
  
  We present a theory of simple deterministic free will (SDFW) in a deterministic world. The theory splits the mechanism that determines action into two parts. The first part computes possible actions and their consequences. Then the second part decides which action is most preferred and does it.
  
  We formalize SDFW by two sentences in situation calculus, a mathematical logical theory often used in AI. The situation calculus formalization makes the notion of free will technical. According to this notion, almost no animal behavior exhibits free will, because exercising free will involves considering the consequences of alternative actions. A major advantage of our notion of free will is that whether an animal does have free will may be determinable by experiment. Some computer programs, e.g. chess programs, exhibit SDFW. Almost all do not. At least SDFW seems to be required for effective chess performance and also for human-level AI.
  
  Many features usually considered as properties of free will are omitted in SDFW. That's what makes it simple. The criterion for whether an entity uses SDFW is not behavioristic but is expressed in terms of the internal structure of the entity.

---

• SSP Forum: Hazel Markus Feb 16, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 5, 2006. Last updated on Feb 14, 2006 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  Psychology: Made in the USA
  
  Hazel Rose Markus
  Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences
  Psychology Department, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract:
  
  Psychology is an American product because it has a distinctive American style. The style derives from its implicit and underlying model of agency, a model that is built deeply and broadly into the foundation of psychological theorizing in all areas—social, personality, developmental, cognitive, neuroscience, evolutionary and clinical (Markus & Kitayama, 2004; Miller, 2004). This model holds that normatively good actions originate in the attributes of an autonomous self, and that the actions of this self should be experienced as disjoint, that is, as separate from the actions of others. This model of agency as disjoint is widely distributed and reflected in American economic, political and legal institutions, in the media, in religion and in language. In other cultural contexts, there are other solutions to the problem of what impels individual action. For example, in a conjoint model of agency, others are formative of agency such that individual actions require the consideration and anticipation of the perspective of meaningful others. Studies comparing features of American and East Asian contexts, as well as studies comparing the responses of individuals engaging in these contexts, suggest that differences in models of agency can explain cultural variation in a wide variety of psychological experience including motivation, choice, cognitive dissonance and well being. Studies within American contexts, comparing middle class and working class contexts, suggest that the disjoint model is a good fit for middle class contexts, but not for working class contexts, where agency assumes other forms. Working class contexts do not easily afford the sense of having many choices and many opportunities for self and expression and control over environments. Together these studies suggest that how people experience agency can vary quite dramatically depending on the prevalent ideas, structures, and practices of their contexts, and that psychology’s basic descriptive and normative model of agency is, in fact, a middle class American one.
  

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• SSP Forum: Geoffrey Morris (M.S. candidate) Feb 9, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 14, 2005. Last updated on Feb 6, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Pockets: Visualizing Campaign Finance
  
  Geoff Morris
  M.S. candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  Abstract:
  The Federal Election Committee (FEC) maintains a public database of all transactions between political action committees (PACs) and political candidates. While the interface provided by the FEC allows one to obtain specific information about candidates and committees, it is difficult to obtain an overview or broader view of the campaign finance landscape. The goal of Pockets is to provide a graphical interface for exploring this data. In this lecture I will examine some important landmarks in information visualization, discuss how they have informed my project, and explain the steps taken in my project's development thus far as well as plans for future development.
  

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• SSP Forum: Michael Bratman Feb 2, 2006 at 04:45 AM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 9, 2006. Last updated on Jan 31, 2006 by Matthew Xavier Etchemendy .

  Event Description:

  Intention: Individual and Shared
  
  Michael Bratman
  Department of Philosophy
  Stanford University
  
  My aim in this talk is to sketch the outlines of an approach to the phenomenon of intention, an approach I have called the planning theory of intention. My concern is with both individual agency and central cases of shared agency.
  
  The first step is a sufficiently developed model of the intentions of individual agents. Here I start with the idea that we (unlike many other goal-directed agents) are planning agents: we settle in advance on partial plans of action and these structure our practical thought and action over time in ways that conduce to important and extremely useful forms of cross-temporal organization. Intentions (in contrast with other kinds of desiring) are attitudes that are embedded in these planning structures, and whose characteristic forms of functioning and associated norms (e.g., norms of consistency) are tied to the organizing roles of these structures.
  
  To get from individual activity that is guided and explained by individual intentions, to shared intentional and shared cooperative activities that are guided and explained by shared intentions, we need to understand how the intentions of the participants connect up in relevant ways. Basic ideas here include: the possibility of my intending our shared activity; interlocking intentions (we each intend that the shared activity go by way of the intentions of both); commitments to meshing sub-plans (we each intend that the shared activity go by way of sub-plans of each that mesh with each other); interdependence; commitments to mutual support; and mutual responsiveness in intention and in action. We also need the idea that these phenomena are out in the open, though the links between the agents in such shared activities are practical and are not merely the cognitive links that are the target of accounts of common knowledge. Finally, these ideas help provide a model of important forms of shared valuing.

---

• SSP Forum: Mehran Sahami Jan 26, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c http://ai.stanford.edu/users/sahami/bio.html Posted on Jan 24, 2006. Last updated on Jan 24, 2006 by Ro-el Rio Cordero .

  Event Description:

  Improving Web Information Finding via Machine Learning
  
  Web search is one of the most important applications used on the Internet.
  It also poses many interesting opportunities to apply machine learning
  technologies and make use of massive amounts of data. In order to better
  help people find relevant information in a growing sea of data, we discuss
  various automated learning techniques that can be harnessed to sift,
  organize, and present relevant information to users. In this talk, we
  provide a brief background on information retrieval, and then look at some
  of the challenges faced in searching the Web. Specifically, we examine
  applications of machine learning to improve information retrieval in a
  variety of contexts, including topical inference for queries as well as
  record linkage. We show how these tasks are directly related to the
  overarching goal of improving various aspects of search on the web. This
  talk will be accessible to a broad audience, and we will provide some
  general expository background on machine learning and its application to
  textual data as we go along. It'll be fun for the whole family.

---

• SSP Forum: Dan Schwartz Jan 19, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://aaalab.stanford.edu Posted on Dec 21, 2005. Last updated on Jan 17, 2006 by Renee Christine Trochet .

  Event Description:

  Agency and Learning
  
  Daniel Schwartz
  School of Education
  Stanford University

  Issues of agency suffuse nearly all prescriptive theories of learning. They appear in proposals that the goal of education is to produce autonomous citizens and in proposals that student-centered learning is superior. In more cynical moments, it appears that educational researchers have a particular vision of agency and then look around for candidate cognitive, motivational, or social mechanisms that can support, or perhaps justify, their vision. I contend there is nothing wrong with this approach, and in fact, prescriptive learning theories that disregard issues of agency do so with peril. But, researchers do need to clarify their tacit theories of agency, lest they slip into faulty assumptions. For example, many people believe that “choosing and doing” involve more agency than “observing” and that “choosing and doing” is a better way to learn. These beliefs are wrong on both accounts. I will explain why using the concept of productive agency. I will provide empirical evidence that “passive” observation can be better than “active” doing, but only when conditions of productive agency are met.

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• SSP Forum: Brook Lillehaugen Jan 12, 2006 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/lillehaugen/ Posted on Jan 10, 2006. Last updated on Jan 10, 2006 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Body and Component Part Locative:
  An Introduction from a Typological Perspective
  
  Brook Lillehaugen
  Linguistics Department
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Many languages, including Tlacolula Valley Zapotec (TVZ; Otomanguean) and Chickasaw (Muskogean) use body and component part (BCP) words in sentences which express location. In these languages some BCP words can be used both as referential nouns ((a) and (a)) and as BCP locatives ((b) and (b)).
  
  a. Zagrùu nàa loh
  mnààa'. (TVZ) pretty COP face woman
  
  'The woman's face is pretty'
  
  b. Bèe'ecw zuu loh
  gyizhi'iilly. (TVZ)
  
  'The dog is standing on the chair'
  
  a. Aai'pa' nota'-at
  okchamali. (Chickasaw) table underside-NOM be.blue
  
  'The underside of the table is blue'
  
  b. Cholhkan-at aai'pa' nota'
  aa-áa. (Chickasaw) spider-NOM table underside LOC-go.around
  
  'The spider is walking around under the table'
  
  In this talk, I present an introduction to BCP locative systems and their typology by demonstrating the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the TVZ and Chickasaw BCP locative systems. I will discuss language change and grammaticalization, metaphor, and the relation between syntactic category and meaning.

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• SSP Forum: Daniel Casasanto Dec 8, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) Posted on Nov 29, 2005. Last updated on Nov 29, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  Space for Thinking
  Daniel Casasanto
  Psychology Department
  Stanford University
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  How do people think about things they can never see or touch? The ability to invent and reason about abstract domains such as time, ideas, or mathematics is arguably the hallmark of human sophistication. Yet, how people mentally represent these abstract concepts has remained one of the great mysteries of the mind. Metaphors in language suggest a potential solution. When people talk about abstract phenomena, they often recruit words from more concrete or perceptually rich domains, such as space (e.g., a LONG time; a HIGH price; a LARGE number). Does metaphoric language reveal something fundamental about the structure of thought?
  In this talk, I will describe a series of nonlinguistic, psychophysical experiments testing the idea that people not only talk about abstract domains using spatial language, they also think about them using ‘recycled’ representations of physical space. Together, these studies suggest that even our most abstract thoughts depend in part upon our physical experiences. Furthermore, cross-linguistic results demonstrate that the language we use to describe abstract phenomena not only provides a window on our underlying mental representations, but also shapes those representations, such that people from different language communities develop distinctive conceptual repertoires.

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• SSP Forum: Scott Klemmer Dec 1, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380c http://hci.stanford.edu/srk/ Posted on Oct 11, 2005. Last updated on Nov 28, 2005 by Ro-el Rio Cordero .

  Event Description:

  "Integrating Physical and Digital Interactions for Creative Collaboration"
  Scott Klemmer
  Computer Science Department
  Stanford University
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Today, physical and electronic media coexist unaware of each other.
  Contemporary design studios, offices, and labs are filled with both
  physical and electronic artifacts, but the two exist separately, and the
  infrastructure for moving between media representations-scanning and
  printing- is heavyweight and cumbersome, at odds with the freewheeling,
  organic nature of creative work.
  
  For the past six years at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, my
  colleagues and I have conducted research into user interfaces that bind
  physical and electronic representations of artifacts for integrated
  interaction: Manipulation in one medium effects a corresponding change
  in the artifact's dual medium. Based on fieldwork with designers, office
  workers, scientists, and engineers, we've created and evaluated
  integrated interfaces ranging from whiteboards to oral history
  transcripts to field notebooks.
  

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• SSP Forum: Martin Kay Nov 17, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 9, 2005. Last updated on Nov 8, 2005 by Gorkem Ozbek .

  Event Description:

  
  Machine Translation: A new frontier?
  Martin Kay
  Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University
  
  
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  
  Serious research on machine translation began in the 1950's but was
  brought almost to a stop towards the end of the 1960's by a critical
  government report. It strongly advocated the view that practical
  systems would require a great deal more work on fundamental issues in
  language and computing, and it was here that the investment should be
  made. This was probably the key event in bringing the field of
  computational linguistics into being. Today, machine translation has
  again become a concentrator of effort and a generator of excitement,
  but not because of advances in computational linguistics. Quite the
  contrary. Leaders of the field have come to the view, the belief,
  nay, the realization, that an understanding of language and
  linguistics is irrelevant, if not an impediment, to success in
  machine translation research. This view is widespread, but not
  universally held. As one who was there in the 1950's and is arguably
  still there today, I will give you my two cents worth.

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• SSP Forum: Dagfinn Follesdal Nov 10, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/fss/df.html Posted on Oct 8, 2005. Last updated on Nov 9, 2005 by Matthew Xavier Etchemendy .

  Event Description:

  "Why Logic: How can logic be useful in philosophy and other fields?"
  
  4:15-5:55 pm
  
  Why Logic? Can logic and formal methods be of help when one works on philosophical issue? If so, how? These and other related questions are dealt with in a book that is coming out in December: Formal philosophy: 5 questions for formal philosophers. I will set forth my own view on these issues and also discuss some of the other views that are put forth in the book.

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• SSP Forum: Annalee Newitz Nov 3, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) http://www.techsploitation.com Posted on Aug 26, 2005. Last updated on Nov 1, 2005 by Renee Christine Trochet .

  Event Description:

  
  Free Speech Hackers --
  How New Laws and Technologies are Creating
  the Next Generation of Digital Subversives
  Annalee Newitz
  AlterNet
  
  
  Free speech, especially anonymous free speech, is under attack on the Internet. Government and private industry are using network surveillance technologies and the legal system to make it difficult for political dissidents, whistleblowers, and social critics to speak their minds without fear of sometimes drastic consequences. At the same time, hackers are creating software tools that allow free information and ideas to punch through technical barriers. This talk will focus on the future of free speech online by looking some of these new technologies, such as anonymizing network Tor, privacy-enhancing chat application OTR, and speech disseminator Ping-o-Matic. It will also look at some of the cultural and legal challenges that these technologies are likely to meet. Along the way, we'll look at the kinds of free speech that are being enabled (or disabled) by present and future hacks.

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• SSP Forum: Marc Pauly Oct 27, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2005. Last updated on Oct 17, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  "Bonn vs. Berlin, and Other Dilemmas of Voting"
  Marc Pauly
  Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
  
  Abstract:
  In 1991, after reunification, the German parliament had to decide whether to keep Bonn as the German capital or to move (back) to Berlin. I will report on the voting procedure that was used in deciding this question, raising some more general procedural issues. As a second example of a voting dilemma, I consider the doctrinal paradox (also known as discursive dilemma) and the problem of aggregating individual judgments into a collective group judgment. I will discuss how formal logic may help in answering some of the questions raised by these dilemmas.
  

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• Symbolic Systems Reunion/Homecoming Barbecue Oct 21, 2005 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Lake Lagunita Barbecue pits Posted on Oct 14, 2005. Last updated on Oct 16, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Symbolic Systems Program is having a barbecue Friday, October 21 from 5-7pm at the barbecue pits at Lake Lagunita for Symsys alumni, faculty and students.
  
  It's an opportunity for alumni who are here for the weekend or who live in the bay area to get together with each other and for current students and faculty to meet with alumni and see what happens to SSP students after graduation.
  
  Please RSVP by 5pm on Thursday, October 20 so we know how much food to prepare. You can email Tina at tinachen@stanford.edu
  
  

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• University-Wide Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress (SURP) Oct 20, 2005 at 03:00 PM Event Location: McCaw Hall, Francis C. Arrillaga Alumni Center http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/urp/SURP/ Posted on Aug 26, 2005. Last updated on Aug 26, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress (SURP)
  
  
  A festival featuring undergraduate researchers, the Fourth Annual SURP pre-empts our regular Forum talks this week and serves as attendance credit for students in SSP 10 (The Symbolic Systems Forum). The event lasts from 3 to 6 pm.

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• SSP Forum: Movie - Revolution OS Oct 13, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.revolution-os.com/ Posted on Sep 21, 2005. Last updated on Sep 21, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Movie: Revolution OS
  (2001, Dir: J.T.S. Moore, 85 minutes)
  
  From the movie's website:
  
  "REVOLUTION OS tells the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.
  
  On June 1, 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
  
  Microsoft fears GNU/Linux, and rightly so. GNU/Linux and the Open Source & Free Software movements arguably represent the greatest threat to Microsoft's way of life. Shot in cinemascope on 35mm film in Silicon Valley, REVOLUTION OS tracks down the key movers and shakers behind Linux, and finds out how and why Linux became such a potent threat.
  
  REVOLUTION OS features interviews with Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, Frank Hecker, and Rob Malda."

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• SSP Forum: Annual Summer Intern Presentations Oct 6, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) Posted on Aug 26, 2005. Last updated on Oct 5, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  "What We Did This Summer"
  Summer Interns, 2005
  Symbolic Systems Program
  4:15-5:55 pm
  
  
  Schedule of presentations:
  
  4:15 Benjamin Newman, "Client-side Foundations for Next-Generation Groupware (DEME)" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  4:20 Aaron Tam, "Using Groupware to Create Groupware" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  4:25 Matt Janes (supervisors: Pat Langley and Will Bridewell)
  
  4:30 Brian Salomaki, "A Cognitive Architecture for Physical Agents" (supervisors: Pat Langley and Dongkyu Choi)
  
  4:35 Gorkem Ozbek, "Creating Output for a Content Analysis Application" (supervisors: Tracy H. King and Richard Crouch)
  
  4:40 Anna Rafferty, "Scoring Strategies for Automatically Determining Textual Entailment" (supervisor: Chris Manning)
  
  4:45 Renee Trochet, "Creating an Ontology, Analyzing Parses, and Coordinating Lexical Databases for CALO" (supervisors: Stanley Peters and Matt Purver)
  
  4:50 Tina Chen, "Analyzing Intelligent Tutoring for Coaching Opportunities" (supervisors: Stanley Peters and Elizabeth Bratt)
  
  4:55 Aurelie Beaumel (supervisors: Stanley Peters and Lawrence Cavedon)
  
  5:00 Hassan Abudu, "Language Log" (supervisor: David Beaver)
  
  5:05 Kat Snyder, "Memory and Spatial Encoding" (supervisors: Anthony Wagner and Alison Preston)
  
  5:10 Kevin Calloway, "Cognitive Neuroscience of Mathematical Development" (supervisor: Vinod Menon)
  
  5:15 Roma Shah, "Visualizations" (supervisors: Barbara Tversky and Angela Kessell)
  
  5:20 Roddy Lindsay, "Developmental changes in probability matching and maximization" (supervisor: Michael Ramscar)
  
  5:25 Itamar Rosenn, "Cross-dimensional influences on time estimation" (supervisors: Lera Boroditsky and Daniel Casasanto)
  
  5:30 Michael Bernstein, "d.tools" (supervisor: Scott Klemmer)
  
  5:35 Zoe Bogart, "Changing ALL" (supervisors: John Rickford, Isabelle Buchstaller, Tom Wasow, and Elizabeth Traugott)
  
  5:40 Steven Lehrberger, "The Center for the Study of Language and Information's In-Car Dialogue Project" (supervisors: Stanley Peters and Sebastian Varges)
  
  5:45 Gabe Recchia, "Understanding Cues for Event Segmentation" (supervisors: Barbara Tversky and Bridgette Martin)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD

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• Autumn Welcoming Party Sep 29, 2005 at 04:00 PM Event Location: Linguistics Courtyard (between buildings 420 and 460, lower level) Posted on Sep 21, 2005. Last updated on Sep 22, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  All Symbolic Systems Program students, faculty, alumni, and prospective majors are invited to join us for the annual Autumn Welcoming Party, held in place of the Symbolic Systems Forum during the first week of classes. The Forum officially begins the following week. Students enrolled in SSP 10 can get Forum attendance credit by attending the welcoming party (look for the signup sheet).
  
  Here are the particulars:
  
  Date: Thursday, September 29, 2005
  Time: 4:00 to 6:00 pm
  Location: Linguistics Courtyard (between buildings 420 and 460)
  
  Food and drinks will be served.

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• SSP Forum: Senior Honors Students Jun 2, 2005 at 04:15 AM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 8, 2004. Last updated on Jun 1, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Annual Presentation of Honors Theses
  Senior Honors Students
  Symbolic Systems Program
  Class of 2005
  
  
  4:15 Jamie Kamel Fitzgerald, "Control of Competitive Interactions in Visual Cortex by Microstimulation of the Frontal Eye Field" (Honors Advisor: Tirin Moore, Neurobiology; Second Reader: Eric Knudsen, Neurobiology)
  
  4:27 Matt Kaufman, "When Inhibitory Neurons Inhibit Themselves: Simulating Rhythms in the Brain" (Honors Advisor: John Huguenard, Neurology and Neuroological Sciences; Second Reader: Shaul Hestrin, Comparative Medicine)
  
  4:39 Brendan O'Connor, "Group Selection and Conflict Explanations for the Evolution of Large-Scale Human Cooperation" (Honors Advisor: Noah Mark, Sociology; Second Reader: James Fearon, Political Science)
  
  4:51 Mahesh Srinivasan, "Nominal Classification and Conceptual Organization: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective from English and Mandarin Chinese" (Honors Advisor: Herb Clark, Psychology; Second Reader: Teenie Matlock, Psychology)
  
  5:03 Tony Tulathimutte, "Controller Mediation in Human-Computer Play" (Honors Advisor: Henry Lowood, German Department and Humanities Resource Group; Second Reader: Jeffrey Schnapp, French and Italian and Comparative Literature)
  
  5:15 Gregory Wayne, "Order and Word Order: How the Information Content of a Word in a Sentence Helps Explain a Linguistic Universal" (Honors Advisor: David Beaver, Linguistics; Second Reader: Tom Wasow, Linguistics)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD
  
  This will be the last SSP Forum of the 2004-2005 academic year. The Forum will resume at beginning of Autumn Quarter, 2005-2006.
  

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• SSP Forum: Scott Bukatman May 26, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 20, 2004. Last updated on May 8, 2005 by Mahesh Srinivasan .

  Event Description:

  
  Comics and the Critique of Chronophotography, or "He Just Couldn't Help It!"
  Scott Bukatman
  Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies
  Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract: In the wake of Muybridge and Marey's experiments in recording movement, comics quickly began to emphasize the depiction of continuous movement. Chronophotography mapped the kinetic body onto the gridded and regulated spaces of industrial culture: it was both a means of revealing the body and a tool for its containment and control. Comics by Wilhlem Busch, Steinlen,Winsor McCay and others, however, mimic the fixed viewpoints and measured progress of chronophotography, but parody the instrumental reason that supplied its motivation. Each episode of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze, for example, offered systematic and meticulous time-motion breakdowns of everyday activities, but the rhythm of efficient motion is always subverted
  by the mighty sneeze that turns all to chaos. With an emphasis on the pioneering comics and animation work of the American artist Winsor McCay, this presentation will explore the peculiar, parodic counter-logics that mark an oasis of disorder at a time of insistent regulation.
  

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• Distinguished Speaker Event: Michael Gazzaniga May 23, 2005 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Kresge Auditorium http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_static?page=dist_spkrs.htm Posted on Jan 3, 2005. Last updated on Mar 7, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  Distributed Systems and Conscious Unity
  Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D.
  David T. McLaughlin Distinguished University Professor
  Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
  Dartmouth College
  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Split-brain studies have revealed the complex mosaic of mental processes that participate in human cognition. And yet, even though each cerebral hemisphere has its own set of capacities, with the left hemisphere specialized for language and speech and major problem-solving capacities and the right hemisphere specialized for tasks such as facial recognition and attentional monitoring, we all have the subjective experience of feeling totally integrated. Indeed, even though many of these functions have an automatic quality to them and are carried out by the brain prior to our conscious awareness of them, our subjective belief and feeling is that we are in charge of our actions. These phenomena appear related to our left hemisphere's interpreter, a device that allows us to construct theories about the relations between perceived events, actions and feelings.
  
  
  BIOGRAPHY:
  Michael Gazzaniga is the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished University Professor at Dartmouth, where he is also Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. In 1964 he received a Ph.D in Psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked under the guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research. In his subsequent work he has made important advances in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another.
  
  Dr. Gazzaniga’s long and distinguished publication career includes many books accessible to a lay audience, such as The Social Brain, Mind Matters, and Nature’s Mind. Works such as these, along with his participation in the public television specials The Brain and The Mind, have been instrumental in making information about brain function generally accessible to the public. He recently published The Cognitive Neurosciences III, from MIT Press, which features the work of nearly 200 scientists in 94 chapters and is recognized as the sourcebook for the field. His book The Ethical Brain will be published by the Dana Press in June of 2005. Dr. Gazzaniga is well known for his teaching and mentoring, including beginning and developing Centers for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of California-Davis and at Dartmouth; supervising the work and encouraging the careers of many young scientists; and founding the Neuroscience Institute and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, of which he is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.
  
  He is much sought-after as a lively and informative speaker, and has spoken at such distinguished venues as the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where he presented the historic Friday Night Lecture inaugurated by Michael Faraday. Dr. Gazzaniga is also prominent as an advisor to various institutes involved in brain research, and is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

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• Conference: Online Deliberation 2005 / DIAC-2005 May 20, 2005 at 09:00 AM Event Location: TBA http://www.online-deliberation.net/conf2005 Posted on Jan 20, 2005. Last updated on Jan 20, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Symbolic Systems Program is co-sponsoring the Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice / DIAC-2005, from May 20-22, 2005. For more information, see the conference website.

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• SSP Forum: Jean-Pierre Dupuy May 19, 2005 at 05:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Apr 27, 2005. Last updated on May 5, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  (PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS FORUM IS AT 5:15 IN PLACE OF THE NORMAL TIME OF 4:15)
  
  Philosophical foundations of NanoEthics
  
  ABSTRACT:
  NanoEthics is a new discipline that accompanies the rapid rise of the nanotechnology research program, both in the US and in Europe. It is still in its formative years, and the way it develops is very different in the US and in Europe. The lecture will confront two styles of approaching the ethics of science and technology in the case of a fledgling technology. Special emphasis will be given to the so-called "convergence" of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (NBIC Convergence).
  
  BIO:
  Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of French and Political Science, Stanford, and Philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris. His recent books include The Mechanization of the Mind--On the Origins of Cognitive Science, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, C.S.L.I. Publications, Stanford University, 1998. His current research program concerns the paradoxes of rationality; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and pre-emptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; the metaphysics of rational doomsaying.
  

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• SSP Forum: Jessica Riskin May 12, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/riskin.html Posted on Nov 8, 2004. Last updated on Apr 14, 2005 by Brendan Thomas O'Connor .

  Event Description:

  Mind Out of Matter: A History of the Quest for a Conscious Machine
  
  Jessica Riskin, History Department
  
  The talk will describe my book-in-progress, which is about the genesis and early history of artificial life. The book will examine attempts to simulate the behaviors and bodily functions of living creatures from the first appearance of these attempts as thought-experiments in the mid-seventeenth century, through their transformation into actual experiments in the early eighteenth century, and ending with the widespread rejection, in the early nineteenth century, of the possibility of simulating life in mechanism. My central interest in telling this story is in the continual re-definition of life and mind, on the one hand, and of machinery, on the other, resulting from these measurements of each against the other. The terms in which nineteenth-century philosophers and engineers rejected the possibility of mechanical simulations of life implied a new understanding of life's (and machinery's) defining features. Some key elements of this new understanding would later, I believe, inform the return of artificial life in cybernetics.
  
  Jessica Riskin is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at Iowa State University and at MIT before coming to Stanford. Her research interests include Enlightenment science, politics and culture, and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history. She is currently writing a book on the history of artificial life since the seventeenth century, as inseparably connected with the history of notions of consciousness and selfhood. The book's working title is Mind Out of Matter: A History of the Quest for a Conscious Machine.

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• Annual Symbolic Systems Spring BBQ May 6, 2005 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Sand Volleyball Court (between the Ford Center and the Campus Drive East tennis courts) Posted on May 2, 2005. Last updated on May 3, 2005 by Emmy Skye Davis .

  Event Description:

  Please join Symbolic Systems students, alumni, and faculty for our annual SSP Spring BBQ! Meet and mingle with new and old affiliates of the program.
  
  We'll be offering the usual barbecue accoutrements at the Sand Volleyball Court (located right between the Ford Center and the Campus Drive Tennis Courts) until 8pm or so. Please stop by at any point for anywhere between 5 minutes (just to say hello) and an hour (to hang out and eat some dinner)!
  
  Directions: Heading south on Palm Drive, turn left onto Campus Drive East. Next, make a right onto Galvez (major stop sign intersection). At the end of Galvez (bollards), turn left onto Serra. Immediately past Encina Hall (which will be on your right) is Arguello Way- make a left, pass the Band Shack (on your right), pass Burnham Pavilion and the Ford Center (on your left), and then reach the Sand Volleyball Court (on your right). If you hit Campus Drive, you've gone too far. Here's a link to a nice map closeup: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/campus_map/zoom.jsp?x=1503&y=836&zoomto=100&zoomfrom=100&click.x=250&click.y=229
  
  As usual, email us at ssp-af at csli dot stanford dot edu with any questions.

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• SSP Forum: Tim Roughgarden May 5, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://theory.stanford.edu/~tim Posted on Nov 15, 2004. Last updated on Mar 4, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  Networks, Game Theory, and the Price of Anarchy
  Tim Roughgarden
  Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract:
  
  The "price of anarchy" measures the extent to which competition approximates cooperation.  It is a rendezvous between the idea of an equilibrium, an idea fundamental to game theory, and the concept of approximation, which is ubiquitous in theoretical computer science.  In this talk I will discuss the price of anarchy in the context of a natural model of traffic routing, "selfish routing."

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• SSP Forum: Anthony Wagner Apr 28, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 1, 2004. Last updated on Apr 18, 2005 by Tanya Breshears .

  Event Description:

  Cognitive Control and Remembering the Past: Governing Access to Memory
  Anthony Wagner, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
  
  Remembering the past is not a unitary cognitive act, but rather depends on an ensemble of processes, including cognitive control mechanisms that guide access to goal-relevant memories. In this talk, evidence will be provided for a distinction between two basic forms of cognitive control--top-down (controlled) retrieval of potentially relevant representations and post-retrieval selection. Initial data will highlight the role of selection and controlled retrieval mechanisms during (a) interference resolution in working memory, (b) retrieval of task-relevant semantic knowledge, and (c) switching between task sets. Subsequently, the role of retrieval and selection for remembering episodic details about the past will be discussed. As such, this talk aims to illustrate how core mechanisms of cognitive control support flexible behavior across a range of memory domains.

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• SSP Forum: Fred Turner Apr 21, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 22, 2004. Last updated on Feb 22, 2005 by Tanya Breshears .

  Event Description:

  Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: Revisiting the WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community
  Fred Turner, Communications Department, Stanford University
  
  Over the last ten years, scholars have largely ascribed the rise of virtual community to the widespread adoption of computer networking technologies. This paper examines the history of the system on which the term "virtual community" was first used, the Whole Earth Lectronic Link (or WELL), and shows that as both an idea and a social formation, virtual community in fact emerged at the intersection of three forces: the appearance of public computer networks, the persistence of countercultural social ideals from the 1960s, and a shift toward networked forms of economic activity. In the process, the paper brings together analytical frameworks from organizational sociology, American cultural history, and science and technology studies in order to illuminate the complex ways in which technological, social and cultural forms co-evolve.
  
  Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of Counterculture Into Cyberculture: How Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Network Transformed the Politics of Information (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor Books, 1996; 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

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• SSP Forum: David Hills Apr 14, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 10, 2005. Last updated on Mar 9, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  Thinking Out Loud: The Problem of Oracular Utterance
  David Hills
  Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract:
  
  Sometimes we lash words together and float them out into the world in a manifestly experimental spirit. We issue these words in the hope that the best interpretation of them will have us embracing claims we’re prepared to embrace, performing speech acts we’re willing and even eager to perform, etc. But we don’t profess to know in advance precisely which claims we’ll be embracing and precisely which speech acts we’ll be performing by issuing these words. In such cases, the best interpretation of our utterance isn’t settled in the classical Gricean manner by how we inferably intend it to be interpreted in the first place. Yet interpretation remains remarkably sensitive
  to the classical Gricean conversational virtues: optimal informativeness, relevance, perspicuity, and so on. Other things equal, we should interpret so as to maximize the informativeness, relevance, perspicuity, etc. of the conversational contribution the utterance would make, were it to be interpreted in the manner in question.
  
  I wonder how this works. I wonder what kind of revision or extension of the classical Gricean framework is needed to account for what I call oracular utterances. I sketch an account of these matters based on two basic ideas:
  
  (a) Human beings are remarkably good at playing games of make-believe together on a pick-up basis.
  (b) When we speak in an oracular manner, we initiate a game of make-believe in which we pretend to be or be speaking for someone much more fully in command of our words and their powers than we ourselves actually are at the time.

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• SSP Forum: Richard Rorty Apr 7, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 5, 2004. Last updated on Feb 28, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  Is there a problem about the relation between the mind and the brain?
  Richard Rorty
  Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
  
  
  Abstract:
  
  Recent attempts to keep the mind-body problem alive typically divide it into a problem about how brains can have intentional states and another problem about how brains can produce consciousness. But intentionality is just aboutness. There is no problem about assertions can be about things, and one should think of beliefs and desires as modeled on sentences. Consciousness will only seem mysterious if one believes it to be possible that a being that behaves exactly like me or like you might nevertheless be a zombie--might lack consciousness. But that possibility is an hypothesis for which there could never be any empirical evidence. Whatever cognitive science may do, it is not going to shed light on the "mysteries" of the mind. For there are no such mysteries.

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• SSP Forum: Vinod Menon Mar 31, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 29, 2004. Last updated on Mar 28, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  Cognitive neuroscience of mental arithmetic
  Vinod Menon
  Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
  
  Arithmetic reasoning is arguably one of the most important cognitive skills a child must master. In this talk, I will summarize our current understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of mental arithmetic. I will describe findings from our recent brain imaging studies of both typical and atypical mental arithmetic skill development. Finally, I will describe how our studies provide new insights into long-term memory consolidation, and how this consolidation impacts the development of arithmetic skills and knowledge.

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• SSP CoHo Advising Night! Mar 30, 2005 at 09:00 PM Event Location: CoHo Posted on Feb 23, 2005. Last updated on Feb 23, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  Your Advising Fellows are at it again!
  It's the begining of spring quarter and if you have any questions about what classes to take, scheduling conflicts, four-year plans, stop by the CoHo from 9pm till 11pm on Thursday the 30th. We'll be there to buy you coffee (or $3 off any food/drink item) and give you advise.

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• SSP Forum: Sean O'Nuallain Mar 10, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 2, 2004. Last updated on Mar 5, 2005 by Mahesh Srinivasan .

  Event Description:

  
  "Computing with waves; neurons as resonators"
  
  Sean O'Nuallain, Dublin City University (Ireland) and CSLI
  
  
  
  
  Abstract: Neuroscience has witnessed a healthy burgeoning of theory in the period of the last decade, from revivals of Hoffman's geometry of systems model, reformulated to stress the dynamical systems aspect, to a similarly transformed holonomic theory by Grass and his colleagues,
  to various cortical columnar architectures proposed, inter alia by Anderson and Burnod, to further-fledged speculations featuring nitrous oxide, glial cells, and quantum coherence in microtubules.
  
  In contrast, computational models of the behavior of networks of neurons are still mainly based on an integrate-and-fire model of neural function. We propose a new computational model of the neuron developed with spectral data processing in mind, which emphasizes sub-threshold oscillation of the membrane potential as a fundamental feature on which to build a computational model. This reformulation of the computational neuron results in networks in which features such as resonance, selective communication and sensitivity to inter-spike periods emerge naturally. Furthermore, integrate and fire behavior emerges as a special case of the new model.
  
  
  Bio:
  
  Education
  
  M.Sc. in Psychology from University College, Dublin (UCD) Ireland (1983)
  Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. (1992)
  
  Work Experience
  
  1987-present Lecturer (Assistant Professor) Dublin City University, Ireland
  Initiated and directed the first undergraduate degree at this university
  
  1997 Visiting scholar, ICSI, Berkeley (Sponsor; Prof. Feldman)
  
  2002-present Visiting scholar, CSLI, Stanford
  
  Selected Publications
  
  "The Search for Mind" (Ablex, 1995;2nd edition Intellect, 2002; Third edition Intellect, 2003)
  
  ï¿?Being Humanï¿? (First edition, Intellect, 2002; second edition, Intellect, 2004)
  
  Editor of "Two Sciences of Mind" (Benjamins, 1997)
  
  Editor of "Spatial Cognition" (Benjamins, 2002)
  
  Co-editor of "Language, Vision, and Music" (Benjamins, 2002) and of "Mind in Interaction" (Benjamins, in preparation).
  
  

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• SSP COHO STUDY BREAK! Mar 8, 2005 at 09:00 PM Event Location: CoHo Posted on Feb 23, 2005. Last updated on Feb 23, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  It's early in dead week, so take a break from studying to hangout with your Advising Fellows and Sym Sys majors. We'll buy you a cup of coffee (or $3 off any drink/food item from the CoHo) and be around to chat about anything.
  See you all then!

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• SPP Forum: Paul Skokowski Mar 3, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 16, 2004. Last updated on Feb 22, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  Thinking Outside of the Room: An Externalist Perspective on the Knowledge Argument
  Paul Skokowski
  Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford Univeristy
  Department of Philosophy, UC Berkeley
  
  Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument is a powerful argument against some forms of materialism. But there are other versions of materialism that Jackson's argument misses entirely. I'll explain why in this talk.

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• SSP Forum: Michal Ben-Shachar Feb 24, 2005 at 04:30 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 1, 2004. Last updated on Feb 22, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Functional MRI studies of long distance dependencies (or: some non-PR reasons to do functional imaging in linguistic research)
  
  [Joint meeting with SPLAT - *Note unusual starting time*]
  
  Michal Ben-Shachar
  Psychology Department
  
  
  Abstract:
  I will present a series of fMRI experiments focusing on comprehension of Hebrew sentences with long distance dependencies (relative clauses, wh-questions, topicalization). These sentences, compared to carefully
  matched control sentences, give rise to a consistent pattern of brain activation, across constructions and tasks. Brain regions activated by long distance dependencies include left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci. Different patterns of activation were
  found for other structural contrasts, for example comparing sentences with verbs that take 1 or 2 complements. I will demonstrate how this effect can be utilized further to test competing theories of certain constructions, such as double objects. The results will be discussed in the context of
  current models of syntactic processing in the brain.
  
  Bio:
  Michal Ben-Shachar is a postdoc with Professor Brian Wandell in the Psychology Department, who did her Phd with Yosef Grodzinsky.
  

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• SSP Forum: Nadine Gaab Feb 17, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 29, 2004. Last updated on Feb 6, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  fMRI and the Auditory Cortex
  Evidence from Language and Music Studies
  Nadine Gaab
  
  
  Auditory tasks in the fMRI environment are challenging because of the loud noise created by the switching of the gradient coils every time the MR signal is read out. This noise may (1) interfere with auditory perception/stimulation and (2) modify the attentional load and as such influence auditory processing especially in children and patients. I will present the broad characteristics of the human auditory system and the challenges of conducting auditory experiments in the MRI scanner. Furthermore. I will show some new data on auditory spectro-temporal processing in musicians and nonmusicians and its possible relation to language perception.

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• SSP Forum: Patrick Suppes Feb 10, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/~psuppes/ Posted on Nov 26, 2004. Last updated on Feb 7, 2005 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  
  Brain and mind: a revised agenda
  for the philosophy of mind.
  
  
  This lecture will concentrate on three main topics that use results as much from brain studies as from philosophical reflections on the nature of the mind. First, the focus will be on the many computations the brain continually makes in perception and cognition, most of which we are mainly unaware of. Second, in considering representations, I will mainly focus on language, and contrast typical concepts of mental representation with actual data on brain representation of the constituents of language. Third, I will focus on consciousness, with analysis of both how it is useful and how it is limited in perceiving, thinking and feeling.

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• SSP Forum: Persi Diaconis Feb 3, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://stat.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/index.html Posted on Dec 1, 2004. Last updated on Jan 6, 2005 by Brendan Thomas O'Connor .

  Event Description:

  
  The Search for Randomness
  Persi Diaconis
  Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
  
  
  I will take a careful look at some of our most primitive examples of random phenemena: tossing a coin, rolling a roulette ball, shuffling cards. In each case, while randomness is possible, usually we are lazy and exploitable structures remain.
  

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• SSP Forum: T. Florian Jaeger Jan 27, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/~tiflo/ Posted on Jan 11, 2005. Last updated on Jan 14, 2005 by Brendan Thomas O'Connor .

  Event Description:

  
  No altruism needed: Dissociating production and comprehension in language processing
  
  T. Florian Jaeger, Department of Linguistics
  
  Proposals to explain aspects of linguistic structure in terms of processing have generally focused on comprehension, arguing that some grammatical feature of a language facilitates efficient parsing. Far less attention has been given the role of production in shaping language.
  
  However, speakers and hearers are subject to different performance pressures when processing language (e.g., while a hearer can at best guess what words are coming up while processing a sentence, a speaker usually has at least some knowledge of what he is going to say before it’s put into words). So comprehension-based explanations require that speakers are altruistic, i.e. they pay attention to the needs of the hearer in formulating their utterances (e.g., by avoiding ambiguities). One phenomenon that has been investigated making use of such an altruism assumption is the optional absence of a relativizer in restrictive English non-subject relative clauses (NSRCs), e.g.:
  
  (1) Yesterday I ran into the guy (who) we met in Seattle.
  (2) This is precisely the kind of talk (that) you may or may not attend.
  
  An altruistic model predicts that the speaker inserts relativizers to facilitate comprehension. Based on a study of 8,500 NSRCs from spoken and written language (Penn Treebank III; Mitchell et al., 1999), we present results that argue against such altruistic models. Instead, our results favor a new Production Difficulty Alleviation (PDA) hypothesis: Using relativizers provides time to alleviate production difficulties. In line with the PDA, we also show that, if uttering a relativizer alleviates production difficulties, speakers use a relativizer even if it does not improve comprehension. The resulting dissociation between production and comprehension complexity casts doubts on connectionist models of language processing (e.g. MacDonald, 1999) that aim at reducing comprehension complexity to frequencies in the input (and thereby to production complexity).
  

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• SSP Forum: Russ Altman Jan 20, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www-helix.stanford.edu/people/altman/ Posted on Nov 10, 2004. Last updated on Jan 10, 2005 by Emmy Skye Davis .

  Event Description:

  Pharmacogenomics: challenges of building
  information systems for modern biomedicine
  
  Pharmacogenomics is the study of how variation in the human genome leads to variation in the response to drugs. It is one of the ways in which the human genome will enable "personalized medicine." Pharmacogenomics is an incredibly complex field, with interactions of genes, drugs, people, heredity, population genomics, and all kinds of experimental data. Thus, it is fundamentally an information technology problem. In this talk, I will introduce the field, and discuss our efforts in building a knowledgebase for pharmacogenomics, PharmGKB (http://www.pharmgkb.org/), and performing research to improve our ability to handle the data and thereby accelerate progress.

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• SSP Forum: Video - "Breaking the Code" Jan 13, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 10, 2005. Last updated on Jan 10, 2005 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Breaking the Code (1996, 75 minutes)
  A BBC Production of the Stage Play by Hugh Whitemore
  
  
  The speaker originally scheduled for this week, Vinod Menon, has had to reschedule his talk for Spring Quarter due to a family commitment. So we are showing the dramatization of computer pioneer Alan Turing's life, Breaking the Code, for this week's SSP Forum. For more info, see the website about the play, maintained by Turing biographer Andrew Hodges.
  

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• SSP Forum: Carl Pabo Jan 6, 2005 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 22, 2004. Last updated on Dec 30, 2004 by Tanya Breshears .

  Event Description:

  Theories of Thought
  Carl Pabo

  
  
  This seminar will consider strategies for synthesizing some of the multiple approaches that have been taken to the problems of understanding human thought. Dr. Pabo's current ideas - which will be discussed at greater length in his winter-term course - involve efforts to systematically "frame" different cognitive viewpoints that may be taken when approaching a problem, and also involve efforts to develop a simple "notation" that may help us keep track of these multiple viewpoints.

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• CoHo & Advising Night Jan 5, 2005 at 08:00 PM Event Location: CoHo Posted on Jan 2, 2005. Last updated on Jan 2, 2005 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  Still haven't decided on what classes to take? Not sure how which concentration you want to be in? Exactly what classes in the core are offered this quarter? If you're asking any of thses questions, then you're in luck! The SymSys AFs are hosting another CoHo night on Wednesday, January 5, 2005 from 8pm to 10:30pm specifically to answer any of your advising/class questions! We'll be there with time schedules and, of course, coupons for $3 off at the CoHo.

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• SSP Forum: Heesoo Kim Dec 2, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 16, 2004. Last updated on Nov 23, 2004 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  Rapid Temporal Processing in Musicians and non-Musicians
  Heesoo Kim, M.S. Candidate
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  Abstract: It has long been shown that dyslexic people have difficulties with rapid temporal processing (e.g. Tallal, 1975). More recently, music intervention/therapy has been shown to improve certain aspects of dyslexia in children (e.g. Overy, 2003). In addition, preliminary data analysis on a recent fMRI study shows that musicians and non-musicians may show different activation patterns in traditional areas when doing a task requiring rapid temporal processing. I have collected behavioral data on rapid temporal processing, using the Repetition Task (REP test), in 3 different groups (musicians, amateur musicians, and non-musicians) from a non-language-impaired adult population. Stimulus duration, Inter-Stimulus-Interval, and degree of sequencing complexity were taken into account. Preliminary data analysis shows that both musicians and amateur musicians significantly outperform non-musicians in tasks that require more sequencing. However, the differences between musicians and amateur musicians are not significant. These results may lead to more research to develop a music-based therapy program for dyslexia.

---

• SymSys Study Break at the COHO Nov 30, 2004 at 08:00 PM Event Location: Coffee House Posted on Nov 16, 2004. Last updated on Nov 16, 2004 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  Take a break from studying and let SymSys buy you some coffee (or whatever you'd like) at the Coho!

---

• Gathering of past, current and prospective students concentrating in AI Nov 29, 2004 at 12:00 PM Event Location: 460-040 Posted on Nov 17, 2004. Last updated on Nov 17, 2004 by Itamar Rosenn .

  Event Description:

  If you're a current or former Symsys student concentrating in Artificial Intelligence, or if you're a new student thinking of concentrating in this field, please join us for an AI Gathering! It'll be a great way to meet some people who are taking those big, hard classes with you, share tricks of the trade and advice, and make new friends. Pizza and drinks provided.

---

• SSP Forum: Yoav Shoham Nov 18, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://cs.stanford.edu/~shoham Posted on Sep 24, 2004. Last updated on Nov 12, 2004 by Brendan Thomas O'Connor .

  Event Description:

  What we talk about when we talk about multi-agent learning
  

  
  Learning in multi-agent systems has a several-decade history within game theory, and a recent surge of interest within computer science (and, in particular, AI). When one looks closely, it becomes apparent that the very questions addressed in this area are often unclear, or at the very
  least only implicit. I will identify (based on joint work with Teg Grenager and Rob Powers) five distinct agendas one can define in the context of multi-agent learning, and then describe (based on joint work with Rob Powers) some recent progress in advancing one of these, the agent-centric agenda.
  
  Bio: Yoav Shoham is a Professor of Computer Science. He received his PhD at Yale University, and did post-doctoral research at the Weizmann Institute
  in Rehovot, Israel. His research includes artificial intelligence work in logic and multi-agent systems, as well as game theory and electronic
  commerce.

---

• SSP Autumn Quarter Honors Dinner Nov 17, 2004 at 06:00 PM Event Location: Symbolic Systems Lounge (040 Suite, Building 460) Posted on Nov 10, 2004. Last updated on Nov 10, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  All seniors in the Symbolic Systems Honors Program are invited for an informal pizza/salad dinner on Wednesday, November 17, from 6-7 pm.

---

• SSP Forum: Susan Holmes Nov 11, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 6, 2004. Last updated on Oct 31, 2004 by Emmy Skye Davis .

  Event Description:

  Phylogenetic Trees and Their Applications
  
  Phylogenetic trees are special parameters that do not belong to a Euclidean space, this makes for interesting mathematical questions which have repercussions in :
  
  -Making confidence statements about decision trees.
  -Deciding whether the Japanese are fishing the blue whale populations.
  -Visualizing the space of all trees (linguistic, family or other).
  -Deciding whether trees are the right representation for oberved data.
  
  I will cover some of these areas that are at the boundaries of probability, statistics and geometry.

---

• SSP Forum: Lera Boroditsky Nov 4, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/ Posted on Sep 16, 2004. Last updated on Oct 28, 2004 by Mahesh Srinivasan .

  Event Description:

  
  How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think
  Lera Boroditsky, Department of Psychology
  
  
  Abstract: Do people who speak different languages think differently about the world? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? I will present several lines of cross-linguistic experiments illustrating how the languages we speak shape the way we attend to, represent, and remember our experiences in the world. The results suggest that the private mental lives of people who speak different languages differ much more than previously thought.

---

• SSP Forum: Jeremy Bailenson Oct 28, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 6, 2004. Last updated on Oct 22, 2004 by Tanya Breshears .

  Event Description:

  "Transformed Social Interaction in Immersive Virtual Reality"
  
  Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written
  letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences.
  Similarly, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further
  change the nature of remote interaction. CVEs are systems which track
  verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render those
  signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations of people
  in a shared digital space. In this talk, I describe a series of projects
  that explore the manners in which CVEs can qualitatively change the nature
  of remote communication. Unlike telephone conversations and
  videoconferences, interactants in CVEs have the ability to utilize
  Transformed Social Interaction, systematically filtering the physical
  appearance and behavioral actions of their avatars in the eyes of their
  conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal
  signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These transformations can have
  a drastic impact on interactants’ persuasive and instructional abilities.
  Furthermore, using CVEs, behavioral researchers can use this mismatch
  between performed and perceived behavior as a tool to examine complex
  patterns of nonverbal behavior with nearly perfect experimental control and
  great precision.

---

• University-wide Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress (SURP) Oct 21, 2004 at 03:00 PM Event Location: McCaw Hall, Francis C. Arrillaga Alumni Center http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/urp/SURP/index.html Posted on Sep 16, 2004. Last updated on Sep 16, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  A festival featuring undergraduate researchers, the Third Annual SURP pre-empts our regular forum talks this week and serves as attendance credit for students in SSP 10 (The Symbolic Systems Forum). The event lasts from 3 to 6 pm.

---

• SSP Forum: Brian Knutson Oct 14, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 28, 2004. Last updated on Oct 8, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Neural Computation of Expected Value
  Brian Knutson, Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program
  
  
  Abstract: How do people decide what to do next? Psychologists and
  economists have argued that people must assess both the anticipated value
  and probability of outcomes in order to decide what to pursue. Recent
  advances in neuroimaging make it possible to visualize anticipatory
  changes in activity deep in the living human brain. In this talk, I will
  first review functional magnetic imaging research from our laboratory
  suggesting that a region of the subcortex called the nucleus accumbens
  plays an important role in anticipating value. Second, I'll describe new
  research suggesting that a the prefrontal cortex may play a more prominent
  role in anticipating probability. The findings have implications for
  understanding phenomena in mental health, and possibly, for predicting
  economic behavior.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Symbolic Systems Summer Interns Oct 7, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 16, 2004. Last updated on Oct 6, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  What We Did This Summer
  Symbolic Systems Summer Interns of 2004
  
  SCHEDULE:
  
  4:15 Jeff Russell [text report from overseas] (supervisors: Stanley Peters and Lawrence Cavedon)
  
  4:20 Michael Bernstein, "Computer-Aided Reading" (supervisors: Richard Crouch and Eric Bier)
  
  4:25 Andrew Parker, "Deme: A Web-Based Platform for Online Deliberation" (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  4:30 Sanjay Kairam (supervisors: Barbara Tversky and Bridgette Martin)
  
  4:35 Becky Neil, "LinGO Project" (supervisors: Dan Flickinger and Stephan Oepen)
  
  4:40 Simon Berring, "SemLab MURI Project" (supervisor: Stanley Peters)
  
  4:45 Aria Haghighi, "Recognizing Textual Entailment" (supervisor: Andrew Ng)
  
  4:50 Dean Eckles (supervisor: B.J. Fogg)
  
  4:55 Kat Snyder, "Cognition and Design" (supervisor: Larry Leifer)
  
  5:00 Jacob Wenegrat (supervisor: Michael Ramscar)
  
  5:05 Jamie Fitzgerald (supervisor: Tirin Moore)
  
  5:10 Itamar Rosenn, "Inducing Tree Transduction Rules" (supervisor: Chris Manning)
  
  5:15 Heesoo Kim, "Rapid Temporal Processing in Musicians and
  nonMusicians" (supervisors: John Gabrieli and Nadine Gaab)
  
  5:20 Dave Kale, "Shape Completion in Computer Vision" (supervisors: Daphne Koller and Drago Anguelov)
  
  5:25 Matt Kaufman, "Simulating Electrical Rhythms in the Cortex" (supervisor: John Huguenard)
  
  5:30 Greg Wayne, "Hippocampal Involvement in Working Memory?" (supervisors: John Gabrieli and Beth Nichols)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD

---

• SSP Fall Welcoming Party Sep 30, 2004 at 04:00 PM Event Location: Mathematics Courtyard (adjacent to 380-380C) Posted on Sep 16, 2004. Last updated on Sep 16, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Students, faculty, and staff: Please join us for our annual fall welcoming reception, adjacent to the room where the Forum is usually held. This will also serve as the first meeting of SSP 10 (The Symbolic Systems Forum) for attendance purposes. Refreshments will be provided.

---

• SSP Forum: Senior Honors Students Jun 3, 2004 at 04:30 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 19, 2003. Last updated on May 26, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Presentations of Senior Honors Projects
  SSP Honors Students, Class of '04
  *NOTE* the exact starting time: 4:30 pm in 380-380C
  
  4:30 Rachel Mackenzie, "Diagrammatic Narratives: Telling Stories
  Effectively with Scientific Diagrams" (Honors Advisor: Barbara Tversky,
  Psychology; Second Reader: Keith Devlin, Center for the Study of Language
  and Information)
  
  4:45 Mia Silverman, "Shared Representations in Effective Collaborative
  Problem-Solving" (Honors Advisor: Barbara Tversky, Psychology; Second
  Reader: Terry Winograd, Computer Science)
  
  5:00 Jennifer (Davie) Yoon, "The Mind Behind the Motion: Infants Act On
  Mentalistic Information In a Biological Motion Display By Twelve Months"
  (Honors Advisor: Susan Johnson, Psychology: Second Reader: Ellen Markman,
  Psychology)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD
  

---

• SSP Forum: Sheba Najmi May 27, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 4, 2004. Last updated on Jun 11, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  Sheba Najmi (M.S. Candidate), Symbolic Systems Program
  
  
  

---

• Christian Rohrer, Senior Director of Yahoo: Role of Science in the Workplace May 27, 2004 at 12:15 PM Event Location: Building 550-550A Posted on May 24, 2004. Last updated on May 24, 2004 by Michael Warren Orme .

  Event Description:

  Christian Rohrer will give a talk on the role of science in workplaces
  that deals with the sociology of organizational politics and inter
  personal relationships. He will give his presentation on Thursday, May
  27th in Building 550-550A from 12:15 - 1:15 PM. Christian Rohrer is a
  Senior Director at Yahoo! and an alumnus of Symbolic Systems in Education,
  Stanford University. This would be an exciting and useful talk for
  students in particular. We welcome you to attend the presentation.
  
  SUMMARY OF THE TALK
  
  Squealing Tires: Researching where the rubber meets the road in corporate
  environments
  
  A good education comes from a reputable school, great program, helpful
  advisors, and years of hard work. However, the academic experience is
  really only the foundation for being an effective research practitioner in
  a corporate setting.
  
  In this discussion, I will cover topics such as:
  
  * How research is used in corporate settings: its role and function
  * Skills that will serve you well:
  - Rapport building
  - Communication
  - Selling and marketing
  - Going beyond results and into solutions
  - Focus on why and how, not just what and how much
  * Corporate politics: playing the game
  * Going beyond research
  - Using your personality
  - Creating an real impact on products
  - Moving up and moving on
  
  BIOGRAPHY
  
  Christian Rohrer received his Ph.D in Symbolic Systems in Education
  (Cognitive Science) from Stanford University in 2001. His dissertation
  dealt with the issue of how joint exploratory learning of a user interface
  takes place in a household where multiple people participate in the
  interaction of a TV-based Internet appliance. He is currently the Director
  of User Experience Research at Yahoo!, where he previously held positions
  as Usability Engineer and Senior Manager of User Experience Research over
  the past 5 years. Prior to Yahoo!, he conducted ethnographic research for
  Network Computer Inc. (now Liberate), consulted as a technical instructor,
  and UNIX technician, and served as a technical support engineer for SCO
  Group. He also holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer and Information
  Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

---

• SSP Gathering 2004: From Symbols to Reality May 22, 2004 at 02:30 PM Event Location: 200-203 Posted on May 20, 2004. Last updated on May 20, 2004 by Michael C. Frank .

  Event Description:

  Tom Wasow, the current director, and Ivan Sag, the director of the Master's program, will give a brief update of how the program is going, then we will open the floor to alumni, who are invited to speak for 5 minutes each about what they've been doing since they graduated and how they've used their SSP education.
  
  If you're interested in speaking, please respond to this email and let me know; you can put together a couple of PowerPoint slides and we'll put all the slides together on a computer for you to use.
  
  

---

• SSP Gathering 2004: Alumni-Student Volleyball and Barbecue May 21, 2004 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Sand Volleyball Court, across from Arrilaga Alumni Center. Posted on May 20, 2004. Last updated on May 20, 2004 by Michael C. Frank .

  Event Description:

  Play volleyball against alums students, eat and drink, hear a welcome by SSP Professor John Perry.
  
  For directions go to the searchable campus map.

---

• SSP Forum: Natasha Kirkham May 20, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 12, 2004. Last updated on May 17, 2004 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  Making sense of it all:  Pattern prediction in infancy
  Natasha Kirkham, Psychology Department
  
  
  Abstract:
  We learn about regularly-occurring events in the perceptual environment by ascertaining associations among temporally adjacent stimuli in input sequences.  Recent research has shown that infants are remarkably adept at learning the input statistics of auditory, visual, and multimodal sequences.  I will be discussing this research in terms of a learning mechanism that supports infants' understanding of their perceptual environment.
  
  Bio:
  Originally from Toronto, Canada, Natasha Kirkham has two undergraduate degrees (a BA in English Literature, and a BSc in Psychology) and received her PhD at Cornell University in Psychology. She is currently an assistant professor in the the developmental area of the Psychology Department at Stanford University.

---

• SSP Forum: Herbert H. Clark May 13, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~herb Posted on Feb 10, 2004. Last updated on May 12, 2004 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  How people coordinate with each other with and without language
  Herbert H. Clark, Psychology Department
  
  
  When people engage in joint activities--waltzing, playing tennis, planning parties, negotiating contracts, or merely conversing--they have to coordinate on what each of them is to do when and where. They achieve that coordination not only by means of language, but by means of what I will call material signals, signals in which they deploy material objects around them. These actions include pointing at, placing, and exhibiting objects, but also other actions on and with objects. I will describe when and how people use both linguistic and material signals to coordinate in several joint activities.
  
  Herbert H. Clark is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He is the author of several books on language and language use, including Psychology and Language (a textbook co-authored with Eve V. Clark), Arenas of Language Use, and Using Language. He is also author of over one hundred research articles and chapters. His research is concerned with speaking and understanding in interactive communication, especially conversation. Clark has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a foreign member to the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences.

---

• SSP Forum: Tracy King May 6, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 25, 2004. Last updated on Apr 20, 2004 by Michael Warren Orme .

  Event Description:

  Engineering Deep Grammars
  Tracy King, PARC Researcher
  
  Abstract: Parsing systems based on deep grammars mark explicitly a variety of syntactic and semantic dependencies and should therefore provide crucial support for meaning-sensitive NLP applications. However, common wisdom has it that parsing systems based on deep linguistic grammars are too difficult to produce, lack coverage and robustness, are massively ambiguous, and have poor run-time performance. In this talk, I will discuss ways in which deep grammars can be engineered to overcome these problems, focussing on techniques used in the implementation of the broad-coverage LFG-based grammars produced by the ParGram project.
  
  Bio: Tracy Holloway King is a member of the research staff at the Palo Alto Research Center and a consulting associate professor with the Symbolic Systems Program.

---

• Symbolic Systems Student/Faculty Mixer May 4, 2004 at 04:00 PM Event Location: Math Building Courtyard Posted on May 4, 2004. Last updated on May 4, 2004 by Michael Warren Orme .

  Event Description:

  Hey Sym Sys students, want to hang out with some of your peers and professors? Hey Sym Sys faculty, want to get to know some of your students outside of class, as well as see other SSP colleagues? Hey everyone, want to get some free food in the process?
  
  Come to the SYM SYS STUDENT/FACULTY MIXER.
  
  Join us on Tuesday, May 4 from 4 to 5:30 PM in the courtyard of Building 380 (where we have the receptions for the Symbolic Systems Forums). You provide yourself; we'll provide the refreshments. With classes ending in just a few short months, this event is a chance for students and faculty to catch up with each other before going away for the summer.
  
  So come on down May 4 for some good snacks, good conversation, and good times with others in the Symbolic Systems Program!

---

• SSP Forum: John Perry Apr 29, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/ Posted on Feb 6, 2004. Last updated on Apr 18, 2004 by Ben Davidson .

  Event Description:

  
  How Real is the Future?
  John Perry, Department of Philosophy
  
  
  John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart argued that time is not real. He thought that the concept of time requires that events have, successively, the properties of being future, being present, and being past; this is the source of temporal change, the essence of time. These are A-properties. The 2000 election was once in the future, then it was present, and now it is in the past. But our concept of time also requires that all temporal properties derive from the order of events in time; the 2000 election was after the 1996 election and before the 2004 election. But these order properties, the B-properties, never change, and so cannot be the source of the changing properties A-properties. So the whole thing is a unreconcilable mess, and the concept of time makes no sense, so there is no time.
  
  Contemporary philosophers of time tend to agree that time is real, but don't agree on what to do about the properties of being future, present, and past. Some argue that these are indexical or token-reflexive properties. When I say now "The 2004 election is in the future," the condition of truth on my remark is that the 2004 election is later than my remark. The relation between the 2004 and my remark never change. So there is no problem finding the fact that makes my statement true in the B-series. Others argue that this analysis leaves the nature of time utterly mysterious, since temporal change, the essence of time, is left out. We find the A-series within the B-series at the cost of losing the essence of time. Moreover, it seems that on this analysis there would be no past, present, or future without utterances, or at least thoughts, for events to be before, simultaneous with, or later than.
  
  I'll argue that the indexical analysis of the properties of being present, past, and future is not right. There are no future events, for events are not real, do not exist, until they happen. If there is no event later than an event E, E is present. If there are events later than it, E is past. Events go from being present to being past in virtue of new events coming into existence. The B-series facts change just as the A-series facts do, and are the basis for them. Time is real, temporal change is unique, and it does not require utterances or thoughts. Confusion on these matters is due, among other things, to not distinguishing representations, models, and reality, and to the overly facile way we talk about propositions being true at times.
  
  This talk covers work I am doing with Thomas Hofweber.

---

• SSP Distinguished Speaker: Daniel Kahneman Apr 27, 2004 at 05:00 PM Event Location: Kresge Auditorium http://www.princeton.edu/~psych/PsychSite/fac_kahneman.html Posted on Feb 10, 2004. Last updated on Mar 28, 2004 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  "Perception, Intuition, and Reason"
  Daniel Kahneman, Department of Psychology
  Princeton University
  
  
  Abstract:
  The distinction between perception and reasoning is familiar. A third family of intuitive cognitive processes resemble reasoning in their ability to deal with abstract information, but resemble perception in their operating characteristics. Most thinking is intuitive and most actions are guided by intuitive beliefs and preferences. The outputs of intuitive thought depart from the extensional logic of belief and choice in predictable ways. Many of these violations of logic can be traced to familiar principles of perception.
  
  
  
  Biography:
  Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and Professor of Public Affairs at its Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is only the second psychologist to win the Nobel Prize, and the first with a pure psychology background. He was a professor at Hebrew University, the University of British Columbia and the University of California-Berkeley before joining Princeton in 1993. Kahneman has received all the most prestigious awards in the psychology field, including the Hilgard Award for Lifetime Contribution to General Psychology, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA and the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Kahneman earned his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley.

---

• SSP Forum: Daniel Richardson Apr 22, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 25, 2004. Last updated on Apr 12, 2004 by Michael C. Frank .

  Event Description:

  
  Looking To Understand: The Coupling Between Speakers’ and Listeners’ Eye Movements during Discourse
  Daniel Richardson, Department of Psychology
  
  Imagine standing in front of a painting, discussing it with a friend. As you talk, your eyes will scan across the image, moving approximately three times a second. They will be drawn by characteristics of the image itself, areas of contrast or detail, as well as features of the objects or people portrayed. Eye movements are driven both by properties of the visual world and processes in a person’s mind. Your gaze might also be influenced by what your friend is saying, what you say in reply, what is thought but not said, and where you agree and disagree. If this is so, what is the relationship between your eye movements and those of your friend? How is that relationship related to the flow of conversation between you?
  
  I will describe an experiment in which participants had their eye movements recorded while they spoke extemporaneously about a TV show whose cast members they were viewing. Later, other participants listened to these speeches while their eyes were tracked. Within this naturalistic paradigm using spontaneous speech, a number of results linking eye movements to speech comprehension, speech production and memory were replicated. More importantly, it was demonstrated that speaker and listener eye movements were coupled, and that the strength of this relationship positively correlated with listeners’ comprehension. Just as the mental state of a single person can be reflected in patterns of eye movements, the commonality of mental states that is brought about by successful communication is mirrored in a similarity between speaker and listener’s eye movements.

---

• SSP Forum: Dan Shapiro Apr 15, 2004 at 04:40 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://cll.stanford.edu/~dgs/ Posted on Mar 8, 2004. Last updated on Apr 5, 2004 by Ben Davidson .

  Event Description:

  
  Value Driven Agents and the "Be all you can be" Guarantee
  Dr. Daniel Shapiro, Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise and Center for the Study of Language and Information
  
  Why don't we live in smart houses that automatically brew our coffee in the morning, and play our favorite music at night? Why don't we drive on automated freeways that get us there faster, even in rush hour? Why won't NASA let the Mars rover avoid rocks on its own? Rather than blame an absence of technology, I treat the issue as a lack of trust due to poor communication. In this view, the goal is to give an agent a better appreciation of its user's values, so that its choices won't have unintended effects.
  
  This talk will introduce a framework for constructing Value Driven Agents that are guaranteed to maximally please their users within the limitations of their given skills. I will begin by introducing the concept of user-agent value alignment, and then outline a design methodology and an implementation model for creating Value Driven Agents of this kind.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Andrew Arana Apr 8, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 25, 2004. Last updated on Apr 5, 2004 by Michael C. Frank .

  Event Description:

  
  Purity in Mathematics
  Andrew Arana, Department of Philosophy
  
  A proof of a proposition P is `pure', roughly speaking, if it is comprised of definitions (including axioms) of terms occurring in P and deductive consequences of those definitions. A proof of a proposition regarding prime numbers that uses just arithmetic premises is pure, while a proof of this proposition using premises from geometry, or complex analysis, or mechanics, is impure. There has been an ongoing debate on the value of pure proofs since antiquity, and it continues today. I will try to give a flavor of what is at stake in this debate. I'll do so by contrasting some pure and impure proofs, and then analyzing their differences. What is at stake turns out to be as much epistemological as mathematical.

---

• Labor Technology/Media Panel Apr 2, 2004 at 02:15 PM Event Location: 420-041 Posted on Apr 2, 2004. Last updated on Apr 2, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  A Special Panel Prior to the LaborTech/Access 2004 Conference
  at Stanford University
  
  "The Internet, Video Production, and the Voice of Labor:
  Perspectives from Four Continents"
  
  Friday, April 2, 2004
  2:15 pm
  Building 420 (Jordan Hall), Room 041
  Click here for map to event
  
  Free and Open to the public
  
  
  
  Panelists:
  Carolina Luzuriaga - Ojo Obrero/Festival Latinoamericano de la Clase
  Obrera, Argentina
  Mag Wompel - LaborNet Germany
  Jiyoung Lee - Labor News Production, South Korea
  Myoung Joon Kim - Labor Media Film Festival and Labor News Production,
  South Korea
  Steve Zeltzer - LaborFest, Labor Video Project, and LaborNet, USA
  
  This panel will feature five activists from around the world who are using
  Internet communication and video production to distribute news and
  perspectives representing workers. The development of an independent labor
  media voice has been a significant, though often overlooked, aspect of the
  globalization of resistance movements, and poses a challenge to
  international media that tend to represent the perspectives of management,
  business, and the well-off. This panel is being held just before the LaborTech/Access 2004 conference, which begins on Friday evening and runs
  all weekend.
  
  Jointly sponsored by LaborTech (San Francisco) and the Symbolic Systems
  Program.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Donald Knuth Apr 1, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 25, 2004. Last updated on Mar 22, 2004 by Michael Warren Orme .

  Event Description:

  All Questions Answered
  Donald Knuth
  Professor Emeritus, Computer Science Department
  
  
  
  Professor Knuth will kick off this quarter's SSP 10 schedule by answering questions from all takers.

---

• SSP Forum: Joan Bresnan Mar 11, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 19, 2003. Last updated on Jan 5, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  The dative alternation and the meaning of variation: Is
  variation at the level of syntax determined by semantic differences?
  Joan Bresnan, Linguistics Department
  
  
  In the linguistics literature it is now almost universally agreed that
  semantics determines syntactic choices, and in a particularly visible
  way with the two dative constructions of English. Yet recent corpus
  work shows that the widely reported evidence for subtle semantic
  differences in these constructions is flawed. An alternative view is
  that the choice of constructions is influenced by the need to
  differentiate the receiver and entity arguments along dimensions such
  as nominal expression type, animacy, person, definiteness,
  accessability, and length. These properties are only indirectly
  influenced by verbal semantics; they primarily reflect actual usage.
  An informational approach to the dative alternation incorporating this
  idea can be extended to explain quantitative lexical variation
  (cf. Gries and Stefanowitsch to appear), as shown by ongoing research
  with Anna Cueni and Tatiana Nikitina.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Heather Pon-Barry (M.S. Candidate) Mar 4, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 10, 2003. Last updated on Feb 11, 2004 by Michael Warren Orme .

  Event Description:

  In Search of Bloom's Missing Sigma
  
  Heather Pon-Barry (M.S. Candidate)
  Symbolic Systems Program
  
  n 1984, Benjamin Bloom reported that students who interacted with expert human tutors yielded test scores two standard deviations above those who received ordinary classroom instruction. Since then, this "2 sigma" effect has been commonly used as the gold-standard for measuring instructional effectiveness. Researchers in various fields have been building intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) for over three decades--with a recent trend towards dialogue-based tutoring systems--yet currently, the best ITSs report learning gains of only 1 standard deviation above classroom instruction. Naturally this leads one to wonder, what happened to the second sigma? What is it that expert human tutors do that makes their interaction so effective?
  
  At CSLI, we have been developing the first Spoken Conversational Tutor (SCoT) under the hypothesis that spoken dialogue might account for (part of) Bloom's missing sigma. I have been exploring the idea that certain features of the student's language can be used to help the tutor present information at an appropriate level of granularity. Adapting to their behavior in this way should make it easier for the student to build a clear mental representation of what is being discussed, and thus facilitate self-reflection. In this talk, I will present the work I have been doing to test these hypotheses, and describe how they have influenced the architecture of the tutorial component I am designing.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Solomon Feferman Feb 26, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 19, 2003. Last updated on Feb 20, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Gödel's Theorem, Minds and Machines
  
  Solomon Feferman
  Philosophy and Mathematics Departments
  
  Gödel's incompleteness theorem (1931) is the most famous result of all
  time in mathematical logic. Its significance has been seen as stretching
  far beyond the fields of logic and mathematics to the very nature of the
  human mind and its potentialities, but such claims are very controversial.
  The theorem itself tells us that for any consistent mathematical axiom
  system S there are simple arithmetical statements which are true but
  unprovable in S. One view of the significance of this result is that
  there are essential limits to human knowledge, since mind is the product
  of the brain, and all of the brain¹s activities (including proving
  theorems in axiomatic systems) may be modeled in computational terms. But
  other philosophers and mathematicians have advanced an opposite view:
  Gödel¹s theorem shows that mind surpasses anything that can be modeled in
  terms of computing machines, and is thus potentially unlimited. In this
  talk I will present and critique Gödel's own unusual formulation of the
  issues involved.
  

---

• From Symbols to Reality: Entrepreneurship and Startups Feb 24, 2004 at 07:00 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Feb 20, 2004. Last updated on Feb 20, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Please join us for the launching of a new series of special events: "From
  Symbols to Reality" (FS2R). FS2R will explore how a degree in symbolic
  systems can be used by SSP majors after graduation, featuring appearances
  by SSP alumni and others talking about the successes, choices, and
  challenges they have faced.
  
  In our first event, Entrepreneurship and Startups, we'll be exploring the
  different experiences of four of our most successful alumni who have been
  entrepreneurs and/or very early employees in startup firms. Each member
  of the panel will give a brief introduction regarding their experiences,
  and then they will take questions from the audience.
  
  About the panelists:
  Reid Hoffman has held a wide variety of positions in the technology
  industry, including EVP of PayPal. He is the current CEO of LinkedIn.
  
  Before becoming co-founder of Excite, Ryan McIntyre worked with
  Hewlett-Packard and Canon, developing information retrieval and
  management systems. Since leaving Excite, he has been with Mobius
  Venture Capital (formerly SOFTBANK).
  
  Srinija Srinivasan was Yahoo!'s fifth employee and is currently a vice
  president and Editor-in-Chief for the company.
  
  While Mark Torrrance was working in the artificial intelligence lab at
  MIT, he developed StockMaster, an investment management tool which he
  later sold to Red Herring. He currently works with Vinq, LLC.
  

---

• SSP Forum: John Gabrieli, Professor of Psychology Feb 19, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 20, 2003. Last updated on Feb 15, 2004 by Emmy Skye Davis .

  Event Description:

  Regulation of Thoughts, Feelings, and Memories in the Human Brain
  
  A fundamental human ability is the voluntarily control or regulation of mental states. I will talk about recent functional neuroimaging studies that elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying such regulation for thinking, for the reappraisal of negative emotions, and for the repression of unwanted memories. I will also talk about the ability of people to regulate focal brain activation itself through real-time feedback from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

---

• SSP Forum: Ken Taylor Feb 12, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 19, 2003. Last updated on Feb 2, 2004 by Brendan Thomas O'Connor .

  Event Description:

  Where Norms Come From: A Naturalistic Approach
  
  

  
  I offer a naturalistic account of the source and nature of
  normativity. My account has four main features. First, I offer a
  purely psychologistic account of what I call the capacity for
  normativity. Second I argue that this psychological capacity for
  normativity is in all likelihood an evolved capacity, designed by
  natural selection to make possible the existence of normative
  communities among human beings. Third I argue that, even if the
  capacity for normativity is not the result of selection, we can still
  see that it is through, and only through, the exercise of the
  psychological capacity that human beings constitute normative
  communities of varying scope and duration. Finally, I argue that
  this psychologistic naturalistic account of the capacity for
  normativity explains the contingent and typically merely partial
  character of normative communities. Moreover, it opens the way for
  a more systematic exploration of the causal factors governing the
  growth and decay of normative community over historical rather than
  evolutionary time.
  

  
  
  Professor Ken Taylor is currently the Chairman of the Philosophy Department.

---

• SSP Forum: Dave Barker-Plummer Feb 5, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 3, 2003. Last updated on Dec 7, 2003 by Ben Davidson .

  Event Description:

  Heterogeneous reasoning, Hyperproof and Playfair
  
  
  Heterogeneous reasoning is the name that we have given to reasoning which involves information presented in mixed representational forms. Finding a route to a party using written instructions and a map of the area is an example of heterogeneous reasoning.
  
  In this talk I will discuss heterogeneous reasoning and why we think that it is important. I will demonstrate a computer program called Hyperproof, which implements a formalized system of heterogeneous natural deduction. The representation systems here are first-order logic, and pictures of a blocks world.
  
  Finally I will discuss Playfair, a package that we are currently working on which extends Hyperproof to use more and different representations. If time permits I will also talk about how the heterogeneous reasoning framework can be used to represent (non-deductive) design reasoning.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Barbara Tversky Jan 29, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Nov 3, 2003. Last updated on Jan 20, 2004 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  
  Spatial Thinking
  Barbara Tversky, Psychology Department
  
  How do people think about space?
  
  People think about different spaces differently, depending on how they
  perceive them and how they interact with or in them. The space of the
  body is composed of typically named body parts and their functions. The
  space around the body is organized by the three major axes of the body,
  and biased by their relative accessibility. The space of navigation is
  constructed out of landmarks and spatial relations among them; this
  organization leads to systematic errors in cognitive maps. Finally, the
  space of graphics is created by people to represent elements and relations
  that are spatial or metaphorically spatial for a number of ends: to
  augment memory, to facilitate information processing, to promote
  inferences and discoveries.
  
  
  Barbara Tversky studied cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan
  and taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before joining Stanford.
  Her general insterests are in spatial thinking and language, memory, event
  cognitive and perception, with specific interests in spatial mental
  models, cognitive maps, spatial and temporal descriptions, event
  perception, event narratives, graphic interfaces, diagrammatic reasoning,
  visual and verbal explanations, visual narratives, design, cognitive
  design principles, cross-linguistic comparisons.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Jeff Shrager Jan 22, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Dec 3, 2003. Last updated on Jan 11, 2004 by Ben Davidson .

  Event Description:

  On Beyond Ontology; Aspects of the philosophy, psychology, and computationality of modern biology
  Jeff Shrager,Carnegie Institution Department of Plant Biology and Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise, CSLI
  
  In the first part of this talk I'll try to answer the question, often put
  to me by students: "What's a molecular biologist doing teaching a
  cognitive science course (SSP145)?" Or, in more chronologically accurate
  terms: "How did a cognitive scientist come to find himself in molecular
  biology, and what does he do there?" In the second part of the talk,
  I'll tell you what I do there. I'll give several examples of cognitive/
  computational issues in molecular biology, esp. how biologist think about
  biological objects and functions, and how computational biologists try to
  represent and reason about these things

---

• SSP Forum: Terry Winograd Jan 15, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://interactivity.stanford.edu Posted on Nov 12, 2003. Last updated on Jan 13, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Cognitive Issues in the Design of Interactive Workspaces
  
  
  We have begun experiments to identify the relevant cognitive properties of a broad variety of command and pointing techniques in a multi-person, multi-machine environment. This presentation will describe a framework for analyzing the dimensions of differences between control affordances, the measures of effectiveness and fluency in a situation of use.
  
  
  Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University,
  where he directs the Interactivity Laboratory (http://interactivity.stanford.edu) and the teaching and research
  program in Human-Computer Interaction Design (http://hci.stanford.edu)
  He is one of the principal investigators in the Stanford Digital
  Libraries project, and the Interactive Workspaces Project. He recently
  completed a sabbatical at Google, a search engine company founded by
  Stanford students from his projects.
  
  Winograd was a founder of Action Technologies, a developer of workflow
  software, and was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social
  Responsibility, of which he is a past national president. He is on the
  editorial board of several journals, including Human-Computer
  Interaction, Personal Technologies, and Information Technology, and
  People.
  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Bernardo Huberman Jan 8, 2004 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl Posted on Nov 10, 2003. Last updated on Jan 5, 2004 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Information Dynamics in the Networked World
  Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett Packard Laboratories
  
  The dynamics of information within social organizations is relevant to
  innovation, productivity, and the sorting out of useful ideas from
  the general chatter of a community. How information spreads and is
  aggregated determines the speed with which individuals and organizations can act and plan their future activities.
  
  This talk will describe new mechanisms for automatically identifying
  communities of practice within organizations and for elucidating the spread of information within those communities. In addition, I'll present new results that show the efficacy of a new mechanism involving groups of people at making predictions in the real world.

---

• SSP Forum: Andrew Ng Dec 4, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 18, 2003. Last updated on Nov 25, 2003 by Emmy Skye Davis .

  Event Description:

  Machine learning and autonomous helicopter flight
  
  Helicopters have complex, highly non-intuitive, noisy dynamics, and autonomous helicopter flight represents one of the most challenging control problems. In this talk, I will describe the key ideas that had enabled the successful application of machine learning to designing a controller for our autonomous helicopter here at Stanford. I will also describe the application of these ideas to some other challenging control problems, such as four-legged robot locomotion.

---

• SymSys CoHo Night! Dec 2, 2003 at 09:00 PM Event Location: Coffee House Posted on Nov 25, 2003. Last updated on Nov 25, 2003 by Emmy Skye Davis .

  Event Description:

---

• Pizza lunch with eBay's User Experience Group Nov 24, 2003 at 12:00 PM Event Location: 460-126 Posted on Nov 12, 2003. Last updated on Nov 12, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  
  
  content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
  
  
  
  Attention all HCI/Design students!!
  
  
  Interested in job opportunities in the User Experience group at eBay?
  Join us for...
  
  
  Lunch with eBay's User Experience Group
  Monday, November 24th
  12 noon
  Margaret Jacks Hall - Greenberg Room (460-126)
  
  
  Come join representatives (and recent Stanford grads) from eBay's User
  Interface and Usability teams for a free lunch! We'll discuss
  what the two
  groups do at eBay, as well as current job opportunities.
  
  
  Agenda:
  12:00 Pizza
  served (Pizza Chicago)
  12:00 - 12:30 Information Session about the roles of UI and
  Usability at eBay
  
  Job Opportunities within the UI and Usability groups
  12:30 - 1:15 Discussion and Q&A
  
  
  
  
  As recent Stanford grads, we'd like to share with you the opportunity
  to design
  at an e-commerce site that:
  * Hosts over 16 million items
  across thousands of categories for sale on
  any given day.
  * Reaches 27 international markets
  in over 150 countries.
  * Draws 85.5 million registered
  users worldwide who trade in more than
  35,000 categories.
  * Works tirelessly to provide its
  passionate community of individuals and
  businesses with a global online trading platform where practically
  anyone can
  trade practically anything.
  
  
  
  
  Looking forward to seeing you there!
  
  
  Jason Heidema & Maureen Fan
  Stanford Class 2002
  
  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Norman Nie Nov 20, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/internetStudy.html Posted on Sep 15, 2003. Last updated on Nov 12, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Unintended social consequences of the Internet: Surfing and
  Sociability--where does all the time come from?
  
  

  How does the time taken for Internet use trade off with other activities in our lives? How does the Internet affect sociability and society in general?
  

  
  Norman Nie is the director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, a former chair of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, and is also co-founder of SPSS Inc. His current research focuses on time spent for Internet use, and issues of the Internet and society more broadly.
  
  

  
  More info:
  
  Norman Nie
  
  
  SIQSS Internet and Society study
  

---

• SSP Forum: Nadeem Hussain Nov 13, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 23, 2003. Last updated on Nov 12, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Return of Moral Fictionalism
  Nadeem Hussain, Philosophy Department
  
  Many people get nervous at the suggestion that there are moral facts. Indeed there is a pretty widespread assumption that facts are one thing and values quite another. What sometimes lies behind this nervousness is the view that if there were moral facts, then they would have to be very strange facts indeed. I know where to look, and how to look, to figure out whether my car is in the garage, but where, and how, do I look to figure out whether cannibalism is wrong? Some respond by adopting versions of relativism and subjectivism in the hopes of avoiding any commitment to strange facts. I'll be assessing a different approach that often comes in two parts. First, an "error theory" that claims that all of us, whether we like it or not, are committing ourselves to strange facts when we believe that, say, cannibalism is wrong, but that since there are no such strange facts our moral beliefs are false. Second, a "fictionalist" replacement for morality: while it no longer makes sense to really believe that cannibalism is wrong, it still makes sense to continue pretending that cannibalism is wrong. What lies behind this approach is the hunch that an illusion of morality, whether we see through this illusion or not, plays an essential role in our psychology.

---

• SSP Forum: Teenie Matlock Nov 6, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 3, 2003. Last updated on Oct 23, 2003 by Michael C. Frank .

  Event Description:

  Simulating Motion in Language and Thought
  
  In everyday talk, people use motion language, such as go, run, or move, when they are describing things that have little or nothing to do with motion. They say, "The mountain range goes from Canada to Mexico," or "The table runs along the wall," when neither the mountain range nor the table moves.  Or they say, "The meeting has been moved forward two days," or "The session runs until 8," when there is no observable motion.   My presentation addresses the following questions: Why do people use motion language to describe static scenes and abstract domains? What's going on during processing?
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Bill Verplank Oct 30, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 21, 2003. Last updated on Sep 28, 2003 by Heesoo Kim .

  Event Description:

  Music Controllers: does the hardware of interaction affect the style
  Bill Verplank

  
  
  

  
  Come learn about Music 250 from Bill Verplank a lecturer in Music. Formerly a mechanical engineer, interaction designer and computer scientist.  His degrees are from Stanford and MIT (PhD) with industrial experience at Xerox, IDEO, Interval and now Stanford.
  

  
  
  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Stanley Peters Oct 23, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~peters Posted on Sep 25, 2003. Last updated on Oct 17, 2003 by Michael Warren Orme .

  Event Description:

  Conversational Intelligence
  
  
  
  What knowledge and skills do people use in dialogue with other people? They clearly need knowledge of a shared language, and it helps to know something about the topics being discussed. Are additional skills required, ones specific to communication, maybe even particular to communicating in human language? I will sketch reasons for thinking there are, ways of investigating the question further, and some implications of our (still tentative) answer for technology that converses with people.

---

• Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress (SURP) Oct 16, 2003 at 03:00 PM Event Location: Arrillaga Alumni Center Posted on Sep 22, 2003. Last updated on Oct 12, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Instead of having one of our own forum talks this week,
  we encourage you to attend Stanford's 2nd Annual Symposium of
  Undergraduate Research in Progress (SURP), between 3 and 6 pm at the
  Arrillaga Alumni Center, 326 Galvez Street, on the Stanford University
  campus. Undergraduates from across the university will display their projects.

---

• SSP Forum: Summer Internship Presentations (Part 2) Oct 9, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 22, 2003. Last updated on Oct 7, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  How I Spent My Summer Internship (Part Two)
  SSP Summer Interns, Summer 2003
  
  
  4:15 Becky Neil, "Pontevecchio: Bridging the Gap between Java
  applications and Lisp Parsers" (supervisors: Ivan Sag and Dan Flickinger)
  
  4:20 Ara Kim, "Testing the ERG on the British National Corpus" (supervisors: Ivan Sag and Dan Flickinger)
  
  4:25 Carina Koo, "Student Modeling for the SCoT-DC Tutoring System"
  (supervisor: Stanley Peters)
  
  4:30 Grace Leslie, "Ensemble Performance Over High-Latency Networks"
  (supervisor: Chris Chafe)
  
  4:35 Danilo Mirkovic, "In-Car, Dialog-Enabled MP3 Player" (supervisor:
  Stanley Peters)
  
  4:40 Adrian de la Mora (supervisor: Stanley Peters)
  
  4:45 Brendan O'Connor, "A Program for Online Deliberation: Small Group,
  Democratic Discussion, Collaboration, and Decision-Making for the Web"
  (supervisor: Todd Davies)
  
  4:50 Rebecca Regos, "The Paraphrase Project" (supervisors: Tom Wasow,
  Joan Bresnan, and Annie Zaenen)
  
  4:55 Mia Silverman and Helen Harris, "Examining Diagrammatic Elements"
  (supervisor: Barbara Tversky)
  
  5:00 Walter Talbott and Guy Isely, "Adding a Structured Knowledge Base
  and a Plan Executor to the CSLI Dialogue Manager" (supervisors: Stanley
  Peters and Lawrence Cavedon)
  
  5:05 Matt Kaufman, "Teaching a Value-Based AI Architecture to Drive"
  (supervisor: Pat Langley)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD
  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Summer Internship Presentations (Part 1) Oct 2, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 22, 2003. Last updated on Sep 30, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  How I Spent My Summer Internship (Part One)
  SSP Summer Interns, Summer 2003
  
  4:15 Tyrone Anderson and Vikrum Fagoora, "Event Perception and Cognition"
  (supervisor: Barbara Tversky)
  
  4:20 Trevor Austin (supervisor: Herb Clark)
  
  4:25 Simon Berring and Dana Ung, "Intelligent Models for Environmental
  Decision-Making" (supervisor: John Kunz)
  
  4:30 Jean Bogart (supervisor: Stanley Peters)
  
  4:35 Ben Davidson, "Openproof Project" (supervisors: John Etchemendy and
  Dave Barker-Plummer)
  
  4:40 Emmy Davis, "The Judgement of Learning" (supervisor: John Gabrieli)
  
  4:45 Matthew Falkenhagen, "Openproof Project" (supervisors: John
  Etchemendy and Dave Barker-Plummer)
  
  4:50 Jamie Fitzgerald, "An Interactive Environment for Scientific
  Modeling" (supervisor: Pat Langley)
  
  4:55 Michael Frank, "How Do Presentation and Context Influence
  Representation for Functional Fixedness Tasks?" (supervisor: Michael
  Ramscar)
  
  5:00 Aria Haghighi, Computational Word Learning (supervisors: Stanley Peters and Dominic Widdows)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD
  
  
  
  

---

• Symbolic Systems Fall Welcoming Party Sep 25, 2003 at 04:00 PM Event Location: Lower level courtyard between Buildings 380 and 420 (Math Courtyard) Posted on Sep 8, 2003. Last updated on Sep 12, 2003 by Brendan Thomas O'Connor .

  Event Description:

  Please join SSP students, prospective students, faculty, and staff for our annual Autumn Quarter welcome reception, Thursday, September 25. Food and drinks will be provided. Ends at 6 pm.

---

• SSP Forum: Senior Honors Presentations Jun 5, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on May 27, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Presentations of Senior Honors Projects
  SSP Honors Students, Class of '03

  
  
  4:15 Micah Boster, "Market Liberalization and Global Cellular Phone
  Propagation" (Advisor: David Abernethy, Political Science)
  
  4:25 Rory Berry, "The Effects of Multiple Instructors and Presentation
  Modality on Learning, Perceived Learning, and User Satisfaction in
  E-Learning" (Advisor: Cliff Nass, Communication)
  
  
  4:35 Jed Rose, "VSG's and the Deaf: A novel visual symbol game to help
  the deaf learn to read complex English sentences" (Advisor: Daniel
  Schwartz, Education)
  
  4:45 Ash Brown, "Persuasive CALL: Using Persuasion to Make Computer
  Assissted Language Learning More Effective" (Advisor: B.J. Fogg, Computer
  Science)
  
  4:55 Kiely Martinez, "Animal play: biological and philosophical
  perspectives" (Advisor: Stuart Thompson, Biological Sciences)
  
  5:05 Bayle Shanks, "Collaborative encyclopaedias covering neuroscience
  and A.I research" (Advisor: John Gabrieli, Psychology)
  
  5:15 Sara Wampler, "A Network Analysis of the 20 July 1944
  Conspiracy" (Advisor: Elizabeth Bernhardt, German Studies)
  
  5:25 Alexis Battle, "The Probabilistic Discovery of Overlapping Gene
  Modules and Their Regulation" (Advisor: Daphne Koller, Computer Science)
  
  5:35 Hilary Spencer, "Visualization and Graph-Drawing Techniques for
  Protein-Protein Interaction Networks" (Advisor: Patrick Hanrahan, Computer
  Science)
  
  REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AFTERWARD
  

---

• SSP Forum: Kent Griffin (M.S. candidate) May 29, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on May 19, 2003 by Yael Shrager .

  Event Description:

  Cross-Cultural Models of Hierarchy in Virtual Worlds: Or Who needs a boss when you have a computer?
  Kent Griffin, Symbolic Systems Program

  
  
  

  
  International businesses have always faced challenges, and communication has
  always been one of the more important of these challenges. Whether
  communicating
  locally or across nations, these businesses face an uphill battle since
  different
  countries tend to have different models for hierarchical communication and
  operation.
  The literature in business management tells us how different cultures have
  different models for interactions. For example, American systems tend to be
  more vertical. On the other hand, Japanese managers tend to be liked more
  by their
  employees than do American managers. The question in international
  relations and
  business management has always been, "How can we operate one company or
  group to
  satisfy two different models?" Now, with the continual onslaught of new
  technologies,
  methods of communication can change drastically. Thus, a new question
  arises: "How does
  a new medium affect and/or represent the hierarchical forms of
  communication in various
  cultures?" For example, if we change the setting from a company's
  conference room to a
  virtual conference room, would this have an effect on the
  interaction? What if we
  changed someone's boss to be nothing more than an agent? Would he/she
  still treat
  the agent like a boss? And, of course, how do these questions differ by
  country?

---

• SSP Distinguished Speaker: Ray Jackendoff May 28, 2003 at 07:00 PM Event Location: 420-041 Posted on Feb 21, 2003. Last updated on May 6, 2003 by Heather Pon-Barry .

  Event Description:

  
  
  Conscious and Unconscious Aspects of Language Structure
  
  
  
  Ray Jackendoff
  
  Professor of Linguistics, Brandeis University
  
  
  
  

  There has been a great deal of recent discussion of the "neural correlates of consciousness." This talk will address a related notion, the "functional correlates of consciousness" -- the formal structures in the mind that are relevant to awareness. I will look specifically at verbal awareness and verbal imagery, in the context of a fleshed out theory of linguistic structure -- the one mental domain where such a theory exists. A number of striking conclusions emerge that (a) call into question many of the popular theories of consciousness, (b) clarify the role of working memory and attention in consciousness, and (c) show how language enhances thought.
  
  

  Ray Jackendoff is Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University, where he has taught since 1971. He has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Stanford and the Wissenschaftskolleg (Center for Advanced Study) in Berlin, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2003 he is President of the Linguistic Society of America. His most recent book is Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. His CD, "Romanian Music for Clarinet and Piano", will be issued by Albany Records this spring.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Len Talmy May 22, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Mar 31, 2003. Last updated on May 12, 2003 by Yael Shrager .

  Event Description:

  How Language Structures Concepts
  Len Talmy, SUNY Buffalo

  
  
  As a fundamental design feature, language has two subsystems, the
  open-class (lexical) and the closed-class (grammatical). These
  subsystems perform complementary functions. In the total meaning
  expressed by any portion of discourse, the open-class forms contribute
  the majority of the content, while the closed-class forms determine the
  majority of the structure. Further, across languages, all closed-class
  forms are under great semantic constraint: They represent only certain
  concepts and categories of concepts, but not others. Closed-class
  representations accordingly appear to constitute the fundamental
  conceptual structuring system of language. This talk will examine
  some of the main conceptual categories and member concepts represented
  by closed-class forms; the properties that distinguish such
  closed-class representations from open-class representations; and the
  conceptual structuring function performed by this organization of
  language. This linguistic structure will be brought into relief by
  contrasting it with the structure found in another cognitive system,
  visual perception. It will be seen that language and vision, along
  with other cognitive systems, each have certain structural properties
  of their own and others that they share, in what I term the overlapping
  systems model of cognitive organization.
  
  

  Leonard Talmy is the Director of the Center for Cognitive Science,
  PRofessor of Linguistics, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the
  University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He received
  his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
  Since then, he has taught in Hamburg, Rome, and Moscow (the latter two
  as a Fulbright Fellow) and at Stanford, Georgetown and UC Berkeley.
  He has done extended research at Stanford on the Language
  Universals Project, at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute with
  language-impaired children, and at the University of California
  at San Diego in cognitive science at the Center for Human Information
  Processing. And he was the Coordinator of the Cognitive Science
  Program at the University of California at Berkeley for six
  years. His broader research interests cover cognitive linguistics,
  the properties of conceptual organization, and cognitive theory. His
  more specific interests within linguistics center on
  natural-language semantics, including: typologies and universals of
  semantic structure; the relationship between semantic structure and
  formal linguistic structures -- lexical, morphological, and syntactic;
  and the relation of this material to diachrony, discourse, development,
  impairment, and culture. Additional specializations are in American
  Indian and Yiddish linguistics. He is the author of a two-volume set
  with MIT Press (2000): Toward a Cognitive Semantics -- volume 1:
  Concept Structuring Systems; volume 2: Typology and Process in
  Concept Structuring. Previously published articles include "The
  Relation of Grammar to Cognition", "Force Dynamics in Language and
  Cognition", "How Language Structures Space", "Fictive Motion in
  Language and `Ception'", "Lexicalization Patterns", and "The
  Representation of Spatial Structure in Spoken and Signed Languages: a
  Neural Model". He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science
  Society in its 2002 inaugural selection of Fellows. He is presently on
  the editorial board of the journal Cognitive Linguistics and of
  the journal of Discourse and Cognition (Korea); on the advisory
  board of English Linguistics (journal of the Linguistic Society
  of Japan), of the Journal of Cognitive Science (Korea), and of
  the Journal of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences; on the
  governing board of the Bolzano International Schools in Cognitive
  Analysis (BISCA); and a corresponding member of the Center for Research
  in Applied Epistemology (CREA) in Paris, France.

---

• SSP Forum: Eleanor Selfridge-Field May 15, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Mar 31, 2003 by Heather Pon-Barry .

  Event Description:

  
  

  
  
  Fluid Content, Fixed Form:
  Symbolic Representations of Music as Intellectual Property
  
  
  
  Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Music Department
  
  
  
  

  
  Music is among the most chameleon of subjects for consideration as intellectual property. In the analog world, music is usually considered to consist of a continuous stream of sound. Abstract views of music are based on other sensory processes—vision in the case of notation, structured listening and reasoning in the case of cognitive activities, such as theorizing and analyzing. In the digital world, musical information is conveyed (even when perceived as a sound stream) in some kind of symbolic form. Some symbolic systems of representation are designed to be humanly comprehensible, others are designed to be inscrutable.
  

  There is no universal system either for representing music or for interchanging data employing different symbol sets. Mere difference of scheme matters very little in the realm of intellectual property, but the fact that no two systems of representation privilege the same elements of music or weight them in the same way allows for subtle differences in multiple representations of the same work. In artistic terms, one can draw a different picture of any given work at every sitting.
  

  This fluidity of both representation and abstraction bodes ill for the primary distinction made under US copyright law between “the work itself” and the fixed form in which it is copyrighted. Music is an art of fluidity and the digital revolution is making it more apparent every day that that the notion of fixing “the work itself” is more amenable to theory than to practice. These challenges will be discussed in this talk.
  

---

• SSP CoHo night May 8, 2003 at 09:00 PM Event Location: Coffee House in Tressider Posted on May 8, 2003. Last updated on May 8, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  SSP COHO NIGHT
  
  Join us for the next SSP CoHo night Thursday, 5/8, from 9 PM to 11 PM!
  
  Enjoy mindful conversation about mind over free drinks provided by the SSP program.
  
  Get to know your fellow majors, faculty, and staff and learn about their studies, research, and outside interests. Learn more about opportunities for involvement as an Advising Fellow and in the Stanford Symbolic Systems Student Society (SSSSS).
  
  Bask in unique symbolic systems art, music, and humor--all clever and amusing musings are encouraged.
  

---

• SSP Forum: Chris Manning May 8, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://nlp.stanford.edu/~manning/ Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Apr 28, 2003 by Heather Pon-Barry .

  Event Description:

  
  Grammar Induction: Learning the Structure of Language
  
  Christopher Manning, Linguistics and
  Computer Science Departments
  
  
  

  
  Grammar induction is the task of learning the grammar of a language
  based on seeing a large body of utterances of the language. Doing this
  (if in a somewhat informal, non-computational manner) was the basis of
  the proposed 'discovery procedures' argued for by structural linguists,
  and which were for a while generally seen as discredited by the work of
  Chomsky. But we know a lot more about learning now. Surely grammar
  induction should be possible? In this talk I will focus on the
  so-called logical problem of language acquisition, why it is apparently
  quite difficult, whether it is reasonable to expect success, how
  engineering approaches to NLP route around the problem, and what the
  implications are for linguistic theory. I will then outline joint work
  with Dan Klein which develops a promising new angle on grammar
  induction, by defining a generative distributional model which
  explicitly models constituent yields and contexts. Parameter search
  with EM produces higher quality analyses than previously exhibited by
  unsupervised systems, giving the best published unsupervised parsing
  results on the ATIS corpus. Experiments on Penn treebank sentences of
  comparable length show an even higher F1 of 71% on non-trivial brackets.

---

• SSP Forum: Anne Fernald May 1, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Apr 24, 2003 by William Bowen .

  Event Description:

  Learning to listen for meaning: Spoken
  language processing in the second year of life
  
  Anne Fernald,
  Psychology Department

  
  
  Adults process spoken language with impressive efficiency, extracting meaning incrementally from rapid strings of highly variable speech sounds. Our recent research shows that infants as well are becoming surprisingly efficient listeners over course of the second year of life, identifying familiar words in simple sentence contexts in a fraction of a second. Using a looking-while-listening procedure, we monitor young children's' eye movements as they look at pictures of objects while listening to speech related to one of the objects. While 15-month-olds respond to a familiar word only *after* it has been spoken, 24-month-olds need to hear just 300 msec of the word to identify it correctly. Moreover, two-year-olds are increasingly able to use their emerging knowledge of language structure and use, from morphosyntactic regularities to semantic associates, to facilitate word recognition and sentence comprehension. Like adults, children at this age make use of a wide range of contextual cues to interpret spoken language successfully, from moment to moment, as the speech signal unfolds.

---

• Field Trip to Hopkins Marine Station Apr 25, 2003 at 12:15 PM Event Location: Posted on Apr 19, 2003. Last updated on Apr 19, 2003 by Heather Pon-Barry .

  Event Description:

  
  Symbolic Systems is organizing a field trip to Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, one of Stanford's best kept secrets. Hopkins Marine Station is a marine biology research and educational facility located right next to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. They have a number of neuroscience laboratories, and with the help of SSP senior Kiely Martinez, we will get to tour a few of these labs, and also go tidepooling. If you're considering spending a quarter there, or if you just want to visit Hopkins before you graduate, this is your chance to do so!
  
  

  
  Date: FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2003
  Time: 12:15pm-6:00pm (return time is flexible)
  RSVP: ponbarry at stanford.edu

---

• SSP Forum: Michael Strevens Apr 24, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/~strevens/research/index.html#cxs Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Apr 22, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  Bigger than Chaos:
  Understanding Complex Systems using Probability
  Michael Strevens
  Philosophy Department

  
  

  Many complex systems behave in surprisingly simple ways. In spite of the complexity of animal behavior, for example, most ecosystems exhibit a fairly simple and stable behavior at the population level. By examining the foundations of statistical reasoning about complex systems such as gases, ecosystems, and certain social systems, I aim to provide an understanding of how macrolevel simplicity emerges from microlevel complexity. The talk will outline the main arguments and methods of my forthcoming book on this topic.

  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Geoff Pullum Apr 17, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://ling.ucsc.edu/~pullum/ Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Apr 1, 2003 by Luke Swartz .

  Event Description:

  Eskimo Snow Vocabulary: The Rest of the Story
  
  Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of California, Santa Cruz
  
  

  
  Almost every educated person has read or heard somewhere or other that "the Eskimos" have X many words for snow, for some fascinatingly large value of X, and that this is meant to be significant in some way for something or other about language, cognition, perception, world view, culture, categorization, primitive peoples... But the weird thing is that everyone who publishes this claim gives a different value for X! In this talk I reveal the astonishing range over which the myth has spread, and make a suggestion concerning why its central idea is so seductive (it relates to both the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and what I call the Big Bag o' Words Fallacy). I then proceed to do what has never been done by any of the people who repeat the myth, or even the people who rebut it: I look at the actual facts from a couple of the eight Yupik and Inuit languages, and consider the question of what we can learn from the grains of truth that are buried under the myth and legend that has become so familiar to journalists and the general public.
  

---

• Pizza Lunch and Info Session: Teaching Internet in East Palo Alto Apr 15, 2003 at 12:00 PM Event Location: 460-426 (Terrace Room, 4th Floor of Margaret Jacks Hall Posted on Apr 9, 2003. Last updated on Apr 9, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Attention students!
  Come to our pizza info session next Tuesday, April 15, at 12 noon in room
  460-426 (Terrace Room in Margaret Jacks Hall, 4th floor)
  - Teach an introductory Internet class (email, web surfing, etc) in EPA
  - Low time commitment - only need to teach 1 two-hour class in May.
  - We train you.
  - RSVP to t-d-a-v-i-e-s-@-c-s-l-i-.-s-t-a-n-f-o-r-d-.-e-d-u.
  

---

• Alumni/student gathering Apr 11, 2003 at 03:15 PM Event Location: Alumni Center and Sand Volleyball Courts Posted on Apr 11, 2003. Last updated on Apr 11, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The schedule is as follows:
  3:15 - 4:30 pm: Graduate school panel (Fisher Conference Center, Alumni
  Center)
  4:45 - 6:00 pm: Job/Career panel (Fisher Conference Center, Alumni
  Center)
  6:00 pm onwards: Barbeque (Sand Volleyball Courts)
  
  
  A map to the alumni center and the volleyball courts can be found
  here.

---

• SSP Forum: Pat Langley Apr 10, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://cll.stanford.edu/~langley/ Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Apr 2, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Challenges in the Computational Discovery of Scientific Knowledge
  Patrick Langley, CSLI and Symbolic Systems Program

  
  
  

  The growing amount of scientific data has led to the increased use
  of computational discovery methods to understand and interpret them.
  However, most work has relied on knowledge-lean techniques like
  clustering and classification learning, which produce descriptive
  rather than explanatory models, and it has utilized formalisms
  developed in AI or statistics, so that results seldom make contact
  with current theories or scientific notations. In this talk, I present
  a new approach to computational discovery that encodes explanatory
  scientific models as sets of quantitative processes, simulates these
  models' behavior over time, incorporates background knowledge to
  constrain model construction, and induces these models from time-series
  data in a robust manner. I illustrate this framework on data and models
  from Earth science and microbiology, two domains in which explanatory
  process accounts occur frequently. In closing, I describe our progress
  toward an interactive software environment for the construction,
  evaluation, and revision of such explanatory scientific models.
  
  
  This talk describes joint work with Kevin Arrigo, Stephen Bay, Lonnie
  Chrisman, Dileep George, Andrew Pohorille, Javier Sanchez, Dan Shapiro,
  and Jeff Shrager.

---

• Conference: Access - Broadband and the Digital Future Apr 5, 2003 at 09:00 AM Event Location: Jordan Hall, Lower Level http://www.linefeed.org/~mic/labortech/index.php Posted on Apr 1, 2003. Last updated on Apr 1, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Access: Broadband and the Digital Future
  Who Is In Control?
  
  
  A one day conference
  Saturday, April 5, 2003, 9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
  Jordan Hall, Lower Level
  Stanford University

  
  
  

  Representatives of non-governmental organizations, labor unions,
  grassroots citizen groups, and universities are gathering at Stanford this
  weekend to discuss the growing curtailment of public access to broadband
  technologies due to changes in law, policy, and business practices, as
  well as potential responses that can empower concerned citizens. Keynote
  speakers will include Mark N. Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America
  and Peter B. Collins of the American Federation of Television and Radio
  Artists. Workshop topics include Privatization and Municipalization of
  Telecommunications; Privacy, Spying, and Censorship; Public Access Cable
  Channels and Interconnects; "Digital Divides" and Discrimination; Workers'
  Rights in New Technology Industries; Wireless Networks (Wi-Fi) and
  Micro-Radio; Defending Access to Alternative Media; Global Internet
  Governance; Cable Internet Regulation; and Labor Video and a Labor
  Channel. Registration is $15-25 (sliding scale), $10 for students, with no
  one turned away for lack of funds. More information is available at the
  conference website.

---

• SSP Special Lecture: Mark Cooper Apr 4, 2003 at 03:15 PM Event Location: 420-041 Posted on Mar 31, 2003. Last updated on Apr 1, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Open Networks in the Digital Information Age:
  The Economic, Legal and Political Importance of Access
  
  Mark N. Cooper, Ph.D.,
  Director of Research,
  Consumer Federation of America, Washington, D.C. and Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School

  
  
  

  The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) is the nation's largest consumer
  advocacy organization. Among many other issues, CFA has been heavily
  involved in political and legal debates concerning the regulation of the
  Internet and telecommunications industries. The CFA's director of
  research, Mark Cooper, argues that network industries tend toward
  monopolization, and has written and lectured widely on the need to protect
  open access to the Internet and freedom from monopoly power. He will
  discuss CFA's and other organizations' pending lawsuit against the FCC
  challenging its decision last year to classify cable broadband as an
  "information service" instead of a "telecommunication service". This case
  has far-reaching implications for the future of the Internet, which was
  built on the premise that service providers must give their customers
  equal access to all content. The ruling opens the way for the Internet to
  become more like cable television: a proprietary, filtered service in
  which providers can discriminate against or block access to some content
  and favor their own, and it may be extended to DSL and other Internet
  providers in the future. Dr. Cooper's presentation will introduce these
  issues, and will be followed up on Saturday by a day-long conference at
  Stanford on related issues, Access: Broadband and the Digital
  Future.

  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Chuck Carlson Apr 3, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Mar 31, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Rise of Silicon Valley and Evolving Images of
  Technology,
  Globalization, and the Information Age
  Chuck Carlson, History Department

  
  
  
  

  The popularizing of the term "Silicon Valley" in a series of 1971 Don
  Hoefler articles in Electronic News is a well-known story recounted in
  nearly every Valley history. Hoefler laid out the basics of how every
  subsequent history has approached the rise of the high tech industry here,
  emphasizing the innovation and entrepreneurialism of Silicon Valley
  engineers/executives, and the remarkable, rapid development of the
  region's technology. In the last eight years, representations of Silicon
  Valley have frequently been coupled with the idea that the Valley's
  technology has fomented a seismic historical shift from one era in a human
  history - the industrial revolution - to the dawn of an "information age."
  The widespread acceptance of this proposition played more than a small
  part in bringing about the meteoric rise and fall of the dot-com sector
  and finacial crash of 2000-2001. The talk today will focus on the evolution of Silicon Valley's and technology's evolving images over the
  past quarter century and how those images relate to or clash with the high
  tech industry's leading role in establishing global production networks
  that often stand in stark contradiction to popular and academic
  perceptions of Silicon Valley. The issues and ideas presented in this
  talk substantially reflect the core material of the Symbolic Systems 151
  "Digital Divides" I will be teaching this spring.

---

• SSP Forum: Raja Shah Mar 13, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Mar 7, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Empirical Investigations in Social Choice Theory
  Raja Shah, M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems

  
  
  ABSTRACT:
  Social choice theory is the formal theory of democracy, and was given a
  mathematical footing in Kenneth Arrow's celebrated "impossibility theorem"
  (1950). Arrow showed that no procedure for making collective choices --
  other than dictatorship -- could satisfy a small set of
  reasonable-looking criteria. I will present a set of experiments I have
  conducted with Todd Davies, which test whether people -- when deciding
  what is best for a group -- act in accordance with one of Arrow's key
  criteria: the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" (IIA). This
  condition requires that all of the information necessary for a collective
  choice between two alternatives must be contained in individuals'
  pairwise preferences among those two options, so that their relative
  rankings with respect to other alternatives cannot have any influence.
  The need to impose IIA has been called into question on philosophical
  grounds by various authors, and has recently come under renewed fire.
  Arrow himself once allowed that IIA is "stricter than desirable" (1967).
  Our findings indicate that subjects violate IIA and the related criterion
  known as "regularity" (which implies IIA) in very strong numbers, even
  when the presentation format only shows pairwise individual preferences.
  One critique of Arrow has been that his philosophical arguments for IIA
  are actually arguments for another criterion that does not lead to
  impossibility. We define this weaker notion as "independence of
  unavailable alternatives" (IUA). A recent set of studies show that a
  majority of subjects respect IUA in certain situations, indicating that
  IUA may in fact have more intuitive appeal than IIA. I will
  discuss the relevance of experiments such as ours to the search for
  defensible democratic principles.

---

• CSLI/Media X Industrial Affiliates Recruitment Day Mar 7, 2003 at 10:00 AM Event Location: Cordura Hall, Room 100 Posted on Mar 4, 2003. Last updated on Mar 4, 2003 by Luke Swartz .

  Event Description:

  Opportunity for CSLI and Media X Industrial Affiliates to meet Stanford undergraduate and graduate students. Interested students should contact Michelle King at "mking at csli dot stanford dot edu" with a URL of relevant information (CV/resume/career interests).

---

• SSP Forum: Krista Lawlor Mar 6, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www.stanford.edu/~klawlor/ Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Mar 1, 2003 by Brandon Mikhael Weiss .

  Event Description:

  Knowing Your Own Mind
  Krista Lawlor
  Assistant Professor of Philosophy

  
  
  
  It can seem that knowing your own mind is the easiest thing in the
  world to do. Are you hungry or not? Do you want to go to class this
  afternoon, or does something else seem more appealing to you? These
  questions are easily answered. Even when such questions are not easily
  answered, it seems that you're the one to do the answering. Who else
  could? You have a kind of authority when you report your attitudes,
  emotions, pains and cravings, that others just cannot have, no matter
  how good they are at knowing you. First-person authority is a robust
  phenomenon, and it survives the recognition that we are fallible.
  
  What is the source of first-person authority? How far does it really
  extend? Just how much fallibility does it survive? I'll discuss one
  recent philosophical theory of the source of first-person authority,
  and some psychological evidence that casts doubt on the theory.
  
  About the speaker: Professor Lawlor got her Ph.D. from the University
  of Michigan in 1999, with a thesis on philosophical semantics. She
  likes to think about issues in the philosophy of mind, like how mental
  representations get their content, and how we know that content. She
  also has a side-interest in epistemology, especially skepticism and
  the epistemology of inference.
  

---

• Networks film series: Social Networks Mar 4, 2003 at 07:00 PM Event Location: 160-330 http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/ Posted on Feb 7, 2003. Last updated on Feb 7, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Networks and Network Science film series presents...
  
  "Social Networks": A panel discussion at the 75th Anniversary Celebration of the Stanford Business School (2000, 90 minutes)

---

• SSP Forum: Andrew Waterman Feb 27, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Feb 18, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Paradigms or Dogmas: Modeling the Rise and Fall of Scientific Laws
  Andrew Waterman
  M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
  
  

  
  

  
  Abstract:
  Thomas Kuhn made waves in the Philosophy of Science in 1962 with his book,
  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by arguing that scientists are
  fundamentally biased by the paradigms they use to understand the world.
  Kuhn's ideas about "paradigm shifts" and "scientific revolutions" are
  commonly accepted in academia today. However, many philosophers doubt
  that scientific laws are just "paradigms" that rise and fall, or that
  "scientific revolutions" actually occur at all. Philosophers, economists,
  sociologists have contributed to this debate through studying the social
  structure of science the network of interactions between scientists, and
  the economic incentives affecting scientists in the modern world. In this
  spirit, I have created a computer simulation of how scientists' beliefs
  evolve as they learn new evidence and influence each other's beliefs.
  This simulation, along with other simulations like it, can help determine
  whether scientists must be fundamentally biased in order for paradigm
  shifts to occur, and whether social and economic factors accelerate or
  impede the progress of science.

---

• SSP Forum: Eve Clark Feb 20, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Feb 16, 2003 by William Bowen .

  Event Description:

  Adult Offer and Child Uptake in the Acquisition of Meaning
  Eve Clark

  
  
  One problem children have to ‘solve’ in language acquisition is what meanings to assign to any unfamiliar words they encounter. Much of the preliminary work on this problem is done in the course of conversational exchanges between adults and children. Adults offer unfamiliar ‘new’ words and children take them up. What does this process look like? What evidence is there that children attend to new words? What kinds of initial meanings could children assign to new words they hear? In this talk, I’ll present some of the work I have been doing on the forms of adult offers, the evidence that children attend to new words, and the kinds of pragmatic inferences, licensed in context, children seem to be making.

---

• Networks film series: Six Degrees of Separation Feb 18, 2003 at 07:00 PM Event Location: 160-330 http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/ Posted on Feb 7, 2003. Last updated on Feb 7, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Networks and Network Science film series presents...
  
  Six Degrees of Separation (1993, 112 minutes)

---

• SSP Forum: Gary Marcus Feb 13, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Feb 8, 2003 by Heather Pon-Barry .

  Event Description:

  Developmental Biology and 'Innate' Mental Structure
  Gary Marcus

  
  
  Recent research in brain development and cognitive development leads
  to an apparent paradox. One set of recent experiments suggests that
  infants are well-endowed with sophisticated mechanisms for learning
  language and analyzing the world; another set of recent experiments
  suggests that brain development is extremely flexible. In this talk,
  I review various ways of resolving the implicit tension between the
  two, and close with a proposal for a novel computational approach to
  reconciling nativism with developmental flexibility.
  

---

• Networks film series: N Is a Number Feb 11, 2003 at 07:00 PM Event Location: 160-330 http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/ Posted on Feb 7, 2003. Last updated on Feb 7, 2003 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  The Networks and Network Science film series presents...
  
  N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdos (1993, 57 minutes)
  
  

---

• SSP Distinguished Speaker: Stephen Wolfram Feb 10, 2003 at 07:30 PM Event Location: Dinkelspiel Auditorium http://www.stephenwolfram.com Posted on Feb 3, 2003. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  "A New Kind of Science"

  
  
  

  Stephen Wolfram, the theoretical physicist who has been described by Wired magazine as "the Bob Dylan of physics" and a "Jedi mind-warrior," will speak on campus on Monday February 10 on the ideas in his book A New Kind of Science.

  
  
  

  Wolfram's paradigm shift may have profound implications for our understanding of physics, biology, and perhaps even the character of intelligence in the universe. The London Daily Telegram headline asked, "Is this man bigger than Newton and Darwin?"

  
  
  

  At complexity's core--from marvels as diverse as the shape of a snowflake to the structure of space and
  time--Wolfram finds simplicity. Starting with a handful of computer experiments, Wolfram has developed a
  new way to explain the essential mechanisms of the natural world. His premise is that simple rules (the
  kind that make up computer programs or describe how to construct a mosaic tile pattern), rather than complex mathematical formulas, have far more potential to accurately describe our complex universe. "The aphorism that the weather has a mind of its own may be less silly than you might imagine," Wolfram says.

  
  
  

  A New Kind of Science has received a colossal amount of press coverage. Pre-release orders put the
  1200-page book on Amazon's top few hundred for much of the past six months--occasionally cracking the top 50--and within a week of its publication, the entire 50,000 print run had sold out.

  
  
  

  Stephen Wolfram was educated at Oxford University and Cal Tech. He was a fellow at the Institute for
  Advanced Study at Princeton, and his early work on elementary particle physics and its relationship to
  cosmology was recognized with a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1981. Wolfram is also the creator of
  Mathematica, the scientific software used by millions of scientists and researchers, engineers, students
  and others.

  
  
  

  Wolfram's lecture will be held Monday February 10 at 7:30 PM in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The event is
  co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning and the Symbolic Systems Program, and is
  free and open to the public.

  
  

---

• Google Co-Founder Talk/Panel Discussion Feb 7, 2003 at 04:00 PM Event Location: TCSEQ Room 200 Posted on Jan 28, 2003. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  Stanford and Google and the World, Oh My!
  Larry Page, Google Co-founder and Stanford Computer Science Alum

  
  

  We'd like to invite you to learn about Google and meet Larry Page on Friday, Feb 7 from 4:00 - 6:00 pm at Stanford, TCSEQ, Room 200. Larry’s talk should be very interesting and a great opportunity to
  hear from someone who put his Stanford education to good use. After Larry’s talk, we will also be hosting a panel of Associate Product Managers and Software Engineers who can tell you what its like to work for Google from the perspective of some people who were
  Stanford students as recently as last year.

  
  
  

  The ultimate search engine would understand the world's information and your query and give you back exactly what you wanted. It might not even need a query.
  Getting there will require hard work, insight, and scientific discoveries. As we get closer to this goal, the benefit to the world will be tremendous.

  
  
  

---

• SSP Forum: Michael Ramscar Feb 6, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C www-psych.stanford.edu/~michael/ Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on May 6, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  
  What are the ingredients of language?
  Michael Ramscar
  Psychology Department

  
  

  Can any part of language be studied independently of meaning and context? I shall discuss a series of experiments that challenge claims that context independent rules are necessary to explain language processing. These studies demonstrate that meaning plays a striking and decisive role even in the most low-level aspects of grammatical processing: e.g., the past-tense inflection of verbs. For example, when asked to produce the past tense of "food-drive," people were more likely to say "food-drove" when food-driving involved cruising door-to-door to collect food, but were likely to say "food-drived" when it involved sitting in front of a supermarket. Indeed, in spite of previous claims to the contrary, meaning turns out to matter more than grammatical considerations when it comes to predicting the patterns of past-tense inflection. I conclude that explanations of language need not necessarily include explicit, abstract mental rules; however they must include considerations of meaning and context.

---

• SSP Forum: Jeff Hawkins Jan 30, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Jan 21, 2003. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  "Why don't we have a theory of higher level brain function and what can
  we do about it?"
  Jeff Hawkins, Redwood Neuroscience Institute, jhawkins@rni.org

  
  
  

  In this talk I will give an overview of the difficulties we face in developing a theory of cognition and provide a perspective on why we have made so little progress to date. I will discuss the problem from both the biological and computational perspective suggesting specific mistakes we have made, such as misunderstanding the role of feedback and ignoring the role of time. There is reason to hope we can make major progress in this field in the near term. I will lay out the research agenda that can make this happen and what a theory of cognition will look like.

---

• SSP Forum: Jennifer Raymond Jan 23, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://sbrc.stanford.edu/faculty/sbrc_fac_list/raymond.html Posted on Jan 13, 2003. Last updated on Jan 13, 2003 by Yael Shrager .

  Event Description:

  
  Instructive Signals in the Brain
  

  
  Learning involves a change or set of changes in the brain. What
  are the neural events that trigger such changes? Which neurons carry the
  instructive signals that guide the cellular events underlying learning?
  We are using a simple motor learning task as an experimental system for
  exploring these questions.

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• SSP Forum: Nils Nilsson Jan 16, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) http://www.robotics.stanford.edu/users/nilsson/bio.html Posted on Jan 6, 2003. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  
  Considerations Regarding Human-Level Artificial Intelligence
  Nils Nilsson

  
  
  

  
  AI researchers have several overlapping objectives. Among these are: to build systems that aid humans in intellectual tasks; to build agents that can function autonomously in circumscribed domains; to build a general science of intelligence as manifested in animals, humans, and machines; and to build versatile agents with human-level intelligence or beyond. Some considerations regarding human-level AI are described in my essay available at:
  
  http://www.robotics.stanford.edu/users/nilsson/hlai.ps.
  
  Participants in this SSP Forum will be encouraged to discuss with the author the claims made in the essay.

  
  

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• SSP Forum: Geoff Nunberg on Jan 9, 2003 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/bio.html Posted on Jan 6, 2003. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  Faulty Filters: What to do about 'Rotten Information' in the Digital Age?
  Geoff Nunberg

  
  
  

  A few years ago, the press was once full of stories about the bright future that the Internet would bring, transforming books, libraries, schools, and all the forms of public discourse. Now we're more likely to read about the dark side of access to information: the pornography and graphic violence, the racist and anti-Semitic sites, the Holocaust deniers, the scams and market manipulations, the pseudonymous defamations and unsubstantiated rumors -- in short, what we can think of as the problem of "rotten information."

  
  
  

  There's a widespread view that these problems are merely bumps in the road ahead, which will yield to a mix of legal and technological solutions. In this talk I'll focus on one example of that approach, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CHIP) passed in 2000, which requires all libraries that received certain federal subsidies to install software filters to screen out depictions of obscenity and child pornography.

  
  
  

  I served as an expert for the American Library Association in its challenge this law, which argued that the inefficacy of filters would result in the overblocking of Constitutionally protected speech. In this talk, I'll go over some of the issues that were raised in that trial -- social, legal, and technological -- and how these were
  received by the federal panel that overturned the law last year. In the end, though, I'll be asking how we can take these issues as a model for thinking about problems of "rotten information" in general.

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• SSP Forum: Joseph Smarr on "Linguistically Rich Statistical Models of Language" Dec 5, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) Posted on Nov 19, 2002. Last updated on Nov 19, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Linguistically Rich Statistical Models of Language
  
  Joseph Smarr, M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems
  
  Abstract: Nearly every prominent vision of the future includes people conversing
  with computers using natural language. Realizing this vision requires
  solving both "general AI problems" (knowledge representation, common sense
  reasoning, etc.) and language-specific problems (coping with the
  complexity, ambiguity, and flexibility of natural language). Much
  progress has been made on this latter front in the last half-century by
  two rather disconnected fields of research: Theoretical Linguistics and
  Natural Language Processing. Theoretical Linguistics seeks to build rich
  logical representations of language that explicate its structure and
  meaning, and in so doing, describe the broad sets of valid and invalid
  utterances. NLP in contrast has tended to settle for simpler
  representations that allow robust processing of everyday language use,
  often relying on a probabilistic (rather than categorical) view of
  language. Now there is a historic convergence of the two fields taking
  place-Theoretical Linguists are building applied systems using techniques
  from NLP like statistical disambiguation, and NLP researchers are adopting
  richer, more linguistically sophisticated models for traditional NLP tasks
  like Information Extraction. This talk will describe in more detail the
  circumstances and substance of this convergence, highlighting recent work
  in service of the unified goal of building linguistically rich statistical
  models of language.

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• SSP Forum: Alex Gruenstein on Conversational Interfaces Nov 21, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C (Math Corner) http://www.stanford.edu/~alexgru/thesis/ Posted on Nov 12, 2002. Last updated on Jan 8, 2003 by Louis Eisenberg .

  Event Description:

  "Conversational Interfaces: a Domain-Independent Architecture for
  Task-Oriented Dialogues",
  or
  "Conversations with Robots, Cars, and Toasters"
  
  Alex Gruenstein, M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems
  
  Abstract: Humans use natural language to get just about everything done in their
  everyday lives, yet they are surrounded by electronic devices like TVs,
  VCRs, and even powerful computers which can't understand a word they
  say. At the same time, there are many groups of people working on
  creating even more intelligent, complex devices capable of doing
  everything from vacuuming on their own to flying helicopters
  autonomously. As electronic devices become more complex and capable
  there arises an immediate need for better interfaces, ones which allow
  for humans to interact naturally with complex devices and agents.
  Because humans use natural language so effortlessly, it emerges as one
  clear choice for such an interface. Clearly, however, it would be
  undesirable, complex, and expensive to design from scratch a natural
  language interface for each new device which is invented. In this talk,
  I will describe an architecture which can be quickly and easily adapted
  to a wide variety of devices.

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• SSP Forum: Beth Levin Nov 14, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~beth/ Posted on Nov 6, 2002. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  "Inside Verb Meanings"
  Beth Levin, Linguistics Department

  
  
  

  Verbs, as the child's rhyme puts it, "tell of something being done" or, to quote a novel I once read, they are "the engines of language." Not surprisingly given this essential function, verbs pose special challenges for speakers, linguists, and lexicographers alike. I show how the scope, complexity and richness of our knowledge of verbs goes well beyond the explicit knowledge embodied in even the most elaborate entries of unabridged dictionaries. I then present results from my ongoing investigations into the internal structure of verb meanings. To conclude I briefly discuss how my research illuminates certain previously observed systematic crosslinguistic differences in the use of certain verbs said to be "translation equivalents."

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• Symbolic Systems Coho Night! Nov 13, 2002 at 09:00 PM Event Location: Coho (Coffee House in Tressider) Posted on Nov 12, 2002. Last updated on Nov 12, 2002 by Heather Pon-Barry .

  Event Description:

  Meet lots of cool people (aka. your fellow students, advising fellows, and staff) on:
  
  Wednesday, November 13
  9pm - 11pm
  at the Co-Ho
  
  The Stanford Symbolic Systems Student Society and the Symbolic Systems Program invite you to a night of (free!) coffee and poetry. That's "co-po" - get it? It's clever... and so are you!
  
  So bring your mugs for a free beverage of your choice (< $4) and a limerick about syntax, an epic about logic, or an ode to Godel. We will award prizes for the best (and worst) poems.
  
  

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• SSP Forum: Films About Technology and Personal Identity Nov 7, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 29, 2002. Last updated on Oct 29, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  [Note: This represents a change from the previous schedule --
  Michael Strevens is unable to appear on November 7,
  and will be rescheduled for a forum in a future quarter]
  
  We will be showing three short films that examine the philosophical
  implications of technology for personal identity:
  
  "To Be" (1990, director:John Weldon, Canada, 10 minutes, animated).
  Through a fast-paced story of a young woman confronting an eminent
  scientist and his mind-boggling invention, this animated film explores the
  nature of personal identity and the moral issues relating to advances in
  science and technology.
  
  "The Man Who Believed in Body Transplants" (1989, producer:David Filkin,
  UK, 30 minutes). Interviews with neurologist Robert Joseph White on how he
  justified the nature of his brain transplantation research.
  
  "Personality Software" (1990, director:Sylvie Fefer, Canada, 8 minutes,animated). People improve their personalities with diskettes which fit
  into custom-made drives cut into their heads.

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• SSP Forum: Chip Heath on "Emotional Selection in Memes: Urban Legends and Mad Cow Disease" Oct 31, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 18, 2002. Last updated on Oct 23, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  My talk will examine whether we can use aspects of individual
  psychology to understand which cultural memes succeed in the "marketplace of
  ideas". We examine two cases where ideas seem to succeed in the marketplace
  of ideas based on emotional selection (i.e., a meme's ability to evoke
  emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). If ideas undergo emotional
  selection, then truth need not win out in the marketplace of ideas: In the
  case of urban legends, many of the ideas that succeed are false, and in the
  case of Mad Cow disease, the ideas that succeed are, at the very least,
  exaggerated.
  

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• SSP Forum: Brian Knutson on "Visualizing Desire" Oct 24, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~knutson Posted on Oct 17, 2002. Last updated on Oct 23, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Recent evidence from comparative research and human brain imaging is converging on a coherent framework for understanding the neural underpinnings of desire. I will highlight some of these developments by describing original research in rats and humans that focuses on reward
  anticipation. These new findings illustrate the promise of affective neuroscience as a means of bridging brain function and behavioral outcomes.
  
  
  For Dr. Knutson's website, please see above link.

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• Performance: Judy, or What Is It *Like* to be a Robot? Oct 23, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: Jordan Hall 420-040 http://sgouros.com/ Posted on Oct 18, 2002. Last updated on Oct 23, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Recent advances in the sciences of the brain have shown us that what have until recently been nothing more than philosophical conundra are now poised to become practical engineering challenges. That is,
  
  
  If you built a robot smart enough to do the dishes,
  would it also be smart enough to find them boring?
  
  
  Come see Judy the Robot and her friend Tom discuss issues like this, play chess, sing folk songs ("John Henry's Hammer" is Judy's favorite), argue about which one of them is *really* smart, and generally carry on, in a show called,
  
  "Judy or What Is It *Like* To Be A Robot?"
  
  

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• Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress (SURP) Oct 17, 2002 at 03:30 PM Event Location: Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center Posted on Oct 12, 2002. Last updated on Oct 12, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Undergraduates from around Stanford, including the Symbolic Systems Program, present their research as Alumni Homecoming weekend gets under way. SSP 10 students can get session credit for attending. Ends at 6 pm.

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• Internet Rights and Workplace Democracy Oct 15, 2002 at 07:30 PM Event Location: Building 420, Room 040 (Basement of Jordan Hall) Posted on Oct 12, 2002. Last updated on Oct 12, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Ken Hamidi, an engineer who was fired by the Intel Corporation, will speak
  about his legal battle with Intel over whether the company can bar him
  from sending email messages to Intel employees who agree to be on his
  email list. Others involved in workplace organizing in the Silicon
  Valley, including janitors from Yahoo! who have joined a unionizing
  campaign with Service Employees Union International (SEIU) Local 1877,
  will speak about the importance of Internet rights for employees in the
  new technology industries.
  
  Sponsored by Labor Net, SEIU Local 1877, and others. Endorsed by VP of SEIU
  Local 715.
  

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• Steven Pinker on "The Blank Slate" Oct 15, 2002 at 07:00 PM Event Location: Kresge Auditorium Posted on Oct 12, 2002. Last updated on Oct 12, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Steven Pinker, renowned psychologist and linguist from MIT, will speak in Kresge Auditorium at 7 pm in a talk co-sponsored by the Symbolic Systems Program. SSP 10 students can get session credit for attending.

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• SSP Forum: Aviv Bergman Oct 10, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Oct 8, 2002. Last updated on Feb 3, 2003 by Hilary Spencer .

  Event Description:

  "Developmental Stability and Evolution: Possible Link Between Micro- and Macro-Evolution"

  
  
  

  Aviv Bergman,
  Center for Computational Genetics and Biological Modeling,
  Stanford University
  (aviv at stanford dot edu)

  
  
  

  Most species harbor abundant genetic variation and experience a range of environmental conditions, yet phenotypic variation in key traits is low. That is, development is robust to changes in genotype and environment. It has been postulated that this robustness, termed canalization, is a product of stabilizing selection. By this view, natural selection yields a genetic system that not only produces the optimal phenotype on average, but also reduces the phenotypic variance. Support comes from demonstrations of increased phenotypic variance under extreme genetic or environmental perturbation, and from theoretical studies. However, there
  is concern that strong selection may prevent evolution of canalization, that evolution of canalization under stabilizing selection may be slow, and that canalization does not explain why some traits have greater genetic variance than others. We show that the developmental process, here modeled as a network of transcriptional regulators, constrains the genetic system so as to produce canalization, even without selection toward an optimum. We argue that canalization may be an inevitable consequence of stable development, and therefore requires no explanation in terms of evolution to suppress phenotypic variation.

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• SSP Forum: Summer Interns Oct 3, 2002 at 04:15 PM Event Location: 380-380C Posted on Sep 30, 2002. Last updated on Oct 1, 2002 by Todd Richard Davies .

  Event Description:

  Join us for Summaries of SSP Summer Internship Projects. Each summary will last approximately 5 minutes, and refreshments will be served afterward. Students include Ben Davidson, Randy Gullett, Laura Hiatt, Yael Shrager, Brandon Weiss, Hilary Spencer, Aria Haghighi, Guy Isely, Jeremiah Torres, Alexis Battle, Dave Kale, Matt Bricker, and Louis Eisenberg.
  

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• Welcome Back Reception Sep 26, 2002 at 04:00 PM Event Location: Courtyard behind SymSys office (near bldg 460) Posted on Sep 20, 2002. Last updated on Sep 20, 2002 by Amy Francesca Perfors .

  Event Description:

  Come reacquaint yourself with Symbolic Systems in this opportunity to mingle with current faculty and students. Drinks and finger food will be available.