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 ssp-events@lists (by emailing majordomo@lists.stanford.edu with "subscribe ssp-events" in the body of the email) 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.
Upcoming Events:
Previous Events:
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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. -
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. -
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 -
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. -
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. -
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.
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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 -
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!) -
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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. -
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.
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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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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. -
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 -
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. -
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. -
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 -
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 .