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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 20 August 2008, vol. 23:48
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
20 August 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 48
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
a subdivision of H-STAR, http://hstar.stanford.edu/
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 20 AUGUST 2008 TO 29 AUGUST 2008
WEDNESDAY, 20 AUGUST 2008
4:00pm Berkeley CHESS Seminar [20-Aug-08]
DOP Center Classroom, 540 Cory Hall (UC Berkeley)
"Timed Automata: Modeling and Analysis"
Oded Maler
CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France
http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/seminar.htm
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 21 AUGUST 2008
4:00pm PARC Forum [21-Aug-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Passage to Peace: Exploring Tea Culture Today"
Jesse Jacobs
Founder-CEO of Samovar Tea Lounge, in San Francisco
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley CHESS Seminar [21-Aug-08]
DOP Center Classroom, 540 Cory Hall (UC Berkeley)
"From Control Loops to Software"
Oded Maler
CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France
http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/seminar.htm
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 22 AUGUST 2008
9:00am Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Seminar [22-Aug-08]
Etcheverry Hall, Fanuc Room (UC Berkeley)
"Nonlinear Computational Geometry in Robotics, Biomedical
Engineering, Manufacturing, and ITS (Intelligent
Transportation Systems)"
Bahram Ravani
Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, UC Davis
Abstract below
11:00am SLAC Talk [22-Aug-08]
SLAC, Building 51, Kavli Auditorium
"Multi-Core Programming and Red Hat Directives for the Future"
Ulrich Drepper
Red Hat
Abstract below
4:00pm Berkeley CHESS Seminar [22-Aug-08]
DOP Center Classroom, 540 Cory Hall (UC Berkeley)
"On Computer Science in Systems Biology"
Oded Maler
CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France
http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/seminar.htm
Abstract below
MONDAY, 25 AUGUST 2008
3:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [25-Aug-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Acquisition and Use of Environment Models for Household Robots"
Michael Beetz
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2008
12 noon Berkeley Center for New Media Open House [26-Aug-08]
340 Moffitt (UC Berkeley)
until 3pm
http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/events/upcoming
WEDNESDAY, 27 AUGUST 2008
THURSDAY, 28 AUGUST 2008
all day Stanford High Performance Computing Conference IV [28-Aug-08]
James H. Clark Center
http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/
Information below
3:00pm CURIS Poster Session [28-Aug-08]
Gates Lobbies, 1st and 2nd floors
CURIS summer research undergraduate intern posters
Computer Science undergraduates
session 3:00pm - 5:00pm
http://curis.stanford.edu/
4:30pm Stanford Security Seminar [28-Aug-08]
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
"Exploiting Online Games"
Gary McGraw
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST 2008
all day Stanford High Performance Computing Conference IV [29-Aug-08]
James H. Clark Center
http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/
Information below
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar [29-Aug-08]
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Individual differences in movements may reflect common neural
processes for action and cognition"
Lena Ting
Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
Abstract below
12:30pm UC Berkeley HWNI Student Seminar [29-Aug-08]
101 LSA (Berkeley)
"Molecular regulation of synapse formation in development"
Kang Shen
Stanford University
http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Kang_Shen/
http://neuroscience.berkeley.edu/events/
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [29-Aug-2008]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Introduction. Recent developments"
Clifford Lynch
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O, A, B, and AB-. For an
appointment: <http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/> or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.
____________
NOTE
Berkeley's summer is ending this week as their Fall Quarter starts on
the 21st. Anyone know of any interesting new seminar series that
should be included in this calendar? Also please pass around the
existence of this calendar to any newcomers who might be interested up
at Berkeley.
Berkeley's CHESS (Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software
Systems) is having a series of special seminars this week. See there
web page at <http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/>.
The mission of the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems
(CHESS) is to provide an environment for graduate research in
cyber-physical systems by developing model-based and tool-supported
design methodologies for real-time, fault tolerant software on
heterogeneous distributed platforms that interact with the physical
world. CHESS provides industry with innovative software methods,
design methodology and tools while helping industry solve
real-world problems. CHESS is defining new areas of curricula in
engineering and computer science which will result in solving
societal issues surrounding aerospace, automotive, consumer
electronics and medical devices.
Other Berkeley departments are also waking from their estivation and
posting events. Stanford still has a month to go.
____________
BERKELEY CHESS SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 20 August 2008, 4:00pm-5:00pm
DOP Center Classroom, 540 Cory Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/seminar.htm
"Timed Automata: Modeling and Analysis"
Oded Maler
CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France
In this talk I will give an introduction to timed systems, system
models situated in an extremely important level of abstraction,
between automata and continuous dynamical systems. After a short
introduction of the principles of analysis of timed system I will
devote the rest of the time to a survey of many attempts, pathetic and
heroic alike, to fight the clock explosion and break the scalability
barriers in order to use timed automata technology in real-life
situations.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 21 August 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
(directions at <http://www.parc.com/directions>)
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Passage to Peace: Exploring Tea Culture Today"
Jesse Jacobs
Founder-CEO of Samovar Tea Lounge, in San Francisco
Wake up and smell the...tea. Tea is about slowing down, making human
connections, and taking the time to witness the sweet passing of
time. It also turns out to be the perfect vehicle for contributing to
and creating world peace. Join Jesse Jacobs, founder-CEO of the famed
Bay Area "Samovar Tea Lounge" as he speaks about his vision for a more
peaceful world through tea, life in the slow lane, and peace through a
profitable company.
About the Speaker: Jesse Jacobs is the founder-CEO of Samovar Tea
Lounge, in San Francisco. He created Samovar with the mission to
deliver Peace to the world through drinking tea. After five stellar
years in business, and features in the New York Times, CNN, Chicago
Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Bon Appetite, and most recently,
voted Top 10 Tea in America by USA Today, Samovar Tea Lounge is now
pursuing national rollout plans to deliver the company's mission to
the widest audience possible. More information is available at
<http://www.samovartea.com/>.
____________
BERKELEY CHESS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 21 August 2008, 4:00pm-5:00pm
DOP Center Classroom, 540 Cory Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/seminar.htm
"From Control Loops to Software"
Oded Maler
CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France
In this talk I explain the basic steps involved in transforming a
controller, defined as a mathematical object, into a real-time program
that realizes it. I also survey the evolution of control technology
from physical "computation" of the feedback function, via analog
computing to sampled-data digital control.
____________
BERKELEY MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 August 2008, 9:00am
Etcheverry Hall, Fanuc Room (UC Berkeley)
"Nonlinear Computational Geometry in Robotics, Biomedical
Engineering, Manufacturing, and ITS (Intelligent
Transportation Systems)"
Bahram Ravani
Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, UC Davis
In this talk, it is shown that nonlinear computational geometry
provides a unified framework for formulation of problems in robotics,
manufacturing, design, biomedical engineering, and ITS (Intelligent
Transportation Systems) where spatial relationships between objects
are important. Examples of such problems include mechanical tasks
requiring movement of objects in their work environments such as in
Robotics or in Numerical Control (NC) machining in manufacturing,
Design of mechanical devices where coincidence or contact
relationships between primitive surfaces are used to construct a
device, biomedical imaging and robotic surgery where image data has to
match the physical location of a patient for surgical tool placement,
and finally ITS where position of a vehicle is matched with the
roadway geometry in intelligent cruise control or vehicles with driver
assistance technologies using GPS (Global Positioning Systems) or
other roadway embedded sensors. It is shown that geometrically, these
problems involve a nonlinear or curved structure and therefore well
established techniques of geometric computations cannot be used since
they are in general for finite dimensional vector spaces and not for
curved geometries. Techniques based on coordinate invariant methods of
Reimanian Geometry and Lie Groups are presented to deal with the
associated nonlinear geometry of such curved spaces. The computational
structure of the Lie Algebra associated with Lie Groups is exploited
and geometric computational methods similar to those in linear spaces
are developed for such problems.
Examples of specific implementation and applications of the theory in
robot motion planning and design, computer graphics and animation, NC
machining, design of mechanical fixtures, and ITS, are presented.
____________
SLAC TALK
on Friday, 22 August 2008, 11:00am - 12:30pm
SLAC, Building 51, Kavli Auditorium
Directions: http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/maps/default.htm
Site map: http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/maps/slacarea.html#gridMap
Please bring a picture ID to get on site.
"Multi-Core Programming and Red Hat Directives for the Future"
Ulrich Drepper
Red Hat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Drepper
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/
Many initiatives are on the way to cope with the increasing
difficulties to program modern multi-core CPUs. These initiatives
include large universities and several big computer and software
companies. In this presentation, Ulrich Drepper, CTO of Red Hat, will
present Red Hat's ideas and plans for multi-core programming and their
directives for the future. Among other things, Uli will address
machine and memory architecture, NUMA, and OpenMP issues.
About the Speaker: Ulrich Drepper is working in Red Hat's office of
the CTO and as technical director of the Tools and Runtime group while
trying to keep up with the obligations as author and maintainer of
several free software projects, including the C, math, and thread
library for Linux.
____________
BERKELEY CHESS SEMINAR
on Friday, 22 August 2008, 4:00pm-5:00pm
DOP Center Classroom, 540 Cory Hall (UC Berkeley)
http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/seminar.htm
"On Computer Science in Systems Biology"
Oded Maler
CNRS-VERIMAG, Grenoble, France
In this talk I argue that computer science is not only a functional
tool in the service of Biology, but that it should be part of the
mathematics and physics of Biology. I illustrate with 2 examples:
adding time to genetic regulatory networks, and reducing the number of
false positives in discrete abstractions of continuous dynamical
systems.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Monday, 25 August 2008, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Acquisition and Use of Environment Models for Household Robots"
Michael Beetz
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
http://www9.cs.tum.edu/people/beetz/
In recent years we have seen tremendous advances in the mechatronic,
sensing and computational infrastructure of robots, enabling them to
act faster, stronger and more accurately than humans do. Yet, when it
comes to accomplishing manipulation tasks in everyday settings, robots
often do not even reach the sophistication and performance of young
children. This is partly due to humans having developed their brains
into computational and control devices that facilitate
knowledge-informed decision making, perspective taking, envisioning
activities and their consequences, and predictive control. Brains
orchestrate these learning and reasoning mechanisms in order to
produce flexible, adaptive, and reliable behavior in
real-time. Household chores are an activity domain where the
superiority of the cognitive mechanisms in the brain and their role in
competent activity control is particularly evident.
In this talk, I will give an overview of the Intelligent Autonomous
Systems groups ongoing research in the excellence cluster "Cognition
for Technical Systems", in which we investigate in an
interdisciplinary endeavor cognitive mechanisms that are to enable
autonomous robots to produce flexible, reliable and high-performance
behavior for everyday manipulation activities. The talk will step
through the "cognitive perception-action loop" for robot control
focusing on the acquisition and use of environment models for
housework as a running example.
About the Speaker: Michael Beetz is a professor for Computer Science
at the Department of Informatics of the Technische Universitaet
Muenchen and heads the Intelligent Autonomous Systems group. He is
also vice coordinator of the German national cluster of excellence
COTESYS (Cognition for Technical Systems) where he is also
co-coordinator of the research area Knowledge and Learning.
Michael Beetz received his diploma degree in Computer Science with
distinction from the University of Kaiserslautern. He received his
MSc, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Yale University in 1993, 1994, and
1996 and his Venia Legendi from the University of Bonn in
2000. Michael Beetz was a member of the steering committee of the
European network of excellence in AI planning (PLANET) and
coordinating the research area robot planning. He was also principal
investigator of a number of research projects in the area of AI-based
robot control. His research interests include plan-based control of
robotic agents, knowledge processing and representation for robots,
integrated robot learning, and cognitive perception.
____________
STANFORD HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CONFERENCE IV
on Thursday and Friday, 28 and 29 August 2008, 8:00AM - 5:00PM
James H. Clark Center
(for Stanford students, staff, faculty, affiliates, free)
http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/index.html
The fourth annual Stanford HPC Conference is rapidly approaching,
brought to you by Bio-X, Flow Physics & Computational Engineering and
Stanford ITS.
Registration is now open. Breaks and Lunch Provided
http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/index.html
Some of the sessions are:
* Matlab Training
* TotalView Training
* Hands-on Cluster Building
* Rocks System Administration Classes
* Stanford HPC Experiences
* Facilities Challenges
There are a number of great research presentations from many
departments on campus and SLAC, in addition to outside research
institutions.
As always, the conference is free of charge, fully-funded by our sponsors!
Be sure to sign up now: http://hpcc.stanford.edu/conference/
____________
STANFORD SECURITY SEMINAR
on Thursday, 28 August 2008, 4:30pm
Gates 4B center area (opposite 490)
http://theory.stanford.edu/seclab/sem.html
"Exploiting Online Games"
Gary McGraw
The talk, based on a book of the same title (co-authored by Greg
Hoglund), exposes the inner workings of online game security for all
to see, drawing illustrations from MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft
to discuss:
1. Why online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come
2. How millions of gamers have created billion dollar virtual economies
3. How game companies invade your privacy
4. Why some gamers cheat
5. Techniques for breaking online game security
6. How to build a bot to play a game for you
7. Methods for total conversion and advanced mods
But ultimately this talk is about security problems associated with
advanced massively distributed software. With hundreds of thousands of
interacting users, today's online games are a bellwether of modern
software yet to come. The kinds of attack and defense techniques I
describe are tomorrow's security techniques on display today.
____________
BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SEMINAR
on Friday, 29 August 2008, 11:00am
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
http://icbs.berkeley.edu/
"Individual differences in movements may reflect common neural
processes for action and cognition"
Lena Ting
Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech
Why can we recognize people at a distance by the way they walk? How do
an individual's unique social, cultural, and biological influences
shape how they move? What does this tell us about the interactions
between the brain, body, and environment that shape us as individuals?
Using a broad combination of computational and experimental techniques
in neurophysiology and biomechanics I have created a new conceptual
framework for understanding how complex and variable muscle activation
patterns arise from interactions between the neural and
musculoskeletal systems. For the first time, we are approaching a
critical understanding of not only commonalities in movements across
individuals, but also differences both within and across individuals
which appear to be shaped by experience. I propose that general neural
processes identified in cognitive processes such as speech, language,
and social interactions are also inherent in motor tasks. No matter
how primitive, neural systems make predictions and decisions in the
face of uncertainty and ambiguity. Thus, the nervous system must
contain stable representations of prototypical interactions with the
environment---be they physical, social, cultural, or conceptual. For
example, when speaking a new language, an individual's performance is
limited by the structure of his or her native language. The relative
inflexibility of the categorization process by which sounds are
represented in the nervous system leads to predictable biases in both
perception and pronunciation---an accent. We have identified building
blocks for motor tasks called muscle synergies that may contribute to
each individual's unique motor accent. We have used muscle synergies
to characterize the structure of motor variability in individuals and
we have identified common optimizing principles that shape the
adaptation of muscle activity patterns in motor learning and motor
deficit. Compared to "cost" of repeating a mispronounced word,
"costs" of movements can be more readily quantified in terms of
performance, energy expenditure, and biomechanics. By developing
technologies simulate how individuals perform the motor tasks, we may
be able to quantify how our unique motor accents reflect our culture,
our perceptual and motor skill, and our neural circuits. As a
neurophysiologist trained in mechanical engineering, this will be a
highly speculative talk mean to encourage discussion, establish broad
interdisciplinary collaborations and to identify areas of research in
which I need to be educated.
____________
END MATERIAL
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