BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
X-WR-CALNAME:CSAIL Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051003T113000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051003T130000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=839
SUMMARY:Insights from Comparative Genomics: From Genome Organization to Regulatory Complexity
LOCATION:TOC Lab 32-G575
DESCRIPTION:Series: Bioinformatics Seminar Series 2005/2006\nSpeaker: Jeff Chuang\, Boston College\nHost: P Clote\, BC & B Berger. MIT\, \nContact: Kathleen Dickey\, 617 253 3037\, kvdickey@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 11:00AM\nRelevant URL: http://www-math.mit.edu/compbiosem/\nThe neutral mutation rate is known to vary widely along human chromosomes\,\nleading to mutational hot and cold regions. We provide evidence that categories\nof functionally related genes reside preferentially in mutationally hot or cold\nregions\, the size of which we have measured. Our results show that genes are\nlocated nonrandomly with respect to hot and cold regions\, offering the possibility\nthat selection acts at the level of gene location in the human genome. In contrast\nto the heterogeneity of mammals\, we find that neutral mutation rates in yeast are\nuniform genome-wide. We develop an approach that uses this uniform rate to\nestimate the amount of promoter sequence under purifying selection. This\namount is ~30%\, corresponding to roughly 90 bp for a typical promoter.\nFurthermore\, using a hidden Markov model\, we are able to separate each\npromoter into distinct high and low conservation regions. The separation of\nfunctionally conserved sequence from the neutral background allows us to\nestimate the complexity of yeast cis-regulation on a genomic scale.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051004T170000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051004T180000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=832
SUMMARY:IP-From Intellectual Property to Innovation and Participation
LOCATION:32-123
DESCRIPTION:Series: T-Party Lecture Series\nSpeaker: Greg Papadopoulos\, Sun Microsystems\nHost: Rod Brooks\, CSAIL\nContact: Victoria Palay\, 617-253-8924\, palay@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:40PM\nRelevant URL: \nAbstract: As barriers to the network are conquered and open models take hold\, individuals the world over will increasingly connect\, interact and innovate. This migration from the Information Age to the Participation Age is changing how we do business and think about the ownership of ideas. As the landscape of intellectual property is evolving and dramatically impacting how people and companies view and use patents and digital rights management\, new sensitivities around licensing are emerging. Dr. Greg Papadopoulos\, CTO of Sun Microsystems\, will outline these issues and the benefits of open models that stimulate across-the-board participation\, creativity and innovation.\n\nBiography: With more than 20 years experience in the technology industry\, Greg Papadopoulos\, “46\,” is responsible for managing Sun’s technology direction and architecture\, standards\, the Science Office\, global engineering architecture\, and associated advanced development programs. He also provides leadership and consistency for hardware and software architectures across Sun.\nDuring his tenure with Sun\, Papadopoulos has held several positions\, including vice president of technology and advanced development for the company’s systems business\, chief scientist for server systems engineering and chief scientist for enterprise servers and storage. Before joining Sun in 1994\, Papadopoulos was senior architect and director of product strategy for Thinking Machines\, where he led the design of the CM5 massively parallel supercomputer.\nHe also was an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T.\, where he conducted research in scalable systems\, multithreaded/dataflow processor architecture\, functional and declarative languages\, and fault-tolerant computing. Papadopoulos also worked as a development engineer at Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell\, where he designed flight control systems for Boeing jetliners. He co-founded three companies: PictureTel (video conferencing)\, Ergo (high-end PCs) and Exa Corp. (computational fluid dynamics).\nPapadopoulos is Chairman of the Board for the Board of Trustees of SETI\, on the Board of Trustees\, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology\, CASC - California Air and Space Center\, and Technology Advisory Council for British Petroleum. He holds a B.A. in systems science from the University of California at San Diego\, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from M.I.T.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051004T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051004T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=847
SUMMARY:Automatic Synthesis of Fine-Motion Strategies
LOCATION:34-401A
DESCRIPTION:Series: Robotics Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Tomas Lozano-Perez\, CSAIL\, MIT\nHost: Daniela Rus\, CSAIL\, MIT\nContact: Alise Kalemkiarian\, 617 253-2773\, alise@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:30PM\nRelevant URL: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/5640/2/AIM-759.pdf\nTomas will present a historical perspective on motion planning and\ndiscuss his paper Automatic Synthesis of Fine-Motion Strategies\n(co-authored with Matt Mason and Russ Taylor). The paper is available\nto download here:\n\nhttps://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/5640/2/AIM-759.pdf
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051005T144500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051005T154500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=854
SUMMARY:Shape reconstruction from multiple views
LOCATION:Patil/Kiva Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: MIT Machine Vision Colloquium 2005/2006\nSpeaker: Sylvain Paris\, MIT CSAIL\nHost: Mario Christoudias and Gerald Dalley\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Mario Christoudias and Gerald Dalley\, 3-4278\, 3-6095\, cmch@csail\, dalleyg@mit\nRefreshment Time: 2:30PM\nRelevant URL: \nIn recent years\, the increased use of computer-generated images and movies has\ndriven a need for digital content. I will focus on the creation of 3D geometry and\npropose a technique for acquiring the 3D shape of an object from several\nphotographs of it. Ultimately\, the goal is to have a lightweight acquisition method to\nproduce models usable for further processing such as rendering\, relighting and so\non.\n\nI will expose how the minimal cut of a graph can be used as a powerful optimization\nengine. This leads to a reconstruction algorithm that recovers accurate heightfields.\nThis approach is then extended by considering the object surface as a collection of\nsmall patches. I will discuss the theoretical properties and consequences of such a\nrepresentation. In addition\, I will show that the representation can practically\nexpress a broad range of shapes\, including non-spherical topology.\n\nThis work is made in collaboration with François Sillion (INRIA Grenoble\, France)\,\nLong Quan and Zeng Gang (HKUST\, Hong Kong).
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051006T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051006T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=850
SUMMARY:Vision Medical Seminar
LOCATION:32-D507
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Mert Rory Sabuncu\, Princeton University\nHost: Wanmei Ou\, CSAIL\nContact: Wanmei Ou\, \, wanmei@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: \nRelevant URL: \n"Renyi entropy-based image registration: a graph-theoretic approach"\n\nInformation-theoretic techniques\, such as mutual information (MI) [Viola\n95\, Collignon 97]\, have yielded robust and accurate automatic\nmulti-modal image registration algorithms. Inspired by this approach\,\nour research employs the theory of entropic spanning graphs [Hero 2001]\nand proposes a novel graph-theoretic image registration framework. In\nthis talk\, I will provide a theoretical and experimental analysis of\nthis framework\, while drawing a rigorous comparison to a popular\nimplementation of the MI-based registration algorithm. I will also\nelaborate on our recent contribution of showing how to obtain a\ngradient-based descent direction for the graph-theoretic registration\nfunction with minimal computational overhead. This result is then used\nfor the efficient optimization of the registration function. Within the\nproposed framework\, issues such as practical methods to speed up the\nalgorithm and increase the robustness against "bad initialization"\,\nextensions to nonlinear transformations \,i.e.\, local deformations\, and\nincorporation of prior knowledge (from pre-aligned image pairs) on the\ncross-modality relationship to improve robustness & speed will also be\naddressed. Experimental evidence for all the discussed ideas will be\nprovided.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051006T143000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051006T153000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=852
SUMMARY:Thesis Defense: Routing Tradeoffs in Dynamic Peer-to-peer Networks
LOCATION:Kiva (G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Jinyang Li\, Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group\, CSAIL\nHost: Prof. Robert Morris\, CSAIL\nContact: Jinyang Li\, x3-0004\, jinyang@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 2:25PM\nRelevant URL: \nDistributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are useful tools for\nbuilding large scale distributed systems. DHTs provide\na hash-table-like interface to application by routing a key to its\nresponsible node among the current set of participating nodes.\n\nMany techniques have been developed to reduce DHT lookup latency: proximity\nrouting\, parallel lookups\, complete routing state\, aggressive routing table\nstabilization etc. While all techniques reduce latency\, none is free and they\nall use bandwidth. Evaluations based solely on latency improvements can be\nmisleading as some techniques consume more bandwidth than others. Ultimately\,\nwe are interested in the relative efficiencies with which different\ntechniques use each extra bit of communication to reduce lookup latency. We\ndevelop a performance vs. cost framework (PVC) to compare these efficiencies.\nOur study of existing DHTs shows that a fixed routing table size is the main\nobstacle to efficient bandwidth use.\n\nThe need to adjust routing table size motivates our design for a new DHT\,\nAccordion. Bigger routing tables result in lower lookup hop-counts. Smaller\nrouting tables can be refreshed more often to avoid timeouts due to stale\nrouting entries that point to crashed nodes. Accordion allows users to\nexplicitly specify a desired bandwidth budget. The goal of Accordion is to\nchoose a routing table size that minimizes lookup latency\, balancing the need\nfor both low lookup hop-count and low timeout probability. Accordion employs\na unique design for managing routing tables. Nodes learn new neighbors\nopportunistically through normal lookup traffic and active exploration.\nLarge bandwidth budgets lead to high learning rates. Nodes evict neighbors\nthat are likely dead by estimating the liveness probability of neighbors\nbased on past statistics of node lifetimes. Short node lifetimes lead to\nhigh eviction rates. The routing table size is determined by the equilibrium\nof the neighbor acquisition and eviction processes. Accordion's automatic\ntable size adjustment allows it to maintains an efficient lookup latency\nversus bandwidth tradeoff over a wider range of operating conditions than\nexisting DHTs.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051006T163000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051006T173000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=857
SUMMARY:Computers in the Creative Space
LOCATION:32-G449 (Patil Seminar Room)
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Charles R. Boswell Jr.\, Director\, AMD Digital Media & Entertainment\nHost: Frédo Durand\, MIT - CSAIL - Computer Graphics Group\nContact: Britton 'Bryt' Bradley\, 617-253-6583\, bryt@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:15PM\nRelevant URL: http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~fredo/CharlieBoswellDirectorDME1.pdf\nI will be speaking on the challenges of moving compute devices from traditional productivity applications into the creative space and why it's like moving from classical physics into quantum mechanics...The world of the cinematic is craving more interactivity and the interactive craving more cinematic realism. What disciplines are important to make this happen. I will use examples from the film industry and the music industry...and rolling out sort of an Artist-Technology Manifesto.\n\n\nSpeaker bio:\n\nCharlie Boswell has been with AMD for nine years\, holds 8 software patents in signal processing and one in fault tolerant computing\, and has recently been promoted to Director of Digital Media and Entertainment. Charlie is an accomplished musician\, composer / director and was featured on Good Morning America in the spring of 2000 for his musical score on an independent film. \n\nCharlie\, as Director of Digital Media & Entertainment for Advanced Micro Devices\, works directly with leading entertainment industry innovators and content creators including George Lucas / JAK Film (Star Wars)\, Robert Rodriguez (Sin City)\, as well as musical artists Eric Clapton\, Peter Frampton and Mark Knopfler\, and music producers Phil Ramone (Elton John\, Barbra Streisand)\, and Elliot Scheiner (The Eagles\, Fleetwood Mac)\, among others. Charlie is currently working with the family of the late great composer and rock icon Francis Vincent Zappa – Frank Zappa - to re-master the entire Zappa catalog using AMD 64-bit workstations. Charlie is also driving AMD’s Digital Cinema initiative. Charlie holds a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051007T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051007T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=853
SUMMARY:Automatic Music Similarity Measures
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Beth Logan\, Hewlett Packard\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:15PM\nRelevant URL: \nIt would be an incredible understatement so say that there have been large changes in the music industry in recent years. We are moving toward a future in which anyone can publish music and expect it to be available to everybody. In addition we can expect all previously published music to be accessible online. Improved search techniques will be needed to enable consumers to find music of interest in these vast music repositories. Automatic determination of similarity between artists and songs is at the core of such algorithms since it provides a scalable way to index and recommend music.\n\nIn this talk we describe several efforts to automatically determine similarity between artists and songs. The first is based on acoustic properties of music and the second is based on analysis of the lyrics. Results on the uspop2002 database show that acoustic-based similarity outperforms that based on lyrics. However the errors made by each technique are not randomly distributed suggesting that the two techniques could be profitably combined. \n\nA sub-theme of this presentation will be evaluation techniques in the emerging field of music information retrieval.\n\nBio:\n\nBeth Logan received the BSc. and B.E. degrees from the University of Queensland\, Australia\, in 1990 and 1991 respectively. She received the PhD in engineering from the University of Cambridge\, United Kingdom\, in 1998\, completing a dissertation on speech enhancement. Since 1998\, she has been a research scientist at Hewlett Packard's Cambridge Research Laboratory in Cambridge Massachusetts. Her work here has focused on indexing of speech and music\, medical informatics and computational biology. http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Beth_Logan/
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051007T130000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051007T140000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=858
SUMMARY:Logical Modeling Frameworks for the Sciences
LOCATION:D463 - Star Conference Room
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Ashish Agarwal\, Carnegie Mellon\nHost: Professor Martin Rinard\, CSAIL\nContact: Mary McDavitt\, 3-9620\, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 12:45PM\nRelevant URL: \nAbstract:\n Models are mathematical expressions of human-made or natural phenomena.\nAs systems of increasing complexity are considered\, the process of devising\nmodels is becoming increasingly difficult. Often\, the challenge is in\nunderstanding the complex system. However\, as we will show with a small\nexample\, sometimes it is exceedingly difficult to pose a formal model even\nafter the system is conceptually understood. In this talk\, we discuss the\ndesign of new modeling frameworks\, which can ease model formulation. Type\ntheory is the technique allowing us to do this\, but the talk assumes no\nprior knowledge in this area.\n As a demonstration of the broader goal\, we consider the challenge of\nmodeling systems with mixed discrete and continuous phenomena\, called hybrid\nsystems. It is possible to represent a certain class of these\, those that\nare piecewise linear\, with constraints in the style of mixed-integer linear\nprogramming (MILP). Although efficient solution methods exist for MILP\nmodels\, it is in practice difficult to pose a model in this framework. We\ndemonstrate how hybrid automata (HA)\, presented by others\, can lead to\nvastly smaller and more intuitive models. We then present a technique for\ntransforming HA models into MILP models. Thus\, an end-user can easily pose\nmodels using HA but still employ algorithms developed for MILP.\n Finally\, a rough proposal is presented for designing modeling\nframeworks in which chemical and biological concepts are primitive notions.\nChemists and biologists could then pose models using a vocabulary they are\nfamiliar with and transparently apply various mathematical techniques to\nthose models.\n\nBio:\nAshish has a background in Chemical Engineering\, and has always taken an\ninterest in Computer Science also. He obtained his B.S. from Berkeley in\nChemical Engineering with an emphasis on Computer Science and Cognitive\nScience. He then briefly worked at MIT fixing up a large piece of software.\nFrom there he took a job at Applied Materials where he tried out neural\nnetworks and genetic algorithms for analyzing chip manufacturing data. He is\ncurrently finishing up his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in the area of programming\nlanguages and optimization.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051007T100000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051007T110000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=859
SUMMARY:Determinate Imperative Programming: A clocked interpretation of imperative syntax
LOCATION:32-D463 Star Conference Room
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Vijay Saraswat\, IBM TJ Watson Research Center\nHost: Professor Saman Amarasinghe & Dr. Rodric Rabbah\, MIT-CSAIL\nContact: Mary McDavitt\, 617-253-9620\, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 9:45AM\nRelevant URL: http://www.saraswat.org/cf.html\nAbstract\n\nThere are a large class of applications\, notably those in\nhigh-performance computation (HPC)\, for which parallelism is necessary\nfor performance\, not expressiveness. Such applications are typically\ndeterminate and have no natural notion of deadlock. Unfortunately\,\ntoday's dominant HPC programming paradigms (MPI and OpenMP) are based\non imperative concurrency and do not guarantee determinacy or\ndeadlock-freedom. This substantially complicates writing and debugging\nsuch code.\n\nWe present a new concurrent model for mutable variables\, the clocked\nfinal model\, CF\, that guarantees determinacy and deadlock-freedom. CF\nviews a mutable location as a monotonic stream together with a global\nstability rule which permits reads to stutter (return a previous\nvalue) if it can be established that no other activity can write in\nthe current phase. Each activity maintains a local index into the\nstream and advances it independently as it performs reads and writes.\nComputation is aborted if two different activities write different\nvalues in the same phase.\n\nThis design unifies and extends several well-known determinate\nprogramming paradigms: single-threaded imperative programs\, the ``safe\nasynchrony'' of [Steele '90]\, reader-writer communication via\nimmutable variables\, Kahn networks\, and barrier-based synchronization.\nSince it is predicated quite narrowly on a re-analysis of mutable\nvariables\, it is applicable to existing sequential and concurrent\nlanguages\, such as Jade\, Cilk\, Java and X10. We present a formal\noperational model for a specific CF language\, MJ/CF\, based on the MJ\ncalculus of [Parkinson03]. We present an outline of a denotational\nsemantics based on a connection with default concurrent constraint\nprogramming. We show that CF leads to a very natural programming\nstyle: often an ``obvious'' shared-variable formulation provides the\ncorrect solution under the CF interpretation. (Not surprisingly\,\nconcurrent idioms that are not determinate do not have a natural\ninterpretation in CF.) We present several examples and discuss\nimplementation issues.\n\nSpeaker Bio: Vijay Saraswat joined IBM Research in 2003\, after a year\nas a Professor at Penn State\, a couple of years at startups and 13\nyears at PARC and AT&T Research. His main interests are in programming\nlanguages\, constraints\, logic and concurrency. At IBM\, he leads the\nwork on the design of X10\, a modern object-oriented programming\nlanguage intended for scalable concurrent computing.\n\nNote: if you'd like to meet with Vijay on Thursday or Friday\, please\ncontact Rodric Rabbah (rabbah@mit.edu).
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051011T161500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051011T173000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=844
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:32-G449 (Kiva)
DESCRIPTION:Series: Theory Colloquium Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Asaf Shapira\, Tel Aviv University\nHost: Ronitt Rubinfeld\, MIT\nContact: TOC Seminar\, \, toc-seminar-planners@theory.csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051012T144500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051012T154500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=855
SUMMARY:Segmentation by Concurrent Grouping at Multiple Levels and Scales
LOCATION:Patil/Kiva Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: MIT Machine Vision Colloquium 2005/2006\nSpeaker: Stella Yu\, Boston College\nHost: Mario Christoudias and Gerald Dalley\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Mario Christoudias and Gerald Dalley\, 3-4278\, 3-6095\, cmch@csail\, dalleyg@mit\nRefreshment Time: 2:30PM\nRelevant URL: \nObjects that are either salient or familiar to viewers pop out from their background. These are two extremes of segmentation: one that can often be implemented by saliency detection on low-level features\, and the other that often involves object recognition. Most segmentation scenarios\, however\, fall somewhere in-between. Does saliency precede recognition\, or the other way around? Can a segmentation method take advantage of both shortcuts without either one dominating?\n\nI will present two recent works regarding these questions. Our solution is to formulate segmentation as a concurrent grouping problem\, where high-level object cues and low-level cues are considered simultaneously. I will also show that\, when edges are examined across scales in a grouping setting\, we can handle both texture segmentation and contour completion using one feature\, one cue and one criterion. Benchmark results on a variety of real images are reported.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051012T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051012T173000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=862
SUMMARY:The challenges of making great software
LOCATION:54-100
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Scott Berkun\, \nHost: Jeffrey Arnold\, SIPB\nContact: Christopher Lesniewski\, 3-0004\, ctl-public-csail@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: scottburkun.com\n[This talk\, originally scheduled in CSAIL as "Why software sucks and what to do about it"\, has been rescheduled to 54-100 at the same time under the sponsorship of the Student Information Processing Board. I imagine the subject remains of interest to many people in CSAIL. --Chris]\n\nDescription: No one makes bad software on purpose. No programmer has ever intentionally frustrated people or deliberately made them cry. But we've all used our share of bad\, even evil\, software. Why does it happen? What do programmers\, designers and leaders need to know to make decent\, good or even great software? This fun and interactive talk diagnoses the main causes and then goes beyond the bad\, exploring how good and great things are made.\n\nSpeaker bio: Scott Berkun worked for ten years at Microsoft Corporation (1994-2003) on projects including Internet Explorer (v1.0-5.0)\, MSN\, and Microsoft Windows. He is the author of O'Reilly's best selling "The art of project management" (www.artofpm.com) about how to plan\, lead and manage innovative software development projects. He works as an independent consultant in project management and software design. His other writings and blog can be found at www.scottberkun.com.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051014T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051014T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=803
SUMMARY:The PlaceLab: What it does\, what's been done with it\, and how you can use it for your own research
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Stephen Intille\, MIT House_n\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:15PM\nRelevant URL: \nThe PlaceLab is a sensor-enabled live-in laboratory for the study of people and technologies in the home setting. The facility is a 1000 sq. foot condominium in a residential neighborhood in Cambridge. Volunteer research participants live in the PlaceLab for days or weeks at a time\, treating it as a temporary home. Meanwhile\, sensing devices integrated into the fabric of the architecture record a detailed description of their activities. The facility generates sensor and observational datasets that can be used for research in ubiquitous computing and other fields where domestic contexts impact behavior. I will describe the design and operation of the PlaceLab\, how the MIT House_n group has been using it for sensor development and exploratory evaluation of preventive healthcare technologies\, and (most importantly) how you might be able to exploit the facility for your own research.\n\nBio:\n\nStephen Intille\, Ph.D.\, is Technology Director of the House_n Consortium in the MIT Department of Architecture. His research is focused on the development of context-recognition algorithms and interface design strategies for ubiquitous computing environments and devices. In current work he is developing systems for preventive health care that support healthy aging and well-being in the home by motivating longitudinal behavior change. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1999 working on computational vision at the MIT Media Laboratory\, an S.M. from MIT in 1994\, and a B.S.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He has published research on computational stereo depth recovery\, real-time and multi-agent tracking\, activity recognition\, perceptually-based interactive environments\, and technology for preventive healthcare. Dr. Intille has been principal investigator on two NSF ITR grants focused on automatic activity recognition from sensor data in the home\, as well as the MIT principal investigator on sensor-enabled health technology grants from Intel\, the National Institutes of Health\, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He received an IBM Faculty award in 2003.\n\nHome page: http://www.mit.edu/~intille
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051014T153000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051014T163000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=830
SUMMARY:From Continuous Models to Discrete Computations
LOCATION:32-G449 (Stata Center\, Patil/Kiva Conference Room)
DESCRIPTION:Series: Language\, Learning\, Vision and Graphics Seminar Series (LLVG)\nSpeaker: Peter Schröder\, CalTech\nHost: Regina Barzilay\, MIT-CSAIL\nContact: Regina Barzilay\, 617-258-5706\, regina@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:15PM\nRelevant URL: http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~ps/\nModeling the shape and physical behavior of the world around us has a long and illustrious history. In fact much of classical differential geometry came about through the study of mathematical models for physical objects and their properties. With the advent of computers it became possible to use this machinery for numerical computation. Unfortunately one must turn continuous mathematical models into discretized equations for this purpose. This conversion often loses much of the essential structures of the underlying equations. For example\, the simulation of a rigid body in free motion may inexplicably gain or loose momentum.\n\nIn my talk I will give an overview of recent work at Caltech which aims to remove this distinction between mathematical models and computation by formulating the entire machinery of differential geometry and calculus in a discrete setting from the very start. This often leads to much simpler\, cleaner\, and more stable algorithms which can be designed to have the same symmetries and conserved quantities as the continuous systems one wishes to model.\n\nI will illustrate these ideas with a number of applications ranging from geometric modeling to fluid simulation.\n\nJoint work with Mathieu Desbrun\, Jerry Marsden\, Alexander Bobenko\, Boris Springboarn\, Yiying Tong\, Eva Kanso\, Sharif Elcott\, and Liliya Kharevych.\n\n - - - - -\nBio: Peter Schröder is a professor of Computer Science and Applied & Computational Mathematics at Caltech\, where he has been on the faculty since 1995. He is best known for his work on multiresolution methods in computer graphics. In 2003 ACM SIGGRAPH awarded him the Computer Graphics Achievement award for this body of work. More recently he has focused on discrete differential geometry.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051017T113000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051017T130000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=867
SUMMARY:Mapping the protein space: From novel system topologies to semantically significant domain architectures and functional maps of the protein space.
LOCATION:32-G575 TOC Lab
DESCRIPTION:Series: Bioinformatics Seminar Series 2005/2006\nSpeaker: Golan Yona\, Dept of CS\, Technion\, Israel\nHost: P Clote/ BC & B Berger/ MIT\, \nContact: Kathleen Dickey\, 617 253 3037\, kvdickey@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 11:00AM\nRelevant URL: http://www-math.mit.edu/compbiosem/\nIn this talk I will present some of the elements that make up our long-term project to chart the protein space.\n\nIn the first part of the talk I will present Biozon (biozon.org). an extensive knowledge resource of heterogeneous biological data that holds more than 100 million biological documents and 6.5 billion relations. Biozon supports complex and fuzzy searches and also integrates first-of-a-kind biological ranking system which resembles the methods implemented in Google.\n\nThe rest of the talk will be devoted to the algorithms and models that we have developed for detection of domains and semantically significant domain architectures\, new similarity measures between proteins and protein families\, and novel embedding techniques that we have developed and are used to construct a complete "road map" of the protein universe.\n\nFor more information see http://biozon.org and http://www.cs.cornell.edu/golan\n\nThe seminar is co-hosted by Professor Peter Clote of Boston College's Biology and Computer Science Departments and MIT Professor of Applied Math Bonnie Berger. Professor Berger is also affiliated with CSAIL & HST.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=760
SUMMARY:The Thrill of Discovery: Information Visualization for High-Dimensional Spaces
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Ben Shneiderman\, University of Maryland\, College Park\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:45PM\nRelevant URL: \n** NOTE: Unusual day and time **\n\nInteractive information visualization provides researchers with remarkable tools for discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces\, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional spaces. They can begin with an overview\, zoom in on areas of interest\, filter out unwanted items\, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms\, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases.\n\nThis talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com\, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial\, Ebay auction\, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher).\n\nOur next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes the rank-by-feature framework (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce). By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections\, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Demonstrations will be shown.\n\nBio:\n\nBEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science\, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/)\, and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies & for Systems Research\, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.\n\nBen is the author of "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction" (4th ed. April 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/. With S. Card and J. Mackinlay\, he co-authored "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (1999). With Ben Bederson he co-authored "The Craft of Information Visualization" (2003). His book "Leonardo's Laptop" appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) (http://mitpress.mit.edu/leonardoslaptop) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T161500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T171500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=771
SUMMARY:Theory Seminar
LOCATION:D463 (Star)
DESCRIPTION:Series: Theory Colloquium Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Asaf Shapira\, Tel Aviv University\nHost: Adi Akavia\, MIT\nContact: Adi Akavia\, 617-253-5866\, akavia@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: http://theory.csail.mit.edu/toc-seminars/\nTitle: Recent progress on graph property-testing\n\nAbstract: \n\nProperty-Testers are fast randomized algorithms for distinguishing between graphs (or other combinatorial structures) satisfying some property from those that are far from satisfying it. In this talk I will discuss some recent results on testing graph properties. These include:\n\n 1. A result showing that every graph property closed under vertex removal is testable.\n 2. A (near) characterization of the graph properties testable with 1-sided error.\n 3. A Separation-type result between two models of property testing.\n\n Based on joint works with Noga Alon.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T173000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=849
SUMMARY:Using Sensor Networks to Watch the Daisies Grow
LOCATION:34-401A
DESCRIPTION:Series: Robotics Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Thomas C. Henderson\, \nHost: Daniela Rus\, CSAIL\, MIT\nContact: Alise\, 253-2773\, alise@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:30PM\nRelevant URL: \nAbstract: \n\nSensor networks consist of a set of physically distributed devices \nwhich can sense the environment\, compute some useful properties\, and\ncommunicate the results to other nodes and systems. The construction\nof smart sensor networks involves several distinct activities\,\nincluding:\n\n * model development: e.g.\, physical phenomena models\, sensor models\,\n communication models\, computation models\, energy utilization\n models\, and high-level network models.\n\n * distributed algorithm design: e.g.\, leadership\, coordinate frames\, \n gradient calculation\, shortest path\, signal processing\, target\n tracking\, etc.\n\n * implementation issues: e.g.\, sensor node devices\, programming\n environment\, application scenarios\, etc.\n\nOur work in these areas will be discussed\, including envisioned\napplications such as fire fighting\, search and rescue\, and the\ndevelopment of a smart sensor networks to monitor snow conditions and\nhelp determine avalanche probability in back country ski areas in the\nWasatch mountains in Utah.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T130000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051018T150000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=874
SUMMARY:Decay behavior and sharp thresholds for hypergraphs 2-coloring and for k-SAT
LOCATION:Stata - 7th Floor Lounge - Gates
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Eli Shamir\, Hebrew University\,Jerusalem\nHost: Dr. Larry Rudolph\, CSG/ORG - CSAIL\nContact: Sally Lee\, 253-6837\, sally@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 12:45PM\nRelevant URL: \nABSTRACT.We study basic constraints-satisfaction problems:\n\nA.{0\,1} coloring of n vertices\,which is legal for a hypergraph with m [k-uniform] edges.\n\nB.{0\,1} coloring of n boolean variables which satisfies a CNF formula - a conjunction of m disjunctive clauses[of width k].\n\nThe analogy is evident.The "refutation cell" q of an edge/clause is\nA1.q={0\,...\,0 or 1\,...\,1}\,the monochromatic k-1 codimensional\nsubspace of Q= {0\,1}^n.\nB1.q={0\,...\,0 for all literals in the clause}\,which is a k-codimensional\nsubspace of Q.\n\nWe study the set S(m) of all legal solutions\,for individual growing processes\,which evidently decays by the rule S(m+1)=S(m) - S(m) cup q(m+1).\n\nFor the random ensemble of graphs[formulas] it is anticipated\,but not fully proved\, that as the density parameter m/n grows\,the transition of\nS(m) to being empty is abrupt:It has a sharp threshold c.m with probability 1-o(1) as n->oo.\n\nWe develop a pseudorandom setting \,proving perfect decay and sharp\nthresholds for A\, after some combinatorial obsructions are tamed\,\nwhich is a 1-o(1) event.\n\nFor B\,we reveal the the chromatic hidden structure and perfect decay in\nthe (k-1) steps of the ladder going down from Q to q.At the last step\,\nfrom A1 to B1\,the chromatic symmetry is broken .The decay factor of a\nclause depends on a single parameter of" polarity gap".\n\nSum of the log-decay factors give the time[number of clauses];its\nanalysis proves the sharp threshold and locates its value.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051019T144500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051019T154500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=856
SUMMARY:Understanding Video: Research and Development in Applied Computer Vision
LOCATION:Patil/Kiva Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: MIT Machine Vision Colloquium 2005/2006\nSpeaker: Matthew Antone\, BAE Systems Advanced Information Technologies\nHost: Mario Christoudias and Gerald Dalley\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Mario Christoudias and Gerald Dalley\, 3-4278\, 3-6095\, cmch@csail\, dalleyg@mit\nRefreshment Time: 2:30PM\nRelevant URL: \nThe past decade has seen great advances in the theory and practice of computer vision. As algorithm maturity and computational power have grown\, so also has the demand for robust application of vision techniques in real-world\, deployed systems. In the first part of this talk\, I will present high-level overviews of a few video-based projects currently under development in our research group. These include tracking of vehicles and people from stationary and moving cameras\, and extraction of salient features for object recognition and classification\, with emphasis on the implementation of working prototypes.\n\nCamera calibration is vital to the success of many such applications. For example\, rectification of perspective effects normalizes size and velocity measurements\, while recovery of pose situates disparate cameras and objects in a consistent coordinate frame. However\, physical access to the site or to the sensors may be limited\, precluding use of explicit calibration patterns. The second part of the talk will describe efficient techniques for automatic recovery of camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters based upon phenomena observed over time\, including object trajectories and cast shadows.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051019T171500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051019T183000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=860
SUMMARY:Building Microsoft Office or what it is like to order pizza for 400\,000\,000 people
LOCATION:34-101
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Steven Sinofsky\, Microsoft Office System Development\nHost: Prof. Michael Cusumano\, Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor\nContact: Rebecca Bisbee\, 617-253-6014\, bianca@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 5:00PM\nRelevant URL: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ssinofsky/default.mspx\nIn this highly interactive talk you will see what it is like to design\nthe next generation Microsoft Office and what it is like to design and\nbuild the interface that will be used by hundreds of millions of people.\nYou will learn how a small team designed and developed a new metaphor\nfor computer-human-interaction that improves upon the Xerox PARC\ndeveloped metaphor of drop down menus and the decades old metaphor of\ntoolbars. You will get a sneak preview of the new Office "12" product.\nThere will be plenty of time to ask questions and learn about Microsoft\nand the different opportunities for you. No questions are off limits\nand all are welcome!\n\nSteven Sinofsky is the senior vice president of Office System\ndevelopment in the Business Software Division at Microsoft. He oversees\nthe development team that creates Microsoft Office (Word\, Excel\,\nPowerPoint\, Outlook\, Access\, InfoPath)\, OneNote\, FrontPage\, Publisher\,\nVisio\, Project\, SharePoint\, and a few things not yet announced! He is a\ngraduate of Cornell University in Computer Science and Chemistry\, and \nthe University of Massachusetts in Computer Science. In 1998 he was a\nVisiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. In the Fall of 2004 he\nlived in Beijing\, PRC on assignment for Microsoft.\nFor further information\, please contact Ken Goldman\, Office of Corporate Relations\, MIT\, kgoldman@mit.edu.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051019T161500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051019T171500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=877
SUMMARY:Graph Coloring Algorithms: Approximate Distance-Edge-Colorings
LOCATION:32-G575 (Theory Lab)
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Takehiro Ito\, Tohoku University\, Japan\nHost: Erik Demaine\, CSAIL\nContact: Erik Demaine\, 617-253-6871\, edemaine@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: \nIn the classic graph coloring problem\, the goal is to color the vertices (or edges) of a given graph using the minimum number of colors such that adjacent vertices (or edges) have different colors. We consider a natural variation of this problem in which vertices or edges within a bounded distance d must have different colors. In particular\, the distance-edge-coloring problem is to compute the minimum number of colors required by the edges of a given graph such that all edges within distance d of each other have different colors. We first present a polynomial-time exact algorithm to solve the problem for graphs of bounded treewidth\, and then give a polynomial-time 2-approximation algorithm for planar graphs.\n\nTakehiro Ito is a Ph.D. student at Graduate School of Information Sciences\, Tohoku University\, Japan. He is visiting Prof. Erik Demaine for 4 months. His research interests include graph algorithms\, approximation algorithms\, and computational complexity.\n\nDate changed to avoid conflict with Applied Mathematics Colloquium.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051021T100000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051021T113000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=881
SUMMARY:Sensor Placement for Municipal Water Networks
LOCATION:Theory Lab 32-G575
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Cynthia Phillips\, Sandia National Laboratories\nHost: Charles Leiserson\, Theory of Algorithms\nContact: Alissa Cardone\, 617-253-2322\, alissa@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 10:00AM\nRelevant URL: www.sandia.gov\nSandia National Laboratories is currently working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to design early warning systems for municipal water networks. For the sensor-placement portion of the system\, we wish to place a budget-constrained set of sensors to minimize expected damage from a set of attack scenarios under "normal" network usage. This is a k-median problem that can be solved in practice for moderate-sized networks using integer programming and linear programming. In this talk\, we will discuss the sensor placement problem with particular emphasis on exploiting problem structure to find heuristic solutions and methods for handling data uncertainty. I will touch on some of the many open problems in modeling\, simulation\, robust optimization\, multicriteria/goal-constrained optimization\, and approximation algorithms. \n\nJoint work with Jon Berry (Sandia)\, Bob Carr (Sandia)\, Harvey Greenberg (UC Denver)\, Erik Lauer (Sandia and UNM)\, Henry Lin (UC Berkeley)\, Bill Hart (Sandia)\, Jim Uber (U. Cincinnati)\, and Jean-Paul Wason (Sandia)
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T161500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T171500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=833
SUMMARY:TBD
LOCATION:32-G449 (Kiva)
DESCRIPTION:Series: Theory Colloquium Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Rachid\, MIT\nHost: TOC Seminar\, \nContact: Adi Akavia\, 617-253-5866\, toc-seminar-planners@lists.csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=851
SUMMARY:Modularity\, synchronization\, and what we may learn from the brain
LOCATION:34-301
DESCRIPTION:Series: Robotics Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Jean-Jacques Slotine\, Nonlinear Systems Laboratory\, MIT\nHost: Daniela Rus\, Csail\, MIT\nContact: Alise\, 253-2773\, alise@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:30PM\nRelevant URL: 34-3XX\nAlthough neurons as computational elements are 7 orders of magnitude\nslower than their artificial counterparts\, the primate brain grossly\noutperforms robotic algorithms in all but the most structured\ntasks. Parallelism alone is a poor explanation\, and much recent\nfunctional modelling of the central nervous system focuses on its\nmodular\, heavily feedback-based computational architecture\, the result\nof accumulation of subsystems throughout evolution. We discuss this\narchitecture from a global stability and convergence point of view. We\nthen study synchronization as a model of computations at different\nscales in the brain\, such as pattern matching\, temporal binding of\nsensory data\, and mirror neuron response. Finally\, we derive a simple\ncondition for a general dynamical system to globally converge to a\nregime where multiple groups of fully synchronized elements coexist.\nApplications of such "polyrhythms" to some classical questions in\nrobotics and systems neuroscience are discussed.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T140000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T160000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=863
SUMMARY:SNAP Computing and the X Window System
LOCATION:Stata - Sem Rm G449 (Patil/ Kiva)
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Jim Gettys\, HP Labs\nHost: Professor Hal Abelson\, CSAIL\nContact: Selene Victor\, 617-452-2857\, selene@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 2:00PM\nRelevant URL: \nToday's computing mantra is "One keyboard\, one mouse\, one display\, one\n computer\, one user\, one role\, one administration"; in short\, one of\n everything. However\, if several people try to use the same computer\n today\, or cross administrative boundaries\, or change roles from work to\n home life\, chaos generally ensues.\n \n Several hardware technologies are now pushing this limited model of\n computing beyond the breaking point. Projectors and physically large\n flat panel displays have become affordable and are about to take a\n leap in resolution. Cell phone size devices can now store many\n gigabytes of information\, take high resolution photographs\, have\n significant computation capability\, and are small enough to always be\n with you. And displays are now cheap enough\, that we could have them all\n over our environment\, if only we could manage them.\n \n Ask yourself "Why can't we sit with friends\, family or coworkers in\n front of large display with audio system\, and all use it at once?"\n \n You should be able change roles or move locations\, and re-associate\n with the local computing environment. The new mantra must become\n 'many' and 'mobile' everywhere 'one' has sufficed in the past.\n \n Change will be required in many areas from base system\, through the\n window system and toolkits\, and in applications to fully capitalize on\n this vision.\n\n\n Jim Gettys\n \n Jim is currently part of HP Labs\, currently working on making open\n source systems useful on desktop and hand held computers. He is spending\n much of his time working on the X Window System with Keith Packard.\n \n Jim served until 1/2004 on the Gnome Foundation board of directors and\n currently serves on the X.org Foundation board of directors.\n \n Jim survived MIT's Project Athena and with Bob Scheifler started the X\n Window System\, edited the HTTP/1.1 specification for the IETF\, and and\n one of the authors of AF\, a network transparent audio server system. Jim\n is interested in systems design and implementation\, collaborative\n systems\, teleconferencing and most areas of Web technology. He is\n interested in mobile desktop and hand held distributed computing.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T110000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T120000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=876
SUMMARY:The Persona Lifecycle: Integrating User Representations into Every Stage of Product Design
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Tamara Adlin\, Amazon Services\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 11:45AM\nRelevant URL: \n** NOTE: Unusual day and time. **\n\nWhether you call them user archetypes\, profiles\, target customer characterizations\, or personas\, creating detailed representations of users to aid in the product design process is generating renewed interest. Yet even though the buzz around personas just keeps increasing\, it¹s hard to find specific\, how-to information for creating and employing personas.\n\nThere's a good reason for the buzz: personas can be a powerful device for integrating user-centered design methods into your development cycle\, radically improving communication and user focus within your organization\, and subsequently improving users¹ experiences with your products and services. For the past 4 years\, Tamara and her co-author John Pruitt (Microsoft) have been working with persona practitioners from all over the world to understand how personas are being used today\, which persona-related methods are most helpful\, and why so many persona efforts fail.\n\nThe result is a highly practical Persona Lifecycle framework that defines five phases of persona development\, use\, and measures of ROI. Tamara will introduce you to the Persona Lifecycle\, discuss a range of tools for creating personas\, and reference a variety of examples illustrating how they can be employed.\n\nBio:\n\nTamara Adlin is the founder and president of Adlin\, Inc.\, (http://www.adlininc.com/) a customer experience consulting company located in Seattle\, WA. Prior to forming her company\, Tamara created the Customer Experience services team for Amazon Services\, which provided complete customer research and site design services for Amazon¹s platform clients (including the official NBA online store\, Marks & Spencers\, Sears Canada\, and others). Previously\, she was the Senior Usability Specialist for Amazon.com (amazon.com)\, where she consulted with teams across the company to improve the user experience for Amazon.com customers\, sellers\, partners\, and support professionals. Before she came to Amazon\, Tamara was the Human-Centered Design Lead at Attenex Corporation (http://www.attenex.com/)\, a legal services software company in Seattle\, where she designed advanced document management interfaces. In previous positions\, Tamara was the team leader for the Human-Centered Design Team at Akamai Technologies' Seattle office\, INTERVU\, Netpodium Corporation\, and MetaBridge\, where she designed interfaces for a variety of web applications and the award-winning Netpodium Interactive Broadcasting Toolset. Tamara started her user experience career as an Engineering Psychologist at the Army Research Laboratory\, where she evaluated human factors issues associated with military systems.\n \nTamara has been invited to speak on personas and other customer-centered design methods at a variety of industry and academic events. Tamara is co-author of a book on personas with John Pruitt (Microsoft). The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0125662513/qid=1127424904/sr=\n8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-1609560-7389440?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)\, is in pre-publication with Morgan Kaufmann Publishers and will be available late autumn 2005. The book includes four invited chapters from other experts in user-centered design and over a hundred sidebars written by 60+ colleagues who have used personas in their work. In 2003 and 2004\, Tamara and John¹s two-day seminar for the Nielsen/Norman Group received the highest ratings from participants at their User Experience Conference (http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/).\n \nTamara holds a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.S. degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington\, where she focused on User Interface design techniques and interdisciplinary communication.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T130000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051025T020000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=886
SUMMARY:Dangerous Ideas Seminar
LOCATION:D449 Kiva
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Larry Rudolph\, MIT CSAIL\nHost: Metin Sezgin\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Tevfik Metin Sezgin\, 617-253-2663\, mtsezgin@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 12:45PM\nRelevant URL: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/dangerous-ideas/dangerous/www/\nTitle: Harry Potter's Next Wand: Should it be digital?\n\n\nHarry Potter and other wizards preferred input-output device is a wand rather than a laptop\, PDA\, or cell phone.\nThis informal presentation will discuss the merits of a portable computer that looks more like a wand or walking stick rather than the current pack of playing cards.\n\nA stick or cylindrical tube can be held in the hand and carried around.\nIt allows many arrays of sensors to be placed along the length at\nprecise\, equally spaced locations. It seems ideally suited for many\ninput/output functions.\n\nMany people have strong opinions about form factors\, and this proposal oppears to challenge them. Must we continue to make interfaces smaller and smaller?\nMust we continue to make them rectangular? Must they all be approved for use on an airplane? Come to the seminar and express your opinion.\n\n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051026T161500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051026T174500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=871
SUMMARY:Toward Self-Directed Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (Kiva)\, 32-G449
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Paul Barford\, University of Wisconsin at Madison\nHost: Dina Katabi\, CSAIL\nContact: Sheila Marian\, x3-1996\, sheila@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: \nAbstract: Network attacks and intrusions have been a fact of life in the Internet for many years and continue to present serious challenges for network researchers and operators alike. The objective of our work is to develop tools and systems that automate or otherwise enhance key activities of network security analysts. In the first part of this talk\, I will describe our malicious traffic assessment activities using our Internet Sink (iSink) system for dark address space monitoring. iSink is a highly scalable system that includes both passive packet capture and a set of stateless active responders that enable details of exploits to be captured. Our results illustrate the variability in the traffic on dark address space and the feasibility of efficient classification of attack types. I will also describe how data from dark address space monitors can be used to provide near real time network "situational awareness" for security analysts. iSink data is also the basis for our Nemean system that automatically synthesizes signatures for intrusion detection. Unlike standard intrusion signatures\, Nemean's signatures are protocol aware which we show greatly enhances their resilience to false alarms. I will describe Nemean\, and conclude with a brief description of our current activities in adapting Nemean into a real time intrusion prevention system.\n\nBio: Paul Barford received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1985\, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University in December\, 2000. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the founder and director of the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory and his research interests are in measurement\, analysis and security of wide area networked systems and network protocols.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051026T140000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051026T150000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=878
SUMMARY:End-to-End Performance Optimization of Java Server Workloads
LOCATION:32-D463 Star
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Jong-Deok Choi\, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center\nHost: Martin Rinard\, CSAIL\nContact: Mary McDavitt\, 617-253-9620\, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:45PM\nRelevant URL: \nThe size and complexity of large-scale commercial middleware systems\, such as J2EE\, and their workloads makes it difficult to understand and optimize the performance of such systems. A J2EE middleware with its application may have tens of thousands of methods\, hundreds of concurrently executing threads\, and runtime stacks that are hundreds of methods deep. While acting like an operating system for its applications and providing various runtime services\, J2EE runs on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as an application mostly written in Java. The JVM itself provides its own various runtime services\, such as synchronization and garbage collection\, and in turn relies on the underlying operating system for OS services such as threading and memory management. This complicated interaction among the various layers of the software (and hardware) stack is a major source of the challenge to understanding and optimizing the performance of such large-scale middleware systems and their applications.\n\nIn this talk\, I will first present a brief description of the whole-stack\, end-to-end analysis and optimization system we have developed at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center for Websphere Application Server (WAS)\, which is IBM's implementation of the J2EE. After that\, I will present runtime data and their analysis results from the various layers of the SW and HW stack running WAS and its key benchmark programs\, and compare them with those of SPECjbb\, a Java benchmark program widely used by Java performance researchers. I will also present a few of the performance bottlenecks we have found\, and their optimization. \n\nBio: \nJong-Deok Choi is a Research Staff Member (RSM) and Manager of the High Performance Programming group at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights\, New York. He is a project co-leader of the End-to-End Server Optimization project\, a cross-organizational effort in IBM for improving the performance of commercial eServer applications on IBM's server platforms. Since joining Watson Research in 1989\, he has been involved in various research and development projects - in the areas of program analysis\, optimization\, and debugging - such as PTRAN\, TPO\, Jalapeno\, DejaVu\, JikesRVM\, and End-to-End Optimization. His research interests include static and dynamic analysis and optimization of commercial and scientific applications\, middleware analysis and optimization\, high performance computer architecture\, and debugging multithreaded and distributed applications.\n\nHe received B.S. in Electronic Engineering from SNU\, Korea in 1979\, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from KAIST\, Korea in 1981\, and M.S. and Ph.D. both in Computer Sciences from Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and 1989\, respectively.\n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051027T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051027T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=831
SUMMARY:From Clean Machine Learning and Elaborate Logics to Robust Textual Inference
LOCATION:32-G449 (Stata Center\, Patil/Kiva Conference Room)
DESCRIPTION:Series: Language\, Learning\, Vision and Graphics Seminar Series (LLVG)\nSpeaker: Christopher Manning\, Stanford University\nHost: Regina Barzilay\, MIT-CSAIL\nContact: Regina Barzilay\, 617-258-5706\, regina@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:45PM\nRelevant URL: \nThe big problem in natural language understanding today is that we still do not have a technology to do arbitrary-domain language understanding which can offer semantic matching at a higher level of fidelity than keyword-based web search or text categorization.\n\nThe task of robust textual inference focuses on this problem. It tests being able to draw conclusions from an arbitrary piece of text as a human would\, bringing to bear on the task any necessary common sense knowledge. For example\, given the text:\n\n Last week\, Romano Prodi met the US President George Bush to discuss the abolition of farming subsidies in Europe and the US.\n\nThen you would want to be able to conclude that 'George Bush has met Romano Prodi' and 'there are farming subsidies in the U.S.' but it would be a big mistake to conclude that 'George Bush abolished farming subsidies in Europe'.\n\nOver the last year\, a bunch of colleagues at Stanford and I have attempted to build a system for this task. It was successful relative to the competition. But in this talk I want to focus more on the possible roles and interactions beween machine learning\, logical inference\, and linguistic knowledge that this problem presents.\n\nChristopher Manning is an assistant professor of computer science and linguistics at Stanford University. Previously\, he held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Sydney. His research interests include probabilistic natural language parsing\, syntax\, information extraction and text mining. He is the author of three books\, including Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (MIT Press\, 1999\, with Hinrich Schuetze).
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051028T110000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051028T120000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=837
SUMMARY:Thesis Defense: Learning to Transform Time Series with a Few Examples
LOCATION:Star.
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Ali Rahimi\, MIT CSAIL Vision Group\nHost: Ali Rahimi\, MIT CSAIL Vision Group\nContact: Ali Rahimi\, 617-953-2160\, ali@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: \nRelevant URL: \nAbstract:\n\nMany problems in machine perception can be framed as mapping one time\nseries to another time series. In tracking\, for example\, one\ntransforms a time series of observations from sensors to a time series\ndescribing the pose of a target. Defining and implementing such\ntransformations by hand is a tedious process\, requiring detailed\nmodels of the time series involved. I will describe a semi-supervised\nlearning algorithm that learns memoryless transformations of time\nseries from a few example input-output mappings. The algorithm\nsearches for a smooth function that fits the training examples and\,\nwhen applied to the input time series\, produces a time series that\nevolves according to assumed dynamics. The learning procedure is fast\nand lends itself to a closed-form solution. I relate this algorithm\nand its unsupervised extension to nonlinear system identification and\nmanifold learning techniques. I demonstrate it on the tasks of\ntracking RFID tags from signal strength measurements\, recovering the\npose of rigid objects\, deformable bodies\, and articulated bodies from\nvideo sequences\, and tracking a target in a completely uncalibrated\nnetwork of sensors. For these tasks\, this algorithm requires\nsignificantly fewer examples compared to fully-supervised regression\nalgorithms or semi-supervised learning algorithms that do not take the\ndynamics of the output time series into account.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051028T150000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051028T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=870
SUMMARY:The price of cache-obliviousness
LOCATION:Stata - D463 - Star
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Keshav Pingali\, Cornell University\nHost: Arvind\, CSG-CSAIL-MIT\nContact: Sally Lee\, 253-6837\, sally@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 2:45PM\nRelevant URL: \nThe price of cache-obliviousness\n\nKeshav Pingali\nCornell University\n \nCache-oblivious algorithms and data structures have been\nproposed as a methodology for writing portable\, high-level\,\nmachine-independent programs whose performance is\nnevertheless competitive with that of cache-aware\nprograms customized to particular machines. This methodology\nwas instrumental in the development of the highly successful\nFFTW code\, but FFT has little algorithmic reuse. How does\nthe cache-oblivious methodology perform for problems with a\nlot of algorithmic reuse such as dense linear algebra computations?\n \n In this talk\, we describe an experimental study of cache-oblivious and\ncache-aware programs for dense linear algebra problems. Our results\nshow that substantial effort may be required to produce cache-oblivious\ncodes that perform well on modern machines\, and that even highly optimized\nversions may not perform as well as cache-aware codes for the same problem.\nWe conclude with some research directions that may help narrow the gap.\n \nThis is joint work with Kamen Yotov and Tom Roeder.\n \n \n\nKeshav Pingali is a professor in the Computer Science department\, where he holds the India Chair in Computer Science. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering\, and he is an Associate Director of the Cornell Theory Center. He received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT\, Kanpur\, India in 1978\, and the S.M. E.E.\, and Sc.D. degrees from MIT in 1986. Pingali’s research has focused on programming languages and compiler technology for program understanding\, restructuring\, and optimization. His group is known for its contributions to memory-hierarchy optimization; some of these have been patented. Algorithms and tools developed by his projects are used in many commercial products such as Intel’s IA-64 compiler\, SGI’s MIPSPro compiler\, and HP’s PA–RISC compiler. In his current research\, he is investigating language based fault-tolerance\, and highly adaptive software systems for large-scale computational science simulations. Among other awards\, Pingali has won the President’s Gold Medal at I.I.T.– Kanpur (1978)\, IBM Faculty Development Award (1986–87)\, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989–94)\, Ip-Lee Teaching Award of the College of Engineering at Cornell (1997)\, and the Russell teaching award of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell (1998).
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051028T140000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051028T150000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=884
SUMMARY:Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Experience and Lessons Learned
LOCATION:35-225
DESCRIPTION:Series: Robotics Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Dave Lavery\, Program Executive for Solar System Exploration\, NASA Headquarters\nHost: Daniela Rus\, MIT\nContact: Alise\, 253-5817\, Alise@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:30PM\nRelevant URL: \nIn this talk Dave Lavery will review of the very successful most recent Mars Exploration Rover mission\, and the achievements of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The talk will also focus on several of the organizational\, strategic\, and technical lessons learned by the project team\, and the implications of those lessons for future \nplanetary exploration missions. \n\n\nSponsored by the Mechanical Engineering \nDepartment Field and Space Robotics Laboratory\, \nCSAIL Center for Robotics\, and Aeronautics and \nAstronautics Man Vehicle Laboratory
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051031T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051031T153000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=872
SUMMARY:From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps
LOCATION:Stata - Sem Rm G449 (Patil/ Kiva)
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Shimon Schocken\, Efi Arazi School of Computer Science\, IDC Herzliya\, Israel and Harvard
University (visiting)\nHost: Hal Abelson\, CSAIL\nContact: Selene Victor\, 617-452-2857\, selene@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:30PM\nRelevant URL: www.idc.ac.il/tecs\nAbstract: We present a new course that aims to demystify the\nintegrated function of computer systems\, using a hands-on\napproach. The course synthesizes many abstractions\, algorithms\, and\ndata structures learned in core CS courses\, and makes them concrete by\nbuilding a complete computer system from the ground up. As the\nsemester progresses\, we guide the students through a modular series\nof projects that gradually construct and unit-test a simple\nhardware platform and a modern software hierarchy\, yielding a\nsurprisingly powerful computer system. The hardware projects are\ndone in a simple hardware description language and a hardware\nsimulator supplied by us. The software projects (assembler\, VM\, and\na compiler for a simple object-based language) can be done in any\nlanguage\, using the API's and test programs supplied by us. We also\nbuild a mini-OS. The result is a GameBoy-like computer\, simulated\non the student's PC. We start the course (and this talk) by\ndemonstrating some video games running on this computer\,\ne.g. Tetris and Pong. We are able to squeeze all this into a\nsingle course since we deal with neither efficiency nor advanced\nfeatures\, leaving these subjects to other courses in the\nprogram. The resulting approach is completely self-contained\,\nrequiring only programming as a pre-requisite. In the Fall 2005\nsemester Shimon Schocken is teaching this course at Harvard's CS\nprogram\, where it is coded CS-101. A book based on the approach\nwas recently published by MIT Press. Joint work with Noam\nNisan. For more details see www.idc.ac.il/tecs
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051103T000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051103T000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=842
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:
DESCRIPTION:Series: Language\, Learning\, Vision and Graphics Seminar Series (LLVG)\nSpeaker: Avi Pfeffer\, Harvard University\nHost: Regina Barzilay\, MIT-CSAIL\nContact: Regina Barzilay\, 617-258-5706\, regina@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: \nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051104T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051104T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=810
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Martin Wattenberg\, IBM Watson Research Center\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:15PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051104T130000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051104T140000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=868
SUMMARY:Extending Mechanics to Minds\, or\, Plain Talk about Ratiocinative Dynamogenesis
LOCATION:Star
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Prof. Jon Doyle\, North Carolina State University Dept. of CS\nHost: Prof Peter Szolovits\, CSAIL Clinical Decision Making Group\nContact: Fern DeOliveira\, x3-5860\, fern@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 12:45PM\nRelevant URL: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/doyle\nAbstract:\n\nThe study of the mind has stood apart from the study of the physical world for some time. Descartes divided persons into both physical and mental substances\, but the mechanics developed subsequently applied only to physical substances. This inapplicability produced a split in the mathematical study of our world\, with mathematical theories of continuous differential systems and laws on the physical side\, and mathematical theories of logic\, probability\, utility\, and language on the other.\n\nThe scientific divorce of mind and body has worked to the disadvantage of the mental sciences\, especially in theories of rational behavior exhibited by people and artificial agents. Ideal rationality calls for complete and immediate assimilation of new information\, but in the real world people take time to assimilate new information\, and assimilation can require noticeable effort. Physics has no trouble analyzing resistance to change and effort needed to change in terms of mechanical inertia and work\, but psychology and economics have had no recourse to these notions.\n\nWe describe how mathematical progress over the past century has set the stage for a reconciliation of the physical and mental sciences that permits analysis of some kinds of minds as mechanical systems complete with actual\, non-metaphorical mental forces and mental inertia. Hilbert's call for development of an axiomatic theory of mechanics produced a revolution in rational mechanics. The axioms supporting this revolution presuppose a continuous physical world\, but this presupposition is inessential to the structure of mechanics. We indicate how one can specialize continuum assumptions to physical space\, time\, and motion\, and so broaden the applicability of mechanics to discrete and hybrid mechanical systems. We illustrate the ideas by identifying forces and masses entering into a simple kind of reasoning agent\, and by sketching how mechanical work in such systems provides a measure of mental effort. The mechanical analysis of thinking thus complements the essentially kinematical analysis of computers introduced by Turing\, and opens the door to a broad range of mechanical analyses in psychology and economics.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051107T161000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051107T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=875
SUMMARY:Computational complexity of games and puzzles
LOCATION:Patil conference room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: CSAIL Student Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Bob Hearn\, \nHost: \, \nContact: Louis-Philippe Morency\, 617-253-4278\, lmorency@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 4:00PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051108T140000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051108T033000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=869
SUMMARY:A discussion of the hows and whats of MATLAB
LOCATION:(STAR Conference) 32-D463
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Bill McKeeman\, MathWorks Fellow\, \nHost: Daniel Jackson & Bob Muller\, CSAIL\nContact: Maria C. Rebelo\, 253-5895\, mr@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: \nRelevant URL: \nMATLAB is a high-level computer-based programming environment. It\noriginally elevated matrix calculations from FORTRAN subroutine calls\nto assignment syntax. It has grown over 20 years from academic\nresearch into a generalized tool for a wide variety of applications\,\nincluding vehicle crash simulation\, financial prediction\, genome\nanalysis\, imbedded computer control\, aircraft design and so on. Some\nschools use it to teach beginning programming. There are about a\nmillion users worldwide. More than 200 MathWorks developers are\nworking on the next release. Another 1000 people run the rest of the\nbusiness\, in Natick and worldwide.\n\nThe topic today is the features of the M language\, their rationale\,\nhow performance is kept competitive with more conventional solutions\,\nand quality assurance. Much of what I have to say is available in\nthe MathWorks online documentation. Most users never need more than\nMATLAB Help to get their work done.\n\nI will illustrate the talk with running MATLAB examples.\n\nBill McKeeman is a Fellow at the MathWorks. He introduced JIT\ntechnology and now looks for other places in MATLAB where performance\ncan be improved. He came to MathWorks after a decade in the compiler\ngroup at Digital. Before that he chaired the Master of Software\nEngineering program at Wang Institute and Information Sciences at UC\nSanta Cruz. He teaches part time for the Computer Science Department\nat Dartmouth College. He earned a BA in Mathematics from UC\nBerkeley\, an MA in Mathematics from George Washington University\, a\nPhD in Computer Science from Stanford and pilot wings from the US Navy.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051110T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051110T173000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=864
SUMMARY:The Power and Weakness of Randomness in Computation
LOCATION:32-123
DESCRIPTION:Series: Dertouzos Lecturer Series 2005/2006\nSpeaker: Professor Avi Wigderson\, Institute for Advanced Study\nHost: Victor Zue\, CSAIL\nContact: Victoria Palay\, 617-253-8924\, palay@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:45PM\nRelevant URL: \nAbstract:\n\nHumanity has grappled with the meaning and utility of randomness\nfor centuries. Research in the Theory of Computation in the last\nthirty years has enriched this study considerably. I will talk about\ntwo main aspects of this research on randomness\, demonstrating its\npower and weakness respectively.\n\n(1) Randomness is paramount to computational efficiency: I will\nshow how the use of randomness can dramatically speed up computation\n(and do other wonders) for a variety of problems and settings.\n\n(2) Computational efficiency is paramount to understanding randomness:\nI will explain the new\, computationally-motivated definition of\nrandomness\, and try to argue its merits as the "right" definition.\nI will then show how such randomness may be generated deterministically\,\nfrom computationally difficult problems. \n\nBiography\n\nAvi Wigderson obtained his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the\nTechnion in 1980\, and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1983.\nHe was a member of the faculty at the Hebrew University in\nJerusalem from 1986-2003\, and is currently a member of the\nMathematics Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study at\nPrinceton. His research interests lie principally in\nComplexity Theory\, Algorithms\, Randomness\, and Cryptography.\nHis awards include the Yoram Ben-Porat Presidential Prize for\nOutstanding Researcher\, and the Nevanlinna Prize (2004).
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051110T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051110T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=879
SUMMARY:Medical Vision Group Seminar
LOCATION:32D-507
DESCRIPTION:Series: None\nSpeaker: Christian Beckmann\, FMRIB Centre\, Department of Clinical Neurology\, University of Oxford\nHost: Wanmei Ou\, CSAIL\nContact: Wanmei Ou\, 3-4143\, wanmei@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: \nRelevant URL: \nIndependent Component Analysis is becoming a popular exploratory \nmethod for analysing highly confounded data such as that from \nfunctional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments. The goal of \nICA is to express a set of random variables as linear combinations of \nstatistically independent component variables. This talk will descibe \nthe underlying generative model\, different techniques for estimating \nthe components and probabilistic extensions to ICA in order to \novercome the 'overfitting' problem. The talk will also cover \ngeneralisations of ICA to a higher order decomposition of multi- \nsubject/multi-session FMRI data into modes of variation describing \nunderlying processes in the spatial\, temporal and subject/session \ndomain.
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051114T141500
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051114T151500
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=846
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:32-D463 (Stata Center - Star conference room)
DESCRIPTION:Series: Language\, Learning\, Vision and Graphics Seminar Series (LLVG)\nSpeaker: Pietro Perona\, Caltech\nHost: Trevor Darrell\, MIT-CSAIL\nContact: Trevor Darrell\, 617-253-8966\, trevor@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 2:00PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051118T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051118T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=809
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:Star Seminar Room (32-D463)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: William Gribbons\, Design and Usability Center\, Bentley College\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:15PM\nRelevant URL: \n** NOTE: Unusual location (Star\, 32-D463) **
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051118T160000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051118T170000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=880
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:32-D463
DESCRIPTION:Series: Language\, Learning\, Vision and Graphics Seminar Series (LLVG)\nSpeaker: Fred Jelinek\, Johns Hopkins University\nHost: Regina Barzilay\, MIT-CSAIL\nContact: Regina Barzilay\, 617-258-5706\, regina@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 3:45PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20051202T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20051202T143000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=885
SUMMARY:TBA
LOCATION:Patil Seminar Room (32-G449)
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Fall 2005\nSpeaker: Paul Lukowicz\, UMIT\nHost: Jaime Teevan\, CSAIL\nContact: Jaime Teevan\, 617/253-1611\, teevan@csail.mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:15PM\nRelevant URL: \n
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR