Date: Sat, 19 Oct 85 21:08 EST To: irdis at vpi Subject: IRList Digest V1 #16 IRList Digest Saturday, 19 Sep 1985 Volume 1 : Issue 16 Today's Topics: Reference - Article on Electronic Books Call for Papers - Application for NSF funds to Pisa Conf. Announcement - Conf. on OED Seminar - Information Lens on Electronic Messages - Neural Circuitry for Motion Discrimination - VLSI Text Search - Computational Discourse Analysis - Visual Inf. Proc., Perceptual Organization and Form ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mark Richer Date: Mon 14 Oct 85 09:31:39-PDT Subject: electronic books article October 1985 issue of IEEE Computer is on MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS (e.g., electronic mail, teleconferencing with mixed text, graphics, sound) and there is an article that might be of interest to many of you: Reading and Writing the Electronic Book Yankelovich, Meyrowitz, van Dam (Brown University) p. 15-30 mark ------------------------------ From: Don Date: Thu, 17 Oct 85 11:45:13 cdt LSU Department of Computer Science LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY BATON ROUGE, LA 70803-4020 (504)-388-1495 CSNET: kraft%lsu@csnet-relay October 17, 1985 Dear World: I have just received the news from the National Science Foundation, Division of Information Science and Tech- nology, about the travel grant to the ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. This conference will be held in Pisa, Italy on Sep- tember 8-10, 1986. The news is good. We have been given fifteen stipends covering airfare to the meeting. The selection for the awarding of the stipends will be made by the ACM/SIGIR executive officers, the U.S. members of the conference program committee, and the travel grant principal investigator (me). Criteria for selection include i) acceptance of a paper to be presented at the confer- ence, ii) participation in the conference program, iii) value of the attendee to the conference, and iv) poten- tial for professional growth of the attendee by attend- ing the conference. Other considerations include being a U. S. resident and geographical dispersion. Anyone interested in receiving a travel stipend should contact me. It is not too early to begin planning now, although the deadline is June 1, 1986. The conference is sponsored by the Italian National Research Council, in cooperation with ACM/SIGIR, AICA/GLIR, BCS/IRSG, and IDI. The topics to be covered at the conference include theory, methodology, and applications of information retrieval; system model- ling, development, and evaluation; storage and retrieval techniques; hardware developments; complexity problems; cognitive and semantic models; mathematical and linguistic models; user interfaces; knowledge-based and expert systems; natural language processing; office information systems; mutimedia information; database management systems -- retrieval relationships; and artificial intelligence and information retrieval. U.S. members of the program committee include Michael Lesk, W. Bruce Croft, Clement T. Yu, Tamas Doszkocs, R. Allen, and G. Salton. Other members include P. Bollmann, J. Schek, J. Tait, P. Willet, C. J. van Rijsbergen, Y. Chiaramella, F. Naldi, M. Agosti, and F. Rabitti. Submission of papers (four copies of a full paper of 3000-5000 words) is due by January 15, 1986; and they should be sent to Professor Gerard Salton, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Upson Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. Final copy is due May 15, 1986, with acceptance notification coming by March 31, 1986. Sincerely yours, Donald H. Kraft Professor and Chairman DHK:unix ------------------------------ From: Michael Lesk Date: Wed, 16 Oct 85 10:11:31 edt Subject: Submission for IR List. (the sooner this gets out the better, since the conference is Nov. 7-8! Sorry for not sending this in earlier, but publicity for this wasn't my job). Subject: Conference on the computerized Oxford English Dictionary From: lesk@bellcore (Michael E. Lesk) The University of Waterloo Centre for the New OED is starting research projects using the machine-readable form of the OED now being prepared. The plan is to have not just typesetting tapes, but an electronic database representing the history and use of the English language, as shown in the dictionary. A one-day meeting at Waterloo, from 7pm Thursday Nov. 7 through 4:30pm Friday Nov. 8, 1985, will examine research areas related to the OED and machine-readable dictionaries. The program is: Introduction John Simpson, Oxford University Press, "The New OED Project" John Stubbs, University of Waterloo, "The UW Centre for the New OED" Using On-Line Dictionaries (Michael Lesk, session chair) Henry Kucera, Brown University, "The Problem of Structural Ambiguity in the Lexicon" Donald Walker, Bell Communications Research, "Knowledge Resource Tools for Accessing Large Text Files" George Miller, Princeton University, "Wordnet: A Dictionary Browser" The Use and Misuse of Dictionaries (Neil Hultin, session chair) Gisele Losier, U. Waterloo, "Using the OED for the Study of Loan Words" Christopher Dean, U. Saskatchewan, "The OED: The Study of Local Regional Dialects and Historical Dialet Dictionaries" Knowledge Databases (Robin Cohen, session chair) Randy Goebel, U. Waterloo, "What is a Knowledge Representation System?" John Sowa, IBM, "Using Knowledge Representation to Capture the Semantic Information of a Lexicon" Summary (Frank Tompa, U. Waterloo, plus other session chairs) Those interested in attending should send $25 US or $35 Canadian, along with their name, address and phone numbers, to: Centre for the New OED Dana Porter Library, rm 105 University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1985 16:53 EDT Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Thursday 17, October 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom The Artificial Intelligence Lab Revolving Seminar Series "The Information Lens: An Intelligent System for Finding, Filtering, and Sorting Electronic Messages" Thomas W. Malone MIT Sloan School of Management This talk will describe an intelligent system to help people share, filter, and sort information communicated by computer-based messaging systems. The system exploits concepts from artificial intelligence such as frames, production rules, and inheritance networks, but it avoids the unsolved problems of natural language understanding by providing users with a rich set of semi-structured message templates. A consistent set of "direct manipulation" editors simplifies the use of the system by individuals, and an incremental enhancement path simplifies the adoption of the system by groups. The talk will also include an overview of the other projects and research goals in the Organizational Systems Laboratory at MIT. ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1985 18:25 EDT Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Wednesday 16, October 12:00pm Room: E25-401 CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION PROCESSING "Towards the Neural Circuitry Underlying Motion Discrimination in the Retina: A Film" Christof Kock Whitaker College In this talk, I will discuss recent advances towards understanding the biophysical mechanisms and the anatomical pathways underlying the computation of the direction of a moving stimuli in the rabbit retina. I will show detailed computer simulation--including a color film-- of the change in intracellular potential within a reconstructed direction selective rabbit ganglion cell in response to massive distributed synaptic input. These simulations also clearly show the functional differences between two major types of synaptic induced inhibition: silent or shunting inhibition--mediated by a GABA(a) receptor--and hyperpolarizing inhibition--mediated by a GABA(b) receptor. Current experimental evidence favors our veto-scheme, whereby direction selectivity is computed at many independent sites within the dendritic tree. ------------------------------ From: Susan Gere Date: Thu 17 Oct 85 15:19:35-PDT Subject: Stanford Computer Systems Seminar 10/23 EE380---Seminar on Computer Systems Title: Fast Data Finder - a VLSI Check Search Machine Speaker: Dr. Kwang-I Yu From: TRW Redondo Beach Time: Wednesday, October 23 at 4:15 p.m. Place: Terman Auditorium Abstract The Fast Data Finder (FDF) is a text-search engine based on a typelined VLSI processor. It has a comprehensive set of search functions and is able to search up to 500 queries, containing up to 8,000 characters, simultaneously at a sustained system-level search speed of 7.8 million characters per second. This makes it by far the most powerful text search system in the world. Architecturally, the interesting features are that all search functions are implemented within a single VLSI processor, that the algorithm is single pass and requires no pauses or iterations, and that very high bandwidth storage devices are employed. ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1985 17:31 EDT Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Note: The date of the following entry has been changed from Monday to Tuesday. Tuesday 22, October 11:00am-12:30pm Room: Millikan Room, E53-482 Computational Discourse Analysis Using DEREDEC: An Analysis of Balzac's Sarrasine Jaqueline Leon and Jean-Marie Marandin Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Paris, France We present research in computational discourse analysis and discuss an example for the case of Balzac's Sarrasine. We use P. Plante's DEREDEC programming system in this work because of its suitability for natural language processing. After a bottom-up syntactic parser for French grammar produces a syntactic derivation, we perform pattern matching on the output to acheive a linguistic and literary interpretation. We describe how we use these programs to capture two different aspects of a text: the thematic segmentation and density. Host: Professor Hayward R. Alker, Jr., Department of Political Science, MIT ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1985 13:33 EDT Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Monday 21, October 4:00pm Room: NE43-8th floor playroom SEMINAR ON VISUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING "Structure from Motion" Shahriar Negahdaripour There are several techniques proposed in the literature for recovering the motion of objects as well as their 3D structure from a sequence of time-varying imagery. These include determining motion and structure from point or line correspondence, tracking contours, or using the optical flow field. The underlying mathematics, as well as the advantages/disadvantages of these methods will be discussed. Some recent results based on using the intensity gradients will also be presented. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: the following announcement is repeated from the previous calendar with the date corrected. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Thursday 24, October 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom The Artificial Intelligence Lab Revolving Seminar Series "Perceptual Organization And The Representation Of Natural Form" Alex P. Pentland AI Center, SRI Int'l and CSLI, Stanford To understand both perception and commonsense reasoning we need a representation that captures important physical regularities and that correctly describes the people's perceptual organization of the stimulus. Unfortunately, the current representations were originally developed for other purposes (e.g., physics, engineering) and are therefore often unsuitable. We have developed a new representation and used it to make accurate descriptions of an extensive variety of natural forms including people, mountains, clouds and trees. The descriptions are amazingly compact. The approach of this representation is to describe scene structure in a manner similar to people's notion of ``a part,'' using descriptions that reflect a possible formative history of the object, e.g., how the object might have been constructed from lumps of clay. For this representation to be useful it must be possible to recover such descriptions from image data; we show that the primitive elements of such descriptions may be recovered in an overconstrained and therefore reliable manner. An interactive ``real-time'' 3-D graphics modeling system based on this representation will be shown, together with short animated sequences demonstrating the descriptive power of the representation. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************