IRList Digest Monday, 25 Nov 1985 Volume 1 : Issue 22 Today's Topics: E-Mail - Downtime at Virginia Tech Reply - More on KWIC and UNIX's ptx Query - Machine Readable Dictionary? Index of MR texts? - Can Seminar Announcements include E-Mail Addresses? - People Interested in Principles of Communication? Announcement - Graduate Program in Communication - Print Version of NSF IST Awards, Call for Reviewers - Books on Plato's Authoring Language (from Ai-ed) Cog-Sci Seminars - CommonLoops, Processing Deficits in Aphasia - Recovering Surface Shape, MED2 Expert System Shell, Children & Language, A RIACS Project on Memory, Flow of Information through Cortical Circuits ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: FOX 25-NOV-1985 11:02 Subj: delay in IRlist Sorry folks, but machines do break down! We have had a series of hardware problems since the last issue. The VAX I usually compose issues on is still down, so please bear with the current layout. Please keep submitting articles - eventually they will get out! - Ed PS Since PSUVM will be down 8pm Nov. 27 to 8pm Nov. 29, some BITNET messages may not get through from up north at that time. ------------------------------ From: Stavros Macrakis Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 14:12:40 EST Subject: Keyword in context Krovetz suggests using the Unix `ptx' command for generating KWIC indices. Unfortunately, ptx (Unix 4.2) does not solve the problem: ptx only provides the context on the same source line; both pre-formatting and post-formatting are in general needed to deal with punctation and layout gracefully; it does not give an error indication for over-long input lines. In short, ptx is fine for generating the index to the Unix manual, but not sufficiently robust or general-purpose for KWIC indexes of continuous texts. -s ------------------------------ From: ROACH 16-NOV-1985 16:00 To: FOX Subj: do you know whether Concept Dictionary of English is available? Ed, Julius Laffal wrote a book called, "The Concept Dictionary of English," Do you know whether that is available in machine readable form? How could I find out? Is there an index available of machine readable texts? John Roach (roach%vpi@csnet-relay.arpa) [Note: The Oxford Text Archive has an index of its holdings but they do not have that particular dictionary. They do have the Collins and Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionaries - I am working now on building a NL lexicon from them. Does anyone have a pointer to the above mentioned dictionary or index? - Ed] ------------------------------ From: Stavros Macrakis Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 12:36:03 EST Subject: Seminar announcements I am writing all of you because you have been kind enough to contribute seminar announcements to various mailing lists recently. I find these announcements to be very valuable, and I appreciate your efforts in publishing them. A suggestion I should like to make, however, is that these announcements could be even more useful if an electronic as well as a mailing address could be provided for the speakers. I have often wanted to get in contact with the speakers, and in general have had to guess at a net address (the Arpanet registry is far from complete and I know of no systematic directory on other networks). I realize that this is not in general easy--ideally, those organizing the practical aspects of the seminar could collect this information and include it in their announcements. (Do departmental adminstrators currently recognize the value of asking for electronic addresses?) But until that happy day, we can only hope for partial information when it is easy to come by. Thanks again for your efforts. -s [Note: please do, at the bottom of all submissions, give one or more electronic mail addresses. If possible, do so in relation to BITNET, the Internet, and UUCPnet since it is sometimes hard to figure out proper return addresses. Thanks! - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 07:21:57 PST From: co175fag%sdcc3@SDCSVAX.ARPA (Melissa O'Neill) Subject: Discussion topics As moderator of IRList you offer a number of interesting topics for discussion. How about discussion regarding the principles of communication? Our course in experimental networking would benefit from such a topic - - know of any interested parties? Melissa at UCSD CO175FAG@SDCC3 ------------------------------ From: Tom Benson 814-238-5277 Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 16:20 EST Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER #14 [following is an extract only - Ed] ANNOUNCEMENT OF A GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION Department of Communication University of California, San Diego The faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego invites applications from students wishing to pursue a Ph.D. in Communication. As a faculty we seek to combine previously separate modes of analysis from the humanities and social sciences to explore the structure, content and methods of the new discipline of communication. The graduate program is conceived as a blending of the critical tradition of European communication research with the empirical tradition of American scholarship. The study of communication at UCSD is unique in several ways. The program places major emphasis on historical and comparative approaches to mediated human activity in all its manifestations. The graduate curriculum is organized around an explicit framework for understanding communicative phenomena. This framework is comprised of three perspectives: 1) communication as a social force, 2) communication and culture, and 3) communication and the individual. The first concentrates on the increasing importance of information and information technologies in American society and on the global political-economic consequences of media practices. The second involves the analysis of culture, using traditions from literature, folklore, and anthropology to focus on questions of interpretation and meaning. The third involves examination of the individual as socially constituted through language and other media. The program also emphasizes problems of methodology including offers a production component in which students and concretize and evaluate this theoretical work. The deadline for receipt of applications is February 1, 1986 for those seeking financial assistance. Final application deadline for all others is March 1, 1986. If you are interested, please contact Gregory Griffin, Department of Communication (D-003), University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, or call (619) 452-2379 for an application. Three letter of recommendation will be required as well as Graduate Record Examination scores. ------------------------------ From: ICS.DEKEN%r20.utexas.edu@CSNET-RELAY Date: Thu 14 Nov 85 06:14:45-CST Subject: Information Science and Technology at NSF The 1983-1984 book of NSF awards, with short descriptions, is now available. We also have a less formal and complete, but official listing of the awards in Information Science and Technology for FY '85 (ended September 30, 1985). People who wish to receive this or other information can obtain printed copies by writing to: Joseph Deken, Director Information Science Program National Science Foundation 1800 G Street N.W. Rm. 336 Washington, D.C. 20550 [Note: both of these are very interesting. There is also a new 'Guide to Programs' for Fiscal Year 1986; the cover shows lighting flashes caused by an undersea volcanic eruption! - Ed] Researchers in information science and technology who are willing to serve as reviewers for the Information Science Progam may also wish to send a brief description of their areas of interest and/or a recent list of publications. ------------------------------ From: Mark Richer Date: Thu 14 Nov 85 08:46:11-PST [Following ai-ed message has been edited. - Ed] I am forwarding this message about Plato from Brodie Lockward, an experienced user and programmer: Date: Mon 4 Nov 85 22:16:44-PST From: Brodie Lockard Subject: Re: ai-ed, plato Mark-- Here's some info on publications concerning PLATO's authoring language (I hate that term). Hope it's some help. -Brod . . . PLATO Author Language Reference Manual This manual describes the PLATO author language and is intended as a detailed reference source. It is designed as a reference for the experienced author who is familar with the fundamentals of the CDC PLATO author language. publication number: 97405100 PLATO Author Language Instruction Formats This pocket-sized manual provides PLATO authors with a complete summary of author language instruction formats, keyboard formats, and a summary of Author Mode page options. publication number: 97406600 The TUTOR Language, by Bruce Sherwood (June 1977). This book is a comprehensive illustrated textbook on the TUTOR language. publication number: 76360692 ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1985 10:16 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Friday 15, November 2:30 (2:15 Refreshments) Room: NE43-512A "CommonLoops" Gregor Kiczales Xerox Palo Alto Research Center CommonLoops is a merger of Object Oriented Programming and Lisp. It has a unique combination of features: 1) No special syntax: Most attempts to add object-oriented programming to Lisp have resulted in special syntax for message sending. In CommonLoops, there is no syntactic difference between calling a function and "invoking a method." 2) Method Specification: In object oriented programming, methods are specified in terms of the class of the object being sent the message. One can think of this as specifying the type of one argument of the method. In CommonLoops, one can specify the type of any number of arguments to a method. 3) Type space: The "object" space is an extension of the normal Lisp type space, not a separate space as in Loops or Flavors. 4) Metaclasses: The implementation of a type (determined by the "metaclass") is independent of the type description. This allows tradeoffs between early binding and ease of exploratory programming. Host: Hal Abelson ------------------------------ Sunday 17, November 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room Harvard 5:30 dinner [can be purchused] 6:00 talk. HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY "Processing Deficits in Aphasia" Bill Milberg Veteran's Administration Hospital info: ETZI@OZ ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1985 11:55 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Monday 18, November 4:00pm Room: E43- 8th floor Playroom 9.382 -- Seminar in Visual Information Processing (A) Recovering Surface Shape from an Extended Gaussian Image James J. Little Artificial Intelligence Laboratory The Extended Gaussian Image (EGI) of an object records the variation of surface area with surface orientation. When the object is polyhedral, the EGI takes the form of a set of vectors, one for each face, parallel to the outer surface normal of the face. The length of each vector is the area of the corresponding face. The EGI uniquely represents convex objects and is easily derived from conventional models of an object. The EGI of a sensed object can be computed directly from photometric stereo, or by differentiating depth maps from binocular stereo or laser ranging. It can be used both in recognition tasks and in determining the attitude of objects. Here the representational power of the EGI is explored. There are two aspects to describing shape for polyhedral objects: first, the way in which faces intersect, termed the adjacency structure, and, second, the location of the faces in space. The adjacency structure describes the combinatorial properties of the object. An iterative algorithm is described which converts an EGI of a polyhedron into an object model in terms of coordinates of vertices, edges, and faces. The algorithm converges to a solution by constrained optimization. ------------------------------ Wednesday 20, November 4:00pm (4:15 Refreshments) Room: NE43-512A "MED2: An Expert System Shell for Diagnosis and Therapy in Complex Domains" Frank Puppe Kaiserlautern University Germany Concentrating on the medical domain, MED2 is a shell combining a wide variety of important aspects of clinical reasoning. It's "Working-Memory" control structure involves investigating a set of hypotheses simultaneously, avoiding the shortcomings of focussing on the top-hypothesis only. This concept allows using differential diagnosis techniques and exploiting relationships among patho-concepts in an efficient manner. Other interesting features of MED2 include separation of database and diagnostic reasoning, temporal reasoning, and belief revision. HOST: Prof. Peter Szolovits ------------------------------ Thursday 21, November 7:30pm Room: Wellesley College 377 Science Center LUCE LECTURES ON LANGUAGE AND MIND "Some things Children Learn from and about Language" Virginia Valian Wellesley College ------------------------------ Friday 22, November 2:00pm Room: Main Seminar Room (2nd floor) Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. 50 Moulton Street Cambridge, MA. BBN Labs SDP AI Seminars "Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory: A RIACS Project" Dr. Michael R. Raugh Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science NASA Ames Research Center An exciting new concept in which information is stored in a large number of neighboring addresses determined by "content," produces a memory that retrieves causal relationships as well as sequences of episodes and is sensitive to similarity. It is also forgetful and reinforcable: a memory much like yours and mine. ------------------------------ Sunday 24, November 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room Harvard HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY "The flow of Information through Cortical Circuits" Terry Deacon Anthropology Department Harvard info: ETZI@OZ