[boston-lisp-meeting-register] Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B

[Erica L Cooper]

hi,

I would like to RSVP for this talk.

thanks,
erica


On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Faré wrote:

> Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B
> Gregory Marton will give a talk about the meanings of English words as programs.
> http://fare.livejournal.com/136992.html
>
> Gregory will introduce a way of thinking about the meanings of English
> words as programs (c.f. SHRDLU), cast the problem of language learning
> as a search through the space of possible programs, and show first
> steps in learning. Gregory has created a system called Sepia that
> makes it relatively easy to write small lexicons that implement some
> semantic theory for a domain. Applications that Gregory and several
> colleagues have had fun with include:
>
>    * understanding dates and times and other measures: "next Wednesday"
>    * finding and linking names of people, organizations, places
>    * telling a robot what to do with stuff on a table: "touch the red one"
>    * asking about spatial paths in video: "show people entering the kitchen"
>    * a toy gossip world: "John loves Mary" "Who does not hate Mary?"
>    * a little number theory: "18 is twice the sum of its digits"
>
> These applications are inherently brittle, and manual construction
> gets harder as the application grows. The research goal is to
> construct new meaning programs with little human input, or with input
> from non-programmers. Given a problem phrase, Sepia uses standard ways
> to find similar words that it knows. Its current approach is to take
> the meanings of those words and makes small changes, looking for a
> combination that produces the target meaning.
>
> Both the system as a whole and the language of semantics are
> implemented in the GNU/Guile flavor of Scheme.
>
> Gregory Marton is a PhD student in computer science at MIT, and this
> is his dissertation topic. His first language is Hungarian, and since
> meeting English at age eight, he has wondered about meanings and how
> to learn language. He has a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in
> Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park, 1999.
>
> *
>
> The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800
> (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.
>
> As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.
> This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge.
>
> MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34
>
> Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA
>
> Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT
> for welcoming us.
>
> * *
>
> Buffet: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclosure: I
> work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our Monthly
> Boston Lisp Meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. We
> appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos
> you have, so that we can order the right amount of food. Tell us by
> sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We
> won't send any acknowledgment unless requested; importantly, we'll
> keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any
> such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors.
>
> * * *
>
> The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on October 27th had over 30
> participants. Tim McNerney gave copious background on the Thinking
> Machines Corporation and its line of massively parallel computer as an
> introduction to his work on automated verification of a compiler
> optimization pass through abstract interpretation. Both the
> presentation and the following discussion were very lively.
>
> We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all
> the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html
>
> For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts
> related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link:
> http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to
> our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting
>
> Please forward this information to people you think would be
> interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message
> multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list
> where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should.
> Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.
>
> [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
> When all lawful citizens are disarmed, will we have an omnipresent police
> state to protect us from armed criminals?
>
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