Meeting Agenda
Wednesday, January 22nd, 1997
- Location:
- DC 1304
- Time:
- 1:30 PM
- Chair:
- Ryan Gunther
1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions
2. Coffee Hour
- Coffee hour this week:
- Liddy Olds
- Coffee hour next week:
- To be determined
3. Next meeting
- Date:
- January 29th, 1997
- Location:
- DC 1304
- Time:
- 1:30 PM
- Chair:
- Mike Hammond
- Technical presentation:
- Ryan Gunther
4. Forthcoming
- Chairs:
- Mike Hammond
- Pete Harwood
- Gilles Khouzam
- Tech Presenters:
- Ryan Gunther
- Mike Hammond
- Pete Harwood
5. Technical Presentation
- Presenter:
- Patrick Gilhuly
- Title:
- Unknown at this time
- Abstract:
-
Unknown at this time
6. General Discussion Items
None indicated
7. Action List
None
8. Director's Meeting
9. Seminars
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS SEMINAR
-Wednesday, January 22, 1997
Paul A.S. Ward, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci.,
Univ. Waterloo, will speak on ``Algorithms for Causal
Message Ordering in Distributed Systems''.
TIME: 2:30-3:30 p.m.
ROOM: DC 1304
ABSTRACT
Causal message ordering is a partial ordering of
messages in a distributed computing environment. It
places a restriction on communication between processes
by requiring that if the transmission of message m to
i
process p necessarily preceded the transmission of
k
message m to the same process, then the delivery of
j
these messages to that process must be ordered such
that m is delivered before m . In this talk we
i j
evaluate several algorithms for ensuring causal message
ordering in a distributed system. We analyze the
algorithms based on two orthogonal axes of
optimization, which are message size overhead and non-
causal message latency. The best algorithm in each
class is detailed, as is some significant prior art
that led to the discovery of these algorithms. The
minimum message size overhead achievable is O(1) but at
the expense of PxT non-causal latency, where P is the
w
number of processes in the system and T is the worst
w
message time between a process and any other process.
By contrast, the non-causal latency can be as low as
2
zero, but with a message size overhead of O(P ).
CASI/SEDS UW Presents...
A double video presentation!
NASA: Space Shuttle: A remarkable flying machine
and
Canada in Space: 25 Years and Counting
Watch the maiden flight of the space shuttle Columbia, and
see where Canada stands in space!
Thursday, Jan. 23
12:30 - 1:30 pm
DC 1304
Everyone is welcome!
SIGGraph Video Night
Interested in Computer Graphics?
Enjoy watching state-of-the-art Animation?
SIGGraph Video Night
Featuring some truly amazing computer animations from Siggraph '96.
Thursday, January 23, 1997
19:00
DC 1302
Tea and doughnaughts will be served.
Members only.
$2 memberships will be sold at the door.
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A Student Chapter of the ACM
CS Colloquium Series
Computer Science Department
University of Waterloo
HealthDoc: A document tailoring system for health education
By: Dr. Chrysanne DiMarco
Of: Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Date: Tuesday, January 28, 1997
Time: 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Place: Davis Centre, Room 1304
Abstract:
Many studies have shown that health-education messages and patient
instructions are more effective when closely tailored to the particular
condition and characteristics of the individual recipient. But in
situations where many factors interact -- for example, in explaining
the pros and cons of hormone replacement therapy -- the number of
different combinations is far too large for a set of appropriately
tailored messages to be produced in advance.
The HealthDoc project is presently developing natural language software
systems for producing, on demand, health-information and
patient-education brochures that are customized to the medical and
personal characteristics of an individual patient.
For each topic, HealthDoc requires a 'master document' written by an
expert on the subject with the help of a program called an authoring
tool'. The writer decides upon the basic elements of the text --
clauses and sentences -- and the patient conditions under which each
element should be included in the output. The program assists the
writer in building correctly structured master-document fragments and
annotating them with the relationships and conditions for inclusion.
When a clinician wishes to give a patient a particular brochure from
HealthDoc, she will select it from a menu and specify the name of the
patient. HealthDoc will use information from the patient's on-line
medical record to then create and print a version of the document
appropriate to that patient, by selecting the appropriate pieces of
material. Then, HealthDoc's `sentence planner', a program with expert
linguistic knowledge, will perform the necessary operations to combine
the selected pieces into a single, coherent text.
The talk will be followed by a demonstration of our current prototype
authoring tool, tailoring engine, and sentence planner. We will also
show the first implementation of our WebbeDoc system, which currently
customizes a Web document describing the HealthDoc project.
Biography:
Chrysanne DiMarco is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the
University of Waterloo. Her research interests are computational
linguistics and artificial intelligence, with particular emphases in
computational stylistics, natural language generation, and medical
informatics. Prof DiMarco's MSc thesis (Toronto, 1983) dealt with the
application of artificial intelligence methods to intelligent hospital
information systems, and her PhD thesis (Toronto, 1990) proposed a
formalization of syntactic style for use in natural language processing
systems.
Everyone is welcome
10. Lab Cleanup (until 12:30 or 5 minutes)