Meeting Agenda

Wednesday, April 1, 1998

Location:

Computer Graphics Lab

Time:

1:30

Chair:

Glenn Evans

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:

???

Coffee hour next week:

???

3. Next meeting

Date:

Wednesday, April 8, 1998

Location:

DC 1304

Time:

1:30

Chair:

Patrick Gilhuly

Technical presentation:

Itai Danan

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:

1. Eric Hall (April 15th) 
2. Kirk Haller (April 22nd)
3. Mike Hammond (April 29nd)

Tech Presenters:

1. Ed Dengler (April 15th)
2. Glenn Evans (April 22nd)
3. Patrick Gilhuly (April 29nd)

5. Technical Presentations

Presenter:

Bill Cowan

Title: Generic Perspective

 

Abstract:

Artists and photographers communicate with images. Grice's first principle of co-operation in communication is informativeness: what is present is significant. When artists choose station points for perspective projection this principle is taken into account. This talk will outline possible implications for computer graphics.

6. General Discussion Items

7. Action List

• Deadline for submission of Theses/Essays for Spring Convocation 1998 is May 30, 1998.
• Alias/SideFX talks coming; send abstracts to Mike McCool

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

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Who:   S.  To,  graduate  student,  Dept.  Comp.  Sci.
Where: DC 1331
When:  Thursday, April 9, 1998, 1:30-2:30 p.m.

What:  MASTER'S THESIS PRESENTATION
"Passage-Based Chinese Text Retrieval".

Passage-based   retrieval  has  been  shown  to  be  an
effective  way  to  improve  retrieval  performance for
full-text   English   document   collections,  but  its
effectiveness on Chinese is not known.

Chinese  texts  are  written as continuous sequences of
characters  without  explicit word boundaries. A common
approach  to  indexing  Chinese  is to first divide the
texts  into overlapping fixed-size blocks of characters
and   index   each   block.   The  problems  with  this
character-based  approach  will  be  discussed.  I will
also  explain  why passage-based techniques can address
these  problems  and  show  how the MultiText retrieval
system,  a  passage-based retrieval system developed at
the  University  of  Waterloo,  can be used for Chinese
text retrieval.

To   evaluate   the   retrieval   performance  of  such
approaches, results of experiments with long queries as
well   as   short   queries   will   be  presented  and
explanations  to  the results will be provided. Most of
the  work that I will be presenting was done as part of
Waterloo's participation at TREC-6 Chinese track.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Who:   Mert Cramer
Where: MC5136
When:  Wed April 1, 3:30-4:30pm

What:
  The Loose Nut That Holds The Keyboard:

  The Effect of the Failures of Subtlety and the Violation of the Laws of
  Stussy, Freud and William of Occam on software use.

  ---------

  If I were to chase you with a meat cleaver, it is unlikely you would pay
  any attention to a performance of Aida, even if the cast were stark
  naked.  All of us have had experiences where the emotional state
  controlled the logical response.

  Are software systems any different from meat cleavers?  Nope!  The same
  organization of priorities affects how a person reacts to a software
  system.  The lack of recognition of the "emotional human" by designers
  and scientists limits the effectiveness of their efforts.
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10. Lab Cleanup