Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

lunch seminar:

CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date:  Monday,  November 9, 2009
Time:  11:45am – 1:15pm
Place:  Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area

Speaker:  Yorick Wilks,  Oxford Internet Institute

Title:  Internet Companions: technical and social issues

Abstract:  COMPANIONS is a concept, and the title of an EU project (http://www.companions-project.org) that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual ‘Companion’. This is intended as an agent or ‘presence’ that stays with the user for long periods of time, developing a relationship and ‘knowing’ its owners preferences and wishes. The Companion communicates with the user primarily through conversational speech. This talk describes the functionality of a Senior Companion (SC), one of two initial prototypes built in the first two years of the project. The Senior Companion provides a multimodal interface for eliciting and retrieving personal information from the elderly user through a conversation about their photographs. The Companion will, through conversation, elicit their life memories, often prompted by discussion of their photographs; the aim being that the Companion should come to know a great deal about its user, their tastes, likes, dislikes, emotional reactions etc, through long periods of conversation.

It is a further assumption that most life information will be stored on the internet (as in the Memories for Life project : http://www.memoriesforlife.org/) and  the SC is linked directly to photo inventories in Facebook,  to gain initial information about people and relationships, as well as to Wikipedia to enable it to respond about places mentioned in conversations about images. The overall aim of the SC, not yet achieved,  is to produce a coherent life narrative for its user from these materials, although its short term goals are also to assist, amuse, entertain and gain the trust of the user. The SC uses Information Extraction to get content from the speech input, rather than conventional parsing, and retains utterance content, extracted internet information and ontologies all in RDF formalism over which it does primitive reasoning about people and places. Even in its current state it raises issues about what kinds of entities people want to emphasize with and trust, once we go beyond humans, and how one can best synthesize personality and emotional rapport. If a Companion were to become the internet repository for someone’s whole life, to be a “cognitive prosthesis” for dealing with their own life’s records, what safeguards are essential, both technical and legal, concerning access to such a repository during the owner’s life and after?

Bio:  Yorick Wilks is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield. He received his MA and PhD (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, especially as applied to the future of the Internet: the Semantic Web and the possibility of Companion-like interfaces.

His recent books include: Natural language Processing and the Semantic Web (with Christopher Brewster, Now Books, 2009); Machine Translation–how far can it go (Springer, 2009); Artificial Believers (Erlbaum 1991), Electric Words (MIT, 1996) and Machine Conversations (Kluwer, 2001); and a new edited volume in 2009 from John Benjamins is: ‘Artificial Companions in Society: scientific, economic, psychological and philosophical perspectives’. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies.

lunch seminar:

CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date:  Monday,  November 2, 2009
Time:  11:45am – 1:15pm
Place:  Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area

Speaker:  Jeff Vaughan, Harvard CRCS

Title: Aura: Programming with Authorization and Audit

Abstract: Standard programming models do not provide direct ways of managing secret or untrusted data. This is a problem because programmers must use ad hoc methods to ensure that secrets are not leaked and, conversely, that tainted data is not used to make critical decisions. This talk will advocate integrating cryptography and language-based analyses in order to build programming environments for declarative information security, in which high-level specifications of confidentiality and integrity constraints are automatically enforced in hostile execution environments.

I will introduce describes Aura, a family of programing languages, which integrate functional programming, access control via authorization logic, automatic audit logging, and confidentially via encryption. Aura’s programming model marries an expressive, principled way to specify security policies with a practical policy-enforcement methodology that is well-suited for auditing access grants and protecting secrets.

Aura security policies are expressed as propositions in an authorization logic. Such logics are suitable for discussing delegation, permission, and other security-relevant concepts. Aura’s (dependent) type system cleanly integrates standard data types, like integers, with proofs of authorization-logic propositions; this lets programs manipulate authorization proofs just like ordinary values. In addition, security-relevant implementation details—like the creation of audit trails or the cryptographic representation of language constructs—can be handled automatically with little or no programmer intervention.

Bio: Jeff Vaughan’s research lies at the intersection of computer security, programming languages, and formal methods. He is particularly interested in access control, information flow, the theory and application of dependent types, and mechanized metatheory. Jeff will be receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.