ISD Retreat Radisson Hotel Santa Barbara

Varun Ratnakar, Stephan Munteanu, Radu Soricut, Michael Fleischman, Kenji Yamada, Hal Daume, Lewis Johnson, Tom Russ, Ed Hovy, Deepak Ravichandran, Andrew Marshall, Erin Shaw, Paul Rosenbloom, Yigal Arens, Hans Chalupsky, Jim Blythe, Chin Yew Lin, Aram Galstyan, Craig Knoblock, Geraldine Clarebout, Wei-Min Shen, Kristina Lerman, Richard Whitney, Kate LaBore, Jihie Kim, Jean Oh

Ed Hovy — Married! By Yigal Arens On July 19, Ed Hovy got married to Louke Van Wensveen in the small Dutch town of Vaals, just across the border from the Ger-man city of Aachen. I know, because I was there—both as a guest and acting offi-cially as a witness. Louke is a professor of theology at

Loyola Marymount Uni-versity just up the hill in the direction of the air-port, and Ed is—well, you know Ed. As many of you are aware, Ed and Louke have already been living together for quite some time in Westchester, to-gether wth Louke’s two children from a previous marriage. In the wed-

(Continued on page 14)

A moment from the wedding ceremony itself. You can see Ed and Louke, just about to seal things with a kiss.

Special points of interest:

• Calendar of upcoming events • Guess Who!! • ISD Retreat photos • Photos from party for Ed and Hans

ISD Tidbits 2

New Faces 4

ISD Publications 7

Look Mom Trains!! 8

AI Movie Review 10

From the offices of AI Grads 19

Inside this issue:

Th

e I

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iDe

r

US

C I

NF

OR

MA

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SC

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NC

ES

IN

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Volume 7, Issue 1

November 1, 2001

(Continued on page 10)

21 inches tall. Mom and baby are doing great!! Ed Hovy became President of the International Association of Machine Translation (IAMT) in September, for 2001-03. Clara Owen Ross was born to Kris-tina Lerman and Richard Ross on Friday, October 23, 6:54 am. She weighed 6 lbs 8 oz and was 19 ¾ inches tall. All are healthy and well (but the grownups are somewhat tired!) ☺

Craig Knoblock promoted to Senior Project Leader May 2001. Stacy Marsella promoted to Project Leader June 2001. Lauri Grier promoted to Administrative Services Co-ordinator II July 2001. Theodore “Theo” Jacob Phil-pot was born to Janna and Andrew Philpot on Thurs-day, September 27, 2:58 am. He weighted 9 lbs and was

Page 2 THE INSIDER

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

1 KR ‘02 paper

submission

2 3

4 5 AAMAS ’02

abstract submis-sion

6 AAMAS ‘02

paper submis-sion

7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 Andrew’s Birth-

day!

15 16 AIPS ‘02 paper

submission

17

18 19 20 21 22 ISI HOLIDAY

23 ISI HOLIDAY

24

25 26 Ulf’s Brithday!

27 28 29 30

November 200 1 Schedule of Events

· November 1, 2001 – KR 2002: paper sub-mission deadline

· November 5, 2001 – AAMAS 2002: Dead-line for electronic abstracts of submitted papers

· November 6, 2001 – AAMAS 2002: Dead-line for electronic submission of papers

· November 14, 2001 — Andrew Philpot’s birthday!

· November 16, 2001 — AIPS 2002: paper submission deadline

· November 22—23, 2001 — ISI HOLDIAY · November 26, 2001 — Ulf Hermjakob’s

birthday!

ISD Tidbits

Kristina Lerman’s daughter... Clara Ross Theo Philpot

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1 Page 3

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

1 ISI HOLIDAY

2 3 4 5

6 7 AAMAS ‘02

proposals

8 9 10 11 CGF-BR ‘02 abstracts due

12

13 14 IUI 2001

Kevin’s Birthday!

15 AAMAS ‘02 notifica-

tion COLING ‘02 proposals ICRA ‘02 notification

IUI 2001

16 IUI 2001

17 IUI 2001

18 19

20 21 AIPS ‘02 notifica-

tion AAAI ‘02 elec-

tronic submission

22 AAAI ‘02 paper

submission

23 24 Deepak’s Birth-

day!

25 ACL ‘02 paper

registration

26

27 28 29 30 31

January 2002

Schedule of Events

· December 13, 2001 – Fanny Mak and Paul Rosenbloom’s birthday!

· December 24—25, 2001 – ISI HOLIDAY · December 25, 2001 – Wei-Min Shen’s

birthday! · December 31, 2001 – ISI HOLIDAY · January 1, 2002 – ISI HOLIDAY · January 7, 2002 – AAMAS 2002: Deadline

for workshop and tutorial proposals · January 11, 2002 – CGF-BR 2002: Ab-

stracts due · January 14, 2002 – Kevin Knight’s birth-

day! · January 14—17, 2002 – International

Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2001: Santa Fe, New Mexico IUI 2001 is the annual meeting of the intel-ligent interfaces community and serves as the principal international forum for report-ing outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces.

· January 15, 2002 – AAMAS 2002: Paper acceptance notifications sent to authors

– COLING 2002: Deadline for Workshop Proposals

– IEEE ICRA 2002: notification of paper acceptance

· January 21, 2002 — AIPS 2002: authors notified

– AAAI 2002: Electronic submission of title page, abstract and paper

· January 22, 2002 — AAAI 2002: Submis-sion of two paper copies to AAAI office

· January 24, 2002 — Deepak Ravi-chandran’s birthday!

· January 25, 2002 — ACL 2002: Paper registration deadline

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 Fanny and Paul’s

Birthday!

14 15

16 17

18 19 20

21 22

23 24 ISI HOLIDAY

25 ISI HOLIDAY

Wei-Min’s Birth-day!

26 27 28 29

30 31 ISI HOLIDAY

December 200 1

GERALDINE CLARE-BOUT

CLAREBOU@ISI.EDU

I was born and lived for a short time in Johan-nesburg, South - Africa, but have no memories of that. When I was six months old my parents moved back to Belgium where I have lived my whole live. Currently I live in Leuven, a small University city in the Flemish part of Belgium. I’ve studied educational science at the Univer-sity of Leuven and after having my master de-gree I started working at the Center for Instruc-tional Psychology and Technology at the Uni-versity of Leuven on a European research pro-ject about collaborative learning in a rich tech-nological environment. After finishing this project, which took two years, I stayed at the Center and have been doing smaller project since then, such as the evaluation of a com-puter-based training program for Tropical Medicine. In September last year I decided that I also wanted to do a PhD about the use of support tools in open learning environments and that’s what brought me to ISI. I would like to gain insight in the possibilities of animated peda-gogical agents to provide support on a meta-cognitive (monitoring) level. Supporting stu-dents on that level might encourage students to make optimal use of support tools embedded in the environment. I’m staying for three months at ISI to find out what the different possibilities are for me to do a study with pedagogical agents. Half of December I go back to Belgium to start a new project on instructional beliefs of students about guided self-study. I’ll continue working on my PhD while doing this project.

KARYN CORDOVA CORDOVA@USC.EDU

Hi! My name is Karyn and I am currently on my second year in the Master program at USC. I am working with Erin Shaw and Kate La-Bore. I obtained my bachelors degree in Com-puter Science at De La Salle University in Ma-nila. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I worked in the industry for a couple of years. My job gave me the chance to meet people from different parts of the world and to live in different cities such as Chicago and Mel-bourne, Australia. My background has given me the chance to learn different languages and dialects, and hopefully I will get the chance to learn new ones. I love food, coffee, nature, chocolate, movies and Disneyland among other things.

HAL DAUME HDAUME@ISI.EDU

SWM seeks graduate degree in creative, stimu-lating environment. Degree environment should be fun and supportive and share extra-curricular interests with him, such as: rock climbing, aikido, hiking and skiing. Degree must be terminal and in the Computer Science discipline, with a research focus in natural lan-guage processing. His interests don't lie just in natural language processing but rather extend to equally nerdy things like syntactic theory (especially Optimality Theory) and theoretical computer science (stuff like approximation algorithms and complexity theory). Respon-dents should realize that he has spend the past three years of his life getting his undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon University and should not mind the fact that he is temporarily quite pale. His current work is doing summari-zation-based research with Daniel Marcu in the Intelligent Systems Division at ISI. Respon-dents should reply by emailing him at hdaume@isi.edu, visiting his web page (www.isi.edu/~hdaume) or, for the truly adventurous, visiting him at his office on the 9th floor, room

(Continued on page 5)

Page 4

New Faces

THE INSIDER

GERALDINE CLAREBOUT ROOM 950

KARYN CORDOVA ROOM 950

HAL DAUME ROOM 957

KWANG-ROK HAN ROOM 911

Page 5 VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1

STEFAN MUNTEANU ROOM 946

PAUL SCERRI ROOM 924

SNEHAL THAKKAR ROOM 910

#957..

KWANG-ROK HAN KWANG@ISI.EDU

I am a visiting scholar of the Natural Language Processing group of the Intelligent Systems Division for about one year and also an associ-ate professor at the Department of Computer Engineering in Hoseo Uniersity, Korea. I received my B.A. degree in Electronic Engi-neering from Inha University and M.S. and Ph.D. in Information Engineering from Inha Uni-versity. My research has been in the area of natural language processing, especially Korean language processing. These days, I’m interested in multilingual text summarization and QA system, and want to study on these subjects with Ed Hovy and his project team. I think it’s a good chance to improve my re-search and experience a new environment. I live in Torrance with my family.

STEFAN MUNTEANU DRAGOS@ISI.EDU

I am Dragos Stefan Munteanu; although Dra-gos is my official first name, I go by Stefan (thereby creating quite a bit of confusion). I was born in Bucharest, Romania, and stayed there until I got my BS from the University of Mathematics. I then went to the University of Iowa, where I joined the M.S. in Computer Science program, working in formal meth-ods applied to compiler construction. I liked it there, Iowa City is a nice town, fairly lively and liberal especially for a Midwestern town. The weather can get rather extreme sometimes, but there's a good side to it, you get to witness some quite impressive displays of mother na-ture's wrath. In the summer of 2001, when I had just fin-ished the M.S at Iowa, I came to ISI for a sum-mer internship. I liked it so much here that I ended up transferring to USC for a Ph.D. I am working in the Natural Language Processing group, with Daniel Marcu (who, besides being a fellow countryman, is a very cool guy) and Kevin Knight (who is not a fellow countryman but is a equally cool guy). And even if the week may be loaded with work, on Fridays there's always the happy hour on the Venice beach oceanfront to boost you up for the next round!

FENG PAN PAN@ISI.EDU

Hi! My name is Feng Pan. I’m currently pursu-ing my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at USC, and I’m a research assistant working with Dr. Knoblock. I came from Beijing, China. I really love Beijing. I received my B.S. degree in Computer Science with great distinc-tion from Clarkson University, NY. Clarkson University is located in Potsdam, which is a very quiet and small town in the very northern part of New York State. In fact, I transferred from Beijing Normal University to Clarkson University when I was a junior. So you can see that I have been traveling a lot – from Beijing to Potsdam, then come to LA. My favorite sport is ping-pong. If you would like to know more about me or about Chinese culture/language, please feel free to drop by my office (943) or email me (fpan@usc.edu).

PAUL SCERRI SCERRI@ISI.EDU

Hi, my name is Paul Scerri (pronounced like the drink). I've come to ISI from sunny Austra-lia, via the arctic greyness of Linkoping, Swe-den (don't tell anyone from Sweden I said that!). I finished my undergraduate studies at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia in 1997. For my undergraduate thesis I built the first of four "Headless Chickens" RoboCup simulation teams that competed in world champion-ships. Working with RoboCup ignited my in-terest in research and, after some fortunate breaks, I was soon off to Sweden for graduate studies. After four fantastic years studying in Sweden and travelling around Europe (to maintain a healthy balance!) I have almost finished my PhD studies and have come to ISI as a post-doc. In Sweden, I continued working with intelligent agents, initially focusing on end-user specification then on adjustable auton-omy. We built an end user system called EASE which allowed relative endusers to spec-ify agents for both RoboCup and an aircombat domain. The adjustable autonomy aspect al-lowed the user to "help" the agents at run-time. Hopefully, I will be flying back to Swe-den before the end of the year to defend my thesis on how to build agents for systems with adjustable autonomy. In the first half of 2000 I spent six great

(Continued on page 16)

FENG PAN ROOM 943

Page 6

Guess Who!!

QUESTIONS ISDer # 1 ISDer #2 ISDer #3 ISDer #4

1. What book are you reading now? Romanian Grammar “Not Your Mother’s life: Changing the Rules of Work, Love, and Family”, by Joan K. Peters

“The Journal of Anna Frank”

“Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse

2. What’s on your mouse pad? Sun mouse netbank.com (online banks are great! I also recom-mend pcbanker.com)

some flying man :) A corporate logo

3. Least favorite smells: seafood Vomit. I always seemed to get stuck cleaning up after my younger siblings when I was growing up

My husband’s socks after a good hike...

burning rubber...

4. Least favorite taste: seafood liver cucumber overdone spaghetti...

5. Favorite sound: music Soundtrack to (new) Sbrina movie

jackpot sound (in Las Vegas)

sound of rain hitting the window...

6. Favorite color: blue blue red, but I’ve been told it should be blue

black, maybe,

7. How many rings before you answer the phone?

1-4 few as possible In the office… one.. at home.. I never answer

depends...

8. Favorite foods: variatio delectat, but cer-tainly not without Kassler

BBQ chips, ice cream, potatoes and gravy, french fries, cauliflower

mexican middle-eastern food

9. Chocolate or vanilla? all of the above vanilla chocolate chocolate

10. Do you like to drive fast? Yes, in moderation not per se, but I hate spending extra time getting from here to there.

No Yes, especially in the ISI parking structure

11. What type was your first car? yellow Citroen Honda Civic Oltcit… you probably never heard of this :)

77 Oldsmobile station-wagon, paid $100

12 If you could meet one person dead or alive, who would it be?

many, including Leonardo da Vinci

Jesus Christ Wesley Snipes Buddha

13. What is your zodiac sign? Sagittarius Virgo Pisces Cancer

14. Do you eat the stems of broccoli? rather not Yes I very, very rarely eat broccoli

No

15. Favorite movies: documentaries Gone with the Wind, Life is Beautiful, It’s a Wonder-ful Life

Mediteraneo, Life Is Beautiful, Usual Sus-pects, Nikita

Forest Gump, Under-ground, The Last Tempta-tion of Christ, Trainspot-ting, etc.

16. Favorite type of music: classical classical, foreign, or elec-tric

reggae Hard to specify… Beetho-ven, Dead Kennedies, and many others in-between...

Four members of the division were selected to be featured in this sec-tion. Try to determine who these individuals are based on the an-

swers they provided. The identities of these individuals are located on page 18

THE INSIDER

Page 7

ISD Publications

José Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock. Planning by Re-writing. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 15. pp 207-261, 2001. Craig A. Knoblock, Steve Minton, Jose Luis Ambite, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, and Martin Frank. Mixed-Initiative, Multi-source Information Assistants. The Tenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW10), Hong Kong, 2001. José Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Mohammad R. Ko-lahdouzan, Maria Muslea, Cyrus Shahabi and Snehal Thakkar. The WorldInfo Assistant: Spatio-Temporal Infor-mation Integration on the Web. Proceedings of the 27th In-ternational Conference on Very Large Data Bases (System Demonstration), Rome, Italy, September 2001. José Luis Ambite, Cyrus Shahabi, Rolfe R. Schmidt, and Andrew Philpot. Fast Approximate Evaluation of OLAP Queries for Integrated Statistical Data. Proceedings of the First National Conference on Digital Government (dg.o 2001), Redondo Beach, May 2001. Ed uard Hovy, Andrew Philpot, José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Judith Klavans, Walter Bourne, and Deniz Saroz. Data Acquisition and Integration in the DGRC's Energy Data Collection Project. Proceedings of the First National Confer-ence on Digital Government (dg.o 2001), Redondo Beach, May 2001. José Luis Ambite, Yigal Arens, Eduard Hovy, Andrew Philpot, Luis Gravano, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, and Judith Klavans. Simplifying Data Access: The Energy Data Collec-tion Project. IEEE Computer 34 (2), Special Issue on Digital Government, February 2001.

Craig A. Knoblock, Jose Luis Ambite, Steven Minton, Cyrus Shahabi, Mohammad Kolahdouzan, Maria Muslea, Jean Oh, and Snehal Thakkar. Integrating the World: The WorldInfo Assistant. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IC-AI), Las Vegas, 2001. Jose Luis Ambite, Craig A. Knoblock, Ion Muslea, and Andrew Philpot. Compiling Source Descriptions for Effi-cient and Flexible Information Integration. Journal of Intelli-gent Information Systems, 16(2):149-187, 2001. Craig A. Knoblock, Steven Minton, Jose Luis Ambite, Naveen Ashish, Ion Muslea, Andrew G. Philpot, and Sheila Tejada. The Ariadne Approach to Web-based Information Integration. International the Journal on Cooperative Infor-mation Systems (IJCIS) 10 (1-2) Special Issue on Intelligent Information Agents: Theory and Applications, pp 145-169, 2001. Ulf Hermjakob. Parsing and Question Classification for Question Answering. Proceedings of the Workshop on Open-Domain Question Answering at the ACL-2001 Conference. Toulouse, France. (http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/papers/acl01-qa-parsing.pdf) E.H. Hovy, L. Gerber, U. Hermjakob, C.-Y. Lin, D. Ravi-chandran. 2001. Toward Semantics-Based Answer Pinpointing. Proceedings of the DARPA Human Language Technology conference (HLT). (http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/projects/webclopedia/pubs/01hlt.pdf) Hovy, E.H., N. Ide, and R.E. Frederking (editors). 2001. Mul-tilingual Information Management. Pisa, Italy: Giardini Edi-tori e Stampatori and Kluwer Academic Publishers. (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/mlim/). Hovy, E.H., U. Hermjakob, and C.-Y. Lin. 2001. The Use of external Knowledge in Factoid QA. Proceedings of the TREC-10 Conference. NIST, Gaithersburg, MD. November 2001.

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1

Page 8 THE INSIDER

tion problem. It involves a grid of radar sensors, and targets moving around in that grid. The sensors collaborate with each other to track those moving tar-gets. While replicating this setup in our lab, it was not too difficult to install radar sensors; but how to get our sample target to move? So Milind came up with this idea of using a small toy train, and mounting our target on its top in order to make it mo-bile. Jay went ahead and got the train. It was great fun setting it up in our lab and mak-ing sure that it worked. We took extra efforts to ensure that its diesel horn worked as well as described, and every-body from the team got a turn at it. Jay even displayed this train during one of the demos that he gave. If you observe its engine, you'll see a shiny copper thing

mounted on its top. That's the target we use for tracking. Behnam Salemi was most kind to handle the technical issues of its mounting. So now, when you see this train running in my office between

some odd looking boxes (the sensors) you need wonder no longer... If you feel like check-ing it out, you are most welcome to drop by 949 and I'll be happy to assist you! I knew that research is interest-ing, but had no idea it could be so much fun! Sometimes I wonder... if a train today, what next ?

I'm sure the future would be much more fantastic than my imagination. irst glance, this new addition may not appear to be very re-search oriented. Because it's a small toy train! To be more precise, it's a minia-ture Southern Pacific freight set (for those interested, it's O-27 scale; although I'm not sure what that means). It comeswith an RS-3 diesel locomotive, diesel

(Continued on page 19)

By Shriniwas Kulkarni If you happen to pass by of-fice 949 (a name-plate

near its door annoucing it to be Multi-Agent Lab) during your daily course of activities, you may have noticed a recent addi-tion to its contents. However, at fIf you happen to pass by office 949 (a nameplate near its door announcing it to be Multi-Agent Lab) during your daily course of activities, you may have noticed a recent addition to its contents. However, at first glance, this new addition may not appear to be very research oriented. Because it's a small toy train! To be more precise, it's a minia-ture Southern Pacific freight set (for those interested, it's O-27 scale; although I'm not sure what that means). It comes with an RS-3 diesel locomotive, diesel horn and operat-ing headlight. Now you may wonder how this is related to our research at all. You see, we are solving a re-source alloca-

The target is mounted on a moving train.

Shriniwas Kulkarni

LOOK MOM TRAINS!!

Sensor node

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1 Page 9

By Yigal Arens “Creepy and annoying”, “preposterous science”, “over the top, long monologs”—choice quotes from the ISI reviewers of the Spielberg/Kubrick film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. During the months preceding the release of the film, many in the AI world, including us at ISI, were trying to find out its plot of and to figure out if the film would be good or bad for the real AI. In response to persistent hounding, the film’s distributors invited Yolanda Gil, Stacy Marsella, Jeff Rickel and myself to an early screening at the Di-rector’s Guild theater in West Hollywood. We didn’t like the movie. We thought it was it too long, that the science underlying it was not well thought out and that it often simply made no sense. I was very surprised that many professional reviewers ac-tually thought the film was good!

At any rate, those of us who pre-viewed the movie provided a public service to the rest of you here by criticizing it to everyone who would listen. That way, when you went to see it—if you work in AI you have to see a movie named AI, no?—your ex-pectations were sufficiently low-ered so that you probably ended up enjoying it… We at ISI did benefit from the brief increase in the visibility of our field. Several of us got to be interviewed on TV, radio and in newspapers where we had a chance to bring our work to the attention of an audience that might not normally have been aware of it. If you’re interested in one slightly more serious thought about the movie, here goes. One of the main questions raised by the film is, what, if anything, distinguishes a human from a ro-bot in principle. The film ap-pears to claim that it is the abil-ity to experience emotions, but it

never bothers to clarify what constitutes an emotion. Worse, it is inconsistent. While none of the robots other than David (the child robot) claim to love any-one, many clearly care about David. Is that not an emotional response? Frankly, despite all the talk about how David is the first robot to have emotions, other than annoyingly demand-ing that his mother love him, he doesn’t behave much differently than many of the other robots. What mainly distinguishes David from the others is that he has a decent and human-like body, not anything about his be-havior. The quality of “having emotions” seems to be some-thing the filmmakers bestowed on the David character only by virtue of their say-so. So is a robot essentially different than a human other than in its physical makeup? A.I. Artificial Intelligence certainly contributes nothing to answering the ques-tion.

A.I. Movie Review

(of teamwork). The four panels provided an opportunity for con-trasting points of view. "Ontologies Strike Back" covered all the major is-sues in ontologies, from knowledge acquisition to conceptual problems to semi-automated learning. In "Futures for CS and AI" the panelists outlined their visions for what's coming, why it's coming, and what makes it hard. "AI on Su-per, Molecular, and Quantum Computers" gave an interesting

glimpse into the experiments being run on very large amounts of data on USC's cluster of almost 200 con-nected computers, suggesting even that some problems may be solved by search over a bil-lion words. And the panel "Preparing for Life after Graduate School" provided very useful information to stu-

dents, including hints on writing a cv, doing the interview, and handling the employer's ques-tions. Two poster sessions gave everyone a chance to de-scribe their own work and to learn about the work of half of the others. Again the range of projects and topics showed how much expertise we have on the 9th floor. But if we needed more proof of the variety, the talent show af-

ter dinner provided it: Hans playing blues, Lewis singing arias, Daniel and Ed and Lewis doing a piano trio, Richard Ross and Kristina showing Richard's photographs, Wei-Min's son playing part of a piano sonata...and the unforgettable ISD Movie Posters! (see page 18) In the Social Program game show, hosts Jay Modi and Greg Barish gave people a chance to strut their AI knowledge and their drawing skills. And the eventual AI Survivor, David Py-nadath, deserves a special place in the pantheon of the Gods (or at least a laurel wreath around his photo on the notice board).

The pro-gram is available online: http://www.isi.edu/~fanny/isd-retreat/program/.

(Continued on page 19)

By Ed Hovy The 2001 ISD Retreat took place on October 4 and 5 in the Radis-son Hotel in Santa Barbara. A great place for a retreat!--we had two rooms to ourselves, upstairs for meetings and downstairs for food. And across the road: on one side the beach and on the other open areas for soccer and other sports. What could be bet-ter? The program was pretty packed...there's so much going on in the Division that even with only 20-minute talks, fewer than half the division members got a chance to describe their re-

search. But we had a chance to sample the smorgasbord of top-ics, from knowledge acquisition and planning to text summariza-tion and educational software agents. It was very interesting to see the wide variety of methodologies and approaches adopted in the Division, including large-scale learning (of Machine Translation knowledge), hardware (digital hormones for robots), software design (for planning systems, etc.), and computational theory

Page 10 THE INSIDER

ISD Retreat

William Wong, Daniel Marcu’s graduate student, setting his poster.

Yigal Arens starts the program.

View from the meeting room at the Radisson Hotel Santa Barbara (in case some of you missed it!)

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1 Page 11

isd retreat photos

Project Leaders Daniel Marcu, Ed Hovy, Yolanda Gil, Kevin Knight, Paul

Rosenbloom, Lewis Johnson, Craig Knoblock, Yigal Arens, Wei-Min Shen, Hans Chalupsky

Graduate Students Parag Samdadiya, Yaser Alonaizan, Jay Modi, Michael Fleischman, Alex Fraser, Snehal Thakkar, Andrew Koehn, Radu Soricut, Hal Daume, Greg Barish, Sheila Tejada, Stefan Munteanu, Jafar Adibi, Kenji Yamada, Varun Ratna-kar

Page 12

Expect Yolanda Gil, Varun Ratnakar, Jim Blythe, Jihie Kim

Ariadne Parag Samdadiya, Jean Oh, Sheila Tejada, Jose-Luis Ambite, Greg Barish, Maria Muslea, Snehal Thakkar,

Craig Knoblock

CARTE Andrew Marshall, Jeff Rickel, Geraldine Clarebout, Kate LaBore, Lewis Johnson,

Erin Shaw, Stacy Marsella

THE INSIDER

KR / Loom Hans Chalupsky and Tom Russ

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1 Page 13

Admin Staff Kary Lau, Liz Hall, Lauri Grier, Fanny Mak

Natural Language Kevin Knight, Jae Hoon Kim, Ed Hovy, Radu Soricut, Hal Duame, Andrew Kohen, Michael Fleischman, Alex Fraser, Chin-Yew Lin, Yaser Alonaizan, Deepak Ravichandran,

Kenji Yamada, Stephan Munteanu, William Wong, Uli Ger-mann, Kwang Rok Han, Daniel Marcu, Irene Geary, Ulf

Hermjakob

Agents David Pynadath, Wei-Min Shen, Paul Scerri,

Jay Modi, Sattiraju Prabhakar

Additional photos available: http://www.isi.edu/~d3admin/isd-retreat/

Ed and Louke!

Page 14 THE INSIDER

(Continued from page 1)

ding photo you can see Ed and Louke just about to seal the deal with a kiss, flanked by the kids (out of frame), who appeared to be quite excited by the whole event. The wedding was not at all what I

had ex-pected. For one thing, the official cere-mony was held mostly in English. It’s true that many of the family and guests did not speak Dutch, but we were, after all, in a non-English speaking country

and a local official was conducting the ceremony.

And then there was the party. I don’t know why, but I was prepared for a straight-laced and prim affair. Perhaps it was the setting—a former estate, then a religious girls school, and now a hotel (see photo). It wasn’t like that at all. At different times, the family and guests donned local costumes, in-

cluding wooden clogs, sang traditional songs and others written specially for the occa-sions, and reminisced about time they had spent in prison.

Hovy Wedding, cont.

The ceremony

Page 14 VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1

Page 16 THE INSIDER

DIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dia-logue, Eurospeech 2001, Denmark, September 2001. Ulrich Germann, Michael Jahr, Kevin Knight, Daniel Marcu, and Kenji Yamada (2001). Fast Decoding and Optimal Decoding for Machine Trans-lation. Proceedings of ACL-2001, Tou-louse, France, July 2001. Best Paper Award. Daniel Marcu. Towards a Unified Ap-proach to Memory and Statistical-Based Machine Translation. Proceed-ings of ACL-2001, Toulouse, France,

July 2001. Jill Burstein, Daniel Marcu, Slava An-dreyev, and Martin Chodorow. To-wards Automatic Classification of Dis-course Elements in Essays. Proceed-ings of ACL-2001, Toulouse, France, July 2001. Daniel Marcu and Laurie Gerber. An Inquiry into the Nature of Multidocu-ment Abstracts, Extracts, and Their Evaluation. Proceedings of the NAACL-2001 Workshop on Automatic Summarization, Pittsburgh, PA, June 3, 2001.

Lynn Carlson, John M. Conroy, Daniel Marcu, Dianne P. O'Leary, Mary Ellen Okurowski, Anthony Taylor, and Wil-liam Wong (2001). An Empirical Study of the Relation Between Ab-stracts, Extracts, and the Discourse Structure of Texts. Proceedings of the Document Understanding Conference (DUC-2001), New Orleans, LA, Sept 13-14. Lynn Carlson, Daniel Marcu, and Mary Ellen Okurowski (2001). Build-ing a Discourse-Tagged Corpus in the Framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Proceedings of the 2nd SIG-

Publications, cont.

tern. On my first day my boss, showed me how to open some Oracle developer tools that I had never seen before, how to use ftp and gave me three different programs to work on for the rest of the week. I bugged my co-workers and fellow interns for a long time and slept on the Oracle course books on the weekends. All the work paid off in December 1998, when I became Oracle Certified Application Developer and Micro-soft Certified Professional (SQL server 6.5 database design). For those of you who want to get certified on SQL server, the first time I actually used SQL server was three days back on 23rd, October 2001. Anyway, I finished my B.S. in Computer Engineer-ing in December 1999 with GPA of 3.798. After my graduation ceremony, I went to work where my manager called me and told me that now I was qualified to see a poster on her cubical wall that had Dilbert cartoon saying: "The rude awakening 1 for fresh college graduate : No one cares about your GPA in the industry"! As I found out later on in my career, my GPA did help me get into USC masters program. During my first class(CS 599) at USC, the professor arrived 10 minutes late and the lecture (introduction and admin stuff) was over in 20 minutes. The class was suppose to run for 3 hours and I could not help but ask fellow student (who hap-pen to work as RA under the prof) if all classes at USC were like this or was it just this professor? Anyway, as it turned out, I really enjoyed the class and impressed the professor (Cyrus Shahabi) enough to give me a research assistant position! I worked

on Active Templates project (which changed names almost every month and is now called Spaitio-Temporal Information Integration (Moving Objects)!). By the time I joined Cyrus' group I had found out that I couldn’t be religious about programming languages and started programming in Java. The project turned out to be a shared pro-ject with Craig Knoblock's group and one of the fellow students drove me to ISI for the first time for a meeting on Friday at 1:30pm. I finished Masters in August 2001 and after a long debate decided to join Craig's group at ISI. Unlike most people who move from Ohio to California, I don't enjoy the weather mainly because I enjoy getting wet in the rain and playing in the snow in the winter. I do enjoy teasing my cousins and my brother that they cannot go play outside while I can, but that is a different story. I made long commute from Burbank to USC and then from Burbank to ISI, so as you can imagine I hate the LA traffic and make comments like – “405 is not a freeway, but a big park-ing lot”. Like fellow Indian students, I miss Indian food, cricket and Indian festivals. I enjoy going out and playing any sport that I can get my hands on (of course, I am not good at any sport, but cricket, solitaire and freecell (What, freecell doesn't count as a sport?) ). If you want to find out more about me or want me to find out more about you, please feel free to stop by at my office in room 910 or send me an email at thak-kar@isi.edu.

months at ISI working on adjustable auton-omy with the Elves project. So, when Mil-ind Tambe offered me a chance to come back I jumped! I am currently working with David Pynadath and Milind on adjust-able autonomy and with Jay Modi and Wei-Min Shen on Dynamite.

SNEHALL THAKKAR THAKKAR@ISI.EDU

Hi, Like one in five people on the earth, I was born and raised in India. I grew up playing and watching cricket in the streets (and breaking windows in the neighborhood houses). Unfortunately, that did not last long enough as I joined part time computer classes during high school. In January 1997, I joined Wright State University in Dayton, OH. I found undergraduate educa-tion really boring initially as I was taking Sociology, Psychology and History during my first quarter of study as Computer Engi-neering major! To make the matters worse, the professor decided to give us printed notes in addition to the huge 450-page Psy-chology book! If that wasn't enough, liter-ally every office on campus decided to send me tons of paperwork ranging from health insurance to offer for a credit card with a low interest rate. I slept my way through some of the History lectures from 8am to 11am on Fridays and Psychology lectures from 1pm to 2pm. In September 1997, I joined Scitex as Information Systems In-

New Faces, cont.

Page 16 VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1

Party for Ed and Hans

no, not to each other

Jay Modi, Jaser Adibi, Jose-Luis Ambite, Jean Oh, Deepak Ravichandran, Elena Filatova, Uli Germann, Radu Soricut, Michael Fleisch-man, Nick Mote, Chin-Yew Lin, Irene Geary

Kate LaBore, Tom Russ, Craig Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Ulf Hermjakob, Paola Rizzo, Hans Chalupsky, Andrew Philpot, Lewis Johnson, Paul Rosenbloom, Daniel Marcu, Erin Shaw

Jihie Kim, Jim Blythe, Yolanda Gil, Andrew Koehn, Milind Tambe, Yigal Arens, Ed Hovy, Kevin Knight, Sheila Tejada, Norm Tubman, Geoffrey Plitt, Jeff Rickel

Photos

Page 18 THE INSIDER

From the Offices of AI Grads

(Continued from page 8)

horn and operating headlight. Now you may wonder how this is related to our research at all. You see, we are solving a re-source allocation problem. It in-volves a grid of ra-dar sensors, and tar-gets moving around in that grid. The sen-sors collaborate with each other to track those moving tar-gets. While replicating this setup in our lab, it was not too difficult to install radar sensors; but how to get our sample target to move ? So Milind came up with this idea of using a small toy train, and mounting our target on its top in order to make it mobile. Jay went ahead and got the train. It was great fun setting it up in our lab and making sure that it worked. We took extra efforts to ensure that its diesel horn worked as well as described, and everybody from the team got a turn at it. Jay even displayed this train during one of the demos that he gave. If you observe its engine, you'll see a shiny copper thing mounted on its top. That's the target we use for tracking. Behnam Salemi was most kind to handle the technical issues of its mounting. So now, when you see this train

running in my office between some odd looking boxes (the sensors) you need wonder no longer... If you feel like checking it out, you are most welcome to drop by 949 and I'll be happy to assist

you! I knew that re-search is inter-esting, but had no idea it could be so much fun! Sometimes I

wonder... if a train today, what next ? I'm sure the future would be much more fantastic than my imagination.

(Continued from page 10)

This, ISD's fourth Retreat, was an unqualified success. Another Retreat should most definitely be planned. Everyone's grateful thanks go to Lauri, Kary, Fanny, and Liz, for all the preparations and dealings with the hotel, to Wei-Min Lewis and all the peo-ple who planned the social events, to the student coordina-tors, and to Yigal for making some of the Division's not-so-ample funds available.

“So Milind came up with this idea of

using a small toy train, and mounting

our target on its top in order to make

it mobile.”.

Answers: Guess Who!! ISDer #1: Ulf Hermjakob, ISDer #2: Irene Geary, ISDer #3: Maria Mulsea, ISDer #4: Aram Galstyan

Page 18 VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1

Guess who is getting married?

Tanya Schenk and

Richard Holland

ISD Retreat, cont.

Ulf Hermjakob at the retreat!

Trains, cont.

4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, CA 90292

U SC INFORMA TIO N S CIENCES I NST ITU TE

Phone: 310-822-1511 Fax: 310-822-0751

The InSiDer Edited by: Fanny Mak

http://www.isi.edu/~d3admin/insideronline/