[Intelligence Seminar] Small correction: June 23: Robert Thibadeau, NSH 1507, 3:30 - "Action Perception"

[Noah A Smith]

Correction:  if you would like a meeting with Robert Thibadeau on
Tuesday, June 23, please contact Dana Houston (dhouston at cs.cmu.edu) as
Michelle Pagnani will be on vacation.

Thanks,
Noah

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Noah A Smith<nasmith at cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Intelligence Seminar
>
> June 23, 2009 (note special place)
> 3:30 pm
> NSH 1507
> Host:  Jaime Carbonell
>
> Action Perception
> Robert Thibadeau
> Seagate Research
>
> Abstract:
>
> The human perception of actions has barely been studied, but this
> study of action perception promises to provide a wealth of interesting
> hypotheses regarding cognitive processing.  Action perception is
> distinct from motion perception in that the direct perception of
> causation is central to the percept.  Among the interesting hypotheses
> is that it can be hypothesized that what we know as thought and
> reasoning is where we perceive and plan actions.  Another hypothesis
> is that what we know as logic and mathematics derives from our direct
> perceptions of causation in the actions we perceive and think about.
>
> I will present a study that attempts to estimate the scale of
> computation needed to implement a system for visually perceiving
> meaningful actions and non-trivially producing an English narration of
> what is being visually perceived, as well as answering questions about
> what is visually perceived.  The scale of the computation for learning
> could easily reach exaflops over distributed datasets (HADOOP or
> MapReduce style).
>
> This study is partly based on my work (Thibadeau, 1986), and Doug
> Rohde's 2002 dissertation (http://tedlab.mit.edu:16080/~dr/Thesis/),
> as well as Simon and Rescher (1966 see summary below).  The study
> includes an explicit proposal for extending Rohde's work to
> multimodal, multisensory, processing.
>
> (Simon and Rescher 1966 From Wikipedia, Causality)
> Derivation theories
>
> The Nobel Prize holder Herbert Simon and Philosopher Nicholas
> Rescher[20] claim that the asymmetry of the causal relation is
> unrelated to the asymmetry of any mode of implication that
> contraposes. Rather, a causal relation is not a relation between
> values of variables, but a function of one variable (the cause) on to
> another (the effect). So, given a system of equations, and a set of
> variables appearing in these equations, we can introduce an asymmetric
> relation among individual equations and variables that corresponds
> perfectly to our commonsense notion of a causal ordering.  The system
> of equations must have certain properties, most importantly, if some
> values are chosen arbitrarily, the remaining values will be determined
> uniquely through a path of serial discovery that is perfectly
> causal. They postulate the inherent serialization of such a system of
> equations may correctly capture causation in all empirical fields,
> including physics and economics.