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April 2009

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[boston-lisp] Boston Lisp Meeting 2009-04-27: Noah Goodman on Lambda the Ultimate Gamble.
by fare＠tunes.org 23 Apr '09

23 Apr '09

Boston Lisp Meeting: This Monday April 27th - Noah Goodman on Lambda the Ultimate Gamble http://fare.livejournal.com/141901.html A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Next Monday, April 27th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Noah Goodman will speak about MIT-Church, a non-deterministic Scheme. Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A). Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below. * Noah Goodman will talk about Church: a language for probabilistic modeling, or, Lambda, the Ultimate Gamble. He will describe the probabilistic programming language Church. Probabilistic generative models have exploded in recent years, becoming central to machine learning and AI. These models are usually described with a mixture of informal english, math, and box-and-arrow diagrams. Such descriptions can be error prone and are difficult to scale in model complexity. Church is a formal language for probabilistic generative models, derived from the pure subset of Scheme and extended with probabilistic constructs. As a description language Church is a convenient and powerfull way to construct models; in this talk I will show several examples drawn from recent machine learning research. Beyond mere description, Church makes it possible to automate the process of inference in probabilistic models. The MIT-Church implementation of Church is a universal inference engine based on Markov chain monte carlo. I will indicate the design of this implementation and highlight some of the unique challenges of probabilistic programming languages relative to standard languages. I will close with some examples of MIT-Church in action. Noah D. Goodman is a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He studies the computational basis of human thought, merging behavioral experiments with formal methods from statistics and logic. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin, several years later he joined the Computational Cognitive Science group at MIT, working with professor Joshua Tenenbaum. Goodman has published more than twenty-five publications in psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Goodman is project leader of the MIT-Church probabilistic programming project. His website is at http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/ * * Having observed the success of the formula at ILC'2009, we have instituted Lightning Talks at the Boston Lisp Meeting. At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute talks followed by 2-minute for questions and answers. The slots for next Monday are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! * * * The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday April 27th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge. MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34 Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us. * * * * Dinner: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclaimer: I work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our monthly Boston Lisp meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. We appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so that we can order the correct amount of food. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any acknowledgement unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors. * * * * * The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on March 30th had between 30 and 40 participants. Carl Eastlund gave a talk about Modular ACL2. We also had our first Lightning Talks: François-René Rideau talked about "Better Stories, Better Languages", and Dan Stanger gave a short introduction to BRL. (Matt Knox couldn't be there to speak about GoaLoC as previously announced.) In the near future, we expect to have Norman Ramsey on 2009-05-25 about purely functional dataflow optimization in Haskell, Bruce Lewis on 2009-06-29 about BRL and ourdoings, Christine Flood on 2009-08-31 about Fortress. * * * * * * We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.

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[boston-lisp] DEADLINE EXTENSION: 6th European Lisp Workshop at ECOOP, July 6 2009
by Didier Verna 08 Apr '09

08 Apr '09

Dear colleagues, upon request from several potential contributors, we have postponed the submission deadline for the 6th European Lisp Workshop by two weeks. The new deadline is now April 22nd. +------------------------------------------------------------+ | CALL FOR PAPERS | | 6th European Lisp Workshop | | July 6, Genova, Italy - co-located with ECOOP 2009 | +------------------------------------------------------------+ Important Dates =============== Submission deadline: April 22, 2009 (EXTENDED) Notification of acceptance: May 08, 2009 ECOOP early registration deadline: May 20, 2009 6th European Lisp Workshop: July 06, 2009 Please note that registration must be done with ECOOP itself. For more information visit http://elw.bknr.net/2009 Contact: Didier Verna, didier(a)lrde.epita.fr 2009 Special News ================= This year, and for the first time, the workshop proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Also, the workshop will feature interactive tutorial/demo/coding sessions (see below). Overview ======== "...Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bio-informatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." -- Kent Pitman Lisp, one of the eldest computer languages still in use today, is gaining momentum again. The structure of Lisp makes it easy to extend the language or even to implement entirely new dialects without starting from scratch, making it the ideal candidate for writing Domain Specific Languages. Common Lisp, with the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS), was the first object-oriented programming language to receive an ANSI standard and retains the most complete and advanced object system of any programming language, while influencing many other object-oriented programming languages that followed. This workshop will address the near-future role of Lisp-based languages in research, industry and education. We solicit contributions that discuss the opportunities Lisp provides to capture and enhance the possibilities in software engineering. We want to promote lively discussion between researchers proposing new approaches and practitioners reporting on their experience with the strengths and limitations of current Lisp technologies. The workshop will have two components: there will be formal talks, and interactive turorial/demo/coding sessions. Papers ====== Formal presentations in the workshop should take between 20 minutes and half an hour; additional time will be given for questions and answers. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to): - Experience reports / Case studies - Educational approaches - Software Evolution - Development Aids - Persistent Systems - Dynamic Optimization - Implementation techniques - Hardware Support - Efficiency / Distribution / Parallel programming - Macro-, reflective-, meta- and/or rule-based development approaches - Protocol Meta-programming and Libraries - Context-Oriented, Domain-Oriented and Generative Programming Interactive Tutorial/Demo/Coding Sessions ========================================= Additionally, we invite less formal talks in the form of interactive tutorial/demo/coding sessions. The purpose of these sessions is to both demonstrate and receive feedback on any interesting Lisp system, either stable or under development. Being less formal than technical paper presentations, it is expected that these sessions be highly interactive. Submission Guidelines ===================== Potential contributors are encouraged to submit: - a long paper (around 10 pages) presenting scientific and/or empirical results about Lisp-based uses or new approaches for software engineering purposes, - a short essay (5 pages) defending a position about where research, practice or education based on Lisp should be heading in the near future, - a proposal for an interactive tutorial/demo/coding session (1-2 pages) describing the involved library or application, and the subject of the session. Papers (both long and short) should be formatted following the ACM SIGS guidelines (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) and include ACM classification categories and terms (see http://www.acm.org/about/class/1998) Authors will later be required to sign an ACM copyright form. Submissions should be mailed as PDF to Didier Verna (didier(a)lrde.epita.fr) before the submission deadline. Organizers ========== Didier Verna, EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, Paris Charlotte Herzeel, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit, Brussel Robert Strandh, LaBRI, University of Bordeaux I, France Christophe Rhodes, Goldsmiths College, University of London Hans Hübner, Software Developer, Berlin -- European Lisp Symposium, May 2009: http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org European Lisp Workshop, July 2009: http://elw.bknr.net/2009 Didier Verna <didier(a)lrde.epita.fr> @ LRDE: 01 44 08 01 85

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