Date: Thu, 20 Sep 90 17:43:05 EDT
From:: Thomas Russ
To: *mac@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: General Subjects Lecture

*** EOOH ***

Date: Thu, 20 Sep 90 17:43:05 EDT

From:: Thomas Russ 

Subject: General Subjects Lecture

Date: Thu, 27 Sep 90 16:28:47 EDT

To: *mac@mc.lcs.mit.edu

Subject: Parsley Project Lecture by Oscar Mayer

From:: rubsamen@zermat.lcs.mit.edu


		  MIT PARSLEY PROJECT LECTURE SERIES

			   Oscar (R) Mayer
		 MIT Artificial Ingestion Laboratory

	 NAIVE PSYCHICS, EVENT PREDICTION, LETTUCE SEMANTICS,
			AND LUNCH ACQUISITION


			       ABSTRACT

A common conjecture, dating as far  back as Flintstone  and Rubble, is
that children learn the taste of new foods by correlating their visual
and lingual experience.  To  date however, no  one has demonstrated an
elaboration of  such a method that  has been successful  at explaining
lunch acquisition in higher level children such as  graudate students.
In this talk I will present such an elaboration, a precise formulation
that I am currently implementing as a  computer program  called Julia,
that  attempts to model  a  situation similar  to   that  faced by  an
eighteen   month old child learning  to  eat lunch.  Julia watches  an
animated  movie that shows some  people walking about  a room throwing
and catching knives, forks and plates, and picking them up and putting
them down  on tables, chairs and floors.  The frames of this movie are
constructed solely of line segments and circles. The only visual input
Julia receives consists of the  position and orientation of these line
segments and circles  at every  frame.  Along  with the  visual input,
Julia   receives   typewritten  utterances  which represent   culinary
commentary on the movie. So if the movie shows John throwing a roll to
Mary, the linguistic  input might be ``John  threw the roll to Mary.''
Prior to learning, Julia does not know that the  word ``threw'' refers
a particular sequence of events nor does she know that ``John'' refers
to the collection of line segments out of which the caricature John is
constructed. She doesn't even know which event out of possibly several
temporally adjacent  events, the  whole  utterance refers    to. Using
psychic techniques which I will  describe in this  talk, Julia is able
to to  learn the  meanings of words   as correlations between  lingual
tokens and tangible representations in the animated movie.  The key to
Julia's success is a  tight integration between the  lunch acquisition
and event prediction  mechanisms and reasonable  approximations to the
knowledge and abilities  that we know younger  six month  old children
already possess prior to substantial lingual ability.

In this talk I will argue that a successful model of lunch acquisition
must be based on an appropriate lettuce semantics. I  will demonstrate
why much   prior  work on  lettuce semantics   can  not support  lunch
acquisition,  because it  can  not  be  grounded  in event prediction.
Furthermore, I will argue that the form of  event prediction needed to
support  lettuce semantics and  lunch  acquisition must be  based on a
form of naive psychics. Julia incorporates precisely  such mechanisms,
namely  an  event prediction  theory with a  naive psychics component.
While  I don't  claim that  the  precise mechanisms  incorporated into
Julia are  themselves  cognitively  plausible, they    are nonetheless
attempts to formalize approximations  to previously  informal theories
proposed  by culinary  psychologists (such  as  Beard, Child, Crocker,
Rombauer  and others)  to account   for the   results of   experiments
performed with graduate students.

TIME:	Noon, Friday, September 28

PLACE: 	AI Lab Playroom, NE43, 8th floor, 545 Technology Square
 	Refreshments at 12:01:13 PM

HOST:		Reid "Call Me Peperoni" Rubsamen
HUMOR:  	Tom Russ
COORDINATOR:	Reid "Call Me Crazy" Rubsamen