Date:  August 1, 2005

Time:  2:00 p.m. - 2:50 p.m.

Venue:  SCOPE Lecture Theatre, SCOPE, Academic Exchange Building,
               City University of Hong Kong

Abstract: 

We have found a method to automatically extract the meaning of words and phrases from the world-wide-web using Google page counts. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and the latent semantic context information entered by millions of independent users averages out to provide automatic meaning of useful quality. We demonstrate positive correlations, evidencing an underlying semantic structure, in both numerical symbol notations and number-name words in a variety of natural languages and contexts. Next, we demonstrate the ability to distinguish between colors and numbers, and to distinguish between 17th century Dutch painters; the ability to understand electrical terms, religious terms, emergency incidents, and we conduct a massive experiment in understanding WordNet categories; and the ability to do a simple automatic English-Spanish translation. This is joint work with Rudi Cilibrasic  (hyperlink for the full paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0412098); Recently reported in: A search for meaning, New Scientist, 29 January 2005, p.21, by Duncan Graham-Rowe (hyperlink: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18524846.100) and immediately made it to Slashdot--- News for nerds, Stuff that matters (hyperlink: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/29/1815242&tid=217&tid=14).

Biography: 

Paul M.B. Vitanyi is a CWI Fellow at the Dutch National CWI Research Institute in Amsterdam, and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam. He serves on the editorial boards of Distributed Computing (till 2003), Information Processing Letters, Theory of Computing Systems, Parallel Processing Letters, International journal of Foundations of Computer Science, Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences (guest editor), and elsewhere. He has worked on cellular automata, computational complexity, distributed and parallel computing, machine learning and prediction, physics of computation, Kolmogorov complexity, quantum computing, publishing more than 150 research papers. Together with Prof Ming Li of the University of Waterloo, since 1984 they pioneered applications of Kolmogorov complexity in computer science, learning, mathematics, pattern recognition, cognitive sciences, and physics. They introduced the subject in the working toolkit of researchers in many countries and co-authored "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications,'' Springer-Verlag, New York, 1993 (2nd Edition 1997), parts of which have been translated into Russian, Japanese and Chinese. He received the People Republic of China's 1999 National 1st Prize for Excellent Books in Science and Technology published in the Peoples Republic of China for: Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, "Description Complexity and Applications,'' China Science Press, Beijing, December 1998 (Chinese translation by Cheng Qi) See http://www.cwi.nl/~paulv/

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General information about the keynote speeches

Keynote Speech 1: Ubiquitous Learning with SCORM by Dr. Timothy K. Shih

Keynote Speech 3: Imagine a World: A look into the Future of E-Learning by Mr. Shaun Rein

Keynote Speech 4: Teaching and Learning - towards Flexibility by Mr. John Treloar

Queries regarding the keynote speeches should be addressed to the Tutorial Chair Howard Leung by email to howard@cityu.edu.hk.