June 2008 - MSLUG - mailman.iro.umontreal.ca

Call for presenters for the next MSLUG meeting: "Dirty Hacks Night"
by Guillaume Germain 07 Jul '08

07 Jul '08

Hi everybody, the next meeting of the MSLUG will consist of a few short presentations around the theme of neat, short (and potentially dirty) pieces of code that are surprisingly useful. The goal is to exhibit the strengths of Lisp and Scheme through its usefulness in real situations. Examples of interesting code could be: - a bunch of functions you always reuse in all your programs that makes you much more efficient, - a useful library other people might not know about, - that little program you once wrote that saves so much time it could put someone out of a job, - something neat you have as a cron job, - some duct-tape you've made around other systems, - an elisp function that does your work for you, - some script you once wrote coming back from the pub that you're still secretly proud of though its ugly, - etc. Anything that *Gets Something Done* qualify. Nothing is "too simple": if it's useful, we want to know about it. The presentations should last around 10 minutes each, so I expect people would prepare around 3 or 4 slides and possibly give a live demo. The tentative date for the next meeting will be Wednesday July 23 2008 at 7pm at Universite de Montreal. I will confirm the date and place later on, along with an announce of the scheduled speakers and subjects. I'll be waiting for volunteer presenters, hope to hear from you soon! Have a nice day, Guillaume

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AI / ALisp Seminar Monday June 30 2008
by Guillaume Germain 27 Jun '08

27 Jun '08

Hi everybody, there's a seminar next Monday at McGill about "hierarchical learning and decision making" by Stuart Russell (co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, along with Peter Norvig). Amongst other things, he will be talking about ALisp. All the information about the presentation is in the announcement below. Guillaume ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Joelle Pineau <jpineau(a)cs.mcgill.ca> Date: Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:08 AM Subject: [Lisa_seminaires] Upcoming Seminar - Stuart Russell, Berkeley: June 30/08 To: lisa_seminaires(a)iro.umontreal.ca, labrl(a)cs.mcgill.ca, cim-all(a)cim.mcgill.ca, profs(a)cs.mcgill.ca Cc: jvybihal(a)cs.mcgill.ca, nat(a)site.uottawa.ca, chaib(a)iad.ift.ulaval.ca Hello everyone, Please note this important seminar. Stuart Russell is a world-renowned researcher in Artificial Intelligence, and author of the leading textbook on the topic. Everyone is encouraged to attend! Monday June 30th, 2008 McConnell Engineering Rm 12 2:00pm Hierarchical learning and decision making Stuart Russell Computer Science Division University of California, Berkeley Effective behaviour in complex environments requires some form of hierarchical structure. The first part of the talk covers hierarchical reinforcement learning, wherein guidance as to the correct hierarchical structure can be supplied to an agent in the form of a *partial program* in which choices may be left unspecified. The ALisp language - an partial programming extension of Lisp - includes reinforcement learning algorithms that converge to the optimal complete program consistent with the given partial program. ALisp includes constructs for specifying asynchronous concurrent activities. ALisp shows promise as a tool for scaling up reinforcement learning. The second part of the talk covers lookahead decision making with hierarchical constraints on behavior. Here the setting is classical hierarchical planning. We resolve a longstanding open problem by defining *angelic* semantics for high-level actions and providing the first algorithms capable of proving that a high-level plan is correct and optimal without considering its concrete implementations. We also consider online hierarchical search with bounded lookahead. [Joint work with Ron Parr, David Andre, Bhaskara Marthi, Andy Zimdars, David Latham, Carlos Guestrin, Jason Wolfe] Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in Physics from Wadham College, Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently Professor and Chair of Computer Science. In 2003 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Stuart Russell is an author of the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (together with Peter Norvig).

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MSLUG pub meeting, this Thursday June 19th 7pm at Vices et Versa on St-Laurent
by Guillaume Germain 19 Jun '08

19 Jun '08

Hi everybody, it's been a long time since the last meeting. Since I haven't been able to find anybody willing to give a talk, I suggest we meet for a beer at the following place: Vices et Versa 6631 boulevard St-Laurent, Montréal (Québec) H2S 3C5 http://www.vicesetversa.com/ http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=6631+Boulevard+St-Laurent,+Montr%C3… They have good beer, a terrasse and wireless internet access. The meeting will take place on Thursday June 19th at 7pm. I'll be there for sure, but it would be nice if people could reply (in public or in private) to say if they think they'll be attending. See you soon! Guillaume

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