initial entry for gvcormac talk

events.xml

@@ -4,6 +4,30 @@
 <eventdefs>
 
 <!-- Winter 2013 -->
+<eventitem date="2013-03-21" time="TBA" room="TBA" title="Using Computers to Find Evidence in Litigation">
+    <short>
+<p>Professor Gordon Cormack will be presenting a talk on using machine-learning based spam filters to accurately locate relevent electronic documents - a process which has typically been very manual, and very expensive.</p>
+    </short>
+    <abstract>
+<p>In a lawsuit, each party is typically entitled to Discovery, in which the
+other party is compelled to produce any "documents" in its possession that
+may be pertinent to the case.   Documents include not only traditional
+paper documents, but email messages, text messages, computer files, and
+other electronically stored information, or ESI.  Suppose you were
+compelled to produce every document in your possession pertaining to
+software downloads or purchases?  How would you do it?   If you were a
+large corporation, you would probably hire an army of lawyers to read all
+your email, plus your assignments, and any other files on your UW account,
+your laptop, your phone, and your tablet, at a cost of one dollar or more
+per file.  As a CSC member, you know there must be a better way.  But what
+is that better way, and how do you convince the court to let you use it?</p>
+<p>It turns out that spam filters that employ machine learning can do this job
+well -- better than that army of lawyers.  But lawyers aren't happy about
+this.  This talk will outline how the technology works and how to prove
+that it works, so as to convince scientists, lawyers, and judges.</p>
+    </abstract>
+</eventitem>
+
 <eventitem date="2013-02-28" time="4:30 PM" room="DC 1302" title="Machine Architecture, Performance, and Scalability: Things Your Programming Language Never Told You">
     <short>
     <p>"Herb Sutter is a leading authority on software development. He is the best selling author of several books including Exceptional C++ and C++ Coding Standards, as well as hundreds of technical papers and articles [and] has served for a decade as chair of the ISO C++ standards committee." &emdash; http://herbsutter.com/about</p>