Thinking Beyond Borders
Google engEDU
33 min – Sep 27, 2007

Google Tech Talks
September 27, 2007

ABSTRACT

Our global society faces great challenges such as Global Warming, HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, wide-spread hunger, and poverty. To effectively address these issues in years to come, we must re-envision how we prepare our next great leaders to be conscious agents of change. Thinking Beyond Borders is a 35-week program to educate Gap Year students about the economic, political, and cultural realities of our world while empowering them with the tools to create proactive social change. Through varied service learning opportunities, the itinerary immerses students in cultures and communities around the world to provide experiences with various issues of International Development. The curriculum challenges students to synthesize academic research and their collected observations into powerful conclusions about the nature of globalization, world hunger, human rights, cultural change, and political systems. The most unique aspect of this program is that students return to the US to meet with international policy makers and share their conclusions with student and philanthropy groups to raise awareness and funds for the NGOs they worked with abroad. In these ways, Thinking Beyond Borders seeks to create a community of conscious agents of proactive change, equipped to tackle our world’s greatest challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

Visual 3D modeling of real-world objects and scenes from images
Google EngEDU
1 hr 3 min – May 1, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 1, 2007

ABSTRACT

Images and videos form a rich source of information about the visual world. The extraction of 3D information from images is an important research problem in computer vision and graphics. The ubiquitous presence of cameras and the tremendous advances of processing and communication technologies yields important opportunities and challenges in those areas.

My work has focused on developing flexible techniques for recovering 3D shape, motion and appearance from images. A first example of this is an approach to recover photo-realistic 3D models of static objects or scenes from videos recorded with a hand-held camera or on a moving vehicle. A key aspect of our approach is the ability to also recover the geometric and photometric calibration of the camera from the image data so that our techniques can also work with uncalibrated consumer cameras or archive photographs. Towards the end of my talk, I will also briefly discuss approaches to capture dynamic scenes, both from single and multiple cameras. Applications ranging from archaeology and 3D urban modeling, to special effects and 3D tele-medecine will be used to illustrate our work. Read the rest of this entry »

Statistical Aspects of Data Mining (Stats 202) Day 3
Google engEDU
56 min – Jul 3, 2007

Google Tech Talks
July 3, 2007

ABSTRACT

This is the Google campus version of Stats 202 which is being taught at Stanford this summer. I will follow the material from the Stanford class very closely. That material can be found at www.stats202.com. The main topics are exploring and visualizing data, association analysis, classification, and clustering. The textbook is Introduction to Data Mining by Tan, Steinbach and Kumar. Googlers are welcome to attend any classes which they think might be of interest to them. Read the rest of this entry »

Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google
Google engEDU
1 hr – Dec 11, 2006

Google Tech Talks
December 7, 2006

ABSTRACT

Adwords introduced a Scrum implementation at Google in small steps with remarkable success. As presented at the Agile 2006 conference this exemplifies a great way to start up Scrum teams. The inventor and Co-Creator of Scrum will use this approach in building the Google Scrum implementation to describe some of the subtle aspects of Scrum along with suggested next steps that can help in distributing and scaling Scrum in a "Googly way". Read the rest of this entry »

You Are What You Say: Privacy Risks of Public Mentions
Google engEDU
27 min – Aug 3, 2006

Google TechTalks
August 3, 2006

Dan Frankowski is both computer science researcher and practitioner in software and algorithms development. He got his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota in 1993, then spent a year in Budapest on a Fulbright grant studying mathematics. From 1997 to 2003 he was an algorithms guy at Net Perceptions. From 2003 to the present, he has been a research fellow with the GroupLens research group at the Unviersity of Minnesota, which is most well-known for recommenders, but now studies online community more broadly.

ABSTRACT
In today’s data-rich networked world, people express many aspects of their lives online. It is common to segregate different aspects in different places: you might write opinionated rants about movies in your blog under a pseudonym while participating in a forum or web site for scholarly discussion of medical ethics under your real name. However, it may be possible to link these separate identities, because the movies, journal articles, or authors you mention are from a sparse relation space whose properties (e.g., many items related to by only a few users) allow re- identification. This talk examines this general problem in a specific setting: re- identification of users from a public web movie forum in a private movie ratings dataset. Read the rest of this entry »