Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading
Google engEDU
1 hr 42 min – Jan 27, 2006

Google TechTalks
January 27, 2006

Thomas C. Heller and Stephen H. Schneider

Abstract
Please join two distinguished Stanford Professors, Dr. Stephen Schneider and Professor Thomas Heller, for a discussion on climate change and the emerging carbon trading markets. Dr. Schneider is one of the world’s leading scientific experts of climate change (his name is cited on all those climate change charts and graphs we’ve seen so far). Dr. Heller has extensive experience with policy and negotiations surrounding climate change and sustainable development. Professor Heller also recently served as Sergey’s host at the recent UN Climate Change Conference meeting in Montreal where Prof. Heller proved his indepth knowledge of thenuances of legislative works, such as the Kyoto Protocol, and the mechanisms that are currently being employed.

This tech talk will be different than our previous climate change talks. These men have helped steered the international course of policy, scientific verifications and the overall consensus on the existence of climate change. They both have plenty to say about what the failures and successes have been along the way, and what their predictions for the future of climate change policy will be. Email me if you have any questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, What’s That? A Map Hack
Google engEDU
51 min – May 8, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 8, 2007

ABSTRACT

Designed to answer the question "What am I looking at?" when standing on a hilltop or pulled over at a scenic overlook, HeyWhatsThat.com has garnered reviews like "Just when I thought I was in danger of becoming a jaded customer of the mass mapping space, here’s a site that effortlessly returns me to a state of slack-jawed wonder" (OgleEarth). In addition to peak detection and identification, it offers viewshed computations, elevation contours, elevation profiles, and integration with Google Maps and Google Earth. This talk — given by Michael Kosowsky, designer and proprieter of HeyWhatsThat.com — will focus on what it is and how it got to be that way.

http://www.heywhatsthat.com/

http://www.heywhatsthat.com/faq.html

Speaker: Michael Kosowsky

Michael Kosowsky has more than 25 years of experience in software development, on platforms ranging from embedded microprocessors to supercomputers. Currently sole proprietor of the HeyWhatsThat.com web site, previous roles include founder and CTO of Great Point Design, where he developed its desktop photo application and web service; founder and CTO of Momentum, Inc., where he led the development and patenting of a portable client-server communications technology; and software engineer for The Jackson Laboratory and DNA Sciences, where he implemented systems for visualizing and sharing genomic data. Read the rest of this entry »

How can we better understand customers?
Google engEDU
50 min – Jul 18, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 18, 2006

Ely Dahan

At MIT’s Sloan School of Business, Ely Dahan taught high tech marketing and new product development. He now develops new models and methods for developing products at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business. Dahan has developed internet-based market research methods, mathematical models of parallel and sequential prototyping, the economics of cost reduction, and strategies for mass customization. Prior to entering academia, he was national product manager for W.R. Grace and NEC until 1984, when he founded a computer networking company in Maryland, serving as CEO until the firm was acquired in 1993. He is the recipient, along with his coauthors, of the INFORMS John D.C. Little Award, the American Marketing Association EXPLOR Award, the INFORMS Frank M. Bass Outstanding Dissertation Award (based on Olivier Toubia’s PhD thesis), and the Journal of Product Innovation Managment Hustad Award. Dahan earned his PhD in the Operations & IT program at Stanford Business School, where he was a Department of Energy Fellow, an AACSB Doctoral Fellow, and a recipient of the Jaedicke Prize for scholarly achievement. He attended Princeton University, then received a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from MIT in 1978 and an MBA from Harvard in 1980. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Static Analysis For Software Defect Detection
Google engEDU
1 hr 3 min – Jul 6, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 6, 2006

William Pugh

ABSTRACT
I’ll talk about some of my experience in using and expanding static analysis tools for defect detection. The FindBugs tool developed at the Univ. of Maryland is now being widely used, including inside Google.

I’ll give an overview of FindBugs, show some of the kinds of errors we routinely find in production code, discuss the methodology we use for enhancing and expanding FindBugs and some of the recent additions to it, discuss ways of incorporating FindBugs into your development process (such as being able to get a report of all the warnings introduced since the last release of your software), and talk about the future of static analysis, including things such as a new Java JSR to provide standard annotations for things such as @NonNull and @Tainted. Read the rest of this entry »

Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop
Google engEDU
1 hr 27 min – May 4, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 4, 2007

ABSTRACT

The computer desktop metaphor is ubiquitous, but how much work do we get done there? None! Time is entirely wasted navigating or shuffling content to the application in which we can finally work. What lessons can we learn from designing interfaces without the desktop and without applications? Is it even possible? And how does this apply to the Web? Currently, Web applications are often more usable than their desktop-based counterparts because each one does one thing and does it well. Desktop applications used to be the same way, but over time — as applications grew to support the the users in the long tail — each became a complex portmanteau of all possible features. If we are not careful, our Web apps will suffer the same conglomerated fate. Mashups and services help to solve the problem on the development end by freeing functionality from any particular application. But, there is currently no way to offer that wealth of possible functionality to users in a scalable way. Would it be nice to embed a dynamic map into your Gmail message? Sure. A Flickr slideshow? Sure. But for Google to offer those in addition to the hundreds of other possible options, would clutter the interface beyond usability. What’s needed is a universal method of accessing functionality: a way of harnessing the power of services without the need for application developers to explicitly support them. I’ll be demonstrating such a method.

The talk demonstrates that a ZUI plus a universal method of accessing functionality spells the death of the application-centric computing model and the desktop-design paradigms. Read the rest of this entry »