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 »

15 Views of a Node Link Graph: An Information Visualization Portfolio
Google engEDU
1 hr – Jun 28, 2006

Google TechTalks
June 28, 2006

Tamara Munzner received a BS in 1991 and a PhD in 2000 from Stanford. Her current research interests are information visualization, graph drawing, and dimensionality reduction. She was the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization Program/Papers Co-Chair in 2003 and 2004.

ABSTRACT
Information visualization, or infovis, is the interactive computer-based visual representation of abstract datasets. I will use collections of linked nodes as the launching point for a discussion of fifteen different approaches to infovis. Node-link graphs appear in many application domains, and people can perform many tasks faster or more effectively when they can manipulate a well-chosen visual representation of these graphs. A major challenge within infovis is how to handle the large datasets that occur in the real world. Designing algorithms with scalable speed and memory complexity is only part of the solution. The visual representation must also provide an appropriate abstraction, often requiring exploration across multiple levels of detail, to be comprehensible to the human in the loop. The talk will include examples in application domains ranging from web browsing to bioinformatics to computational linguistics, and datasets from thousands to millions of items. Read the rest of this entry »

The Surprising History of Copyright and What It Means For Google
Google engEDU
55 min – Aug 15, 2006

Google Tech Talks
August 15, 2006

Karl Fogel

ABSTRACT
Copyright is derived from a 16th-century English censorship law, later turned into a monopoly right to subsidize distribution. This history is somewhat at odds with the modern conception of copyright, and an understanding of it is increasingly important today, as the economics of distribution are changing radically.

This talk will give the audience a mid-level overview of copyright’s history, with pointers to further reading, followed by a survey of alternative economic bases for creation and distribution, and a discussion of what these dynamics mean for companies, like Google, that flourish in an environment of frictionless information sharing. I will leave as much time as possible for Q&A.

This is a slight reworking of a talk I just gave at OSCON in Portland, see http://www.questioncopyright.org/node/5 for more. Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet of Things: What is a Spime and why is it useful?
Google EngEDU
49 min – Apr 30, 2007

Google Tech Talks
April 30, 2007

ABSTRACT

World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and ’searchabiliity’ to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth.

This same paradigm will find you "wrangling" with product-lifecycle- management systems that do for physical objects what the iPod has done for music. These and other radical ideas are delivered in Sterling’s latest book`Shaping Things’. This concise book was written to inspire designers to visualize radical scenarios connecting information technology and sustainability in a new ecology of artifacts. Sterling suggests new connections between the virtual world and the physical world that will have you rethinking many of your assumptions about how we relate to products.

He will be joined by Scott Klinker, 3-D Designer-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI who leads a graduate design program known for giving form to experimental cultural ideas. Klinker’s own design work focuses on digital customization as industry shifts from mass production toward niche production in a networked society.

The presentation will include an invitation for Sterlling and Klinker/ Cranbrook to team-up with Google to create a short documentary film that would portray a speculative future of life with SPIMES. Distributed online, this short film would convey the look and feel of SPIME scenarios as a provocation for widespread industry discussion about the new potentials of ubiquitous, ambient, searchable, geolocative products. 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 »