Biofuels: Think Outside The Barrel
Google engEDU
1 hr 9 min – Mar 29, 2006

Google TechTalks
March 29, 2006

Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla is a venture capitalist considered one of the most successful and influential personalities in Silicon Valley. He was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and became a general partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1986. In 2004 he formed Khosla Ventures.

ABSTRACT
On Wednesday, March 29th, by invitation from our co-founders and CEO, our special guest, Vinod Khosla, visited Google to deliver a tech talk about the emergence of ethanol as a viable, market ready, and competitive source of renewable energy.

His presentation has been making huge waves in the investor, policy, and business communities and we are privileged to have had him take time to talk to us about the tremendous potential for ethanol’s explosion into the market. Here are some recent articles that might be of interest in relation to this talk:

Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley billionaire, who wants to save the world from oil

http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5655161

On the Ethanol Bandwagon, Big Names and Big Risks
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/business/yourmoney/26etha.html?_r=1&oref=login Read the rest of this entry »

The Semantic Chemical Web: GoogleInChI and other Mashups
Google engEDU
55 min – Sep 13, 2006

Google Tech Talks
September 13, 2006

Peter Murray-Rust is Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.

ABSTRACT
The millions of scientific papers published each year are an amazing source for scientific discovery but in most of them the experimental data is destroyed by the publication process. Publishers insist on converting semantic data into PDF which effectively destroys everything. We have been developing social and technical strategies to preserve and liberate this data and where this has happened have been able to create completely new mashups and other semantic resources.

Chemistry is the most tractable discipline for the semantic web – most chemistry can be turned into XML with little semantic loss, using Chemical Markup Language and complementary MLs such as XHTML, MathML and SVG.

We have to mobilise a bottom-up revolution through modern Internet ideas – blogs, communal source development, interoperability. We have done this in chemistry through the Blue Obelisk movement – an informal but coherent group of young-at-heart hackers. We are adopting lightweight web technologies ("REST", etc.) to chemistry – an example will be CMLRSS which we run in a Bioclipse environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time
Google engEDU
52 min – May 30, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 30, 2007

ABSTRACT

Dr. Ben Goertzel – Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time Essay: www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0701.html Abstract: When the AI field was founded over 50 years ago, it was squarely focused on the grand dream of creating software displaying general intelligence at the human level or beyond. Since that time the field has drifted in a direction Ray Kurzweil has called "Narrow AI": the creation of intelligent software applications carrying out highly particular functions. The relationship between this sort of narrow AI and "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) as in the original dreams of the AI field, is an issue of dispute among experts. Some researchers believe powerful AGI will result eventually from the development and combination of narrow AI products — such as, for example, data mining software as is commonly used in the finance industry; auto navigation software like the kind used in the DARPA Grand Challenge; and last but not least, sophisticated search engines like Google. Other researchers believe that AGI will only come about via emulation of the human brain, once brain mapping technology has advanced further. On the other hand, an increasing minority of researchers believes that AGI is most likely to be achieved via computer science researchers explicitly attempting to create AGI software programs, divorced from any particular narrow application area. In this talk I will briefly overview this emerging subdiscipline of "AGI", including the work of various researchers such as Stan Franklin, Pei Wang and Stuart Shapiro. I will then discuss my own work on the Novamente Cognition Engine, an AGI project based on combining a number of knowledge representations and reasoning and learning techniques into an integrative architecture motivated by complex systems theory, and initially oriented at the control of virtual agents in 3D simulation worlds such as Second Life. Read the rest of this entry »

Big ball of Mud

1 hr 6 min – Aug 28, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 28, 2007

ABSTRACT

Brian Foote is a research computer scientist with nearly thirty years of professional programming experience. He cut his computational teeth in the realm of realtime scientific programming. The highly volatile requirements present in this domain led him to an interest in objects, reuse, software reuse, frameworks, components, and, ultimately, reflection and metalevel architectures. He is one of five people to have attended every OOPSLA conference since 1986.

He has also been active in the software patterns community, and edited Pattern Languages of Program Design 4. He was instrumental in gaining the conviction of the so-called Gang-of-Four (Design Patterns authors Vlissides, Johnson, Helm, and Gamma) for crimes against computer science at OOPSLA ’99.

Brian is currently a Senior Pontificator at Industrial Logic, Inc., where he has been spreading the Gang of Four’s Gospel to a new generation of Googlers.

Though Big Ball of Mud has been Slashdotted twice, and is probably his best known work, this will be Foote’s first live, full-dress presentation based upon this material.
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed.

A Ball of Mud (http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html ) is haphaza… Read the rest of this entry »

Web Applications and the Ubiquitous Web
Google engEDU
1 hr – 1-Feb-06

Google TechTalks
February 1, 2006

Dave Raggett

Dave Raggett is currently a W3C Fellow from Canon, and W3C Activity Lead for Multimodal Interaction. Dave has been closely involved with driving standards for the Web since 1992, e.g. setting up the IETF HTTP working group, helping with work on ECMAScript, and W3C work on HTML, XForms, MathML, VoiceXML and other related specifications. For further details see: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

ABSTRACT
The Web is increasingly a ubiquitous platform for application developers. The talk will outline an emerging vision for the Ubiquitous Web and areas where further work is needed. I will also present work I have been doing on a Web-based alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and its extension to support remote meetings. Finally, I will demonstrate the use of AJAX to add speech capabilities to web browsers and the role of remote speech engines. Read the rest of this entry »