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 »

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 »

Advanced Topics in Programming Languages Series: Python Design Patterns (Part 1)
Google engEDU
59 min – Mar 14, 2007

Google Tech Talks
March 14, 2007

ABSTRACT

Design Patterns must be studied in the context on the language in which they’ll get implemented (the Gang of Four made that point very strongly in their book, though almost everybody else seems not to have noticed:-). This talk explores several categories of classic "elementary" DPs in a Python context — Creational, Masquerading, Adaptation, and Template. 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 »

Zero Configuration networking with Bonjour
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Nov 2, 2005

Google TechTalks
November 2, 2005

Dr. Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer

http://www.stuartcheshire.org/

ABSTRACT
The desirability of making IP networking easy to use has been obvious for many years, but achieving that goal has proved elusive. One day, Stuart Cheshire got tired of fellow Stanford Computer Science PhD students wanting to print from his Mac (via AppleTalk) because they couldn’t work out how to configure their Linux /etc/printcap files to access the network printer they wanted to use via IP, and he decided it was time someone did something about it.

Thus began a long saga, beginning with the formation of the IETF "Zero Configuration Networking" working group, and ending where we are today, with widespread adoption of Stuart Cheshire’s Multicast DNS and DNS Service Discovery technology, or "Bonjour", as Apple likes to call it. Today just about every network printer from just about every printer vendor supports Bonjour, and ships with it enabled by default. Read the rest of this entry »