Structuring Personal Information When Everything Can Be Saved and Searched…
Google engEDU
58 min – May 17, 2006

Google TechTalks
May 17, 2006

William Jones
William Jones is an Research Associate Professor in The Information School at the University of Washington where he manages the Keeping Found Things Found project (funded by the National Science Foundation , http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/index.asp; see also http://pim.ischool.washington.edu/).

ABSTRACT
Many people are curators, consciously or not, of large and growing collections of personal information. People collect articles, books, magazines, recipes, songs, pictures, etc. They collect still more information with no clear subordinating category other than "stuff".

Or, perhaps more accurately, the information itself "collects". People can have gigabytes of storage representing email messages, electronic documents and various other files. They may have large numbers of references that point to information on the Web. And people often still have large amounts of information on paper.

This talk will describe exploratory research to understand better how people manage ever larger collections of their personal information, the kinds of problems people encounter as they do so, and the kinds of support people need in order to "manage" better ? to manage not only the information but the various activities for which this information is needed. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle Conference on Scalability: Scaling Google for Every User
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Jun 23, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User
Experience, leads the product management efforts on Google’s
search products – web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the
Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She
joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the
user interface and webserver teams at that time. Her efforts have
included designing and developing Google’s search interface,
internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining
Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100
features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been
filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design.

Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught
introductory computer programming classes at Stanford to over
3,000 students. Stanford has recognized her with the Centennial
Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding
contribution to undergraduate education.

Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab
(Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo
Park, California. Marissa has been featured in various publications,
including Newsweek ("10 Tech Leaders of the Future"), Red Herring
("15 Women to Watch"), Business 2.0 ("Silicon Valley Dream
Team"), BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Fast Company. Graduating
with honors, Marissa received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and
her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both
degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

The Virus Safe Computing Initiative at HP Labs
Google engEDU
59 min – Jul 5, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 5, 2006

Alan Karp

Principle Scientist Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Dr. Karp has been leading the Virus Safe Computing Initiative at HP Labs since 2003. He served as Chief Scientist of HP’s E-speak Operation from June 1999 until April 2000, at which time he returned to HP Laboratories to work on automated negotiation. Before working on E-speak, Dr. Karp participated in developing the EPIC chip architecture, the basis of Intel’s Itanium line.

ABSTRACT
HP Labs encourages activities considered to be outside the mainstream. Our group, the Virus Safe Computing Initiative, takes a view of security that is quite different from that of the official HP and HP Labs security teams. This talk will explore the concept of Authorization Based Access Control (ABAC) and demonstrate a number of novel technologies that emerge from this school of thought.

Our primary project is Polaris, a virus safe computing environment for Windows. Derived from the ABAC-based CapDesk system described in a later talk in this series, Polaris limits the potential damage of many common attacks. The result is a computing system with far less damage from malicious code you may happen to run, fewer security dialog boxes to interfere with your work, and more functionality, such as the freedom to launch executable attachments from email without risking your machine. Read the rest of this entry »

Scary Monsters: Does Social Software Have Fangs?
Google engEDU
53 min – Jun 27, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 27, 2007

ABSTRACT

So we’re all agreed. Blogs: good; email: bad. Wikis: good; sending round attachments to a dozen people and then having to merge all the changes by hand afterwards: bad.

But despite the labour-saving wonders of social software, many people – even those who otherwise pounce on every new technological innovation – prefer to stick with the old way of doing things. What’s stopping them from adopting blogs and wikis as a way of getting things done? It can’t be the tool, because the tools are easy. So what scary monsters are lurking in the social software closet, ready to leap out at the innocent project leader, fangs and claws to the fore?

Speaker: Suw Charman
Suw Charman is a social software expert specialising in the use of blogs and wikis in business. She’s worked with companies in the UK and US – in the tech, travel, media, financial and public relations sectors – to help them understand how social software can be used both behind the firewall and for customer communications.

Suw writes about social software, the media, publishing, and other related subects at Strange Attractor (strange.corante.com, with her partner Kevin Anderson), and also keeps a personal blog, Chocolate and Vodka, (chocnvodka.blogware.com).

A passionate digital rights advocate, Suw co-founded the Open Rights Group in July 2005 with the aim of raising awareness of digital rights issues, running campaigns and supporting grass roots activism. Read the rest of this entry »

Leveraging Unit Tests As Functional Tests, Load Tests, and Service Monitors
Google engEDU
45 min – Aug 13, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 13, 2007

ABSTRACT

Frank Cohen, the leading authority on XML, Platforms, Applications and Database (XPAD) optimization will give a TechTalk at Google on the issues confronting software developers, QA technicians, and IT managers to rapidly surface and solve functional and performance problems in service environments.

Frank will demonstrate the new PushToTest TestMaker Version 5 open- source end-to-end service governance and test automation tool. Software developers use PushToTest to turn their unit tests into functional tests in a test automation platform that runs on their development machine. Frank will demonstrate PushToTest’s Wizards and Recorders to automatically build tests and supports a variety of languages, including Java, .NET, Jython, Groovy, PHP, Ruby, and many others. Plus Frank will show how PushToTest Version 5 supports SOA, Web Service, AJAX, and REST services using HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP, XML- RPC, and the email protocols.

Frank will show how the platform requires no programming to turns these same functional tests into load tests and service monitors for QA technicians, IT operations managers, and CIOs. PushToTest test run- time load tests and service monitors integrate into Service Registry/ Repository products and database performance optimization and root- cause analysis tools. Read the rest of this entry »