Bay Area Discrete Math Day XII: Stat. Physics, Comp. Simulation, and Probability
Google engEDU
41 min – Apr 15, 2006

Google TechTalks
Bay Area Discrete Math Day XII
April 15, 2006

Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis)

ABSTRACT
Statistical physics, computer simulation and discrete mathematics are intimately related through the study of shared models. These are primarily lattice models, such as the Ising model, yet can also involve discrete structures such as networks. Several models illustrate the current interplay between these three fields, while also providing cautionary tales of interpolating results obtained in one realm to the other. This talk will survey several such models, focusing on pattern formation in a simple first-order jamming transition. Read the rest of this entry »

7 Ways To Ruin A Technological Revolution
Google engEDU
1 hr 14 min – Dec 18, 2006

Google Tech Talks
December 18, 2006

ABSTRACT

If you wanted to undermine the technological revolution of the last 30 years, using the law, how would you do it? How would you undercut the virtuous cycle that results from access to an open network, force technological innovation into stagnation, diminish competition, create monopolies over the basic building blocks of knowledge? How many of those things are we doing now?

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, the founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and a Board Member of Creative Commons. He is also a columnist for the Financial Times New Technology Policy Forum. His most recent books were Bound By Law — a comic book about fair use — and The Shakespeare Chronicles, a literary mystery about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. Read the rest of this entry »

Mysteries of the Human Genome
Google engEDU
1 hr 3 min – Oct 23, 2006

Google Tech Talks
October 23, 2006

Gill Bejerano holds a BSc, summa cum laude, in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Twice recipient of the RECOMB best paper by a young scientist award, and a former Eshkol pre-doctoral Scholar and HHMI postdoc. As co-discoverer of ultraconserved elements, his research focuses on deciphering the function and evolution of the non-coding regions of the Human Genome. Gill is currently a postdoc with David Haussler at UC Santa Cruz, and in early 2007 he will join Stanford university as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and the Department of Computer Science.

ABSTRACT
The human genome, the hereditary material we pass on to our progeny, can be cast as a 3 billion letter string over a DNA alphabet of four. We currently understand 1.5% of this mass, mostly in the form of genes, DNA substrings that code for proteins, the quintessential constituents of every living cell. The remainder 98.5% of our genome was often deemed as "junk". This picture changed when the genome of related species became available. By comparison we are suddenly able to pinpoint the locations of a staggering one million additional human subsequences that must be important to the human cell. The functions of these regions remain largely unknown, while their sheer volume overwhelms any comprehensive experimental approach. Guided by experimental results for handfuls of these subsequences, computational approaches can be employed to tackle the tremendous challenge of understanding this data and providing key biological observations. In this talk, I will describe ultraconserved elements, some of the most perplexing regions within the human genome, and track down a phenomenon of turning genomic junk into gold. The talk will assume no prior knowledge in Molecular Biology Read the rest of this entry »

Hashing Searching Sketching.
Google engEDU
1 hr 2 min – Nov 20, 2006

Google Tech Talks
November 20, 2006

ABSTRACT
We will see improved results on search using hashing and sketching. Hashing is often analyzed as balls being thrown into bins where you think of the hash items as balls and buckets as bins. By studying variants of the balls and bins processes we obtain a hashing algorithm with 85% hash table space utilization. We will also study locality sensitive hashing, a hashing method used for nearest neighbor search, as opposed to exact search. A locality sensitive hash function is likely to map nearby elements to the same bucket. We will see a variant of locality sensitive hashing that finds an approximate nearest neighbor in high dimensions using linear space. We will also see some lower bounds and applications to kd trees. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospects for extending healthy life – a lot
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Jun 1, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The first is that aging is happening to us throughout our lives but only results in appreciable functional decline after four or more decades of life: this shows that we can postpone the functional decline caused by aging arbitrarily well without knowing how to prevent aging completely, but instead by increasingly thorough molecular and cellular repair. The second is that the typical rate of refinement of dramatic technological breakthroughs is rather reliable (so long as public enthusiasm for them is abundant) and is fast enough to change such technologies (be they in medicine, transport, or computing) almost beyond recognition within a natural human lifespan. In this talk I will explain, first, why (presuming adequate funding for the initial preclinical work) therapies that can add 30 healthy years to the remaining lifespan of healthy 55-year-olds may arrive within the next few decades, and, second, why those who benefit from those therapies will very probably continue to benefit from progressively improved therapies indefinitely and thus avoid debilitation or death from age-related causes at any age.

Speaker: Aubrey de Grey Ph.D

Slides available at http://www.sens.org/Google.ppt Read the rest of this entry »