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 »

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 »

How can we better understand customers?
Google engEDU
50 min – Jul 18, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 18, 2006

Ely Dahan

At MIT’s Sloan School of Business, Ely Dahan taught high tech marketing and new product development. He now develops new models and methods for developing products at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business. Dahan has developed internet-based market research methods, mathematical models of parallel and sequential prototyping, the economics of cost reduction, and strategies for mass customization. Prior to entering academia, he was national product manager for W.R. Grace and NEC until 1984, when he founded a computer networking company in Maryland, serving as CEO until the firm was acquired in 1993. He is the recipient, along with his coauthors, of the INFORMS John D.C. Little Award, the American Marketing Association EXPLOR Award, the INFORMS Frank M. Bass Outstanding Dissertation Award (based on Olivier Toubia’s PhD thesis), and the Journal of Product Innovation Managment Hustad Award. Dahan earned his PhD in the Operations & IT program at Stanford Business School, where he was a Department of Energy Fellow, an AACSB Doctoral Fellow, and a recipient of the Jaedicke Prize for scholarly achievement. He attended Princeton University, then received a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from MIT in 1978 and an MBA from Harvard in 1980. Read the rest of this entry »

Algorithmic Mechanism Design
Google engEDU
57 min – Aug 15, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 15, 2007

ABSTRACT

One of the challenges that the Internet raises is the necessity of designing distributed protocols for settings where the participating computers are owned and operated by different owners with different goals. Over the last decade or so there has been much research that aims to address these issues using ideas taken from the micro-economic field of mechanism design. In this talk I will survey the current state of the field: how mechanism design is applied in computational settings, how far can classical ideas go, and what are the challenges for further research. Among the applications discussed will be combinatorial auctions, cost sharing, scheduling, and routing in networks. Read the rest of this entry »

Sowing the Seeds for a more Creative Society
Google engEDU
54 min – Oct 26, 2006

Google Tech Talks
October 26, 2006

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory, develops new technologies and activities to engage people (especially children) in creative learning experiences. Resnicks Lifelong Kindergarten research group developed ideas and technologies underlying the LEGO Mindstorms and PicoCricket construction kits. He co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, a network of after-school centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Resnick earned a BA in physics at Princeton University (1978), and MS and PhD degrees in computer science at MIT (1988, 1992). Resnick has consulted throughout the world on the use of computers in education. He is author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994), co-editor of Constructionism in Practice (1996), and co-author of Adventures in Modeling (2001).

ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, many people talked about the transition from the "Industrial Society" to the "Information Society." In the 1990s, people began to talk about the "Knowledge Society." But as I see it, we are now in a transition towards the "Creative Society." Success in the future (for individuals, for companies, for nations as a whole) will be based not on what we know or how much we know, but on our ability to think and act creatively. Unfortunately, current educational practices are woefully inadequate. In this talk, I will discuss new technologies and new educational initiatives designed specifically to help children develop as creative thinkers — so that they are prepared for life in the Creative Society. I will focus especially on two projects we are developing at the MIT Media Lab: (1) a new programming language, called Scratch, that makes it easier for kids to create animated stories, games, and interactive art — and share their creations with one another online ( http://scratch.mit.edu), and (2) a new breed of construction kit that combines art and technology, enabling kids to create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, and other artistic inventions — and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process. For more information, see scratch.mit.edu and www.picocricket.com and llk.media.mit.edu Read the rest of this entry »