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 »

Core Patterns for Web Permissions
Google engEDU
56 min – Jul 19, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 19, 2006

Tyler Close

Visiting Scientist Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

Mr. Close is a researcher and developer, working in the field of secure, multi-user, distributed applications since 1998.

ABSTRACT
In Authorization Based Access Control (ABAC) systems built with object-capabilities, an access policy is expressed by the shape of a reference graph: what a user can do is determined by where they are in the reference graph and what other parts of the graph are reachable from that point. By applying some basic cryptography to create links that act as "webkeys", we can construct URL graphs that are compatible with today’s WWW infrastructure and additionally provide the properties of distributed capabilities. Webkeys enable users to achieve password-free fine-grain access control implicitly, simply by sending one another links to the pages they want to share. The webkey approach simultaneously provides developers with a powerful, and readily audited, access-control model.

In this talk, we’ll study the implementation of the CapWiki, which can serve as a private data space, a locally shared data space, a blog, and a wiki, simply by varying which links have been distributed to which people. Read the rest of this entry »

From Sound Synthesis to Sound Retrieval and Back
Google engEDU
55 min – Jul 10, 2007

Google Tech Talks
July 10, 2007

ABSTRACT

In this talk I will go over the technological and conceptual ties that exist between some of the current trends in sound generation for music and multimedia applications and the techniques for content based sound retrieval. This is because quite a number of the techniques being worked on for sound retrieval come from the field of sound synthesis and at the same time the new developments in retrieval are being applied and are inspiring new directions in the development of sound generation systems. To explain all this I will use examples from the research carried out in the Music Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, Spain. In particular I will go over our research on spectral based concatenative synthesis and our work on sound and music retrieval. Also I will link it with the online community that we have developed for sharing sound files, Freesound http://freesound.iua.upf.edu, showing the potential that this open and shared resource has for the research on sound retrieval and for experimenting with new sound generation systems.

Speaker: Xavier Serra
Director of the Music Technology Group (http://mtg.upf.edu)
Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona Read the rest of this entry »

15 Views of a Node Link Graph: An Information Visualization Portfolio
Google engEDU
1 hr – Jun 28, 2006

Google TechTalks
June 28, 2006

Tamara Munzner received a BS in 1991 and a PhD in 2000 from Stanford. Her current research interests are information visualization, graph drawing, and dimensionality reduction. She was the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization Program/Papers Co-Chair in 2003 and 2004.

ABSTRACT
Information visualization, or infovis, is the interactive computer-based visual representation of abstract datasets. I will use collections of linked nodes as the launching point for a discussion of fifteen different approaches to infovis. Node-link graphs appear in many application domains, and people can perform many tasks faster or more effectively when they can manipulate a well-chosen visual representation of these graphs. A major challenge within infovis is how to handle the large datasets that occur in the real world. Designing algorithms with scalable speed and memory complexity is only part of the solution. The visual representation must also provide an appropriate abstraction, often requiring exploration across multiple levels of detail, to be comprehensible to the human in the loop. The talk will include examples in application domains ranging from web browsing to bioinformatics to computational linguistics, and datasets from thousands to millions of items. Read the rest of this entry »

Return to the RNAi World: Rethinking Gene Expression and Evolution
Google engEDU
1 hr 9 min – Apr 9, 2007

Google Tech Talks
April 9, 2007

ABSTRACT

While investigating the genetic workings of the microscopic worm, C. elegans, Mello and colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, discovered RNAi, a natural but previously unrecognized process by which a certain form of RNA can be manipulated to silence—or interfere with—the expression of a selected gene. The discovery, published in the journal Nature in 1998, has had two extraordinary impacts on biological science. One is as a research tool: RNAi is now the state-of-the-art method by which scientists can knock out the expression of specific genes in cells, to thus define the biological functions of those genes. But just as important has been the finding that RNA interference is a normal process of genetic regulation that takes place during development. Thus, RNAi has provided not only a powerful research tool for experimentally knocking out the expression of specific genes, but has opened a completely new and totally unanticipated window on developmental gene regulation. RNAi is now showing promising in the clinic as a new class of gene-specific therapeutics.

The speaker, Craig Mello, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006. Read the rest of this entry »