High End Computing and Scientific Visualization at NASA
Google engEDU
1 hr 2 min – Jan 25, 2006

Google TechTalks
January 25, 2006

Dr. Rupak Biswas and Dr. Chris Henze

Dr. Rupak Biswas is currently the Acting Chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Biswas received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1991 and has been at NASA ever since.

Chris Henze is the lead of the Visualization Group in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center, in which capacity he supervises research and development activities in data analysis and visualization. Dr. Henze received his Ph.D. in computational biology from the University of Arizona in 1993. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second Price Auction
Google engEDU
1 hr 3 min – Feb 9, 2006

Google TechTalks
February 9, 2006

Michael Schwarz

Michael Schwarz served as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Economics Department after earning a Ph.D. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economics Research. Dr. Schwarz specializes in economic theory and industrial organization and applications of theory to business decision making and public policy.

ABSTRACT
We investigate the "generalized second price" auction (GSP), a new mechanism which is used by search engines to sell online advertising that most Internet users encounter daily. GSP is tailored to its unique environment, and neither the mechanism nor the environment have previously been studied in the mechanism design literature. Although GSP looks similar to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, its properties are very different. In particular, unlike the VCG mechanism, GSP generally does not have an equilibrium in dominant strategies, and truth-telling is not an equilibrium of GSP. To analyze the properties of GSP in a dynamic environment, we describe the generalized English auction that corresponds to the GSP and show that it has a unique equilibrium. This is an ex post equilibrium that results in the same payoffs to all players as the dominant strategy equilibrium of VCG. Read the rest of this entry »

Update on the Natural Programming Project
Google engEDU
1 hr 8 min – Sep 26, 2007

Google Tech Talks
September 26, 2007

ABSTRACT

The Natural Programming Project is working on making programming languages and environments easier to learn, more effective, and less error prone. We are taking a human-centered approach, by first studying how people perform their tasks, and then designing languages and environments that take into account people’s natural tendencies. We focus on all kinds of programmers: professional programmers, novice programmers who are trying to learn to be experts, and "end-user programmers" who are people who program because they must to achieve their "real jobs." This talk will update my talk to Google from October 27, 2005, and cover the exciting progress we have made since then. After briefly reviewing our old work on designing languages for novices, our new systems and studies will be presented. We have a new version of the the Whyline tool, which allows programmers to directly ask "why" and "why not" questions of their Java programs and get a visualization of the answers. The previous version for Alice decreased debugging time by a factor of 8 and increased programmer productivity by 40%, and pilot studies of the new version suggest a factor of two improvement in time. Other new work helps programmers keep track of their "working sets," since our research showed that programmers spend about 38% of their time navigating around code. Most of coding today is making use of APIs, and we have evaluated a number of APIs and design patterns using HCI techniques, to reveal how to make their easier to use for programmers. We also have a brand new study of the practices and problems for Interaction Designers working on interactive behaviors. Read the rest of this entry »

Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action
Google engEDU
25 min – Aug 30, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 30, 2007

ABSTRACT

Quicksilver hides almost unbounded power beneath the interface of a keyboard-driven launcher. Using a basic grammatical model, it allows you to move beyond basic search and work effortlessly with applications, data, and the web. Quickilver is above all a prototype intended to explore new forms of interaction.

In this talk, we will explore the motivation behind Quicksilver, highlights of its implementation, lessons learned from its design, and the ways it might inform the future of navigation for the desktop and the web.

Speaker: Nicholas Jitkoff Read the rest of this entry »

Market Failure and Market Design
Google engEDU
1 hr 7 min – Oct 11, 2007

Google Tech Talks
October, 11 2007

ABSTRACT

An overview of the field of market design

Speaker: Al Roth
Al Roth is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and in the Harvard Business School. His research, teaching, and consulting interests are in game theory, experimental economics, and market design. The best known of the markets he has designed (or, in this case, redesigned) is the National Resident Matching Program, through which approximately twenty thousand doctors a year find their first employment as residents at American hospitals. He has recently been involved in the reorganization of the market for Gastroenterology fellows, which started using a clearinghouse in 2006 for positions beginning in 2007. He helped design the high school matching system used in New York City to match approximately ninety thousand students to high schools each year, starting with students entering high school in the Fall of 2004. He helped redesign the matching system used in Boston Public Schools, adopted for students starting school in September 2006. He is one of the founders and designers of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, for incompatible patient-donor pairs. He is the chair of the American Economic Association’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, which has designed a number of recent changes in the market for new Ph.D. economists. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim and Sloan fellow. He received his Ph.D at Stanford University, and came to Harvard from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Economics. Read the rest of this entry »