Modeling Application Usage Visually
Google engEDU
37 min – Apr 24, 2006

Google TechTalks
April 24, 2006

Scott Barber
Scott Barber is the CTO of PerfTestPlus, Inc. and Co-Founder of the Workshop on Performance and Reliability (WOPR). Scott’s particular specialties are testing and analyzing performance for complex systems, developing customized testing methodologies, group facilitation and authoring instructional materials.

ABSTRACT
Modeling application usage is more than just parsing log files and calculating page frequencies. Whether we are analyzing navigation path effectiveness, planning for scenario testing, documenting performance test workload models or mapping services or objects to user activity having a single, intuitive picture to reference makes the job easier.

In this session, we’ll explore a highly adaptable method for visualizing application usage and how to use this model to improve cross-functional team communication without requiring team members to invest time learning some new fad of a modeling language that they’ll probably never use again. This method references UCMLâ„¢ which has been described as "what collaboration diagrams should have been."
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Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading
Google engEDU
1 hr 42 min – Jan 27, 2006

Google TechTalks
January 27, 2006

Thomas C. Heller and Stephen H. Schneider

Abstract
Please join two distinguished Stanford Professors, Dr. Stephen Schneider and Professor Thomas Heller, for a discussion on climate change and the emerging carbon trading markets. Dr. Schneider is one of the world’s leading scientific experts of climate change (his name is cited on all those climate change charts and graphs we’ve seen so far). Dr. Heller has extensive experience with policy and negotiations surrounding climate change and sustainable development. Professor Heller also recently served as Sergey’s host at the recent UN Climate Change Conference meeting in Montreal where Prof. Heller proved his indepth knowledge of thenuances of legislative works, such as the Kyoto Protocol, and the mechanisms that are currently being employed.

This tech talk will be different than our previous climate change talks. These men have helped steered the international course of policy, scientific verifications and the overall consensus on the existence of climate change. They both have plenty to say about what the failures and successes have been along the way, and what their predictions for the future of climate change policy will be. Email me if you have any questions.
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Advanced Topics in Programming Languages Series: Python Design Patterns (Part 1)
Google engEDU
59 min – Mar 14, 2007

Google Tech Talks
March 14, 2007

ABSTRACT

Design Patterns must be studied in the context on the language in which they’ll get implemented (the Gang of Four made that point very strongly in their book, though almost everybody else seems not to have noticed:-). This talk explores several categories of classic "elementary" DPs in a Python context — Creational, Masquerading, Adaptation, and Template.
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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.
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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.
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Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop
Google engEDU
1 hr 27 min – May 4, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 4, 2007

ABSTRACT

The computer desktop metaphor is ubiquitous, but how much work do we get done there? None! Time is entirely wasted navigating or shuffling content to the application in which we can finally work. What lessons can we learn from designing interfaces without the desktop and without applications? Is it even possible? And how does this apply to the Web? Currently, Web applications are often more usable than their desktop-based counterparts because each one does one thing and does it well. Desktop applications used to be the same way, but over time — as applications grew to support the the users in the long tail — each became a complex portmanteau of all possible features. If we are not careful, our Web apps will suffer the same conglomerated fate. Mashups and services help to solve the problem on the development end by freeing functionality from any particular application. But, there is currently no way to offer that wealth of possible functionality to users in a scalable way. Would it be nice to embed a dynamic map into your Gmail message? Sure. A Flickr slideshow? Sure. But for Google to offer those in addition to the hundreds of other possible options, would clutter the interface beyond usability. What’s needed is a universal method of accessing functionality: a way of harnessing the power of services without the need for application developers to explicitly support them. I’ll be demonstrating such a method.

The talk demonstrates that a ZUI plus a universal method of accessing functionality spells the death of the application-centric computing model and the desktop-design paradigms.
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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.
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Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: Java Puzzlers, Episode VI
Google engEDU
1 hr 14 min – Jul 23, 2007

Google Tech Talks
July 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

Java Puzzlers, Episode VI: The Phantom-Reference Menace/Attack of the Clone/Revenge of the Shift.
Josh Bloch and special guest star Bill Pugh present yet another installment in the continuing saga of Java Puzzlers, consisting of eight more programming puzzles for your entertainment and enlightenment. The game show format keeps you on your toes while the puzzles teach you about the subtleties of the Java programming language and its core libraries. Anyone with a working knowledge of the language will be able to understand the puzzles, but even the most seasoned veterans will be challenged. The lessons you take from this session are directly applicable to your programs and designs. Some of the jokes may even be funny. If you loathed Episodes I–V, you’ll detest Episode VI. Come early, because overripe fruit will, as usual, be given to the first 50 attendees. This is a repeat of a talk given at Google in May and at JavaOne 2007.
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New generation of math software from Maplesoft
Google engEDU
52 min – Sep 11, 2007

Google Tech Talks
September 11, 2007

ABSTRACT

The name Maple is synonymous with doing complex math on computers. Best known for its symbolic or algebraic computation abilities, Maple is one of the most important tools for the modern applied mathematician and scientist. Many of you are likely familiar with Maple from college but you’ve probably not kept up to date with latest developments. This presentation will present some of the latest product developments from Maplesoft. Topics include

- developments in high performance numerical computation
- recent advances in symbolic computing
- new Maple libraries including graph theory, statistics, optimization, polynomial operations, and more
- parallel and grid computing
- knowledge capture for mathematical documents
- the Maple programming language and application development
- overview of new add-on products including global optimization, and modeling and simulation

The presenter will be Mohamed Bendame, a senior engineer from Maplesoft. The presentations will include an open Q&A session.
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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.
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Statistical Aspects of Data Mining (Stats 202) Day 3
Google engEDU
56 min – Jul 3, 2007

Google Tech Talks
July 3, 2007

ABSTRACT

This is the Google campus version of Stats 202 which is being taught at Stanford this summer. I will follow the material from the Stanford class very closely. That material can be found at www.stats202.com. The main topics are exploring and visualizing data, association analysis, classification, and clustering. The textbook is Introduction to Data Mining by Tan, Steinbach and Kumar. Googlers are welcome to attend any classes which they think might be of interest to them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)
Google engEDU
1 hr 33 min – Nov 9, 2006

Google Tech Talks
November 9, 2006

ABSTRACT
This is not your father’s fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that’s been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.

Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal… until now.

Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).

Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google’s annual electricity bill? Come see what’s possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.
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PhotoTechEDU Day 12: High Dynamic Range Image Capture
Google engEDU
1 hr – Apr 11, 2007

Google Tech Talks
April 11, 2007

ABSTRACT

Although digital imaging has been around for nearly 40 years, the past decade has seen the nearly complete replacement of analog film by digital sensors, most of which capture only a tenth the dynamic range of the black and white film Ansel Adams worked with 80 years ago. Using multiple exposure techniques (or advanced sensors), it is in fact possible to turn this around and capture ten times the range of film, equalling or surpassing the capacity of human vision. Greg will introduce some of the concepts and present a few details of HDR imaging in the context of digital photography, and demonstrate interactive software he has developed to assist in the merging of bracketed exposures.
# useful properties of light and image formation
# theory and techniques of photographic optics and image capture
# theory of colorimetry and techniques of color reproduction
# where and how photography is being used in Google products and projects
# what tools exist inside Google for photographic image storage, processing, etc.
# and lots more…
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The Surprising History of Copyright and What It Means For Google
Google engEDU
55 min – Aug 15, 2006

Google Tech Talks
August 15, 2006

Karl Fogel

ABSTRACT
Copyright is derived from a 16th-century English censorship law, later turned into a monopoly right to subsidize distribution. This history is somewhat at odds with the modern conception of copyright, and an understanding of it is increasingly important today, as the economics of distribution are changing radically.

This talk will give the audience a mid-level overview of copyright’s history, with pointers to further reading, followed by a survey of alternative economic bases for creation and distribution, and a discussion of what these dynamics mean for companies, like Google, that flourish in an environment of frictionless information sharing. I will leave as much time as possible for Q&A.

This is a slight reworking of a talk I just gave at OSCON in Portland, see http://www.questioncopyright.org/node/5 for more.
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C++0x Initialization Lists
Google engEDU
1 hr 2 min – Feb 21, 2007

Google Tech Talks
February 21, 2007

ABSTRACT

Getting initialization right is an important part of programming. Over the years, this has led to a mess of language facilities and techniques. This talk describes how C++0x (most likely) will address two issues: how to get a uniform syntax and semantics for all initialization and how to allow initialization by general lists. Obviously, people will want the solution to be really simple and completely compatible. As ever, the resolution is to be almost completely compatible and almost simple. This talk will describe sequence constructors, homogeneous and heterogeneous initializer lists, and (as far as time allows) fit generalized constant expressions, prevention of narrowing conversions, and variadic templates into this picture.
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Wilderness Survival: Building and using a wilderness survival kit
Google engEDU
1 hr 5 min – Jan 18, 2007

Google Tech Talks
January 18, 2007

ABSTRACT

We’ll cover:
-approapriate attire for wilderness activities ("cotton kills")
-how not to get lost

Once lost:
-signaling for assistance (both day and night)
-building land markers to indicate direction
-choosing a location for shelter
-building shelters
-finding and purifying water
-basic medical kit and its use
-basic land navigation (and direction determination) without a compass
-also, well cover "child SAR", so parents are encouraged to attend
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Six Months in the Space Station

1 hr 6 min – Aug 30, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 30, 2007

ABSTRACT

A special space station tour for Googlers by NASA astronaut Daniel W. Bursch detailing his more than six months long stay on the International Space Station. In addition of Illustrating the stay with many unpublished pictures of both the station and Earth, Dan will take us through the nooks and crannies of living and working in weightlessness. He will also talk about the psychological challenges of living with two other people in the same "can", a theme that will no doubt affect profoundly any human mission to Mars. Carl Walz and Dan Bursch set the US record for the longest single spaceflight in 2002, when they flew for 196 days, this record was just broken this year by US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria.

Speaker: DANIEL W. BURSCH (CAPTAIN, USN, Ret.)NASA ASTRONAUT (FORMER)
NASA EXPERIENCE: Selected by NASA in January 1990, Bursch became an astronaut in July 1991. His technical assignments to date include: Astronaut Office Operations Development Branch, working on controls and displays for the Space Shuttle and Space Station; Chief of Astronaut Appearances; spacecraft communicator (CAPCOM) in mission control. A veteran of four space flights, Bursch has logged over 227 days in space. He was a mission specialist on STS-51 (1993), STS-68 (1994) and STS-77 (1996), and served as flight engineer on the International Space Sta…
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Mobiles, The Digital Divide, And Google
Google EngEDU
1 hr 1 min – Jan 12, 2007

Google Tech Talks
January 17, 2007

ABSTRACT

If you’ve enjoyed Hal’s talks and emails on how economic theory can help make sense of various financial phenomenon around us from the US real estate bubble to zero-coupon bonds; come listen to Prof. Waverman from the London Business School talk about how mobile technology can impact economic growth in emerging markets. His work was recently profiled in The Economist. Prof. Waverman visits Google in Mountain View courtesy of efforts by Yonca Brunini and Dennis Woodside from our EMEA offices.

Professor Waverman’s research quantifiably demonstrates that communications networks form a key component of the infrastructure crucial to a nation’s economic growth, joining the ranks of roads and electricity. In Friday’s talk, we’ll see promising signs that the explosion of mobile telephony across the developing world is shrinking the digital divide and providing real opportunity for economic growth in the world’s poorest regions. Prepare to be impressed by research profiled in The Economist, wowed by ingenious and vital applications of mobile telephony, and challenged to make the world’s information accessible and useful to those whose lives it could benefit the most.
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Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development
Google engEDU
48 min – Mar 17, 2006

Google TechTalks
March 17, 2006

Dave Astels

Dave Astels (co-author of "A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming" and author of Jolt Award winning "Test-driven Development: A Practical Guide") has over 2 decades of experience in the software field, most of that involved with object-oriented technologies and techniques. Dave has been studying, practicing, teaching, evangelising, and coaching XP and Agile Processes since 1998. Dave’s experience ranges from embedded process control systems to consumer products (both consumer electronics and shrinkwrapped software) to energy trading systems. Dave is an independant software consultant specializing in the areas of agile process, programming practices, and object design/architecture. Dave is one of the thought leaders in the area of TDD, and now BDD.

ABSTRACT
Test Driven Development (TDD) has become quite well known. Many developers are getting benefit from the practice. But it is possible that we can get even more value. A new practice is getting attention these days: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD).

BDD removes all vestiges of testing and instead focuses on specifying the behaviour desired in the system being built. This talk will be focus on Ruby and will introduce a new BDD framework: rSpec. The ideas, however, are language independent.
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Mindfulness Stress Reduction And Healing
Google EngEDU
1 hr 15 min – Mar 8, 2007

Google Tech Talks
March 8, 2007

ABSTRACT

Jon will describe the revolution in medicine that has occurred over the past 30 years that has integrated the mind back into the body and developed a remarkable range of practices for integrating one’s experience, reducing stress, healing the body, coping more effectively with emotions such as anxiety, anger, and depression, and cultivating greater well-being and happiness. His work has been instrumental in bringing Buddhist meditative practices, as he likes to say, "without the Buddhism" to full acceptance within the mainstream of medicine, psychology, and health care, and has shown them to be effective in people suffering from a wide range of medical disorders and diseases who have not been entirely helped by more traditional approaches. He will present data from several studies showing the effects of simple mindfulness practices on the brain and the immune system in employees in a high-stress work environment, and on rates of healing in medical patients. He will also speak about the growing conversation at the highest levels between science and ancient contemplative traditions, catalyzed in part by the Dalai Lama’s interest in science, and how it is leading to new ways of exploring and understanding the nature of human experience and our potential to lead satisfying, happy, and healthy lives.
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• Download: “Mindfulness Stress Reduction And Healing” (video/mp4)

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The Internet of Things: What is a Spime and why is it useful?
Google EngEDU
49 min – Apr 30, 2007

Google Tech Talks
April 30, 2007

ABSTRACT

World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and ’searchabiliity’ to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth.

This same paradigm will find you "wrangling" with product-lifecycle- management systems that do for physical objects what the iPod has done for music. These and other radical ideas are delivered in Sterling’s latest book`Shaping Things’. This concise book was written to inspire designers to visualize radical scenarios connecting information technology and sustainability in a new ecology of artifacts. Sterling suggests new connections between the virtual world and the physical world that will have you rethinking many of your assumptions about how we relate to products.

He will be joined by Scott Klinker, 3-D Designer-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI who leads a graduate design program known for giving form to experimental cultural ideas. Klinker’s own design work focuses on digital customization as industry shifts from mass production toward niche production in a networked society.

The presentation will include an invitation for Sterlling and Klinker/ Cranbrook to team-up with Google to create a short documentary film that would portray a speculative future of life with SPIMES. Distributed online, this short film would convey the look and feel of SPIME scenarios as a provocation for widespread industry discussion about the new potentials of ubiquitous, ambient, searchable, geolocative products.
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• Download: “The Internet Of Things: What Is A Spime And Why Is It Useful” (video/mp4)

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Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets
Google engEDU
30 min – Jun 23, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

2007 Google Seattle Conference on Scalability:
Using MapReduce on Large Geographic Datasets
Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google, Inc.

MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to
simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of
computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism
which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle
challenging distributed computing problems such as data
distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While
working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to
process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s
geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its
broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic
data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the
context of geographic data.
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• Download: “Seattle Conference On Scalability: Mapreduce Used On Large Data Sets” (video/mp4)

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Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: Concurrency/message passing Newsqueak
Google engEDU
57 min – May 9, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 9, 2007

ABSTRACT

Sometimes what you want to say is hard to write or hard to get right in the programming model you’re using. But how do we try another? There are many powerful programming models but most are not well supported by today’s mainstream languages. Concurrency is one.

This talk will discuss the programming model of Newsqueak, a concurrent programming language I designed and implemented to make it easier to write interactive applications in the late 1980s. It acts nothing like the tools used for that purpose today, but its ideas still have relevance. The language’s users taught me a lot about concurrency, but they also taught me a lot about interface design and how to think about interactive – and interacting – systems.
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• Download: “Advanced Topics In Programming Languages: Concurrencymessage Passing Newsqueak” (video/mp4)

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When is a Googol Not Enough?
Google engEDU
55 min – May 24, 2006

Google TechTalks
May 24, 2006

Washington Taylor

ABSTRACT
Recent developments in string theory, combined with the experimental observation that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, have led theoretical physicists to a radical (and controversial) new picture of the universe. In this new picture, the universe is enormously larger than our parochial observable region of radius 13.7 light years.

In other patches of the universe, the laws of physics may be quite different, though in each patch the local physics is governed by a metastable solution of string theory. Since there may be something like $10^{1000}$ or more distinct solutions of string theory giving physics roughly like that we observe, to make physical predictions we need to classify enormous numbers of possible solutions.

In this talk this new theoretical picture of cosmology will be described, and related computational problems will be discussed.
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• Download: “When Is A Googol Not Enough” (video/mp4)

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Impact of Technology on Reducing Poverty and Alleviating Social Issues in India
Google engEDU
58 min – Jun 7, 2006

Google TechTalks
June 7, 2006

B. Ramalinga Raju and Venkat Changavalli

ABSTRACT
India is booming with visionary initiatives to transform rural India and its poor. This tech talk tells the story of one corporation that is leveraging its core competency to address the issues.

Satyam group of Industries took on new missions starting in 2001 – to serve and transform the "Bottom of the Pyramid" – a phrase coined by Prof. C.K. Prahalad. Driven by the vision of Mr. Ramalinga Raju and his family, Satyam is forging ahead on three different fronts:

The Byrraju Foundation: has developed a model of transforming villages into self sufficient commercial societies. To date this initiative has transformed the lives of ~2M people.

Gram-IT: A model to take BPO jobs to the villages where loyalty is high, costs are extremely low and the success of which will transform the global service industry yet again.

EMRI: A 911 analog (108 in India) which has innovated and deployed a model of bringing emergency services at <$1 per incident. In the short six months the program has saved an estimated 1500 lives.
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• Download: “Impact Of Technology On Reducing Poverty And Alleviating Social Issues In India” (video/mp4)

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Effective Approaches to Video Search and Classification
Google engEDU
51 min – Mar 1, 2006

Google TechTalks
Date: March 1, 2006

Alexander Hauptmann
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A New Way to look at Networking
Google engEDU
1 hr 21 min – Aug 30, 2006

Google Tech Talks
August 30, 2006

Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He’s been studying networking since 1969. He still hopes that someday something will start to make sense.

ABSTRACT
Today’s research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows.

Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what’s available from either the research community or the marketplace. I’ll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy.
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