Hey, What’s That? A Map Hack
Google engEDU
51 min – May 8, 2007

Google Tech Talks
May 8, 2007

ABSTRACT

Designed to answer the question "What am I looking at?" when standing on a hilltop or pulled over at a scenic overlook, HeyWhatsThat.com has garnered reviews like "Just when I thought I was in danger of becoming a jaded customer of the mass mapping space, here’s a site that effortlessly returns me to a state of slack-jawed wonder" (OgleEarth). In addition to peak detection and identification, it offers viewshed computations, elevation contours, elevation profiles, and integration with Google Maps and Google Earth. This talk — given by Michael Kosowsky, designer and proprieter of HeyWhatsThat.com — will focus on what it is and how it got to be that way.

http://www.heywhatsthat.com/

http://www.heywhatsthat.com/faq.html

Speaker: Michael Kosowsky

Michael Kosowsky has more than 25 years of experience in software development, on platforms ranging from embedded microprocessors to supercomputers. Currently sole proprietor of the HeyWhatsThat.com web site, previous roles include founder and CTO of Great Point Design, where he developed its desktop photo application and web service; founder and CTO of Momentum, Inc., where he led the development and patenting of a portable client-server communications technology; and software engineer for The Jackson Laboratory and DNA Sciences, where he implemented systems for visualizing and sharing genomic data. 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 »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Understanding SVG with Inkscape
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Feb 12, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 19, 2006

ABSTRACT

SVG is an XML vector graphics standard that is gaining momentum on the web. It is supported by most browsers (IE with a plug-in) and fills a need for vector graphics in the high resolution environments that webpages are finding themselves in while still providing graphics rich experiences to mobile users with smaller file sizes. This talk will go into the SVG standard and how to easily make SVG documents using Inkscape. Inkscape is a cross-platform Open Source vector drawing tool that is based on the SVG standard. 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 »