Descripción:Google Tech Talks June 16, 2008 ABSTRACT Explore the brain's amazing ability to change throughout a person's life. This phenomenon—called neuroplasticty—is the science behind brain fitness, and it has been called one of the most extraordinary scientific discoveries of the 20th century. PBS had recently aired this special, The Brain Fitness Program, which explains the brain's complexities in a way that both scientists and people with no scientific background can appreciate. This is opportunity to learn more about how our minds work—and to find out more about the latest in cutting-edge brain research, from the founder of Posit Science and creator of the Brain Fitness Program software, Dr. Michael Merzenich. Speaker: Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. Michael M. Merzenich, PhD: Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Merzenich leads the company's scientific team. For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity research. He is the Francis A. Sooy Professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. Dr. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Ipsen Prize, Zulch Prize of the Max Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and Purkinje Medal. Dr. Merzenich has published more than 200 articles, including many in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. His work is also often covered in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by market leader Advanced Bionics. In 1996, Dr. Merzenich was the founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation (Nasdaq: SCIL), which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language learning and reading. He is an inventor on more than 50 patents. Dr. Merzenich earned his BS degree at the University of Portland and his PhD at Johns Hopkins.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks May, 7 2008 ABSTRACT Introduced last November, the 23andMe Personal Genome Service offers customers a glimpse at their own DNA sequence, a 750-megabyte string of four characters (A, C, T and G) that functions as the operating system for a human being. Common variations in this code can influence the structure and function of the associated wetware in predictable ways. Some of these variations and their effects on traits such as athletic talent, pain sensitivity and avoidance of errors will be discussed in reference to three well-documented examples (Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt). Have questions? 23andMe will have their Ancestry and Gene Journal specialists handy to answer all levels of questions. Want Your Own Genome? You can order it at the Spit Party for a significant discount (50% off)! Can't wait to spit? They will have kits available at the event for you to purchase and spit right there. If you happen to miss this party, the discount will be available for 24 hours after the event as well. You are encouraged to visit www.23andme.com, sign up for a demo account and take 23andMe for a test drive! This talk will be taped. Speaker: Linda Avey Linda has over 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry in San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. Prior to starting 23andMe, she developed translational research collaborations with academic and pharmaceutical partners for Affymetrix and Perlegen Sciences. Linda also spent time at Spotfire helping scientists understand the power of data visualization and at Applied Biosystems during the early days of the human genome project. The advent of high density genome-wide scanning technologies brought huge potential for significant discoveries. However, the lack of sufficient funding to enable adequate studies prompted Linda to think of a new research model. These ideas led to the formation of 23andMe. Her primary interest is the acceleration of personalized medicine, using genetic profiles to target the right drug to the right person at the correct dose. Linda graduated from Augustana College with a B.A. in biology.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks February, 8 2008 ABSTRACT Emporiatrics or Travel Medicine is a discipline within medicine that prepares a traveler using vaccines, medicines and knowledge to avoid disease when visiting a foreign destination. I will discuss the current mapping of interventions offered to patients planning trips and illustrate with examples how the constraints of patient needs and the risks at a specific destination overlap to arrive at a list of recommendations that are offered a traveler before departure. Depending on crowd size I can run through personal case examples for those who are planning an exotic trip. I hope to also highlight limitations of the practice of emporiatrics and suggest where Google can potentially offer a useful "expert system" that might be modulated by risk, price points and insurance coverage using disease maps from publicly available surveillance data and patient records, using the Kaiser Epic Data system. Speaker: D. Scott Smith. Scott grew up in Boulder Colorado and attended medical school at the University of Colorado. He went to public health school at Harvard University where an interest in Tropical Public Health was further developed, leading to a year long adventure on a Fulbright scholarship in Cali, Colombia, seeking improved diagnostic technologies to understand the epidemiology of leishmaniasis, and onchocerciasis (River Blindness). He completed residency then a Fellowship at Stanford University in Medicine then Infectious Disease & Geographic Medicine. Scott practices at Kaiser in Redwood City, California where he heads the HIV/AIDS clinic and oversees the travel medicine services locally but also is developing regionalization of the Travel Medicine Services for Kaiser Northern California. He co-chairs the biennial National Conference on Preparing International Travelers. He teaches at Stanford Medical School in the Microbiology and Immunology Division and directs a course for undergraduates in Human Biology entitled "Parasites & Pestilence: Public Health Challenges". He was recently presented the Bloomfield award in recognition of excellence in the teaching of clinical medicine at Stanford School of Medicine. Acknowledging Candid's epiphany (after tumultuous world travel) that staying in one's own backyard is a pathway to happiness, in his spare time he gardens and keeps chickens and bees. As one's own content is not a final destination, he recently traveled with family to Uganda and South Africa to speak and visit an AIDS study site and to see family later this year. http://www.permanente.net/homepage/doctor/scottsmith/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/humbio103/

Descripción:Google Tech Talks April, 22 2008 ABSTRACT Cosmic radiation presents a very real threat to astronauts. As part of a NASA funded project to evaluate the cancer risks of a trip to Mars, Dr. Costes' team has been collecting hundreds of gigabytes of 3D and 4D imagery showing the traversal of cosmic particles in human cells, and characterizing the DNA damage along those tracks to reveal the existence of DNA repair factories. In addition to sharing his project with us, Dr. Costes will discuss how they've overcome some of the challenges in 3D image registration and segmentation, pattern recognition and classification, and storing, organizing and browsing through thousands of images and experimental measurements. Speaker: Sylvain Costes Dr. Costes is a principal investigator in the Life Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks January, 25 2008 ABSTRACT In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. A new generation of software libraries and algorithms are needed for the effective and reliable use of (wide area) dynamic, distributed and parallel environments. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile--time and run--time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run--time environment variability will make these problems much harder. We will focus on the redesign of software to fit multicore architectures. Speaker: Jack Dongarra University of Tennessee Oak Ridge National Laboratory University of Manchester Jack Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He now holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, has the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Turing Fellow in the Computer Science and Mathematics Schools at the University of Manchester, and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published approximately 200 articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda and he is coauthor of several books. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks January, 30 2008 ABSTRACT Greg Gillis and Lesly Higgins, experienced corporate coaches, will discuss and demonstrate various methods to effectively communicate; whether it is delivering a yearly review to a fellow Googler, developing your group's strategic vision, or influencing others towards an idea. By learning about Advocacy and Inquiry, Appreciate Inquiry, and Effective Feedback/Feedforward, you will come away from this workshop with concrete examples and experiences to help you get your message across with impact. Speaker: Lesly Higgins I've been coaching since 1999. After my first career in software development, with roles that included VP Software Engineering at Commerce One and VP Information Technology at Charles Schwab, I returned to school to complete an MS in Organizational Behavior and Development and also a comprehensive coaching program. I've coached at all levels in organizations, most functions, and with both early stage and Fortune 500 companies. Most of my clients are in the tech space, and they include: Agile Software, America Online, Apple Computer, Autodesk, Charles Schwab, Coremetrics, CNET, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Peoplesoft, Pixar, SAP, Shutterfly, Taleo, TiVo, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I believe everyone wants to be more effective and more fulfilled in life. Usually we don't know HOW to achieve that. And often we don't know what skills are important to develop to increase our overall effectiveness and satisfaction in work, and to position ourselves for greater responsibility. I help clients to understand WHAT they need to work on, and then HOW to achieve their developmental goals. I partner with clients as a guide, a mirror, a challenger, a support system, a sounding board—to name a few roles. I help them to develop new awarenesses, master new skills, assimilate new ways of seeing the world and shift their way of being in a way that not only meets their developmental goals but also creates the ability to continue growing—as a person and as a leader. I've been coaching at Google since 2003. Speaker: Greg Gillis I combine real-world wisdom, gathered through years of high technology corporate experience, with solid coaching expertise and training -- to help successful people become even more successful. I help my client's transition from manager to leader, enhance their leadership skills, better work within political infrastructures, delegate effectively, and collaborate wisely. I often increase their awareness of power in the organization, how it is acquired, manifested, held and diminished. I enhance their influence skills--critical to a leader's growth in managing cross-functionally. I increase their awareness about emotional intelligence and interpersonal effectiveness while helping them shift to a more encompassing outlook resulting in more successful performance.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks November, 15 2007 ABSTRACT The Bloom filter, conceived by Burton H. Bloom in 1970, is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positives are possible, but false negatives are not. Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with a counting filter). The more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives. For example, one might use a Bloom filter to do spell-checking in a space-efficient way. A Bloom filter to which a dictionary of correct words has been added will accept all words in the dictionary and reject almost all words which are not, which is good enough in some cases. Depending on the false positive rate, the resulting data structure can require as little as a byte per dictionary word. In the last few years Bloom filter become hot topic again and there were several modifications and improvements. In this talk I will present my last few improvements in this topic. Speaker: Ely Porat Ely Porat received his Doctorate from Bar-Ilan University in 2000. Following that, he fulfilled his military service and, in parallel, worked as a faculty member at Bar-Ilan University. Having spent the spring 2007 semester as a Visiting Scientist in Google, he is now back at Bar-Ilan University. The main body of Ely Porat's work concerns matching problems: string matching, pattern matching, subset matching. He also worked on the nearest pair problem in high-dimensional spaces as well as sketching and edit distance.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks April, 2 2008 ABSTRACT Imagine a game where two players go back and forth making moves and at the end of a fixed number of moves the position is either a win or a loss for the first player. In this case, if both players play best possible, it is determined at the first move who wins or loses. To figure out who will be the winner you need not look at all of the N final positions but only at N^0.753. I will show that with a quantum computer the exponent can be reduced to 0.5. The technique involves quantum scattering theory and illustrates how ideas from physics can be used to design quantum algorithms that outperform even best possible classical algorithms. Speaker: Edward Farhi Professor of Physics; Director, Center for Theoretical Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Interests: Edward Farhi was trained as a theoretical particle physicist but has also worked on astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. His present interest is the theory of quantum computation. As a graduate student, Farhi invented the jet variable "Thrust," which is used to describe how particles in high energy accelerator collisions come out in collimated streams. He then worked with Leonard Susskind on grand unified theories with electro-weak dynamical symmetry breaking. He and Larry Abbott proposed an (almost viable) model in which quarks, leptons, and massive gauge bosons are composite. With Robert Jaffe, he worked out many of the properties of a possibly stable super dense form of matter called "Strange Matter" and with Charles Alcock and Angela Olinto he studied the properties of "Strange Stars." His interest then shifted to general relativity and he and Alan Guth studied the classical and quantum prospects of making a new inflationary universe in the laboratory today. He, Guth and others also studied obstacles to constructing a time machine. More recently, Farhi has been studying how to use quantum mechanics to gain algorithmic speedup in solving problems that are difficult for conventional computers. He and Sam Gutmann proposed the idea of designing algorithms based on quantum walks, which has been used to demonstrate the power of quantum computation over classical. They, along with Jeffrey Goldstone and Michael Sipser, introduced the idea of quantum computation by adiabatic evolution, which has generated much interest in the quantum computing community. This group was tied for first in showing that there is a problem that cannot be sped up by a quantum computer. In 2007, Farhi, Goldstone and Gutmann showed that a quantum computer can determine who wins a game faster than a classical computer. Edward Farhi continues to work on quantum computing but keeps a close eye on particle physics and recent developments in cosmology. Biographical Sketch: Edward (Eddie) Farhi went to the Bronx High School of Science and Brandeis University before getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978. He was then on the staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at CERN in Geneva Switzerland before coming to MIT, where he joined the faculty in 1982. Farhi has given lectures on his own research at many of the major physics research centers in the world. At MIT, he has taught undergraduate courses in quantum mechanics and special relativity. At the graduate level he has taught quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, particle physics and general relativity. Farhi won three teaching awards at MIT and in 2000, 2001, and 2002 he lectured the big freshman physics course, "8.01." In July 2005, he was appointed the Director of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics. Selected Publications: Professor Farhi's publications are available online from the SPIRES HEP Literature Database (particle physics) and arXiv.org e-Print archive (quantum computing).

Descripción: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 Credits: Speaker:Nicholas Jitkoff

Descripción:Google Tech Talks April, 10 2008 ABSTRACT Social Recommendations will change both the lens through which we see the world as well as the manner in which we experience it. Everything from the media that we consume to the events we attend will be influenced by hyper-relevant results delivered through hierarchical social relationships. This talk demonstrates current efforts to integrate social relationships into recommended user experience including SoMR, the Social Media Recommendation API. Speaker: Dan Carroll Dan is the Director of the SoMR (Social Media Recommendation) project and the CEO of imp, the Intelligent Media Platform. Dan has worked in magazine and book publishing, labor organizing, and at a public policy think tank. He holds a patent in digital media distribution and writes the blog www.mediapatron.com. Dan lives in Mountain View, California and serves on the boards of Echolocations and InRadio.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks March, 5 2008 ABSTRACT Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it. Speaker: David M. Levy David Levy earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1979 and a Diploma in Calligraphy and Bookbinding from the Roehampton Institute (London) in 1983. For more than fifteen years he was a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where his work, described in "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (Arcade, 2001), centered on exploring the transition from paper and print to digital. During the year 2005-2006, he was the holder of the Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the Library of Congress. A professor at the UW Information School since 2000-2001, he has been investigating how to restore contemplative balance to a world marked by information overload, fragmented attention, extreme busyness, and the acceleration of everyday life.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks October, 18 2007 ABSTRACT Similarity search is the problem of preprocessing a database of N objects in such a way that given a query object, one can effectively determine its nearest neighbors in database. "Geometric near-neighbor access tree" data structure, an early work (1995) by Sergey Brin, is one of the most known solutions to this problem. Similarity search is closely connected to many algorithmic problems in the web. Similarity search is an abstraction of many algorithmic problems we face in data management. In this talk we will focus on: - Personalized news aggregation: Searching for news articles that are most similar to the user's profile of interests - Behavioral targeting: Searching for the most relevant advertisement for displaying to a given user. - Social network analysis: Suggesting new friends. - Computing co-occurrence similarities. - "Best match search": Searching resumes, jobs, BF/GF, cars, apartments. We describe features that make web applications somewhat different from previously studied models. Thus we re-examine the formalization and the classical algorithms for similarity search. This leads us to new algorithms (we present two of them) and numerous open problems in the field. Speaker: Yury Lifshits Yury Lifshits obtained his PhD degree from Steklov Institute of Mathematics at S...

Descripción:Google Tech Talks November 8, 2006 ABSTRACT The World Energy Council has estimated the 'useful' global ocean wave energy resource as 2TW (17,500TWh/year). From this it has been estimated (Thorpe 1999) that the practical economic contribution from wave energy converters could be 2,000TWh/year (similar to current installed nuclear or hydroelectric generation capacity). Such generating capacity could result in up to 2 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions being displaced from fossil fuel generation per year - similar to current emissions from electricity generation in the US. Formed in 1998, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Ocean Power Delivery Ltd has developed the 'Pelamis' wave energy converter...

Descripción:Google Tech Talks November 21, 2008 ABSTRACT Personal Growth Series: Cracking the Neural Code: Speaking the Language of the Brain with Optics The technological seeds of a Manhattan project-style scientific enterprise, the optical reverse-engineering of brain circuits to crack the neural code, have recently been planted at Stanford. The brain is a high-speed dynamical system consisting of different players that are intertwined and that cannot be separately controlled using conventional methods. For this reason, until recently we have not been able to speak the language of the brain (with millisecond timescale and cell-specific resolution), and in 1979 Francis Crick called for a technology by which all neurons of just one type could be controlled, "leaving the others more or less unaltered". Tools from the Deisseroth laboratory at Stanford over the past four years have responded to this challenge. These include optical technologies for controlling neural circuits, using precisely-targeted delivery of light energy of different colors that is captured by neurons using nanoscale protein-based antennae, resulting in controlled activity of just the targeted cell types with millisecond precision. Light is delivered by fiberoptics; while light encounters all cell types, only the desired cell type is light-sensitive and responds. Using different optogenetic probes, cells can be turned on or off with millisecond precision and in different combinations. These tools have now been used to optically deconstruct Parkinsonian neural circuitry, setting the stage both for cracking the neural codes of normal brain function, and for re-engineering neural circuits in disease. Speaker: Karl Deisseroth Professor Deisseroth received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1992, his PhD from Stanford in 1998, and his MD from Stanford in 2000. He completed medical internship and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and he was board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 2006. He joined the faculty on January 1, 2005. He is the first, and so far only, practicing psychiatrist in the nation with a primary appointment in a bioengineering department. As a bioengineer focused on neuroengineering, he has launched an effort to map neural circuit dynamics in neuropsychiatric disease, including depression and Parkinson's Disease, on the millisecond timescale. His group at Stanford has developed optical and stem-cell based neuroengineering technologies for noninvasive imaging and control of brain circuits, as they operate within living intact tissue. His work on optical control of neural circuits has launched a new field called "optogenetics", and he has published major papers in Nature and Science that have been termed "stunning" and "revolutionary" by his scientific colleagues. Professor Deisseroth has received many major awards including the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE), the McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, the Larry Katz Prize in Neurobiology, the Schuetze Award in Neuroscience, the Whitehall Foundation Award, the Charles E. Culpeper Scholarship in Medical Science Award, the Klingenstein Fellowship Award and the Robert H. Ebert Clinical Scholar Award.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks July, 25 2007 ABSTRACT This talk begins with an overview of software development at Adobe and a look at industry trends towards systems built around object oriented frameworks; why they "work", and why they ultimately fail to deliver quality, scalable, software. We'll look at a possible alternative to this future, combining generic programming with declarative programming to build high quality, scalable systems. Speaker: Sean Parent Sean Parent is a principal scientist at Adobe Systems and engineering manager of the Adobe Software Technology Lab. One of his team's current projects is the Adobe Source Libraries

Descripción:Google Tech Talks February, 28 2008 Speaker: Ola Bini I work for ThoughtWorks Studios, and recently published the book Practical JRuby on Rails at APress. I'm very interested in Artificial Intelligence, Lisp, Ruby and the fuzzy lines between languages...

Descripción:Google Tech Talks December, 19 2007 Topics include: Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Using Cryptography in Practice and at Google, Proofs of Security and Security Definitions and A Special Topic in Cryptography This talk is one in a series hosted by Google University: Wednesdays, 11/28/07 - 12/19/07 from 1-2pm Speaker: Steve Weis Steve Weis received his PhD from the Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT, where he was advised by Ron Rivest. He is a member of Google's Applied Security (AppSec) team and is the technical lead for Google's internal cryptographic library, KeyMaster.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks October, 8 2007 ABSTRACT Geoff Butterfield, Senior Technical Producer at The George Lucas Educational Foundation, and Angie Byron of Lullabot will talk aboout Drupal development and implementation. Speaker: Geoff Butterfield Speaker: Angie Byron

Descripción:Google Tech Talks November, 28 2007 Topics include: Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Using Cryptography in Practice and at Google, Proofs of Security and Security Definitions and A Special Topic in Cryptography This talk is one in a series hosted by Google University: Wednesdays, 11/28/07 - 12/19/07 from 1-2pm Speaker: Steve Weis Steve Weis received his PhD from the Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT, where he was advised by Ron Rivest. He is a member of Google's Applied Security (AppSec) team and is the technical lead for Google's internal cryptographic library, KeyMaster.

Descripción:Google Tech Talks November 6, 2008 ABSTRACT Clean Code Talk Series Topic: Don't Look For Things! Speaker: Misko Hevery