| Efficient, Secrecy-Preserving, Provably Correct Computation (and Some Cool Ap... - 4285 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 21 2008
ABSTRACT
Cryptography is now much more than keeping credit card numbers safe from packet sniffers and laptop thieves. We combine several advances in cryptography theory to construct a model of computation in which a third party securely performs computations for a set of parties who do not trust one another. These parties encrypt their inputs to a computation, then circulate the encrypted values. Our third party decrypts them, performs the computation and then issues correctness proofs of the results: we cryptographically "tie its hands" to do the right thing. In addition to this model of provably correct computation, we will discuss other techniques to control the information flow of secret data to and from the party, so even the third party cannot profitably abuse the secret data before or after it knows it during the computation. Finally, we will illustrate the power of these techniques in e-commerce, and our design decisions, through secure electronic auctions and securities exchanges.
Speaker: Dc. Christopher Thorpe
Dr. Christopher Thorpe is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who recently completed a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, advised by Michael Rabin and David Parkes. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., he led internationalization at Tellme Networks, after being the internationalization engineer for Yahoo!'s commerce properties and software engineer for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. Chris joined Yahoo in 1998 when it acquired Viaweb as its Yahoo! Store property; Viaweb was founded by graduate students he knew as an undergraduate at Harvard. He also holds an A.B. from Harvard in Computer Science and Music.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
 | | Digging Beyond User Preferences - 3837 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 16 2008
ABSTRACT
Many of the applications you develop are applications you would use. This makes it easy to know what will work and what won't. At some point, however, you'll find yourself developing something that you would only occasionally use, and suddenly you're treading in dark places. You know user research is important, you know the experience of using the product should be positive, if not delightful. But sometimes the findings you get are pretty difficult to translate into a decision about the software.
Mental models are diagrams that represent the underlying philosophies and emotions that drive people's behavior, matched up with the ways you think you can support them with your software. Rather than knowing "I like to go to movies alone," you'll learn the myriad reasons why. (E.g. "I like to give the director the attention and respect he deserves, because when I wrote a play in college, people didn't pay attention very well, they didn't get the point, and I felt frustrated.") Knowing the motivating philosophy opens up different avenues for supporting the behavior. You could, for example, offer additional means for this type of moviegoer to "get the point" of the movie. Mental models are useful as structures for attaching these ideas to sets of philosophies and for generating new ideas in places where there are gaps.
In this presentation, author Indi Young will introduce you to mental models and show you one that was developed at Google for the Analytics product. Indi will show you how to use the mental model to expand your perspective and create applications that reach beyond the basic requirements.
Speaker: Indi Young
Indi's work spans a number of decades, from the mid-80's when the desktop metaphor was replacing command line and menu-based systems, to the mid-90's when the Web first toddled onto the scene, to now, when designers are intent on crafting good experiences. After 10 years of consulting, Indi helped found Adaptive Path with six other partners, all hoping to spread good design around the world, making things easier for people everywhere. Indi's mental models have helped both start-ups and large corporations discover and support customer behaviors they didn't think to explore at first. She has written a book about the mental model method, Mental Models - Aligning design strategy with human behavior, published by Rosenfeld Media.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Nighttime Story: Learning From Early Success of One Thousand and One Rails Ap... - 5631 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 17 2008
ABSTRACT
Three companies recently collaborated to use DTrace, a powerful open source process introspection tool to find and fix a substantial Rails latency issue.
Teams from Joyent and Twitter and DTrace developer Bryan Cantrill from Sun joined forces to spend a day looking in detail at how Ruby processes behave within a Rails production environment. The purpose of the collaboration was to use the dynamic tracing framework to fix a latency issue observed in Twitter. DTrace is one of the components of the open source project OpenSolaris. It is designed for forensic investigation of processes, and as such is perfectly suited for the inspection and monitoring of Ruby processes running Rails applications.
During their analysis, the joint team discovered that the raising and catching of particular set of exceptions within Rails caused large amounts of CPU time to be consumed generating back-traces hundreds of frames long. Through the detection and removal of these exceptions, the latency of a particular class of Rails request-response cycles was substantially improved.
Joyent CTO and co-founder Jason Hoffman is vocal about the benefits of DTrace:
We use DTrace all the time in identifying performance issues in our customer's and in our own applications.
However, he believes that there is still room for improvement, and that the introspection into Ruby processes that DTrace offers is still not deep enough. Patches for versions 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 of Ruby are currently being worked on that will afford DTrace with an even greater ability to peer inside Ruby's internals. Jason also believes that DTrace will continue to generate a tremendous amount of insight into production Rails and Ruby processes. With ports in development for FreeBSD and planned for OS X Leopard, DTrace is no longer an exclusive tool for Solaris users.
Interestingly, not only is this a success story for open source tools being used to improve open source frameworks, it is also a success story for the process of open source software development. Within 11 hours of a ticket being filed, it had been accepted by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson himself, and incorporated into the latest version of Rails for immediate use.
Speaker: Jason Hoffman
Jason A. Hoffman is a founder and the CTO of Joyent, an on-demand infrastructure and cloud computing company that serves billions of page views and traffics hundreds of millions of emails per month.
Joyent is dedicated to the singular mission that developers should be able to start at a small scale and flex to a global scale with minimal friction. Joyent is among the world's largest OpenSolaris installations and while supporting all unix-based languages and data stores, Joyent's products have included the first production support of Ruby on Rails, inclusion of the ZFS file system, and Joyent's DTrace-enabled Ruby ships on MacOS X Leopard and soon on OpenSolaris.
Jason is a systems scientist with BS and MS degrees from UCLA, and a PhD from UCSD, and is an expert in scalable architectures. He has applied his knowledge and experience from the Web to Games to Computational Chemistry, Proteomics and Cancer biology.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | If You Had Everything Computationally Where Would You Put it, Financially? - 3888 sec
Google Tech Talks
May 5, 2008
ABSTRACT
Technology has transformed investment and trading over the past 30 years. Markets have become computer networks, brokers are disintermediated by direct access and algo trading. Reporters are disintermediated when investors have access to primary sources at the same time they do. An ever larger view of exploitable economic and business activity can found on the web. Dr. Leinweber brings an unusually broad and deep view to these issues, from both a sell- and buy-side perspective.
Speaker: David Leinweber
David Leinweber is Haas Fellow in Finance. His professional interests focus on how moderninformation technologies are best applied in trading and investing. As the founder of two financial technology companies, and a quantitative investment manager he is an active participant in today's transformation of markets.
He is an advisor to investment firms, stock exchanges, brokerages, and technology firms in areas related to financial markets , and a frequent speaker and author on these subjects. His book, "Nerds on Wall Street" will be published by Wiley in 2008.
He graduated from MIT, in physics and computer science and also has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. But on a good day, it's hard to tell.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | "Flex Your API Skills to the Max!" : Using Maps + AJAX APIs in AS3/Flex - 3680 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 14 2008
ABSTRACT
We'll go over what the new Maps API for Flash can do, and show how to easily integrate it with other libraries for parsing XML/GeoRSS/KML/JSON. We'll also show how to use it with the non-JS version of the Google AJAX libraries.
The talk will include an introduction to ActionScript3 (like JS but better!), Flex development, and Flex controls.
Speaker: who/pamelafox
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | GAMEFACE : Developing Typefaces for the Xbox 360 and Other Devices - 3471 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 15 2008
ABSTRACT
The Xbox 360 game platform was released with a great deal of fanfare surrounding its new product design and user interface. The developers saw the need for a tight brand consistency with print, packaging, and product interface, and chose to commission a new typeface family for use throughout the brand. Steve presents the path to the Xbox 360's new look from the type designer's perspective: the evolution of the product, the design brief, the creative process, and the unique challenges of developing a font for less than optimal screen displays. Steve also discusses the business and technology of fonts, the work for the Android platform and, most importantly, why type matters in an age of multimedia and text messaging.
Speaker: STEVE MATTESON
STEVE MATTESON is the Director of Type Design for Ascender Corporation and has created fonts for use in various screen display environments and print publishing since 1987. A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, Steve has an extensive background in typography, design and printing which he has applied to his development of high quality typefaces.
His work can be found in user interface designs (such as Windows Vista, Xbox 360 and Google's Android Platform); in publishing (such as Pescadero Pro, Andy and Endurance Pro); and for corporate branding (such as Symantec, Microsoft and Alcon Labs). He resides in Louisville, CO with his wife, 2 kids and 2 Labrador Retrievers.
A partial showing of Steve' Portfolio can be found here: http://ascendercorp.com/portfolio_commercial.html
and here: http://ascendercorp.com/portfolio_custom.html
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | KML, EarthBrowser and the virtual globe as a platform - 1896 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 15 2008
ABSTRACT
KML is the default language of virtual globes, however it only delivers static data with pre-set rules of behavior. Using EarthBrowser as an example, new ideas for creating, presenting and controlling earth based information will be explored.
http://www.earthbrowser.com/
http://www.jskml.org/
Speaker: Matt Giger
Matt Giger is the founder of Lunar Software and creator of EarthBrowser. Matt was born and has lived in Oregon for most of his life. He received a B.A in Physics from Reed College, B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from CalTech and a M.S. in Computer Science from The University of Oregon.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | We Told Stories - what Six to Start did with Penguin, and what we're doing next - 3416 sec
Google Tech Talks
July 14, 2008
ABSTRACT
Behind the scenes of digital fiction project We Tell Stories (http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/) that turned Google Maps into a storytelling engine. Learn about how leading alternate reality game studio Six to Start works, the projects they're working on next, and the kind of toys they like to play with.
Speaker: Adrian Hon
Adrian Hon is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Six to Start. One of the world's foremost alternate reality game designers, Adrian has been the lead designer of games including Perplex City and We Tell Stories. Adrian is also the founder of the innovative Let's Change the Game charity that aims to raise money for Cancer Research UK through alternate reality games.
Before becoming a games designer, Adrian studied neuroscience at Cambridge University and Oxford University, and campaigned for the human exploration of Mars. Adrian also writes a weblog at mssv.net.
Speaker: Dan Hon
Dan has been at the forefront of alternate reality gaming since its inception in 2001, when he co-moderated the groundbreaking online community Cloudmakers, formed to play The Beast, Microsoft's production for AI. Before co-founding Six to Start with his brother, Adrian, Dan was COO at Mind Candy, where he worked on award winning alternate reality game Perplex City.
Six to Start, launched in September 2007 recently went public with its first project, We Tell Stories, for Penguin Books, received to great critical and commercial acclaim. The company is now working on interactive, cross-platform projects for the BBC, Channel 4 and other clients.
Dan has spoken extensively on both social software and cross media gaming, and has served as a jury member for the BAFTA Videogames and RTS Education Awards. Dan has most recently spoken at South by Southwest 2008, South by Southwest 2007, the London Games Festival, Digital Communities 2006 and BBC New Media Central's Digital Futures. He appears to be spending most of his free time levelling his Horde Rogue in World of Warcraft to get ready for Wrath of the Lich King.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Emacs Org-mode - a system for note-taking and project planning - 2816 sec
Google Tech Talks
July 15, 2008
ABSTRACT
Org-mode is a large Emacs sub-systems that has been integrated into
Emacs with the version 22.1 release. From it original intend,
Org-mode is a system for structured note-taking and project planning.
It uses strictly plain text files, making it a truly portable,
system-independent solution. The project-planning features are
implemented using a fairly simple outlining paradigm, upon which
meta-data concepts like due dates, priorities, TODO states and tags
are overlayed in a non-intrusive way. Besides outlining the system
and its basic concepts, I will give background information into the
history of Org-mode and discuss the properties of such an evolved
system compared to a top-down designed one. Finally, I will also
briefly touch on some technical aspects that may be interesting for
Emacs wizards and developers.
Speaker: Carsten Dominik
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education GTD "Getting Things Done" Emacs
| | Billion Bag Bottle and Bulb Challenge - 3406 sec
Google Tech Talks
May 8, 2008
ABSTRACT
www.yourguidetogreen.com is sponsoring the Billion Bag Bottle and Bulb Challenge. Greg Peterson will talk to us about what this challenge is, and why it is important.
Speaker: Greg Peterson
Greg Peterson is a writer, teacher and lecturer on many aspects of sustainability. His passion is to present the concepts so that the receiver can conceptualize and implement the technology into their own space. He is currently a contributing writer for Phoenix Magazine, Edible Phoenix and is a primary writer and host for the new television show Smart Spaces: Inside & Out www.SmartSpacesTV.com. Greg has owned several businesses in his life and has an extensive background in the world of technology having run a computer training and software development company from 1986 to 2003.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | "Trading on the female body: exploitation of women for eggs" - 2799 sec
Google Tech Talks
July 14, 2008
ABSTRACT
One quick Google search on "egg donation" will demonstrate how prevalent the ads are to "make dreams come true" or "help create a miracle".
Women on Ivy League campuses across America and poor women from around the world are being heavily recruited to "donate" their eggs to fertility clinics and now for cloning research.
Sadly, egg donation has less to do with altruism and more to do with the exploitation of women--particularly young women and often poor women who are usually facing large debts or just trying to make ends meet. Egg donation puts women's health and safety at risk. Newer trends in fertility medicine are moving away from current practices which are harmful to infertile women but neglect the nameless, faceless egg donor women.
People of all political and religious stripes have organized all around the world to call attention to the risks of egg donation practices.
For more information visit:
www.cbc-network.org
OR
www.handsoffourovaries.com
Speaker: Jennifer Lahl
Jennifer Lahl, Founder and National Director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture and Founding Director with HandsOffOurOvaries, an international campaign raising awareness of the dangers of egg harvesting will speak on the ethics of egg donation.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | The story of One Thousand Paintings - "The number is the art is the limit is... - 2268 sec
Google Tech Talks
July, 10 2008
ABSTRACT
"One number, one painting - the number is the art is the limit is the price."
Onethousandpaintings.com is a truly global art project that has received worldwide media coverage (BBC, Wired, BoingBoing, and many others). On May 30th and 31st 2006 alone, 322 paintings were sold - most likely the highest number of unique, handmade paintings sold on the internet within such a short time. Since then, close to 800 paintings have been shipped to 26 countries. In his talk, Marcel Salath, the creator of One Thousand Paintings, will tell the story behind the project that started as a thought experiment in the heart of Europe, and took him on a trip around the world, eventually bringing him to Mountain View. He'll talk about how the project started, the personal stories behind each number, developing a secondary re-sale market, and many other aspects at this intersection of art, technology, and marketing.
This talk will be taped.
Speaker: Marcel Salathé (Sala)
Marcel Salathé (a.k.a. Sala) has a PhD in theoretical biology and is currently a research fellow at Stanford University. Most bloggers know him for his "webpages as graphs" applet that transformed millions of otherwise ugly webpages into beautiful graphs. His project onethousandpaintings.com has been a worldwide success with about 800 paintings sold in 26 countries, and was featured by BoingBoing, the BBC, Wired and many others. He recently moved from Zurich, Switzerland to San Jose, California.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Making the Semantic Web Accessible to the Casual User - 3412 sec
Google Tech Talks
June, 26 2008
ABSTRACT
The Semantic Web presents the vision of a distributed, dynamically growing knowledge base founded on formal logic. Common users, however, seem to have problems even with the simplest Boolean
expression. So how can we help users to query a web of logic that they do not seem to understand? One frequently proposed solution to address this problem is the use of natural language (NL) for
knowledge specification and querying. We propose to regard formal query languages and NL as two extremes of a continuum, where semistructured languages lie somewhere in the middle.
To evaluate what degree of structuredness casual users prefer, we introduce four query interfaces, each at a different point in the continuum, and evaluate the users' preference and their query performance in a study with 48 subjects. The results of the study reveal that while the users dislike the constraints of a fully
structured formal query language they also seem at a loss with the freedom of a full NLP approach. This suggests that restricted query languages will be preferred by casual users because of their
guidance effect, mirroring findings from social science theory on human activity in general.
Speaker: Prof. Bernstein
Abraham Bernstein is a full Professor at the Department of Information Technology (Institut für Informatik) of the University of Zurich. He conducts research on various aspects of supporting dynamic (intra- and inter-) organizational processes. His work draws from both social science (organizational psychology/sociology) and technical (computer science, artificial intelligence) foundations.
Before coming to Zurich he was an Assistant Professor, at the Information Systems Department in New York University's Stern School of Business, and received a Ph.D. at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he worked with Prof. Thomas W. Malone at the Center for Coordination Science.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Eclipse Day at the Googleplex: Wiring Hacker Synapses - 2875 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008
ABSTRACT
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
Wiring Hacker Synapses: Collaborative Coding and Team Tooling in Eclipse
by Scott Lewis, Composent & Mustafa K. Isik
ECF is a communication framework and an increasing set of integrated tools. ECF provides APIs useful for the development of Equinox-based servers, RCP applications, and Eclipse-based development tools. The provider architecture supports the use of existing communications services, such as Google Talk and UI integration with web-based services, and other Eclipse-based tools. For example, for the upcoming Ganymede release, ECF is working on real-time shared editing of source code to support distributed team use cases like code reviews and collaborative debugging.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Eclipse Day at the Googleplex: Plug-in Development Tips - 2854 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008
ABSTRACT
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
Speaker: Chris Aniszczyk, Code9
Plug-ins are everywhere in Eclipse so come learn about how to develop them! Depending on the audience, for the first half of the talk, I will discuss what a plug-in is and what tooling is provided around developing plug-ins. For the second half, I will discuss tips and tricks that can save you time in developing plug-ins and will also talk about some lesser known, but extremely useful, parts of PDE.
About Chris Aniszczyk:
Chris Aniszczyk is the technical lead for the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) project at Eclipse. Chris also commits on various other Eclipse projects, has the honor to represent the committers on the Eclipse Board of Directors and sits on the Eclipse Architecture Council. Chris's passions are blogging, software advocacy, tooling and anything Eclipse. He's always available to discuss open-source or Eclipse over a frosty beverage.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Eclipse Day at the Googleplex: GWT in Eclipse - 3271 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008
ABSTRACT
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
Speaker: Bruce Johnson, Google
Building high-performance Ajax easily with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) in Eclipse has always been possible, but soon it will be downright easy. Bruce will present GWT's upcoming Eclipse plugin that helps novices get started and lets experts fly.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
| | Creative Commons Technical Summit 2008 Part 3 of 4 - 4751 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 18, 2008
ABSTRACT
The recorded talks presented at the 2008 Creative Commons Technical Summit, held June 18th, 2008. Part 3 of 4
Speaker: CCSummit Speakers
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education Open Source Creative Commons Songbird Standard
| | Creative Commons Technical Summit 2008 Part 4 of 4 - 3369 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 18, 2008
ABSTRACT
The recorded talks presented at the 2008 Creative Commons Technical Summit, held June 18th, 2008. Part 4 of 4
Speaker: CCSummit Speakers
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education Open Source Creative Commons Songbird Standard
| | Creative Commons Technical Summit 2008 Part 2 of 4 - 4695 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 18, 2008
ABSTRACT
The recorded talks presented at the 2008 Creative Commons Technical Summit, held June 18th, 2008. Part 2 of 4
Speaker: CCSummit Speakers
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education Open Source Creative Commons Songbird Standard
| | Eclipse Day at the Googleplex: Mylyn Simplifies Development - 2737 sec
Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008
ABSTRACT
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex
How Mylyn Changes the Way I Develop
by Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Eclipse Foundation
Mylyn is an Eclipse project that gives tasks first-class status in the developer workspace. In this presentation Bjorn will show how task focused programming simplifies his (developer) life. Mylyn makes it easier for him to maintain focus while switching between tasks and to collaborate on tasks with geographically and time-zone disparate developers. Fair warning though: once you've started using Mylyn, you never want to return to the old ways.
About Bjorn Freeman-Benson:
Bjorn is the Director for Committer Community at the Eclipse Foundation, a position that is tailor-made for someone with his keen interest and experience in building high-quality software with geographically distributed teams. He has dabbled in applications and user interfaces, but returns, like the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, to his three foci: hardware, software and process (embedded devices, programming languages and software engineering). Bjorn has worked for OTI, Amazon.com, Rational and Gemstone, along with a career as a university professor. He has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and is happy to talk at length about his passion for orienteering and/or his love of flying.
Auteur : googletechtalks
Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education
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