Google TechTalks
June 29, 2006

George Wolberg
http://www-cs.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~wolberg/

ABSTRACT
The photorealistic modeling of large-scale scenes, such as urban structures, requires a fusion of range sensing technology and traditional digital photography. In this talk, we describe a system that integrates multiview geometry and automated 3D registration techniques for texture mapping 2D images onto 3D range data. The 3D range scans and the 2D photographs are respectively used to generate a pair of 3D models of the scene. The first model consists of a dense 3D point cloud, produced by using a 3D-to-3D registration method that matches 3D lines in the range images. The second model consists of a…

Google Tech Talks
October 23, 2006

Gill Bejerano holds a BSc, summa cum laude, in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Twice recipient of the RECOMB best paper by a young scientist award, and a former Eshkol pre-doctoral Scholar and HHMI postdoc. As co-discoverer of ultraconserved elements, his research focuses on deciphering the function and evolution of the non-coding regions of the Human Genome. Gill is currently a postdoc with David Haussler at UC Santa Cruz, and in early 2007 he will join Stanford university as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and the Department of Computer…

Google Tech Talks
September 14, 2006

Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a software artist residing in San Francisco. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona.

ABSTRACT

Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms known as sheep. The votes of the users form the basis for the fitness function for a genetic algorithm on a space of abstract animations. Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool.

This cyborg mind composed of…

Google TechTalks
April 27, 2006

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen

ABSTRACT
Thinglink.org is an open database where makers can register free unique identifiers for their work and create labels for their products. The beta was launched at Maker Faire on Saturday.

Artists, crafters, designers, and small producers need online recommendation systems to compete on the global market because recommendation systems place the products of the small producers on equal footing with those of the large corporations. Recommendation systems require unique identifiers for products. UPCs, EANs and EPCs are the standard ID schemas. However, small producers especially in developing countries do not have access to these codes…

Google TechTalks
April 11, 2006

Richard G. Baraniuk
Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and Founder of Connexions.

W. Joseph King
W. Joseph King is the Executive Director of Connexions. Previously, he was an investment banker focused on incubating new technology companies.

ABSTRACT
A grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The “open access movement” is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit…

Google Tech Talks
September 19, 2006

Dr. Markus Jakobsson, Associate Professor of Informatics at IUB Associate Director of CACR ABSTRACT
We describe a new type of threat to the Internet infrastructure, in the shape of a highly efficient but very well camouflaged click-fraud attack on the advertising infrastructure, not using any type of malware. The attack, which we refer to as a “badvertisement”, is described and experimentally verified on several prominent advertisement schemes. This stealthy attack can be thought of as a threatening mutation of spam and phishing attacks, with which it has many commonalities, except for the fact that it is not the targeted individual who is the victim in the…

Google TechTalks
July 26, 2006

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005. Previously, Luis obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship. ABSTRACT
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human…

Google London Test Automation Conference (LTAC)
Google Tech Talks
September 7th, 2006

Presenters:
Shannon Maher and Allen Hutchison

Google TechTalks
June 21, 2006

Olena Medelyan is a grad student who has just started on a Google-funded PhD scholarship, looking at keyphrase extraction using lexical and linguistic techniques.

ABSTRACT
Keyphrases are widely used in information retrieval as a brief but precise summary of documents. They are usually selected by professional human indexers. The more consistent the indexers are with each other, the higher the retrieval efficiency. 1. We describe an experiment where six professionals assigned keyphrases from a controlled vocabulary to the same documents, and evaluate their indexing consistency. Interesting patterns discovered in this experiment helped in developing an automatic…