Google TechTalks
July 5, 2006

Alan Karp

Principle Scientist Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Dr. Karp has been leading the Virus Safe Computing Initiative at HP Labs since 2003. He served as Chief Scientist of HP’s E-speak Operation from June 1999 until April 2000, at which time he returned to HP Laboratories to work on automated negotiation. Before working on E-speak, Dr. Karp participated in developing the EPIC chip architecture, the basis of Intel’s Itanium line.

ABSTRACT
HP Labs encourages activities considered to be outside the mainstream. Our group, the Virus Safe Computing Initiative, takes a view of security that is quite different from that of the official HP and HP Labs security teams….

Google TechTalks
August 1, 2006

David Wolber (http://cs.usfca.edu/~wolber) is a professor at the University of San Francisco. His interests include collaborative research systems, e-politics, and service learning within computer science. ABSTRACT
Peoplicious is a collaborative research tool. Unlike systems such as del.icio.us, people are first-class data objects, along with documents. Users can create people, provide structured information about people (image, homepage, blog feed, delicious name, etc.), and create lists of people (people-tagging). Users can also bookmark documents and associate documents with people (personmarks). Any user can enter information about any person.

Peoplicious is…

Google TechTalks
May 24, 2006

Jared Spool
Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

Jared M. Spool is founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of it’s kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers. ABSTRACT
What’s the most effective way to strengthen a brand on the internet? Recent research shows that it isn’t using traditional branding techniques. In fact, those tried-and-true methods can…

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…

Google TechTalks
August 3, 2006

Gerhard Weikum

ABSTRACT
The peer-to-peer (P2P) computing paradigm is an intriguing alternative to Google-style search engines for querying and ranking Web content. In a network with many thousands or millions of peers the storage and access load requirements per peer are much lighter than for a centralized server farm.

On the other hand, P2P Web search also poses major challenges, one of them being the computation, dissemination, and efficient management of statistical measures that are crucial for good search strategies and ranking algorithms. Statistics (e.g., local and global document frequencies, overlap among peers’ contents, PageRank-style authority) need…

Google TechTalks
January 17, 2006

Daniel M. Reeves

Daniel Reeves recently completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Michigan as a student of Michael Wellman and is now (temporarily) a lecturer at Michigan, teaching Knowledge-Based Systems (Lisp, Prolog, and Mathematica for AI Programming). His most active area of research is the application of game-theoretic and computational techniques to strategic behavior in games, particularly for eCommerce-inspired market mechanisms. He is one of the creators of and top competitors in the international Trading Agent Competition. Dr Reeves is also one of the top ultra-marathon inline skaters in the US and climbs stairs…

Google TechTalks
June 16, 2006

Gaurav Oberoi & Chuck Groom
Co-Founders, BillMonk.com

ABSTRACT
The web 2.0 bubble inflates as geeks pump out an astonishing number of web-based solutions to daily problems. But a lot of these solutions only appeal to a small niche. What goes into a service that appeals to a broad range of people?

How can it start and grow without a generous helping of capital? The two guys behind BillMonk.com, a service for helping friends with the casual borrowing of money and stuff, will share their views from the trenches. They will share the story of what it took to quit their comfy jobs at Amazon, how a handful of philosophical axioms dictated the entire site design and…

Google TechTalks
June 15, 2006

Georg Greve, chairman of the FSF Europe explains priorities and strategies of the FSFEurope.

Google TechTalks
February 23, 2006

Russ B. Altman

Prof. Altman is the director of the Center for Biomedical Computation at Stanford University and is director of the biomedical informatics training program. He is also the principal investigator of a project, PharmGKB, which is an online database of genetic and phenotype information from people who have participated in research studies at various medical centers participating in the PGRN. ABSTRACT
Pharmacogenomics is the study of how variation in human genes leads to variation in drug response. One of the major promises of the genome project was to improve medical outcomes for patients by using knowledge of their genetic background. The PharmGKB…