Google TechTalks
June 7, 2006

B. Ramalinga Raju and Venkat Changavalli

ABSTRACT
India is booming with visionary initiatives to transform rural India and its poor. This tech talk tells the story of one corporation that is leveraging its core competency to address the issues.

Satyam group of Industries took on new missions starting in 2001 – to serve and transform the “Bottom of the Pyramid” – a phrase coined by Prof. C.K. Prahalad. Driven by the vision of Mr. Ramalinga Raju and his family, Satyam is forging ahead on three different fronts:

The Byrraju Foundation: has developed a model of transforming villages into self sufficient commercial societies. To date this initiative has transformed…

Google TechTalks
July 21, 2006

Guido van Rossum is a computer programmer who is best known as the author and Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Python programming language.

ABSTRACT
The next major version of Python, nicknamed Python 3000 (or more prosaically Python 3.0), has been anticipated for a long time. For years I have been collecting and exploring ideas that were too radical for Python 2.x, and it’s time to stop dreaming and start coding. In this talk I will present the community process that will be used to complete the specification for Python 3000, as well as some of the major changes to the language and the remaining challenges.

Google TechTalks
June 27, 2006

Frank Fabrega, Jean McNeil-Wy

Jean works for the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and has been a volunteer with the American Cancer Society for 22 years. She has been active in breast health education to local corporations and worked on the Daffodils Days, Making Strides, and Relay for Life campaigns. She was on the First annual Santa Monica Relay for Life planning team and has participated ever since. For the past two years, she has been the Chair of the Survivor Tent activities. Come meet Jean, learn more about the Relay for Life, and join or support Google’s team.

Google TechTalks
March 23, 2006

Raj Reddy

ABSTRACT
Jaime Carbonell stated, about 10 years ago, that the mission for the Language Technology Institute at CMU is the research agenda implied by “getting the right information, to the right people, at the right time, on the right medium, in the right language and with the right level of detail”. In spite of major contributions from Google and others, we are not close to achieving the bill of rights of information society. This talk will provide a forum for discussion on the research agenda necessary for fulfilling this vision.

Google TechTalks
March 7, 2006

Ola Rosling
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Johan Nystrand

Google TechTalks
May 24, 2006

Washington Taylor

ABSTRACT
Recent developments in string theory, combined with the experimental observation that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, have led theoretical physicists to a radical (and controversial) new picture of the universe. In this new picture, the universe is enormously larger than our parochial observable region of radius 13.7 light years.

In other patches of the universe, the laws of physics may be quite different, though in each patch the local physics is governed by a metastable solution of string theory. Since there may be something like $10^{1000}$ or more distinct solutions of string theory giving physics roughly like…

Google TechTalks
May 9, 2006

Kevin Kelly

ABSTRACT
The scientific method which provides us with so many technological goodies does not resemble the science of 1600. Ever since Bacon, science has undergone a slow evolution.

Landmarks in the history of the scientific method are the invention of libraries, indexes, citations, controlled experiments, peer review, placebos, double blind experiments, randomization, and search among others. At the core of the scientific method is the structuring of information.

In the next 50 years, as the technologies of information and knowledge accelerate, the nature of the scientific process will change even more than it has in the last 400 years. We can’t…

Google TechTalks
August 2, 2006

Sebastian Thrun

ABSTRACT
The DARPA grand challenge, technical details enabling Sebastian Thrun’s win, and an introduction to the next phase called “The Urban Grand Challenge”.

Google Tech Talks
January 30, 2006

Prof. Sanjeev Khudanpur
Sanjeev Khudanpur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. He obtained a B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 1988, and a Ph. D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997, both in Electrical Engineering. ABSTRACT
We will describe the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for content-based retrieval of images and video via text queries. In this model, objects or concepts present in an image or video clip constitute the state-space of a Markov chain, and the observed visual…