Google TechTalks
August 14, 2006

Holger Bast

ABSTRACT
We consider the following full-text search autocompletion feature. Imagine a user of a search engine typing a query. Then with every letter being typed, we would like an instant display of completions of the last query word which would lead to good hits. At the same time, the best hits for any of these completions should be displayed. Known indexing data structures that apply to this problem either incur large processing times for a substantial class of queries, or they use a lot of space. We present a new indexing data structure that uses no more space than a state-of-the-art compressed inverted index, but that yields an order of magnitude…

Google TechTalks
July 21, 2006

Jonathan Oxer is the founder and technical director of Internet Vision Technologies in Australia, as well as the current president of Linux Australia, the national organization for Linux users, developers, and vendors. He is one of the authors of O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Hacks.

ABSTRACT
Learn about the internal structure of Debian/Ubuntu packages and how to create them, starting with disection of a binary package and then going through the process of creating your own package using various build helper scripts to automate much of the process.

Google TechTalks
March 22, 2006

S. Keshav
University of Waterloo

ABSTRACT
Rural kiosks in developing countries provide a variety of services such as providing birth and death certificates, land records, and consulting on medical and agricultural problems.

Fundamental to a kiosk’s operation is its connection to the Internet for bidirectional information transfer. Network connectivity today is primarily provided by dialup lines, though Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) or long-distance wireless is also being deployed. These solutions tend to be both expensive and failure prone.

We propose the use of buses and cars as `mechanical backhaul’ devices to carry data to and from a village and…

Google TechTalks
Date: March 1, 2006

Alexander Hauptmann

Google TechTalks
February 9, 2006

Michael Schwarz

Michael Schwarz served as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Economics Department after earning a Ph.D. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economics Research. Dr. Schwarz specializes in economic theory and industrial organization and applications of theory to business decision making and public policy.

ABSTRACT
We investigate the “generalized second price” auction (GSP), a new mechanism which is used by search engines to sell online advertising that most Internet users encounter daily. GSP is tailored to its unique environment, and neither the mechanism nor the environment have previously been…

Google TechTalks
March 8, 2006

Jim whitehead
Jim Whitehead is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has recently been developing a new degree program on computer gaming, the BS in Computer Game Engineering. Jim received his PhD in Information and Computer Science from UC Irvine, in 2000

Abstract:
Almost all software contains undiscovered bugs, ones that have not yet been exposed by testing or by users. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to know the location of these bugs? This talk presents two approaches for predicting the location of bugs. The bug cache contains 10% of the files in a software project.

Google TechTalks
April 06, 2006

Dr. Cornelia Brunner
Associate Director, Center for Children & Technology Education Development Center

Dr. Brunner has been involved in the research, production, and teaching of educational technology in a variety of subject areas for thirty years. In addition to conducting research projects about the relationship between learning, teaching, and technology, she has designed and implemented educational materials incorporating technologies to support inquiry-based learning and teaching in science, social studies, media literacy, and the arts. ABSTRACT
Research over the past two decades has pointed to a strong, persistent, gendered difference in technological desire…

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Ross Collard
Ross Collard is with Collard & Company, a Manhattan-based consulting firm which specializes in software quality. A Google search on his name reveals about 100 citations in this area. He has computer science degrees from Caltech and Stanford, and has taught for UC Berkeley and Harvard.

ABSTRACT
Testers’ ability to identify, assess and prioritize risk is critical to having the right test focus. Objective, quantitative methods for risk assessment generally do not work well. And s ubjective, intuitive methods for risk assessment are derived as much or more from emotion and psychology rather than “logic”.

A possible new breakthrough is “prospect…

Google TechTalks
August 8, 2006

B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970. He is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies ( http://sbinstitute.com ).

ABSTRACT
Galileo took a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the physical sciences, and a key element in this revolution was the rigorous, sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although…