Google Tech Talks
June 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

The intrinsic genetic instability of cancer cells makes age-related cancers harder to postpone or treat than any other aspect of aging. Any therapy that a cancer can resist by activating or inactivating specific genes is unlikely to succeed long-term, because pre-existing cancer cells with the necessary gene expression pattern will withstand the therapy and proliferate. WILT (Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres) seeks to pre-empt this problem by deleting from as many of our cells as possible the genes needed for telomere elongation. Cancers lacking these genes can never reach a life-threatening stage by altering gene expression, only by…

Google Tech Talks
June 1, 2007

ABSTRACT

The notion of a “market” has undergone a paradigm shift with the Internet — totally new and highly successful markets have been defined and launched by companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN and Ebay. These markets are computationally intensive; indeed, this is just the beginning of a much larger revolution in which algorithmic considerations are bound to have an impact.

In view of these new realities, the study of market equilibria, an important, though essentially non-algorithmic, theory within Mathematical Economics, needs to be revived and rejuvenated with new models, ideas, and an inherently algorithmic approach.

Interestingly enough,…

Google Tech Talks
May 25, 2007

ABSTRACT

The sounds that animals use to communicate, including the syllables of speech, have a very special `pulse resonance’ form which automatically distinguishes them from background noise. The parts of the body used to produce these sounds grow as the animal grows. Thus, there is `acoustic scale’ variability in communication sounds which poses a serious problem for the perception and recognition stages of communication. The success of bio-acoustic communication suggests that the auditory system has a special pre-processor that automatically normalizes for acoustic scale as it constructs our internal `auditory image’ of a sound. In this paper, we propose that the…

Google Tech Talks
March 23, 2005

ABSTRACT

As we work on the challenges of organizing the world’s information, we owe our collective progress to the early pioneers who first made information available through a computer. Imagine research in a world without personal computers, the Internet, and high-speed telecommunications. Back in the 1970s, students really hung out in the bowels of library stacks and their favorite resource was called “The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”

Dr. Roger Summit is one of the early innovators whose brainchild, Dialog Information Services, was the de facto standard in online information retrieval for 25 years. Roger will discuss the philosophy behind and the…

Peter F. Carpenter received his BA degree in Chemistry from Harvard
College and his MBA in Research and Development Management from the
University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1962 to 1968
with assignments with the Air Force Systems Command, 5th Force
Reconnaissance Company (USMC), HQ 19th Air Force and as a Program
Manager in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). From 1968 until
1971 he was the Assistant Director of the Center for Materials Research
at Stanford University and a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior
at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He subsequently
served in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and as the Deputy
Executive…

Google Tech Talks
May 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

A glistening spaceship, with seven lonely years and billions of miles behind it, glides into orbit around a ringed, softly-hued planet. A flying-saucer shaped machine descends through a hazy atmosphere and lands on the surface of an alien moon, ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth.

Fantastic though they seem, these visions are not a dream. For seven years, the Cassini spacecraft and its Huygens probe traveled invisible interplanetary roads to the place we call Saturn. Their successful entry into orbit a thousand days ago, the mythic landing of Huygens on the cold, dark equatorial plains of Titan, and Cassini’s subsequent explorations of the…

Google Tech Talks
May 4, 2007

ABSTRACT

In this talk I will focus on the importance of designing new technologies for children and how children can change what we design. Our methods at the University of Maryland for design with children will be highlighted. In addition, examples of the work we have developed with these methods will be presented e.g., the International Children’s Digital Library, http://www.childrenslibrary.org , Mobile Techologies for Collaborative Creation, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/tangibleflags/TangibleFlags.shtml, Kidpad: a zooming storytelling tool, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/kidpad.shtml).

Speaker: Allison Druin

Allison Druin is assistant professor at the…

Google Tech Talks
June 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

North Korea today is home to a network of several dozen concentration camps rivaling those of Auschwitz and Dachau of days past, hosting over 250,000 political prisoners and their families. North Korea is a prison state- there are no freedoms of religion, speech, movement, assembly- even the right to leave the nation is barred from the people. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have fled to neighboring China, only to be hunted down by Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea to face torture and death; or to be sold by brokers and smugglers as labor or sexual slaves. An additional 15,000 North Koreans toil in slave labor camps outside North…

Google Tech Talks
May 28, 2007

ABSTRACT

Over the past two years, Microsoft has been gathering GPS data from volunteer drivers. Each driver has one of our recording GPS receivers on their dashboard for two weeks. So far, we have data from 227 drivers, comprising over 1.7 million time-stamped (latitude, longitude) points. This talk will give a brief overview of several different research projects we have completed based on this data. These projects include:

* Destination Modeling — We characterize where and when people go and how quickly they fall into a rut of visiting very few new destinations.
* Predestination — We use our destination models to predict where a driver is driving as the trip…