Google Tech Talks
April 16, 2007

ABSTRACT

There are many common misconceptions about nuclear power that can be proven to be false, even among people with a variety of opinions. For example, it is often stated that nuclear power plants are very large and cost at least a couple of billion dollars. However, ever since there have been nuclear power plants, there have been some that have been small enough to fit inside submarines. One of those submarines is only 12 feet in diameter and could fit on half of a football field. It has also been said that nuclear power plants must operate at a nearly constant power level, yet they can power both submarines and aircraft carriers through extreme maneuvers….

Google Tech Talks
May 3,2007

ABSTRACT

BlueEnergy addresses the energy needs of poor communities in Nicaragua through the construction and maintenance of hybrid wind/solar systems. blueEnergy builds wind turbines and other key system components locally, near their point of usage, to keep energy costs low and improve serviceability.

It is widely accepted that access to electricity is a necessary, although not sufficient, requirement for modern economic and social development. Electricity opens the door to a host of technologies that promote education, public health, and economic development, such as emissions-free light, refrigeration, and communication. Without electricity, communities are…

Google Tech Talks
May 3, 2007

ABSTRACT

Computers have given us a new way of thinking about language. Given a large sample of language, or corpus, and computational tools to process it, we can approach language as physicists approach forces and chemists approach chemicals. This approach is noteworthy for missing out what, from a language-user’s point of view, is important about a piece of language: its meaning.

I shall present this empiricist approach to the study of language and show how, as we develop accurate tools for lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging and parsing, we move from the raw input — a character stream — to an analysis of that stream in increasingly rich terms: words, lemmas,…

Google Tech Talks
May 4, 2007

ABSTRACT

Using Case studies and examples, this talk looks at the challenges of applying standard HCI techniques in a developing world context. We look at how HCI can have a fantastic impact on communities in the developing world, but there is still some way to go in understanding how HCI can best benefit the developing world.

Speaker: Gary Marsden

Gary Marsden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his
Ph.D. work at Stirling University in 1998. He now teaches computer
science and HCI. Besides his academic interests in designing
interaction for mobile computers including cell…

Google Tech Talks
May 3, 2007

ABSTRACT

DNA is a programming language for living cells. The cell’s basic operating system, or genome, directs functions like growth and reproduction, energy utilization, and the production of useful compounds like ethanol or penicillin. With genetic engineering, new functions can be added to cells or broken metabolic pathways repaired. Until recently, genetic engineering has required the DNA molecule itself to be physically manipulated, a tedious and expensive process. Now, automatic DNA synthesis permits virtually any DNA code to be made from scratch, opening up genetic engineering to anyone with a computer and a credit card. The capabilities of this new synthetic…

Google Tech Talks
April 13, 2007

ABSTRACT

Since its inception in the 1980s, the popularity of the Internet has been growing exponentially, resulting in a mass of shared knowledge and fast, cheap communication. Hand-in-hand with these developments, we have seen the birth of a plethora of new valuable systems and services ranging from web search and email to blogging and social networking sites. Perhaps the most essential system for monetizing such web services is online advertising. In this talk, I will first present an overview of the most common market mechanism for online advertising, namely pay-per-click auctions. I will then discuss some of the challenges in the design of these auctions…

Google Tech Talks
April 12, 2007

ABSTRACT

The mission of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) movement is to ensure that every school-aged child in the lesser-developed parts of the world is able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning.

The OLPC Association focuses on designing, manufacturing and distributing XO laptops to children in lesser developed countries, initially concentrating on those governments that have made commitments for the funding and program support required to ensure that all of their children own and can effectively use a laptop.

Initially the…

Google Tech Talks
May 1, 2007

ABSTRACT

Images and videos form a rich source of information about the visual world. The extraction of 3D information from images is an important research problem in computer vision and graphics. The ubiquitous presence of cameras and the tremendous advances of processing and communication technologies yields important opportunities and challenges in those areas.

My work has focused on developing flexible techniques for recovering 3D shape, motion and appearance from images. A first example of this is an approach to recover photo-realistic 3D models of static objects or scenes from videos recorded with a hand-held camera or on a moving vehicle. A key aspect of…

Google Tech Talks
June 26, 2007

ABSTRACT

An electronic book is defined as a digital book that not only captures the affordances of a physical book, but also transcends the limitations of its paper counterpart. There is much debate as to whether the use of the book metaphor is appropriate for an electronic document. User studies suggest that current popular document presentations (HTML and PDF) are not always the most convenient, or the most comfortable, for the reader. On the other hand, while realistic physically-based computer models of books have been around for years, they are rarely deployed in practice. I suggest that this happens not because of any proven drawbacks, but is purely…