Google Tech Talks
March 27, 2007

ABSTRACT

The relation between Google and the free software movement is one of the most important diplomatic relationships in the 21st century. But it is largely invisible, even to the principals. In this talk I will try and make some of what we have taken for granted less implicit, so we can progress with mutual confidence and collective security.

Speaker: Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Center

Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School, and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. In addition to FSF, Professor Moglen has represented many of the world’s leading free software…

Google Tech Talks
March 14, 2007

ABSTRACT

Murray Gell-Mann is one of the largest living legends in physics. He’s also been described as The Man With Five Brains, and it’s no puzzle why: He was admitted to Yale at 15, got his PhD from MIT at 21, and is an international advisor on the environment. He speaks 13 languages fluently (at last count), and has expertise in such far-ranging fields as natural history, historical linguistics, archaeology, bird-watching, depth psychology, and the theory of complex adaptive systems.

Oh yeah… he also coined the term “quark,” after developing key aspects of the modern theory of quantum physics… for which he earned an unshared Nobel prize in physics in…

Google Tech Talks
April 6, 2007

ABSTRACT

The set of routers, end hosts, and links located in a metropolitan area form a city-net. City-nets are large, comprising thousands of routers, end hosts, and links, hundreds of autonomous systems, and several ISPs. They represent a diverse set of end users—home customers, businesses, government, educational institutions, etc. We study the topological structure of city-nets in order to understand how the Internet has evolved in centers of human activity (namely, cities) and to understand the structural robustness/vulnerability of the Internet, a critical infrastructure.

This talk will describe our methodology for constructing and analyzing realistic…

Google Tech Talks
March 15, 2007

ABSTRACT

If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his book, Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill and from the research in neuroscience on the effect of mind-training on the brain.

Speaker Bio: Matthieu Ricard, a gifted scientist turned Buddhist monk, is a best selling author, translator, and photographer. He has lived and studied in the Himalayas for the last 35 years…

Google Tech Talks
December 18, 2006

ABSTRACT

If you wanted to undermine the technological revolution of the last 30 years, using the law, how would you do it? How would you undercut the virtuous cycle that results from access to an open network, force technological innovation into stagnation, diminish competition, create monopolies over the basic building blocks of knowledge? How many of those things are we doing now? James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, the founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and a Board Member of Creative Commons. He is also a columnist for the Financial Times New Technology Policy Forum. His most recent books were…

Google Tech Talks
January 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

The modern Internet is, like all collections of information artifacts, affected by technology as well as culture. The question is what kinds of current technology ideas are potentially disruptive to Google goals, and what might one have to do to understand that disruption, and turn it to a positive effect. This talk will present some technical ideas that arise in broader AI research, but again and again reveal connections to culture that show the difficulty of “democratizing” the world’s information. Examples include data visualization, sensor networks, and belief revision, most notably connected to the idea of trusted digital community. Credits:…

Google Tech Talks
January 17, 2007

ABSTRACT

Kai-Fu Lee, Greater China President, visited the Seattle area Google office on January, 17, 2007 to talk about the current development of our offices in China. He spoke about the challenges and opportunities facing Google China as well as collaboration between the Seattle/Kirkland and China offices. Credits: Speaker:Kai-Fu Lee

We all know how to use Google Earth as a toy. But how do we use it as tool? We’ll go through some of the most powerful, yet overlooked, features of this program, how people are using it, and hopefully, take you way out of this world. Credits: Speaker:Jessica Pfund

Google Tech Talks
March 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

Video is becoming increasingly important content type, and it’s time to make video a first-class citizen on the web. The element is, along with JavaScript bindings, proposed as a simple solution to encourage browsers to support video natively. Equally important is the choice of video format to be used with. I will argue that the success of the web is based on using open standards, and that video should be no exception. I will demo Opera showing Ogg Theora video clips natively.

A demonstration is available here:

http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/video Credits: Speaker:Håkon Wium Lie