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…

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…