Google TechTalks
August 2, 2006

Sebastian Thrun

ABSTRACT
The DARPA grand challenge, technical details enabling Sebastian Thrun’s win, and an introduction to the next phase called “The Urban Grand Challenge”.

Google Tech Talks
January 30, 2006

Prof. Sanjeev Khudanpur
Sanjeev Khudanpur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. He obtained a B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 1988, and a Ph. D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997, both in Electrical Engineering. ABSTRACT
We will describe the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for content-based retrieval of images and video via text queries. In this model, objects or concepts present in an image or video clip constitute the state-space of a Markov chain, and the observed visual…

Google TechTalks
January 26, 2006

Dr. Monika Kress

Dr. Kress was a member of the ANSMET 2003-04 Expedition. (ANSMET = Antarctic search for meteorites)
http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/

ABSTRACT
Every year since the late 70’s the US National Science Foundation has supported a team of space scientists to search for meteorites in Antarctica. Why Antarctica? The polar desert environment best preserves these precious samples of other worlds, which include shattered planetesimals, fragments of asteroids, and even rocks from the Moon and Mars. In this talk, I will discuss the scientific importance of meteorites, and the methods used to recover them from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Google TechTalks
May 24, 2006

Cyrus Shahabi
Cyrus Shahabi is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also a Research Area Director at the NSF’s Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California.

ABSTRACT
The vision of GeoDec is to enable an information-rich and realistic 3-dimensional visualization and/or simulation of a geographical location (e.g., a city), rapidly and accurately. The idea is not just to allow navigation through a 3-D model, but to be able to ask queries and get information about the area seamlessly and effortlessly. Our main focus it to build tools to quickly…

Google TechTalks
August 23, 2006

Chris Holmes

ABSTRACT
This talk will introduce GeoServer, an open source server to publish and edit geospatial data using open standards with Google Earth, Google Maps, and more. The talk will highlight the recent the work done to interoperate with Earth and Maps, and how GeoServer fits in to the stack of software to share and collaborate around geospatial information. Also discussed will be the relevant open standards used by GeoServer, including WMS, WFS, SLD and GML, and how they were leveraged to create KML network links with the existing GeoServer core. The close of the talk will look towards the future, with more speculative questions such as what a true…

Google TechTalks
February 24, 2006

Dennis Strelow

Robust motion from monocular image measurements would be an enabling technology for Mars rover, micro air vehicle, and search and rescue robot navigation; and for modeling complex environments from video.
While algorithms exist for estimating six degree of freedom motion from monocular image measurements, motion from image measurements suffers from inherent problems. These include sensitivity to incorrect or insufficient image feature tracking; sensitivity to camera modeling and calibration errors; and long-term drift in scenarios with missing observations, i.e., where image features enter and leave the field of view.
The integration of image…

Google TechTalks
May 31, 2006

Narayanan Shivakumar

Shivakumar is a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur. Earlier, he was a Director of Engineering responsible for many of Google’s advertising products and Google Search Appliances. Before Google, he cofounded Gigabeat (’99), a startup in the online music space, and later acquired by Napster. He graduated with a BS ’94 (Summa Cum Laude) from UCLA in Computer Science and PhD ’99 in Computer Science from Stanford University.

ABSTRACT
Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google’s various products, and make the products…

Google TechTalks
January 06, 2006

Illah R. Nourbakhsh

Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Associate Professor of Robotics in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was on leave for the 2004 calendar year and was at NASA/Ames Research Center serving as Robotics Group lead. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute. His current research projects include educational and social robotics, electric wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion. His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software…

Google TechTalks
July 19, 2006

Meng Weng Wong & Julian Haight

Meng Weng Wong is an email geek. He started pobox.com in 1995 and karmasphere.com in 2005. He is responsible for SPF, the email authentication standard which was embraced and extended by Microsoft to form Sender ID. He recently moved from Philadelphia to Silicon Valley to work on Karmasphere, the open reputation network for the Internet. Julian Haight founded SpamCop.net, the impossible spam-reporting service. He is currently working on a book dealing with network security. Before SpamCop, he worked as a private consultant developing small interactive web-sites. He has always been concerned with privacy and security.

ABSTRACT
A…