Globalization and the Flow of Knowledge

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Speakers: AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean, School of Information and Professor, City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley. Steven Weber, Director, Institute of International Studies and Professor, Political Science

The mobility of skilled labor is transforming the flow of knowledge around the world. As U.S.-educated engineers and professionals return to their home countries, they are turning what once was a brain drain into a two-way process of brain circulation. These professionals are transferring to developing regions the technology and managerial know-how that once resided exclusively in advanced economies like the U.S. This process is fueling the emergence of new centers of technology entrepreneurship and creating new competitors for Silicon Valley and foreshadows persistent global skill shortages in coming decades. Discover Cal Lecture, University of California, Berkeley.

AdFraud 2007 Workshop

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Dr. Kourosh Gharachorloo, head of Google’s Ad Traffic Quality engineering team, speaks at the AdFraud workshop at Stanford University on September 14th.

http://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/files/adfraud_anecdotes.pdf

FIRST Lego League 2007 Challenge Kick-Off

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Mark Edelman, of Playing At Learning, describes the 2007 FIRST Lego League “Power Puzzle” challenge: the challenge details, changes in this years rules and judging guidelines, and answers questions. Slides for the talk are at: http://www.ncafll.org/2007/kickoff_slides.pdf

Domain Adaptation with Structural Correspondence Learning

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Google Tech Talks
September, 5 2007

ABSTRACT

Statistical language processing tools are being applied to an
ever-wider and more varied range of linguistic data. Researchers and
engineers are using statistical models to organize and understand
financial news, legal documents, biomedical abstracts, and weblog
entries, among many other domains. Because language varies so widely,
collecting and curating training sets for each different domain is
prohibitively expensive. At the same time, differences in vocabulary
and writing style across domains can cause state-of-the-art supervised
models to dramatically increase in error.

This talk describes structural correspondence learning (SCL), a method
for adapting models from resource-rich source domains to resource-poor
target domains. SCL uses unlabeled data from both domains to induce a
common feature representation for domain adaptation. We demonstrate
SCL for two NLP tasks: sentiment classification and part of speech
tagging. For each of these tasks, SCL significantly reduces the error
of a state-of-the-art discriminative model.

Speaker: John Blitzer

John Maeda: Designing for simplicity

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http://www.ted.com The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art, a place that can get very complicated. Here he talks about paring down to basics.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

New generation of math software from Maplesoft

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Google Tech Talks
September, 11 2007

ABSTRACT

The name Maple is synonymous with doing complex math on computers. Best known for its symbolic or algebraic computation abilities, Maple is one of the most important tools for the modern applied mathematician and scientist. Many of you are likely familiar with Maple from college but you’ve probably not kept up to date with latest developments. This presentation will present some of the latest product developments from Maplesoft. Topics include

– developments in high performance numerical computation
– recent advances in symbolic computing
– new Maple libraries including graph theory, statistics, optimization, polynomial operations, and more
– parallel and grid computing
– knowledge capture for mathematical documents
– the Maple programming language and application development
– overview of new add-on products including global optimization, and modeling and simulation

The presenter will be Mohamed Bendame, a senior engineer from Maplesoft. The presentations will include an open Q session.

This talk will be taped by the engEDU Tech Talks Team.

Speaker: Mohamed Bendame

Seattle Conference on Scalability

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Google Tech Talks
June, 23 2007

ABSTRACT

Seattle Conference on Scalability: June 23, 2007

We care a lot about scalability at Google. An algorithm that works only on a small scale doesn’t cut it when we are talking global access, millions of people, millions of search queries. We think big and love to talk about big ideas, so we’re planning our first ever conference on scalable systems. Our goal: to create a collegial atmosphere for participants to brainstorm different ways to build the robust systems that can handle, literally, a world of information.

The Agenda Can Be Found Here:
Agenda

Speaker: Barry Brumitt
Barry Brumitt is a software engineer with Google, Inc. who has been
working on maps-related applications since joining the Kirkland, WA
office in November 2005. Prior to coming to Google, he was at
Microsoft Corp for 8 years, working in both MS Games Studios and
MS Research. At MGS, he was responsible for the Artificial
Intelligence in Forza Motorsport, a simulation-style XBox racing
game. Previously at MSR, he worked in Ubiquitous Computing,
exploring location-based services, geometric models, and multi-
modal interfaces for smart environments, and publishing over a
dozen peer-reviewed papers. He received his Ph.D. in Robotics
from Carnegie Mellon in December 1997, and two B.Sc.s’ in
Computer Engineering and Physics from the…