Google Tech Talks
May 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The first is that aging is happening to us throughout our lives but only results in appreciable functional decline after four or more decades of life: this shows that we can postpone the functional decline caused by aging arbitrarily well without knowing how to prevent aging completely, but instead by increasingly thorough molecular and cellular repair. The second is that the typical rate of…

Google Tech Talks
May 7, 2007

ABSTRACT

Over the past few years, our work has centered around the development of computing technologies that are sensitive to what is perhaps the most important contextual cue for interacting with humans that exists: the fabric of their attention. Our research group has studied how humans communicate attention to navigate complex scenarios, such as group decision making. In the process, we developed many different prototypes of user interfaces that sense the users’ attention, so as to be respectful players that share this most important resource with others. One of the most immediate methods for sensing human attention is to detect what object the eyes look at. The…

Google Tech Talks
June 18, 2007

ABSTRACT

“Supersymmetry, Extra Dimensions and the Origin of Mass: Exploring the Nature of the Universe Using PetaScale Data Analysis”

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to begin operation in Summer 2008, will collide protons at energies not accessible since the time of the early Universe. The study of the reactions produced at the LHC has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the most fundamental forces in nature. The ATLAS experiment, currently being installed at the LHC, is designed to detect collisions at the LHC, to collect the relevant data and to provide a unified framework for the reconstruction and analysis of these data. This talk…

Google Tech Talks
June 25, 2007

ABSTRACT

Science Commons was launched to expand the Creative Commons mission into the scientific realm. James Boyle will be talking about two Science Commons projects: The Neurocommons and the Materials Transfer Project. The Materials Transfer Project uses standard machine readable licenses so that one day sharing biological materials between labs might be as easy as buying books from Amazon. If these words weren’t forbidden at Google, he’d describe the Neurocommons as a first draft of an open “semantic web” for neurology. The overall goal is to take some of the ingenuity we devote to allowing teenagers to flirt with each other online, or people to share and find…

Google Tech Talks
June 27, 2007

ABSTRACT

So we’re all agreed. Blogs: good; email: bad. Wikis: good; sending round attachments to a dozen people and then having to merge all the changes by hand afterwards: bad.

But despite the labour-saving wonders of social software, many people – even those who otherwise pounce on every new technological innovation – prefer to stick with the old way of doing things. What’s stopping them from adopting blogs and wikis as a way of getting things done? It can’t be the tool, because the tools are easy. So what scary monsters are lurking in the social software closet, ready to leap out at the innocent project leader, fangs and claws to the fore?

Speaker: Suw…

Google Tech Talks
June 29, 2007

ABSTRACT

The intrinsic genetic instability of cancer cells makes age-related cancers harder to postpone or treat than any other aspect of aging. Any therapy that a cancer can resist by activating or inactivating specific genes is unlikely to succeed long-term, because pre-existing cancer cells with the necessary gene expression pattern will withstand the therapy and proliferate. WILT (Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres) seeks to pre-empt this problem by deleting from as many of our cells as possible the genes needed for telomere elongation. Cancers lacking these genes can never reach a life-threatening stage by altering gene expression, only by…

Google Tech Talks
June 1, 2007

ABSTRACT

The notion of a “market” has undergone a paradigm shift with the Internet — totally new and highly successful markets have been defined and launched by companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN and Ebay. These markets are computationally intensive; indeed, this is just the beginning of a much larger revolution in which algorithmic considerations are bound to have an impact.

In view of these new realities, the study of market equilibria, an important, though essentially non-algorithmic, theory within Mathematical Economics, needs to be revived and rejuvenated with new models, ideas, and an inherently algorithmic approach.

Interestingly enough,…

Google Tech Talks
May 25, 2007

ABSTRACT

The sounds that animals use to communicate, including the syllables of speech, have a very special `pulse resonance’ form which automatically distinguishes them from background noise. The parts of the body used to produce these sounds grow as the animal grows. Thus, there is `acoustic scale’ variability in communication sounds which poses a serious problem for the perception and recognition stages of communication. The success of bio-acoustic communication suggests that the auditory system has a special pre-processor that automatically normalizes for acoustic scale as it constructs our internal `auditory image’ of a sound. In this paper, we propose that the…

Google Tech Talks
March 23, 2005

ABSTRACT

As we work on the challenges of organizing the world’s information, we owe our collective progress to the early pioneers who first made information available through a computer. Imagine research in a world without personal computers, the Internet, and high-speed telecommunications. Back in the 1970s, students really hung out in the bowels of library stacks and their favorite resource was called “The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”

Dr. Roger Summit is one of the early innovators whose brainchild, Dialog Information Services, was the de facto standard in online information retrieval for 25 years. Roger will discuss the philosophy behind and the…