Peter F. Carpenter received his BA degree in Chemistry from Harvard
College and his MBA in Research and Development Management from the
University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1962 to 1968
with assignments with the Air Force Systems Command, 5th Force
Reconnaissance Company (USMC), HQ 19th Air Force and as a Program
Manager in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). From 1968 until
1971 he was the Assistant Director of the Center for Materials Research
at Stanford University and a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior
at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He subsequently
served in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and as the Deputy
Executive…

Google Tech Talks
May 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

A glistening spaceship, with seven lonely years and billions of miles behind it, glides into orbit around a ringed, softly-hued planet. A flying-saucer shaped machine descends through a hazy atmosphere and lands on the surface of an alien moon, ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth.

Fantastic though they seem, these visions are not a dream. For seven years, the Cassini spacecraft and its Huygens probe traveled invisible interplanetary roads to the place we call Saturn. Their successful entry into orbit a thousand days ago, the mythic landing of Huygens on the cold, dark equatorial plains of Titan, and Cassini’s subsequent explorations of the…

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…