Decision Making and Chance

Google Tech Talks
September 17, 2006

Dr. Mike Orkin is a Managing Scientist at Exponent, a publicly traded scientific consulting company headquartered in Menlo Park. Mike has numerous research publications in game theory and probability theory and has written data mining and simulation software. He is a nationally known authority on odds and gambling games and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to discuss gambling and odds, including CNN, NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s World News Tonight.

ABSTRACT
Certain gambling games, such as roulette and craps, are games of pure chance: In repeated play, luck disappears, and the persistent gambler will go broke. Other gambling activities, such as betting…

Tango EV Electric Sports Car

Google Tech Talks
July 18, 2006

ABSTRACT
Before there was the Wrightspeed X-1, there was the Tesla prototype. Before the Tesla, there was the Tango – the first 0-60 in 4 seconds electric sports car that you can actually buy. Credits: Speaker:Rick Woodbury

E-Sourcing: Impact of Non-Price Attributes Strategic…

Google Tech Talks
October 20, 2006

D.J. Wu

ABSTRACT
Internet and other Information Technology (IT) innovations have redefined the classic concept of market revolutionarily, creating new marketplaces continuously such as Google, eBay and Amazon. The design of such electronic markets calls for new models, algorithms, and theoretical guidance. Credits: Speaker:D.J. Wu

Multiview Geometry for Texture Mapping 2D Images onto 3D…

Google TechTalks
June 29, 2006

George Wolberg
http://www-cs.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~wolberg/

ABSTRACT
The photorealistic modeling of large-scale scenes, such as urban structures, requires a fusion of range sensing technology and traditional digital photography. In this talk, we describe a system that integrates multiview geometry and automated 3D registration techniques for texture mapping 2D images onto 3D range data. The 3D range scans and the 2D photographs are respectively used to generate a pair of 3D models of the scene. The first model consists of a dense 3D point cloud, produced by using a 3D-to-3D registration method that matches 3D lines in the range images. The second model consists of a…

Mysteries of the Human Genome

Google Tech Talks
October 23, 2006

Gill Bejerano holds a BSc, summa cum laude, in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Twice recipient of the RECOMB best paper by a young scientist award, and a former Eshkol pre-doctoral Scholar and HHMI postdoc. As co-discoverer of ultraconserved elements, his research focuses on deciphering the function and evolution of the non-coding regions of the Human Genome. Gill is currently a postdoc with David Haussler at UC Santa Cruz, and in early 2007 he will join Stanford university as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and the Department of Computer…

The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity

Google Tech Talks
September 14, 2006

Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a software artist residing in San Francisco. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona.

ABSTRACT

Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms known as sheep. The votes of the users form the basis for the fitness function for a genetic algorithm on a space of abstract animations. Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool.

This cyborg mind composed of…

Thinglink – A Free Product Code for Creative Work

Google TechTalks
April 27, 2006

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen

ABSTRACT
Thinglink.org is an open database where makers can register free unique identifiers for their work and create labels for their products. The beta was launched at Maker Faire on Saturday.

Artists, crafters, designers, and small producers need online recommendation systems to compete on the global market because recommendation systems place the products of the small producers on equal footing with those of the large corporations. Recommendation systems require unique identifiers for products. UPCs, EANs and EPCs are the standard ID schemas. However, small producers especially in developing countries do not have access to these codes…