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…

Google TechTalks
May 30, 2006

Douglas Lenat
Dr. Douglas Lenat is the President and CEO of Cycorp. Since 1984, he and his team have been constructing, experimenting with, and applying a broad real world knowledge base and reasoning engine, collectively “Cyc”. Dr. Lenat was a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Stanford University. His interest and experience in national security has led him to regularly consult for several U.S. agencies and the White House.

ABSTRACT
It’s way past 2001 now, where the heck is HAL? For several decades now we’ve had high hopes for computers amplifying our mental abilities not just giving us access to relevant stored information, but…

Google TechTalks
February 27, 2006

Arne Sølvberg

ABSTRACT
The talk presents a full scale field laboratory for mobile information services. The laboratory comprises wireless broadband covering a substantial part of downtown Trondheim, and is to be integrated with the wireless broadband network of the NTNU indoor and outdoor campus area. The first stage comprises a total of approximately 2.5 square miles outdoor area and more than ½ million square feet indoor area. Approximately 25 % of the indoor area has already wireless broadband. We head for having operational the first square mile of outdoor area within autumn 2006.

The project is backed by a consortium consisting of NTNU, Trondheim…

Google TechTalks
January 27, 2006

William Softky
http://www.softky.com/Bill/resume.html

The brain seems to carry out nearly all its sensory perception using generic, interchangeable modules, each of which learns (from scratch) to represent and process whatever signals it is exposed to. But what does each module actually do? What is the “API” between modules such that they can all learn and work in harmony?

Google TechTalks
May 26, 2006

Esme Voss

Esme Voss is the founder of muniwireless.com and the acknowledged expert on municipal wireless.

Google TechTalks
June 19, 2006

Bryan O’Sullivan is a Senior Principal Engineer at QLogic, Inc, where he works on HPC clustering and compiler technologies. He likes to write software tools that help other engineers, and to build interesting distributed systems. He is an enthusiastic rock climber of sadly limited facility.

ABSTRACT
Mercurial is a free distributed revision control system. It focuses on conceptual simplicity, robustness, and high performance. Well-known open source projects that use Mercurial include OpenSolaris, Xen, and One Laptop Per Child.This talk presents some of the advantages of using Mercurial to manage large, fast-moving projects.

We give a brief overview of the…

Google TechTalks
July 6, 2006

William Pugh

ABSTRACT
I’ll talk about some of my experience in using and expanding static analysis tools for defect detection. The FindBugs tool developed at the Univ. of Maryland is now being widely used, including inside Google.

I’ll give an overview of FindBugs, show some of the kinds of errors we routinely find in production code, discuss the methodology we use for enhancing and expanding FindBugs and some of the recent additions to it, discuss ways of incorporating FindBugs into your development process (such as being able to get a report of all the warnings introduced since the last release of your software), and talk about the future of static analysis,…