Google TechTalks
February 9, 2006

Michael Schwarz

Michael Schwarz served as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Economics Department after earning a Ph.D. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economics Research. Dr. Schwarz specializes in economic theory and industrial organization and applications of theory to business decision making and public policy.

ABSTRACT
We investigate the “generalized second price” auction (GSP), a new mechanism which is used by search engines to sell online advertising that most Internet users encounter daily. GSP is tailored to its unique environment, and neither the mechanism nor the environment have previously been…

Google TechTalks
March 8, 2006

Jim whitehead
Jim Whitehead is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has recently been developing a new degree program on computer gaming, the BS in Computer Game Engineering. Jim received his PhD in Information and Computer Science from UC Irvine, in 2000

Abstract:
Almost all software contains undiscovered bugs, ones that have not yet been exposed by testing or by users. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to know the location of these bugs? This talk presents two approaches for predicting the location of bugs. The bug cache contains 10% of the files in a software project.

Google TechTalks
April 06, 2006

Dr. Cornelia Brunner
Associate Director, Center for Children & Technology Education Development Center

Dr. Brunner has been involved in the research, production, and teaching of educational technology in a variety of subject areas for thirty years. In addition to conducting research projects about the relationship between learning, teaching, and technology, she has designed and implemented educational materials incorporating technologies to support inquiry-based learning and teaching in science, social studies, media literacy, and the arts. ABSTRACT
Research over the past two decades has pointed to a strong, persistent, gendered difference in technological desire…

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Ross Collard
Ross Collard is with Collard & Company, a Manhattan-based consulting firm which specializes in software quality. A Google search on his name reveals about 100 citations in this area. He has computer science degrees from Caltech and Stanford, and has taught for UC Berkeley and Harvard.

ABSTRACT
Testers’ ability to identify, assess and prioritize risk is critical to having the right test focus. Objective, quantitative methods for risk assessment generally do not work well. And s ubjective, intuitive methods for risk assessment are derived as much or more from emotion and psychology rather than “logic”.

A possible new breakthrough is “prospect…

Google TechTalks
August 8, 2006

B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970. He is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies ( http://sbinstitute.com ).

ABSTRACT
Galileo took a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the physical sciences, and a key element in this revolution was the rigorous, sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although…

Google TechTalks
March 7, 2006

Will Noel
Roger L. Easton, Jr.
Michael B. Toth

ABSTRACT
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 10th Century medieval manuscript that is the subject of an ongoing technical, scientific and conservation effort at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 1999, the multidisciplinary team has been disbinding, conserving, imaging, analyzing, transcribing and studying the 174 parchment folios — yielding approximately 400Gb of data to date. The Palimpsest, which the team affectionately calls “Archie,” includes at least seven treatises by Archimedes: The only copies of two of his Treatises, /The Method/ and /Stomachion/; the only copy in Greek of /On Floating…

Google TechTalks
April 28, 2006

Stewart Smith
Stewart Smith works for MySQL AB as a software engineer working on MySQL Cluster. He is an active member of the free and open source software community, especially in Australia.

ABSTRACT
Part 1 – Introduction to MySQL Cluster The NDB storage engine (MySQL Cluster) is a high-availability storage engine for MySQL. It provides synchronous replication between storage nodes and many mysql servers having a consistent view of the database. In 4.1 and 5.0 it’s a main memory database, but in 5.1 non-indexed attributes can be stored on disk. NDB also provides a lot of determinism in system resource usage. I’ll talk a bit about that.

Part 2 – New features…

Google TechTalks
February 28, 2006

John Maceri

Abstract:
Every night there 84,00 people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles. From this large number about 2,000 live here in our Santa Monica community. OPCC (formerly Ocean Park Community) is a network of shelters and services that provide assistance to men, women and children who are part of one of the largest homeless populations in Los Angeles County. This assistance comes in the form of housing, mental and medical health programs, food, counseling, peer support, and in-depth preparation for independent living. OPCC will be here on Tuesday, February 28th from 1-2 to give a general overview of the organization, which would also describe…

Google TechTalks
February 9, 2006

Danny O’Brien and Jason Schultz

Danny O’Brien
Danny O’Brien is the Activism Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help EFF’s membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public. Jason Schultz
Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF’s Patent Busting Project. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. Jason maintains a personal blog at…