YUI Open RoundTable May 23, 2013

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YUI Open Roundtable for May 16th, 2013

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Google Tech Talk
May 10, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Wayne M. Getz, Richard M. Salter, Nick Sippl-Swezey

ABSTRACT

Current graphically-driven coding platforms for building computational models are either confined to a restricted selection of in-house elements or have a flat structure that facilitates the formulation of either dynamical systems models or individual-based, event-oriented (agent) models, but not both. NOVA is a hierarchically structured, modularized platform with a graphics-based IDE. Nova models are constructed using graphical components that are subsequently captured and converted to a JavaScript extension called NovaScript that seamlessly merges dynamic-system and agent based modeling paradigms. It is simple enough to be used in the K-12 classroom to meet the Next Generation Science Standards in computational thinking, as described in A Framework for K-12 Science Education. It is also powerful enough to build full scale computational models for research in the environmental and human sciences fields. Nova features include:

• Modularity and open-ended scalability with hierarchical levels that can be independently run,
tested,evaluated and intertwined. Such levels may be reused in multiple models.
• Wrapping of any code required for model implementation into Nova code chips, which are portable and reusable components of the IDE.
• Platform extension through the use of plugins.
• Proliferation and movement of agents over real landscapes
• Interfacing the platform with other platforms to take advantage of existing tool boxes (e.g. geographic information systems, R statistical packages).

Since models can be depicted as a graphical set of wiring diagrams at each hierarchical level of the formulation, recyclable modules and code chips can be easily snapped in and out of the model, allowing the platform to facilitate the development of communities of applied computational scientists that have rudimentary coding skills, and enabling them to communicate the structure of very complex models, build upon common experiences, assemble very large models rapidly and accurately with considerable confidence in their voracity to address the most challenging societal problems of today: poverty, disease, global change.

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YUI Open RoundTable May 9, 2013

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Google Tech Talk
March 15, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Joseph Kim, President, Genesis International College.
ABSTRACT

Japan has some of the oldest and most respected universities in the world. However, higher education in Japan is only for the privileged and is inaccessible to the majority of high school graduates. Genesis International College of Osaka, Japan (www.genesiscollege.jp) is a non-profit startup English-language college scheduled to launch in 2015 that is aimed at the working class poor of Japan. After giving an overview of Japan's economy and educational system, Joseph Kim will discuss innovation/disruption in higher education and how Genesis College hopes to reach the 15+ million people in the working class poor in Japan through a globalized English-language curriculum.

About the Speaker: Joseph Kim is the founding president of Genesis International College. He brings to Genesis College a unique blend of leadership in academics, non-profit organizations, and church ministry. Previously, he was the Executive Vice-President of CBI Japan in Nagoya, Japan. He has taught philosophy and business ethics for Hope International University, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also taught public speaking and organizational strategy at キリスト聖書神学校 in Nagoya. Although his academic research is primarily in philosophy, the majority of his writing is now focused on leadership, organizational strategy, and effective communication. He is the author of Reformed Epistemology and the Problem of Religious Diversity, a book at the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of religion. He is currently working on his newest book, Personal Strategy: a Competitive Life, a book which is focused on the personal strategic choices a young person faces when deciding upon their future.

He has been a keynote speaker or seminar leader, mostly on the topic of leadership, for more than 30 international organizations such as Nagoya University of Foreign Studies (Japan), Handong Global University (South Korea), Torch Trinity Graduate School (South Korea), EMA Nairobi (Kenya), Midwest University, Asia Center (Thailand), Gracepoint Hsinchu (Taiwan), Covenant Seminary (USA), and JAMA Leadership Conferences (USA). He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School (GMP) and Arizona State University where he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy.

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Google Tech Talk
March 19, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Stephen Devries, M.D.

ABSTRACT

New scientific advances have revealed the remarkable potency of simple strategies for optimizing our health. This talk will highlight surprising, yet highly practical nutritional and mind/body interventions that can make an enormous difference in maintaining wellness. When further steps are needed, a path to balanced medicine will be discussed-combining the best of both natural approaches and conventional medicine.

Speaker Info:

Stephen Devries, M.D is a preventive cardiologist and Executive Director of the Gaples Institute for Integrative Cardiology, a nonprofit organization that promotes natural approaches to heart health. He is also an Associate Professor at Northwestern University.
Dr. Devries has had unique training, including a Fellowship in Integrative Medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona.
He previously wrote the weekly Chicago Sun-Times column, "Heart Beat"and authored the Time/Warner book, "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Cholesterol."
Dr. Devries has been voted by his peers many years over as one of the "Best Doctors in America" and lectures internationally on integrative approaches to prevention of heart disease.

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Google Tech Talk
April 30, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by: Gully Burns

ABSTRACT

Not all information is created equal. Accurate, innovative scientific knowledge generally has an enormous impact on humanity. It is the source of our ability to make predictions about our environment. It is the source of new technology (with all its attendent consequences, both positive and negative). It is also a continuous source of wonder and fascination. In general, the value and power of scientific knowledge is not reflected in the scale and structure of the information infrastructure used to house, store and share this knowledge. Many scientists use spreadsheets as the most sophisticated data management tool and only publish their data as PDF files in the literature. In this high-level talk, we describe a powerful, new knowledge engineering framework for describing scientific observations within a broader strategic model of the scientific process. We describe general open-source tools for scientists to model and manage their data in an attempt to accelerate discovery. Using examples focussed on the high-value challenge problem: finding a cure for Parkinson's Disease, we present a high-level strategic approach that is both in-keeping with Google's vision and values and could also provide a viable new research that would benefit from Google's massively scalable technology. Ultimately, we present an informatics research initiative for the 21st century: 'Building a Breakthrough Machine".

Speaker Info

Gully Burns develops pragmatic biomedical knowledge engineering systems for scientists that (a) provide directly useful functionality in their everyday use and (b) is based on innovative, cutting edge computer science that subtlely transforms our ability to use knowledge. He was originally trained as a physicist at Imperial College in London before switching to do a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Oxford. He came to work at USC in 1997, developing the 'NeuroScholar' project in Larry Swanson's lab before joining the Information Sciences Institute in 2006. He is now works as project leader in ISI's Information Integration Group, as well as a Research Assistant Professor of neurobiology at USC's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He maintains a personal blog called 'Ars-Veritatis, the art of truth', and is very interested in seeing how his research in developing systems for scientists could translate to helping and supporting understanding and our use of knowledge in everyday life.

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How Google Impacts Global Education: Introducing the Google API usages within the computer adaptive formative assessment
(more info below)

Google Tech Talk
April 30, 2013
Presented by Jaehwa Choi

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this presentation is introducing the Google APIs applications within the Computer Adaptive Formative AssessmentTM (CAFATM; Choi, Kim, & Yoon, 2012). CAFATM is a technology-based educational assessment and learning system focused on a formative assessment process. This system provides individually tailored diagnostics, feedback, and learning progress information to students, educators, parents, policy makers, and members of the community. This web-based formative assessment system integrates 1) various educational practices (e.g., standards-based curriculum, classroom instruction, and accountability system), 2) learning and cognitive theoretical frameworks (e.g., Cognitive Knowledge Maps), and 3) advanced psychometric models (e.g., Item Response Theory Models, Computer Adaptive Assessments, Diagnostic Assessment Models, Formative Assessment Models, Auto Item Generation Modules, and Multi-level Longitudinal Assessment Models). This presentation illustrates how the Google APIs (e.g., Android, Google Translation, Google Search, YouTube, Google Chart, and Google Image, etc.) have been utilized for various components inside of the CAFA TM system. A math learning application of the CAFA TM system, http://eMathTest.com which provides free computer adaptive math worksheets to K-12 students, will also be introduced to demonstrate the broad and practical impacts of the Google APIs to the global math education.

Speaker Info:

Jaehwa Choi is Associate Professor of educational research methods in the Department of Educational Leadership at The George Washington University. His research interests include structural equation modeling, latent growth models, Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation methods for latent variable models, and formative assessment system applications. He is the chief inventor of Computer Adaptive Formative AssessmentTM (CAFATM; www.eMathTest.com/CAFA) that is the core engine of a web based mathematics learning system, www.eMathTest.com.

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YUI Open RoundTable Thurs May 2 2013

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/9VY2b

James Waldrop, Twitter

James will be discussing the tools, process, and philosophy that goes into performance testing at Twitter. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Iago open source load testing library, which he wrote to enable Twitter's engineering teams to perform load tests before deploying code to production. The talk will dive into implementation details of some of these tests (including source code) and how complicating factors such as OAuth and arbitrary Thrift protocols are managed.

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http://g.co/gtac2013

David Röthlisberger, YouView

We'll build a video-capturing image recognition system in 3 minutes, using GStreamer's command-line tools and OpenCV. (GStreamer is an open-source media-handling framework; OpenCV —"Open Computer Vision"— is an open-source image-processing library.)

A leading example of such a system is http://stb-tester.com, an open-source tool developed at YouView to automate the UI testing of our set-top boxes. We'll describe stb-tester, the flexibility offered by its GStreamer underpinnings, some of the possibilities it opens up, and the challenges ahead.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/pPQ1u

Katerina Goseva-Popstojanova, West Virginia University

Software product lines exhibit high degree of commonality among the systems in the product line and a well specified number of possible variations. Based on data extracted from two case studies - a medium size industrial product line and a large, evolving open source product line - we explored empirically if the systematic reuse improves the quality and supports successful prediction of potential future faults from previously experienced faults, source code metrics, and change metrics. Our research results confirmed, in a software product line setting, the findings of others that faults are more highly correlated to change metrics than to static code metrics. The quality assessment results showed that although older packages (including commonalities) continually changed, they retained low fault densities. Furthermore, the open source product line improved in quality as it evolved through releases. The prediction based on generalized linear regression models accurately ranked the packages according to their post-release faults using the models built on the previous release. The results also revealed that post-release fault predictions benefit from additional product line information.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/E1v14

Mark Trostler, Google

Testable JavaScript is a process. Whether starting with a blank slate or an already implemented application (or somewhere in-between) being able to test your JavaScript code simply, cleanly, and effectively is a necessary feature. Code that cannot be tested will be rewritten.
While JavaScript is unique due to the myriad of environments within which it runs, there are several tried and true 'testable' methodologies from other languages which also hold true for JavaScript. And of course there remain the unique challenges that JavaScript developers must face while writing and testing their code.
What patterns make code testable? Which anti-patterns hinder testing? What metrics and common sense guideposts can be used to measure the testability of our code? Once the process of creating testable code has started now what?
Join me to break down the process of writing testable JavaScript. We will investigate ideas, patterns, and methodologies that greatly increase the testability, and hence the maintainability, correctness, and longevity of your code. Whether you write client- or server-side JavaScript mastering this process will greatly enhance the quality of your code.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/kpJCL

Guang Zhu (朱光) and Adam Momtaz, Google

As Android gains popularity in the mobile world, application developers and OEM vendors are exploring ways to perform end-to-end UI driven testing of applications or entire platform. With a brief review of existing UI Automation solutions on Android, this talk introduces the recently released Android UI Automator framework, and continues to give an inside look of the framework, typical use cases and workflows.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/wb3nm

Tao Xie, North Carolina State University

This talk presents Pex4Fun (http://www.pexforfun.com/), which leverages automated test generation to underpin automatic grading in an online programming system that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users. It provides a programming-oriented gaming experience outside of the classroom, training users to learn various programming and software engineering skills, including testing skills such as writing parameterized unit tests. Pex4Fun makes a significant contribution to the known problem of assignment grading, as well as providing a fun learning experience based on interactive gaming. Pex4Fun has been gaining high popularity in the community: since it was released to the public in June 2010, the number of clicks of the "Ask Pex!" button (indicating the attempts made by users to solve games at Pex4Fun) has reached over one million as of early 2013.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/7UeEI

David Burns and Malini Das, Mozilla

This is the problem that confronted Mozilla when we decided to venture into the world of FirefoxOS. Where to start and how to do it was going to prove an interesting task. Come listen to how we solved this problem and how we created a new framework.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/pOSkp

Igor Dorovskikh and Kaustubh Gawande, Expedia

Expedia started investing in Mobile Web and iOS/Android apps in early 2012. At the same time Test Engineers started developing test automation solutions to build quality and testability into the products from the beginning. In this talk, we will share our experience and learning of utilizing open source tools to build automated testing in Expedia's Agile development and continuous delivery environment. We will talk about Test Pyramid and go into more detail of specific open source tools that have worked well for us. Some of the open source tools we use are BDD tools such as Cucumber, web automation tool Selenium-WebDriver, iOS automation tool Frank, Android automation tools Robotium and Calabash, and Continuous Integration system Jenkins. In addition, we will share some of the Agile delivery principles we strive to adopt like TDD, Pair Programming, Build and Test Radiators. Finally, we will share some of the benefits we have realized from our investment in Agile and test automation and how that is getting us to our Continuous Delivery goals.

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http://g.co/gtac2013

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/76Ggf

Ari Shamash, Google

You built an app. You launched it. You figured you'd get it out there, build up some volume, get some funding, throw it all out, and then start from scratch so you can "do it right". But, demands for new features are sky high, you are now being asked to push towards unprecedented scale at an unheard of velocity. Yikes! Now what?

You cannot throw it away and start from scratch, you'll just need to evolve what you have, while continuing to add high quality features at breathtaking speed. In addition, you need to ensure that what is already there doesn't break. How do you do this? Fortunately, a new field is forming within the software engineering industry that addresses this common scenario: at Google, we call this "test engineering".

This talk will focus on what test engineering is, how it evolved from quality assurance, and how the industry as a whole has implemented test engineering (with specific examples of how it is implemented at Google).

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/8qqHA

Claudio Criscione, Google

Cross site scripting, or XSS, is the modern-day equivalent of the middle-ages black plague in the web application world: it's widespread, it's bad and there are little or no technical ways to detect it until it's too late. DOM XSS is a particularly nasty variant of those, as it requires a real browser or equivalent to be detected: a difficult problem with little automated solution available.

We needed powerful, self-driving tools to identify DOM XSS early in the development lifecycle, usable by engineers outside of the security team: all we wanted was a product which could scan our huge, fast moving, highly complex and arcane corpus of applications... and of course, we found none. So we built our own: a web application scanner targeting DOM XSS designed on top of standard Google technologies. It runs in App Engine and leverages the powerful Chrome browser and some hundreds of CPUs as a security scanning platform.
It is also a nice citizen of the testing arsenal at Google: it lives inside our testing infrastructure, instead of being the instrument of the security team.

In this talk we outline our novel approach, the challenges we faced in scaling our system to Google size and the ideas behind our detection and crawling models on JavaScript intensive applications.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/5QHVY
Demo code: https://gist.github.com/klepikov/5457750

Michael Klepikov, Google

In web performance testing, we know pretty well how to analyze a page load. We need to move beyond a page load though: modern apps are highly interactive, and operations tend not to reload the entire page, but rather update it. Different people, myself included, have integrated WebDriver into web performance test harnesses, which helps, but still keeps performance tests separate from the rest of the UI test suite. I propose to build performance testing features right into WebDriver itself, leveraging its recently added Logging API. This makes it possible to collect performance metrics while running regular functional tests, allowing for a much more seamless integration of performance tests into the overall development and test flow. It is also much less disruptive to the custom build/test toolchains that almost every large organization creates.

I will demonstrate this with the new-generation ChromeDriver (WebDriver for the Chromium browser).

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http://g.co/gtac2013

Vojta Jina, Google

Introduction to Karma - test runner that makes testing JavaScript applications in real browsers frictionless and enjoyable.

Testing is not optional when one is building a JavaScript application that must work across many browsers and devices. However executing tests in all of these various environments is hard. Karma turns this typically painstaking task into a piece of cake. It allows you to execute JavaScript tests in real browsers or devices such as your phone or tablet directly from the comfort of your terminal or your favorite IDE.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/FPVd8

Kostya Serebryany, Google

AddressSanitizer (ASan) is a tool that finds buffer overflows (in stack, heap and globals) and use-after-free bugs in C/C++ programs.
ThreadSanitizer (TSan) finds data races in C/C++ and Go programs.
MemorySanitizer (MSan) is a work-in-progress tool that finds uses of uninitialized memory (C++).
These tools are based on compiler instrumentation (LLVM and GCC), which makes them very fast (e.g. ASan incurs just 2x slowdown).
We will share our experience in huge scale testing using these tools.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/q9dGd

Celal Ziftci, University of California, San Diego
Vivek Ramavajjala, Google

Continuous build is one of the key infrastructures in Google. When a build fails, it is vital to pinpoint the culprit changelist (CL)/changelists quickly, so that it can be fixed to get the build back to green.
Culprit detection solutions exist for small and medium sized builds, but not for large integration builds.

Our culprit finder targets finding the culprit CL for large builds automatically, in a very short time-frame with high success. Based on production usage on multiple projects in the last 9 months, culprit finder provides very promising results. Come see our talk to see how we implemented the culprit finder, how successful it is in production and what it feels and looks like.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/UG3BN

Yvette Nameth & Brendan Dhein, Google

Continuous testing is generally about running unit tests and integration tests. But when the data that your server processes is actually the biggest cause of change, how do you ensure that consumers of the data still find it useable and that nothing crashes under the rate of change or a bad change? We'll discuss techniques for continuous data testing with examples from Google Maps.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/IuvKF

Jonathan Lipps, Sauce Labs

Appium is is a Node.js server that automates native and hybrid mobile applications (both iOS and Android). Appium's philosophy dictates that apps should not be modified in order to be automated, and that you should be able to write your test code in any language or framework. The result is a Selenium WebDriver server that speaks mobile like a native. Appium runs on real devices and emulators and is completely open source, making it a wonderfully friendly way to get started with mobile test automation. In this talk I will outline the principles that inform Appium's design, talk about Appium in the space of other mobile automation frameworks, and introduce the architecture that makes the magic happen. Finally, I'll dig into the code for a simple test of a brand-new mobile app, and demonstrate Appium running this test on iPhone and Android.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/RltPp

Thomas Knych, Stefan Ramsauer, & Valera Zakharov, Google

Are you ready to take the red pill?
Mobile has changed the way humans interact with computers. This is great, but as engineers we're faced with an ever growing matrix of environments our code runs on. The days of considering only a handful of browsers and screen resolutions are not coming back. How can engineers cope with the Matrix? We'll cover how Google is fighting this testing problem on workstations, in the cloud and in your head...
"I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/8epF0

Minal Mishra, Netflix

The boom of mobile and tablet computing has inundated the software industry with application development platforms. Developing consumer applications on computing platforms have their own magical experience for the end users. Consumer facing software companies always attempt to put their best foot forward when they develop an application for these platforms. However, the biggest challenge in application development only begins after companies roll out the first version of the application. Consumers and the software companies want the latest features and functionalities out of development as soon as possible with the highest quality. This leads to constant code churn in every layer of the stack. We, UI automation engineers, build a variety of detection systems to catch application issues sooner than later. In this talk I will share some of our challenges and successes behind one such detection system, that helped find problems outside the application layer but still adversely impacted the user experience.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/6rA9q

Ken Kania, Google

From its start as a Windows-only browser, Chrome has expanded to Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, and most recently, Android and iOS. User level testing of web applications across these platforms has been difficult and necessitated various automation approaches. This talk will describe the work the Chrome team is doing to make WebDriver available for Chrome on all platforms. This will include a technical look at the underlying approach but will focus on how developers can use the new ChromeDriver to write tests for Chrome's various platforms. Also, the current state of the project and a roadmap for its future will be covered.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/sF7Fm

Patrik Höglund, Google

Yes, it is possible to automatically test complex, subjective measurements such as video quality! This talk will show how we constructed a continuous, automated end-to-end test of a WebRTC video call. We'll take a look at the toolchain at a high level and what challenges we ran into while constructing it. This is perfect if you want inspiration for how to take your media testing to the next level.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/278b4

Simon Stewart, Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular Android applications there is. In this talk, you'll find what Facebook does to ensure that each release is as good as it can be. We'll cover everything from how we manage our code, through our approaches to testing and all the way out to dogfooding.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/ieunS

Valera Zakharov , Google

Developing a reliable Android test should be as quick and easy as pulling a shot of espresso. Unfortunately, with existing tools, it may feel more like making a double-shot-caramel-sauce-upside-down-single-whip-half-decaf-latte - confusing and rarely consistent. Espresso is a new Android test framework that lets you write concise, beautiful, and reliable UI tests quickly. The core API is small, predictable, and easy to learn - yet it is also open for customization. Espresso tests state their expectations, interactions, and assertions clearly without distracting boilerplate, custom infrastructure, or messy implementation details getting in the way. Tests run optimally fast - leave your waits, syncs, sleeps, and polls behind and let the framework gracefully manipulate and assert on your UI when it is at rest. Start enjoying writing and executing UI tests - try a shot of Espresso.

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http://g.co/gtac2013
Slides: http://goo.gl/xWZKt

Eduardo Bravo, Google

Testing native apps in a meaningful, stable and scalable way is a challenge. The G+ have developed efficient solutions to tackle these problems by providing the right infrastructure for each of the complex test scenarios that mobile presents. Our current test infrastructure provides the right tools to both iOS and Android apps to give our development team the confidence that new changes won't break existing clients.

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Google Tech Talk
April 12, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Randy McIntosh

ABSTRACT

The Virtual Brain (TVB, thevirtualbrain.org) is an international project that uses real neuroimaging data to construct a simulation of the human brain. Anatomical data setup the conduit for communication between different brain regions. The dynamics for each region are generated from a library of nonlinear models, and produce large-scale activity patterns that can be compared directly to empirical functional data, such EEG/MEG or functional MRI. The talk will present the core of the platform and its applications to understanding the structure-function interplay that forms the basis of cognitive architectures. TVB's use of real data is also at the heart of a larger social neuroscience initiative, wherein small groups of people interact with TVB through wireless EEG headsets, modifying an immersive audiovisual environment that mimics a dream -- My Virtual Dream. The goal is to make use of individual brain signals to augment the group experience through TVB. The two avenues of development for TVB will inform neurally-inspired computing architectures and the evolution of interactive devices that can use a person's physiology to redesign their experience.

Speaker Info:

Randy McIntosh, PhD.
Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
Director, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre

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Google Tech Talk
April 22, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Stephon Alexander

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, based on work pioneered by the speaker, cosmologists have had reason to suspect that Einstein's gravity has a preferred handedness (chirality). In this talk, after giving an overview of the structure of general relativity, I will explore the cosmological, gravitational wave detection and particle physics consequences of the Chiral Nature of General Relativity. I conclude with an astonishing new direction of unifiying gravity with the weak nuclear interaction, that differs from string theory. At stake potentially is the long elusive goal of physicists to develop a Grand Unified Theory - a coherent model of particle physics, gravitation and cosmology!

Speaker Info

Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist specializing in the interface between cosmology, particle physics and quantum gravity (String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity). He is currently the Ernest Everett Just 1907 Professor of Natural Sciences. He received his BSc (1993) from Haverford College and PhD (2000) from Brown University. He held postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College, London and The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He previously held faculty positions at Penn State and Haverford College.

Research Interests

Theoretical Cosmology: Cosmological Constant Problem, Baryogenesis, Cosmic Inflation, Structure Formation, Singularity Resolution, Quantum Fields in Curved Spaces, String Cosmology. Quantum Gravity: String Theory, Modified Theories of Gravity, Loop Quantum Gravity/Spin Foams. Music: Instrument Acoustic Modelling, Geometry and Math of Music. Recent publications: http://inspirehep.net/search?p=author%3AS.Alexander.2+

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The GTAC event brings together engineers from many organizations to discuss test automation. It is a great opportunity to present, learn, and challenge modern testing technologies and strategies.

This year's theme will be "Testing Media and Mobile".

http://developers.google.com/gtac

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I created this video with the YouTube Video Editor (http://www.youtube.com/editor)

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The GTAC event brings together engineers from many organizations to discuss test automation. It is a great opportunity to present, learn, and challenge modern testing technologies and strategies.

http://developers.google.com/gtac

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http://oscon.com

Join us July 22-26 at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2013 in Portland, Oregon. We know you won't want to miss it: we're celebrating the 15th anniversary of OSCON, and it's going to be an extraordinary experience.

OSCON is the must-attend gathering of the best and brightest minds in technology, an opportunity to challenge your assumptions and spark your imagination. Join us for five immersive days of all things open source—new and innovative projects, major enterprise-wide deployments, and—from icons of the open source movement—deep perspective on where we've been and where we're headed.

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Google Tech Talk
March 26, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Oliver Francis Koch (founder of Easy Bites), Ralph Benjamin Magnus (lead developer of Easy Bites)

ABSTRACT

In this talk we narrate the story of Easy Bites, an internet start-up in post-war Iraq set to provide location-based food delivery services to the local community. The start-up was brought together through a close collaboration between international and local experts, motivated to tap into the significant growth of internet and mobile penetration in the region to provide innovative local services to the community. The talk will discuss and emphasize the team's lean and agile methodologies in product development. These agile methods helped to quickly and adequately overcome a series of challenges such as cultural localization of the service and infrastructural challenges (e.g. absence of physical addresses in Iraq).

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Google Tech Talk
March 27, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by: Sina Nader-SWAN Sleep Solutions and Dr. Stephen Brooks, Dr. Jerome Hester, Dr. Sue Kim and Dr. Manoj Waikar.

Hear from the experts about sleep's impact on your health and productivity and learn a few quick, concrete tips to help optimize your sleep. We're excited to partner with SWAN (Sleep Well At Night) Sleep Solutions (swansleepsolutions.com).

In addition to panelists from the medical community, we'll be joined by Congressman Michael Honda who will speak about the impact of sleep on the community.

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Google Tech Talk
March 22, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Caitlin Malone (CERN), Jens Dopke (CERN)

ABSTRACT

Last week at the Moriond physics conferences, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN confirmed that the particle they discovered last year is, in fact, a Higgs boson. If it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck in July 2012, why did it take until March 2013 to confirm that it is a duck? And why, for that matter, was a duck theorized in 1963 only discovered last year? Here's the story of the Higgs boson discovery, from inside the Higgs working groups, as experienced by the CERN foot soldiers (read: grad students and postdocs). As a generous bonus, we'll throw in some wild and irresponsible speculation about what might be next from CERN...

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Google Tech Talk
March 28, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Nadiene Zylstra.

ABSTRACT

Sesame Street seems like a simple, straightforward kids program. In fact, it's the conjunction of many streams of work in technology, education research, production, international politics and intense creativity.

In this talk, Nadine Zylstra, VP Sesame Street Production and Programming and Supervising Producer of Sesame Street takes us under the hood. Through the lens of Sesame Street's recent STEM (Science-Technology-Education-Math) and STEAM (STEM + Arts) initiatives Nadine will break down the Sesame Street Production Model for inspection.

How do preschoolers learn? How does one create compelling preschool content that teaches complex educational goals? How can you use the digital eco-system to deepen impact? What will content innovation look like ten years from now?

Speaker Info: Nadiene Zylstra, Vice President of Sesame Street Production, Sesame Workshop

As Vice President of Sesame Street Production Zylstra supervises the creative direction of the video content produced for both linear and digital platforms.

Zylstra joined the Sesame Street family as a director and producer on the South African version of Sesame Street. She was part of the team that initiated and executed the show's first HIV-positive Muppet. Moving to the United States, Zylstra joined the Workshop as the Executive Producer for the Sesame Street productions in Bangladesh and India. Before taking her position as the Supervising Producer for Sesame Street, Nadine led the Digital Media Programming team. In this role she provided the strategic vision to deliver content to all of Sesame Street's audiences (including children and their caregivers, teachers, fans, funders, and business partners) via direct digital distribution. She is currently also one of the directors on Sesame Street.

Zylstra has worked as a producer, director, and writer in the television and documentary industry for over a decade and has focused much of her effort in the realm of educational television. Her body of work has been distinguished by numerous awards. Amongst these are a Peabody Award and Webby Award for her work with Sesamestreet.org, numerous Emmy Awards for Outstanding Directing in a Children's Television Series, several South African Avanti Awards, and the United Nations/NHK/Japan Prize for Courage in depicting Youth in Difficult Circumstances. In 2001, she produced and directed The Summit- No Substitutes, South Africa's first reality television show for E-TV (a national network).

As a writer, Zylstra has focused much of her work on youth and education. She has written for a number of edutainment-focused series including the International Award Winning drama series, Soul City and South African award-winning series Tsha Tsha Tsha.

Zylstra earned a BA Honors in Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. There she received The Edgar Bold Award for the Best Television Student, the Questek Award for Excellence in Editing, and a University Merit Award for Scriptwriting. She was awarded a scholarship to study video editing at Quantel in London. Zylstra resides in New York City with her husband Jonathan, their daughter Ella and son Jack.

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Google Tech Talk
March 25, 2013
(more info below)
Presented by Toby Ord

ABSTRACT

People admire doctors and rescue workers and marvel at the possibility of saving someone's life -- something that few of us would ever achieve. And yet at the same time, we routinely hear that for a small sum of money we could save someone's life in a developing country and this scarcely impacts our behaviour. There is an important disconnect between these two attitudes and it has serious moral implications. I will speak about the evidence which shows that we really can make a tremendous difference by giving, and then explore the moral case for giving much more than we typically do. I will then look at the great disparity in effectiveness between different charities and show how choosing *where* to give can be even more important than the decision to give in the first place.

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Google Tech Talk
December 13, 2012
(more info below)
Presented by Geir Engdahl.

ABSTRACT

There's a ton of under-utilized stuff collecting dust in closets and garages around the world. How can we make it searchable, accessible and useful?

Xoogler and CEO of SkyLib Geir Engdahl will tell the story of what motivated him to found SkyLib and how he's using Google technologies such as App Engine, Android and Maps to "index" the world's stuff. The talk outlines the "big picture" around today's resource usage, and suggests how resources can be utilized more effectively. It also dives into the details of using Google's technologies "from the outside".

Geir has a master's degree in applied math, and has worked three years for Google Canada on the Conversion Optimizer product, which he received an OC Award for. In his spare time, he organizes the Norwegian Informatics Olympiad and is the leader of the local Green Party chapter. His ambition is to work for a smarter, greener future.

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Google Tech Talk
January 4, 2013
(expand for more info)
Presented by Tim Conway

ABSTRACT

GoPano plus uses a specially curved mirror. Its shape gathers light from all directions and reflects it into the lens of your camera.

This single image/video shows everything in a 360° ring around the GoPano plus. On your computer, this warped image is transformed ("unwarped") into an interactive scene where anyone can control the view.

Once you have the raw photos and/or videos, you'll need software to edit them. We provide PhotoWarp (for images) and VideoWarp Director (for 360° videos). Whether you're shooting 360° stills, panoramic videos, or both, we've got you covered.

The GoPano plus has a standard 67mm photographic filter thread base which can be easily adapted to fit almost all the digital cameras, DSLR lenses, and camcorders. GoPano Step Rings can adapt any camera or lens with a filter thread to connect directly to the GoPano plus.

SPEAKER INFO:

Tim Conway (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1122112/)

Not to be confused with actor in the Dorf videos, Tim Conway has been creating, supervising, and creating unique technology in the field of Visual Effects and Post Production since 1997.

His latest endeavor is a camera lens with an attached mirror which allows you to take 360 degree panoramic still images or video.

This Tech Talk was presented at Google's LA office.

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Google Tech Talk
1/8/13

Presented by Nigel P. Smart

ABSTRACT

Multi-Party Computation (MPC) allows, in theory, a set of parties to compute any function on their secret input without revealing anything bar the output of the function. For many years this has been a restricted to a theoretical tool in cryptography. However, in the past five years amazing strides have been made in turning theory into practice. In this talk I will present the latest, practical, protocol called SPDZ (Speedz), which achieves much of its performance advantage from the use of Fully Homomorphic Encryption as a sub-procedure. No prior knowledge of MPC will be assumed.

Speaker Info

University of Bristol, U.K.

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In this YUIConf 2012 presentation, the YUI team member Reid Burke talks about testing software and writing code that works. His talk is richly illustrated with demos of the tools that Reid has built for testing JavaScript in the browser and includes a discussion of the software testing philosophy and the special place that testing holds in the development process.

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In this YUIConf 2012 talk, Montie Tsai and Zordius Chen, Yahoo! mobile e-commerce engineers, discuss a mobile UI library called Bottle that features components packaged as YUI widgets for better reusability. The library is available in the YUI Gallery.

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The Google LAX office hosted the CEO and Co-Director of MEET (Middle East Education through Technology), Noa Epstein on 2012/11/06.

Founded in 2004 by a Googler and a team of Palestinians and Israelis, MEET is a program that is using technology and business to educate and empower tomorrow's most promising Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Each year MEET brings together hundreds of excelling Palestinian and Israeli young leaders to study technology, business, and entrepreneurship and together launch awesome technology products that transcend borders. MEET works in partnership with MIT and holds its program in Jerusalem. Find out more at http://meet.mit.edu/

Tens of Googlers both in the Middle East and the United States have participated in the program as instructors and mentors to the students, helping them launch inspiring projects such as a mobile app that helps to mobilize collective action, a Codecademy-like site focused on youth in the Middle East, and a gesture-controlled technology. Join us to learn more about this great initiative and how you can get involved!

The embedded video prepared by MEET students may also be found at http://youtu.be/jCrSQgFOL-E

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