GTAC 2008: Atom Publishing Protocol - Testing Your Server Implementation

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: David Calavera

Google Tech Talks
October 24, 2008

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In the 1970s, essentially all of the educated population of Cambodia were murdered in the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia today, despite its rich culture and stunning temples, remains a devastated country, suffering from poverty, lack of education, and corruption. The best hope for Cambodia lies in improved education and new leadership. To that end, Lightman and Smead have been working to empower a new generation of women leaders in Cambodia. (Studies by the U.N. and World Bank have repeatedly shown that the most effective method of helping third world countries is through education of its women.) The critical obstacle to higher education for women in Cambodia , remarkably enough, is housing. Universities in Cambodia do not provide housing for their students. Male students can live in the Buddhist temples but not females. Seizing upon this weak link in the chain, in 2006, Lightman and Smead's nonprofit organization built the first dormitory for female college students in the country. The Harpswell Foundation Dormitory and Leadership Center for College Women in Phnom Penh not only provides free room and board and medical coverage to its 36, carefully selected residents. The facility also gives them English and computer classes, leadership training, and critical discussions of national and international events. After two years of operations, these young women are at the tops of their classes at the 7 different universities they attend and are committed to leading their country into a new era of hope and transformation. In another two years, a new crop of 36 outstanding young women will enter the mentorship and cultivation of the Harpswell facility, and in ten years, we will have a powerful force of over a hundred women dedicated to revolutionizing their country. This is a story of how a small, highly-targeted nonprofit organization can potentially change an entire country.

In this illustrated lecture, Chenda Smead, who escaped Cambodia in 1979 at the age of 18, will describe her family's experience living under the Khmer Rouge. Alan Lightman, founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, will discuss the work of the Foundation, the strategy of leadership training and maximum social impact for minimum investment, and the challenges facing modern Cambodia.

Speaker: Alan Lightman
A physicist and novelist, graduated from Princeton University and received a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology. Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT, where he was the first person to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. Lightmans novel Einsteins Dreams was an international bestseller, and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award. After a life-changing trip to Cambodia in 2003, Lightman founded the nonprofit organization The Harpswell Foundation, which has been working to empower a new generation of leaders in Cambodia.

Speaker: Chenda Smead
Chenda Smead is a Khmer Rouge genocide survivor who escaped Cambodia in 1979 as a refugee to the U.S. and later graduated from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln with degrees in computer science and mathematics.

She has helped build a school in Siem Reap and a Learning Center near Phnom Penh, as well as contributed significantly to the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory and Leadership Center for College Women in Phnom Penh. Ms. Smead is on the Board of Advisors of the Harpswell Foundation.

Google Tech Talks
November 6, 2008

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How fast Web pages load and how fast they change dynamically depends on both the Web page and the browser it's running in. Browser makers put significant effort into making their browsers faster, but there are also things that Web page authors can do to make their pages more responsive.

I plan to talk about HTML, CSS, and the DOM in Mozilla, from the DOM tree and CSS style sheets through to displaying pixels on the screen. In particular, what do Mozilla-based browsers spend the time doing when they're displaying a Web page? Which parts of this work are redone when the page is changed by script? And what implications does this have for how authors can make their pages faster, and for how authors can test the performance of their pages?

Speaker: David Baron
David is a software engineer at Mozilla Corporation, where he works on Mozilla's implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout algorithms (computing the positions of objects), fixing memory leaks, and other things. He has been working on Mozilla since 1998, and is a member of the W3C CSS working group.

Google Tech Talks
November 12, 2008

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Agreement problems are fundamental building blocks of reliable distributed systems, and the issue of designing reliable solutions that can cope with the high dynamism and self-organization nature of mobile ad-hoc and peer-to-peer networks is a very active field of current research. The core problem behind agreement problems is the consensus problem.

Informally, a group of processes achieves consensus in the following sense: each process initially proposes a value and all correct processes must reach a common decision on some value that is equal to one of the proposed values. It is well known that in classical environments, in which entities behave asynchronously and where identities are known, consensus cannot be solved in the presence of even one process crash. It appears that self-organizing systems are even less favorable because the set and identity of participants are not known.
In this talk, we are going to present necessary and sufficient conditions under which fault-tolerant consensus become solvable in these environments. Those conditions are related to the synchrony requirements of the environment, as well as the connectivity of the knowledge graph constructed by the nodes in order to communicate with their peers.

Joint work with Professor Sébastien Tixeuil, from LIP6, Université Paris 6, France

Speaker: Fabíola Greve
Fabíola Greve received the PhD degree in computer science in 2002 from Rennes University, INRIA Labs, France for her work on agreement protocols and group communication middleware. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, where she acts as the leader of the Gaudi distributed computing group. Her research interests are distributed computing and fault tolerance. Her current projects aim at identifying conditions and protocols able to provide fault tolerance in dynamic and self organizing systems, like as Manets and P2P systems.

Google Tech Talks
April, 18 2008

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The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn't suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services. Three authors of Adaptive Path's new book, Subject to Change, share a handful of breakthrough ideas for succeeding in a future that you can't predict.

This talk will be taped.

Speaker: Brandon Schauer
is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks on, writes about, and practices design as a means to create value. He has over a decade of experience developing new user experiences on the Web, desktops, and products. His passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World.

Brandon holds two master-level degrees from schools with the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Master of Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago and an MBA from the Stuart School of Business. Brandon also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

Speaker: David Verba
is the Technology Advisor at Adaptive Path, and Chief Technical Officer of Emmett Labs. He was a core developer for CodeZoo.net, and provided essential technical leadership to Measure Map, a web service (now part of Google) that tracks blogs' traffic stats.

Google Tech Talks
May, 7 2008

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"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind." -- Edward Bernays, founder of the public relations industry.

Billions of dollars are spent each year in the United States alone on public relations, a little-understood profession that has become a modern propaganda-for-hire industry. "Publicity" was once the work of carnival hawkers and penny-ante hustlers smoking cigars and wearing cheap suits. Today's PR professionals are recruited from the ranks of former journalists, retired politicians and eager-beaver college graduates eager to rise in the corporate world. They hobnob internationally with corporate CEOs, senators and U.S. presidents. PR wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony "grassroots" front groups, spy on citizens, and conspire with lobbyists and politicians to thwart democracy. In today's electronic age, they use 800-numbers and telemarketing, advanced databases, and "video news releases" -- entire news stories written, filmed and produced by PR firms and transmitted electronically to thousands of TV stations around the world. Canned news from PR firms is designed to be indistinguishable from real news and is increasingly taking its place, used as "story segments" on TV news shows without any attribution or disclaimer indicating that what viewers are seeing is in fact subtle paid advertisements. On the internet as well, PR firms have created slick websites that promise to inform the public while pushing hidden agendas. Example include:

• the Greening Earth Society (funded by the coal industry), which claims that global warming is actually good for the environment
• the Foundation for Clean Air Progress (which opposes regulations to control air pollution)
• the African American Republican Leadership Council (a conservative organization headed by white Republicans)
• Working Families for Wal-Mart (secretly funded, of course, by the Wal-Mart itself)
• Project Learning Tree (sponsored by the logging industry)

PR firms create front groups as part of what they call the "third party technique." The basic idea, as described by one PR executive, is to "Put your words in someone else's mouth." They realize that their messages are more likely to persuade the public if they come from seemingly independent "third parties" such as a professor or a pediatrician or someone representing a nonprofit citizens' group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you believe what they have to say--preferably in an "objective" format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their opinions.

Speaker: Sheldon Rampton
Sheldon Rampton researches deceptive PR firms for the Center for Media and Democracy and is the co-author, with John Stauber, of books including "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damned Lies and the Public Relations Industry"; "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With your Future": and "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq." He will discuss the Center's work including its website, Sourcewatch.org, a wiki-powered collaborative research project to document the "names behind the news."

Google Tech Talks
May, 6 2008

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Recent technical developments have inspired an interest in 'digital memories': repositories for capturing our entire personal history of personal and work related information that will substitute for our fragile organic memories. I will first review the Digital Memories vision, briefly present various studies that challenge that vision, moving on to suggest an alternative approach to the topic that is informed by cognitive science, suggesting that instead of focusing on exhaustive capture we should be designing prosthetic memory devices that are (a) synergistic with our organic memories (b) have mechanisms for selecting and abstracting critical events from the memory record.

Speaker: Steve Whittaker, Sheffield University
Steve Whittaker is Chair in Information Studies at Sheffield University. Previously he worked in industrial research at HP, Lotus/IBM and AT Bell Labs. His research interests are in the theory, design and evaluation of collaborative systems, multimedia retrieval, and personal information management. In the past he has designed and built many novel HCI and CSCW systems: one of the first IM clients, shared workspaces, social email clients, meeting capture systems, personal memory and various tools for accessing and browsing speech. He has co-authored over 100 refereed journal or conference papers. He is holder of 11 US and UK patents, and is currently working on digital tools that help us remember and share our memories. He was recently elected to the CHI Academy.

Google Tech Talks
April, 28 2008

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With the advent of the Internet, billions of images are now freely available online and constitute a dense sampling of the visual world. Using a variety of non?parametric methods, we explore this world with the aid of a large dataset of 79,302,017 images collected from the Web. Motivated by psychophysical results showing the remarkable tolerance of the human visual system to degradations in image resolution, the images in the dataset are stored as 32x32 color images. Each image is loosely labeled with one of the 75,062 non?abstract nouns in English, as listed in the Wordnet lexical database. Hence the image database gives a comprehensive coverage of all object categories and scenes. The semantic information from Wordnet can be used in conjunction with nearest?neighbor methods to perform object classification over a range of semantic levels minimizing the effects of labeling noise. For certain classes that are particularly prevalent in the dataset, such as people, we are able to demonstrate a recognition performance comparable to class?specific Viola?Jones style detectors.

In the second part of the talk, we present efficient image search and scene matching techniques that are not only fast, but also require very little memory, enabling their use on standard hardware or even on handheld devices. Our approach uses the Semantic Hashing idea of Salakhutdinov and Hinton, based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines to convert the Gist descriptor (a real valued vector that describes orientation energies at different scales and orientations within an image) to a compact binary code, with a few hundred bits per image. Using our scheme, it is possible to perform real?time searches on our Internet image database using a single large PC and obtain recognition results comparable to the full descriptor. Using our codes on high quality labeled images from the LabelMe database gives surprisingly powerful recognition results using simple nearest neighbor techniques.

This talk will be taped

Speaker: Rob Fergus
Rob Fergus is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. Originally from the UK, he has a undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He then did a Masters in Electrical Engineering with Prof. Pietro Perona at Caltech, before completing a PhD with Prof. Andrew Zisserman at the University of Oxford. Before coming to NYU, he spent two years as a post-doc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, working with Prof. William Freeman.

Google Tech Talks
May, 8 2008

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Discrete Denoising with Shifts

Recovery of discrete data corrupted by discrete noise is an increasingly encountered problem in contexts as diverse as digital communications, bio-molecular sequence analysis, and the Internet. Perfect recovery is sometimes possible but, more generally, performance is measured under a given fidelity criterion.

This talk will focus on the often realistic scenario where the corruption mechanism is a "discrete memoryless channel", meaning that the components of the corrupted data are independent given the underlying clean data. I will introduce an algorithm for this setting which performs essentially as well as a genie that has access, in addition to the noisy data, also to the underlying clean data, and can choose to switch between "sliding-window" denoisers in a way that optimizes the overall performance. This will be shown to be the case in several strong statistical senses, within a "semi-stochastic" setting where the underlying clean data are deterministic and the only randomness is due to the noise. Further, when the clean data form a piecewise stationary stochastic process or field, the algorithm achieves the optimum distribution-dependent performance. These performance guarantees are contingent on a certain growth rate condition that must be imposed on the number of switches, which is necessary in the sense that any scheme fails to compete in the above senses when the condition does not hold.

The key issue in implementing our scheme is to efficiently learn the best segmentation of the data and the associated denoisers that the genie is using, based solely on the noisy data. We will describe our approach to this problem, which results in a practical algorithm: implementable with complexity (time and memory) growing linearly with the data size and the number of switches. Preliminary experimental results suggest that the new scheme has the capacity to improve on prior art in applications where the nature of the data abruptly changes in time (or space), as is often the case in practice. I will conclude with a discussion of some remaining challenges.

Joint work with Professor Tsachy Weissman (Stanford University).

Speaker: Taesup Moon

Google Tech Talks
May, 5 2008

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The team from MetaBroadcast Ltd describe their work on URIPlay (uriplay.org).

Radio and TV were designed to be simple, to require minimum
involvement. Our grandparents sometimes chose to change channel, but this was strictly optional. Today's technology has brought us more choice, freeing our viewing and listening from set schedules.

However, alongside this choice, we users must deal with complexity. Increasingly, we are asked to decide not only what we would like to watch or listen to, but also via what route we would like to receive it. PVRs, 'on demand' TV platforms, streaming websites and downloads each add to our technology choices.

Broadcasters have traditionally provided a simpler experience for audiences, but their recent technology and commercial choices are adding to the underlying complexity. Together with rights owners, they attempt to control the consumption of content through DRM, geoblocking, etc. Thus, content distribution via broadcasters' websites, hubs like YouTube, search engines and P2P downloads requires serious efforts on the side of the user--not our grandparents' experience.

URIplay aims to restore simplicity to the experience without reducing choice. We compile and publish metadata files listing the URIs at which content can be played. Each URI is described in terms of media data format, revenue model, and restrictions applied. Developers will be able to use this information and our open API to refer precisely to the content and select appropriate URIs for their users. Think of it as DNS for media.

Since the project started in late 2007, we have defined an XML format, built a website and an API, and imported data from the BBC--our first sponsor. During our talk we will describe the system design and related challenges, as well as our aspirations in restoring simplicity to media consumption.

Speaker: Chris Jackson
Speaker: Lee Denison
Speaker: George Wright

Google Tech Talks
April, 3 2008

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We will discuss the nature of play, how play in the preschool pre-structures habits of mind that are required by creative adults, and how these precursors can be supported by the sensitive parent or teacher. The talk will be divided into two hours: the first hour can be an exposition of ideas, the second can be a dialogue with the audience. We can prepare the participants with advanced provocations using the Google intra-network, perhaps giving them links to some digital video examples.

2. Define how the "Tech Talk" is a "Tech Talk." The hook here could be that to truly understand the subtleties of play, one needs tools such as those that allow one to annotate video. Parents already add captions to the family album. We could extend this "family album" idea to something like ... something like "From My Face to Our Place: Digital Video as the New Family Album: A Tool for Understanding Our Children." We could add the power of "search" to the digital history of one's own family.

Speaker: Dr. George Forman
George Forman, Chief Executive Officer and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts retired in 2002 to found Videatives, Inc. George has over 33 years of experience in university teaching, cognitive research, multimedia design, and educational consulting in the area of early childhood learning and development. At Videatives, George is responsible for product design and content development. He has authored over 7 books, 3 videotapes and many research articles on how children think and how teachers can help children reflect on their work through drawing, video feedback, and play with objects. In the 1970's he founded The School for Constructive Play, an experimental program for young children based on the learning theory of Jean Piaget. He has designed museum participatory exhibits, educational puzzles, and instructional games. He is past president of the Jean Piaget Society, serves on numerous editorial boards, and was recently advisory faculty in residence at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. His speaking engagements have taken him all over the world including Asia, Australia, Europe, and Scandinavia speaking mainly about constructivist education, particularly as inspired by the preprimary schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. George holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Alabama.

Speaker: Dr. Ellen Hall
Ellen Hall, Chief Development Officer, is a co-founder of Videatives, Inc. and the Owner and Executive Director of Boulder Journey School, a school for young children in Boulder, Colorado. Ellen has over 30 years of experience in the field of early childhood education, working with children, families and educators as a teacher, administrator, mentor and consultant. At Videatives, Ellen is responsible for leading outreach and partnership initiatives. At Boulder Journey School, Ellen directs the Teacher Education Program, designed in partnership with the University of Colorado at Denver. Digital video assets, including video clips, videatives, and Thinkprints are utilized extensively in this program. Ellen's doctoral dissertation studies how videatives accelerate and deepen teachers' conceptualizations of children's thinking. Ellen has published in textbooks and journals and presents frequently at national and international early childhood conferences and meetings. Ellen serves on the Executive board of the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance (NAREA), an organization of educators, parents, and advocates seeking to elevate both the quality of life and the quality of schools and centers for young children. Ellen holds a M.Ed. from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Innovation from the University of Colorado at Denver.

Google Tech Talks
April, 17 2008

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Join a fascinating presentation on how to find good journalism online, hosted by NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news network devoted to quality news and information.

NewsTrust helps people make more informed decisions as citizens, by offering an integrated online service, which includes a quality news filter, media literacy tools and a civic engagement network. Their free web site features a daily feed of quality news and opinions from mainstream and independent sources, based on ratings from their reviewers -- who rate the news based on quality, not just popularity. Their web review tools enable our members to evaluate fairness, evidence, sourcing and other core journalistic principles. NewsTrust rankings are based on a combination of professional and amateur evaluations, as well as computer algorithms. This presentation will include a discussion of best practices for helping people develop their news literacy skills, and becoming more discriminating news consumers.

To find out more, visit the NewsTrust site: http://www.newstrust.net/
Presenter: Fabrice Florin, Founder and Executive Director, NewsTrust.net

This tech talk will be videotaped.

Following this presentation, NewsTrust will also host a smaller, one-hour Salon on Good Journalism, from 3pm to 4pm, in a nearby conference room TBD. Here's some info about that event:

NewsTrust Salon on Good Journalism - A Group Discussion*
Wed. April 30 - 3pm-4pm, Benghazi

This stimulating group discussion will explore best practices for helping people find good journalism online. As a group, we will start by evaluating a news article for fairness, sourcing, context and other core principles of journalism - using the NewsTrust review tools. We will then brainstorm ways we can encourage this type of critical thinking by using online news services such as Google News and NewsTrust.net.

Some of the questions we'll discuss in this session include:

• what is good journalism? how can you tell it apart from misinformation?
• how can we join forces online to share quality news with each other?
• how can we encourage more citizens to grow their news literacy skills?
• how can we improve NewsTrust.net to serve these goals?
• how could we mash-up Google News and NewsTrust to bring this service to a broader audience?

During the meeting, we will briefly introduce what we're doing at NewsTrust to address these questions– and ask your thoughts on how to best expand this public service in combination with other popular news sites -- to help more citizens make informed decisions about their lives and governments.

Session leaders: Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala, NewsTrust.net

*Maximum 30 participants. This salon is open to all Google employees, on a first-come first-serve basis. To sign up, simply RSVP at http://go/newstrust-signup or by email to rsvp@newstrust.net

To find out more about NewsTrust, visit our site:
http://blog.newstrust.net/about/

To find out more about NewsTrust Salons, check this video on the NewsTrust blog:
http://blog.newstrust.net/2008/02/his-short-video.html

The discussion session will be videotaped, but NOT videoconferenced.

Speaker: Fabrice Florin
Google Tech Talks
April, 30 2008

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Enjoying amazing ancient structures through Internet technologies is one of the most promising methods to promote our culture and cultural heritage. These technologies involve sensing, transmission, and display. In this talk, I will briefly explain these three aspects, and then focus on sensing issues, in particular, the technical challenges presented by sensing huge outdoor structures. I will describe the technical challenges and how we solved them as we confronted the difficult task of modeling the huge Bayon Temple in the Angkor ruin in Cambodia. I will show the digital data we obtained, including the entire structure of the temple, the hundred and seventy-three faces of deities, and the hidden pediments. I will also explain some of the technical issues involved in displaying the data we obtained, using our virtual Aska as an example.

Speaker: Katsushi Ikeuchi
Dr. Katsushi Ikeuchi is a Professor at the University of Tokyo. He received a Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1978. After working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI Lab for two years, Electrotechnical Lab, Japan for five years, and Carnegie Mellon University for ten years, he joined the university in 1996. His research interest spans computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. He has received several awards, including the David Marr Prize in computational vision, and IEEE R K-S Fu memorial best transaction paper award. He has served as the program/general chairman of many international conferences, including 1995 IEEE-IROS, 1996 IEEE-CVPR, and 2003 IEEE-ICCV. He is
Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision. He is a distinguished speaker of the IEEE CS society this year. He has been elected as a fellow of IEEE since 1998.

Google Tech Talks
May, 8 2008

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In 18 months full human genome sequences will be available under $100 - and in minutes. The $5,000 full human genome was announced to come in 9 months. Is "Big IT" ready for the avalanche of data, to be obtained and processed e.g. while the patient is still on the operating table, to be diagnosed, and how the genomics glitch, that caused a benign or malign tumor, could be compensated for?

Algorithmic approaches are needed to better understand genome regulation, even for the simple reason to deploy most effective data retrieval, data storage and computational means, via both parallel hardware and software, but more importantly for opening entirely new perspectives.

In the 100+ year old Genomics, for over half a Century had us to resign to the fatalistic gloom that we are stuck with any glitches in our inherited genome. Is it true that genomic glitches doom one to "incurable" hereditary diseases?

No longer. Genomics now considers the DNA-RNA-Protein chain not as a thermodynamically closed system, where entropy increases, but as an open system that can be interfered with. There is theoretically sound hope that you are not stuck with your genomic glitches.

After half a Century of sticking to two mistaken axioms of Genomics, the paradigm of recursive genome function must quickly make up for lost time for those (potentially) inflicted with formerly "incurable" diseases. "The Genome baby is left on the doorsteps of Information Technology".

Doctors sent those inflicted with fleece for "debugging". Debugging genome information (by Genome Computers) would be much harder without understanding the algorithms that our natural genome computing operates with.

Speaker: Dr. Andras Pellionisz
Ph.D. in Biology
Ph.D. in Computer Engineering
Director of Genome Informatics, Mitrionics, Inc., Los Gatos, California
European Union visiting Professor for Hungary (for "European Inaugural of IPGS")
Founder of International PostGenetics Society (IPGS,PostModern era of Genetics "beyond Genes")
Founder of FractoSoft (Software for PostGenetics, Silicon Valley, with Central European outsourcing)
Founder of Helixometry (IP portfolio holding, Silicon Valley)
Inventor and Founder of FractoGene (Fractal approach to DNA)
Chief Software Architect and Chief Intelligence Officer of several Silicon Valley Internet Companies in the dot.com boom
Founder of International Neural Networks Society (INNS)
Founding Editor of Neural Networks (publication organ of INNS)
Section Editor for Neural Networks of The Cerebellum (Springer, New York & Heidelberg)
Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, New York University Medical Center
Visiting Professor of Marburg University, Germany (Humboldt Prize for Senior Distinguished Amercian Scientists)
Visiting Professor of UMR/CNRS, College de France, Paris
Senior Research Council Associate of the National Academy of Science, USA, to NASA
PostDoctoral Fellow, University of Iowa
PostDoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
Tenured Senior Research Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Google Tech Talks
October 30, 2008

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GTAC 2008: Practicing Testability in the Real World

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Vishal Chowdhary

Google Tech Talks
October 24, 2008

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Clean Code Talks - Unit Testing

Speaker: Misko Hevery

Google Tech Talks
October, 30 2008

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Replay debugging allows developers to debug recordings of programs running in virtual machines. This simple (and old) idea addresses some of the greatest challenges of software development, because a recording containing the manifestation of a bug represents an unambiguous encapsulation of that bug. Whether the bug is non-deterministic, difficult to reproduce, or just difficult to describe, the program containing the bug will behave identically each time it is replayed, allowing the developer to more easily debug it. In addition, replay debugging is non-invasive, because while debugging a replayed program behaves as it did during recording. The developer need not worry about how debugging may change the scheduling of threads, the order in which locks are acquired, or connections with external processes/machines timing out. Finally, an abstraction of reverse execution can easily be built on top of replay debugging, allowing developers to directly move (backward) from the manifestation of a bug to its origin.

VMware Workstation 6.5 includes an experimental form of replay debugging for C/C++ Windows developers using Visual Studio. We hope you will give this feature a try, and we are very interested in feedback concerning the direction it should take in future releases.

This presentation motivates and introduces replay debugging and summarizes our implementation in VMware Workstation 6.5. More information is available at http://www.replaydebugging.com/.

Speaker: E Christopher Lewis
E Lewis has been an engineer in the Advanced Development Group at VMware since 2007 where he explores novel applications of virtualization.
Before joining VMware, E was a professor (University of Pennsylvania), student (Cornell University and the University of Washington), and lay about (growing up in Vermont and North Carolina). To get away from it all, E plays guitar, knits, and teaches empathy to the unsuspecting.

Speaker: Prashant Dhamdhere
Prashant is MTS at VMware, where he is actively working on Replay Debugging technology. Before joining VMware, he worked on various aspects of storage solutions at Veritas that is now part of Symantec. Prashant brings key windows kernel expertise to team. He holds BS in Computer Science from University of Pune, India.

Speaker: Eric Xiaojian Chen
Eric is an engineering manager at VMware. He manages several projects on VM kernel driver development. Before VMware, Eric has worked at Cisco on a high end switch product for eight years. Eric holds a MBA degree from UC Berkeley and a master degree of Computer Science from Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

Google Tech Talks
October 30, 2008

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The C++ language has started the formal approval process with the recent release of its Committee Draft, i.e. Beta.

This talk outlines the process, the new features, some features left out, and the procedures for formal comments.

Speaker: Matt Austern
Matt Austern is a long-time contributor to the C++ standard, as well as a Google engineer.

Speaker: Lawrence Crowl
Lawrence Crowl is a long-time contributor to the C++ standard, as well as a Google engineer.

Google Tech Talks
October 31, 2008

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GTAC 2008: Context-Driven Test Automation - How to Build the System You Really Need

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Pete Schneider

Google Tech Talks
October 24, 2008

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Our aim is to present a personal view of Gdel's incompleteness. We will focus on interesting/natural concrete independent sentences, on the source of incompleteness, and on how common the incompleteness phenomenon is. Some open questions will be briefly stated.

Speaker: Cristian Calude
A lifelong researcher in algorithmic information theory and a close friend of Gregory Chaitin, Dr. Calude has written and edited dozens of books and hundreds of articles on computability and incompleteness.

Google Tech Talks
November 4, 2008

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Go through the symptoms, intervention procedure, medication and recovery from a patient's perspective. Show highlights from 2 catheterization procedures and all that I was involved.

Speaker: Caio Villela
I had a heart attack on Sep 9th, the whole experience is still quite fresh.

Google Tech Talks
October 30, 2008

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In knowledge-based information retrieval, search engines consult external sources of knowledge ontologies, taxonomies, thesauri, glossaries, gazeteers to help process the documents they encounter and the requests they receive. The idea is old, obvious, and compelling but results have been singularly unimpressive. The best performing and most widely used search systems are still those that deal in lexical character patterns without using any structured knowledge to understand them.

Wikipedia is changing all that. This open, constantly evolving encyclopedia represents a vast pool of topics and semantic relations. It is arguably the largest knowledge base humanity has ever seen. At last we have a resource that is (or may be) sufficiently broad, deep, and timely to be applicable to open-domain information retrieval. However, it brings its own challenges. Wikipedia's haphazard and only partially machine-readable structure bears little resemblance to the carefully crafted knowledge bases that have been used to assist information retrieval in the past.

This talk will discuss Wikipedia's promises and shortcomings, and describe ongoing investigations of how best to apply it to organizing and retrieving information.

Speaker: David Milne
David Milne is a PhD student at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, where he studies under the supervision of Prof. Ian H. Witten.

Google Tech Talks
October 31, 2008

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GTAC 2008: Simple Tools to Fight the Bigger Quality Battle: Continuous Integration Using Batch Files and Task Scheduler

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Komal Joshi
Speaker: Patrick Martin

Google Tech Talks
October 24, 2008

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The Carbon Trust is a private company set up the by the UK government to combat the threat of anthropogenic climate change. It has a simple but profound mission: "to accelerate the move to a low-carbon economy by working with organisations to reduce carbon emissions and develop commercial low-carbon technologies". All of the Carbon Trust's activities derive directly from this statement. The Carbon Trust is also a company limited by guarantee: it has shareholders and can make profits but cannot distribute cash dividends. Those that invest in the company do so in expectation of return in the form of carbon savings, while any arising profits are recycled into the company's operations.

The Carbon Trust Innovations division develops low carbon technologies through partnerships, funding, expert advice and large-scale demonstrations. Its mandate is to provide targeted support for low carbon technology development using public funds, but always with the expectation of catalysing private sector follow-on investment. Innovations has been active in the UK for the last six years, with notable achievements in the marine energy, smart metering, micro-CHP, low carbon buildings and fuel cell sectors. This talk will provide a summary of the assessment frameworks, methods of intervention and future plans for Carbon Trust Innovations and should be useful to anyone with an interest in the role of technology in fighting climate change.

Speaker: Robert Trezona
Robert is responsible for all the Carbon Trusts investments in low-carbon research and development and has led the Advanced Bioenergy Accelerator initiative that was launched earlier this year with the Pyrolysis Challenge. Other areas of focus for the Carbon Trust are algal biofuels and novel routes from sugars.

Robert is a materials scientist by training, and has a First Class degree and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has five years experience as an engineer working on fuel cell technology with Johnson Matthey and then Ceres Power, where he led the fuel cell development programme. Before joining the Carbon Trust in 2007, Robert worked for management consultants McKinsey and Company, where he focussed on strategic and operational issues in the energy, utilities and basic materials sectors.

Google Tech Talks
October 30, 2008

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Contemporary society is experiencing a steady stream of new electronic gadgets, software products, and web applications. In this flood of functionality, users have adapted to rely less on manuals (if they are present at all) and shift their learning to trial and error, common paradigms, and experimentation. To accommodate this style of use -- or perhaps driving this behavior - developers have successfully abstracted much of the technological complexity and transformed it into intuitive user interfaces often avoiding the need for reading lengthy manuals and formal training. Is it possible to adopt the same trial-and-error experimentation habit not only for using gadgets, but also for application development? We claim that intuitive aggregation and combination of software gadgets makes this possible.

In this talk, we will show the use of current technology in building a consumer oriented development tool appropriate for individuals not formally trained in programming. We demonstrate that the complexity of existing system and scripting languages i.e.; syntax, semantics, control and data flow, data structures, data types, and programming components can be successfully replaced with analogies intuitively accessible to a much wider consumer population based exclusively on their use and understanding of user interfaces in popular web applications. We present a demo of Geppeto -- a consumer tool for gadget-based application development. Composing gadgets with Geppeto does not require programming experience or reading of convoluted manuals. The presented research is sponsored by Google Inc. and the Croatian Ministry of Science.

Speaker: Sinisa Srbljic
Professor Sinisa Srbljic, Ph.D., is currently a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, and the project leader of the Geppeto project. His career also spans Silicon Valley where he worked on large-scale distributed systems at AT Labs. He was visiting the University of Toronto, where he worked on the NUMAchine multiprocessor project, and the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include Web computing, gadget composition, and consumer programming. In teaching, he is involved in the theory of computing, programming language translation, service-oriented computing, and network middleware systems.

Speaker: Marin Silic
Marin Silic, B.Sc., is currently a computer science Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He works on web architectures for composing gadgets as a part of the Geppeto project. As a Google intern in the Spreadsheets group he developed a one-second load application for Google Spreadsheets.

Google Tech Talks
November 10, 2008

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GTAC 2008: JInjector - A Coverage and End-to-End Testing Framework for J2ME and RIM

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Julian Harty
Speaker: Olivier Gaillard
Speaker: Michele Sama

Google Tech Talks
October 24, 2008

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Measuring Value of learning programs

James will present:

• specific ways diverse training departments can use the four levels of evaluation to create a silver thread that creates a consistency among the diverse groups,
• how that will help make training more effective,
• and provide more specific evidence that learning indeed is a major contributor to the bottom line.

Speaker: James Kirkpatrick

Google Tech Talks
November 5, 2008

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The LHC is the biggest (27 kilometers around) scientific instrument ever built and it is now ramping up to start taking data. It smashes together protons at enormous energy in order to create new forms of matter. Physicists hope to find the Higgs Boson which is the missing link in our current theory. Hopefully unanticipated discoveries will be made. I will explain why physicists need this expensive tool in order to understand nature at the smallest distance scales.

Speaker: Edward Farhi
Edward Farhi was trained as a theoretical particle physicist but has also worked on astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. His present interest is the theory of quantum computation.

As a graduate student, Farhi invented the jet variable "Thrust," which is used to describe how particles in high energy accelerator collisions come out in collimated streams. He then worked with Leonard Susskind on grand unified theories with electro-weak dynamical symmetry breaking. He and Larry Abbott proposed an (almost viable) model in which quarks, leptons, and massive gauge bosons are composite. With Robert Jaffe, he worked out many of the properties of a possibly stable super dense form of matter called "Strange Matter" and with Charles Alcock and Angela Olinto he studied the properties of "Strange Stars." His interest then shifted to general relativity and he and Alan Guth studied the classical and quantum prospects of making a new inflationary universe in the laboratory today. He, Guth and others also studied obstacles to constructing a time machine.

More recently, Farhi has been studying how to use quantum mechanics to gain algorithmic speedup in solving problems that are difficult for conventional computers. He and Sam Gutmann proposed the idea of designing algorithms based on quantum walks, which has been used to demonstrate the power of quantum computation over classical. They, along with Jeffrey Goldstone and Michael Sipser, introduced the idea of quantum computation by adiabatic evolution, which has generated much interest in the quantum computing community. This group was tied for first in showing that there is a problem that cannot be sped up by a quantum computer. In 2007, Farhi, Goldstone and Gutmann showed that a quantum computer can determine who wins a game faster than a classical computer.

Edward Farhi continues to work on quantum computing but keeps a close eye on particle physics and recent developments in cosmology.

Edward (Eddie) Farhi went to the Bronx High School of Science and Brandeis University before getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978. He was then on the staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at CERN in Geneva Switzerland before coming to MIT, where he joined the faculty in 1982. Farhi has given lectures on his own research at many of the major physics research centers in the world. At MIT, he has taught undergraduate courses in quantum mechanics and special relativity. At the graduate level he has taught quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, particle physics and general relativity. Farhi won three teaching awards at MIT and in 2000, 2001, and 2002 he lectured the big freshman physics course, "8.01." In July 2005, he was appointed the Director of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics.

Professor Farhi's publications are available online from the SPIRES HEP Literature Database (particle physics) and arXiv.org e-Print archive (quantum computing).

Google Tech Talks
October 17, 2008

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To evaluate an innovation in computer systems, performance analysts measure execution time or other metrics using one or more standard workloads. The performance analyst may carefully minimize the amount of measurement instrumentation, control the environment in which measurement takes place, and repeat each measurement multiple times. Finally, the performance analyst may use statistical techniques to characterize the data.

Unfortunately, even with such a responsible approach, the collected data may be misleading due to measurement bias and observer effect. Measurement bias occurs when the experimental setup inadvertently favors a particular outcome.

Observer effect occurs if data collection alters the behavior of the system being measured. This talk demonstrates that observer effect and measurement bias are (i) large enough to mislead performance analysts; and (ii) common enough that they cannot be ignored.

While these phenomenon are well known to the natural and social sciences this talk will demonstrate that research in computer systems typically does not take adequate measures to guard against measurement bias and observer effect.

Speaker: Amer Diwan
Amer Diwan is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before joining the University of Colorado, he was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for his PhD and at Stanford University for his postdoc. His research interests include tools and techniques for understanding program performance, programmer productivity tools, program analysis, memory management, and compiler optimizations.

Google Tech Talks
November 7, 2008

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Clean Code Talk Series
Topic: Don't Look For Things!

Speaker: Misko Hevery

Google Tech Talks
November 6, 2008

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This is the first Annual Cornell University Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS)/Cornell Silicon Valley (CSV) event in Silicon Valley. It will feature the Dean of CIS, Robert Constable, along with Cornell alumnus (and Googler) Amit Singhal.

Speaker: Robert Constable
Speaker: Amit Singhal

Google Tech Talks
September 19, 2008

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GTAC 2008: Context-Driven Test Automation - The Value of Small Tests

The Third Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), Seattle, WA, Oct. 23rd and 24th.

Speaker: Christopher Semturs

Google Tech Talks
October 24, 2008

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Berners-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be best solved by a bootstrapping method: creating enough structured data to motivate the development of applications. We believe that autonomously `Semantifying Wikipedia' is the best way to bootstrap. We choose Wikipedia as an initial data source, because it is comprehensive, high-quality, modestly sized, and contains enough manually-derived structure to bootstrap an autonomous, self-supervised process. In this talk I will present our success to date in this endeavor:

A novel approach for self-supervised learning of CRF information extractors

Automatic construction of a comprehensive ontology via statistical-relational learning

Vast improvements in extraction recall through shrinkage over this ontology and retraining

The stimulation of a virtuous feedback cycle between communal content creation and information extraction

We aim to construct a knowledge base of outstanding size to support inference, automatic question answering, faceted browsing, and potentially to bootstrap the Semantic Web.

Speaker: Daniel S. Weld
Daniel S. Weld is Thomas J. Cable / WRF Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. After formative education at Phillips Academy, he received bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1982. He landed a Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988, received a Presidential Young Investigator's award in 1989, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator's award in 1990, was named AAAI Fellow in 1999 and deemed ACM Fellow in 2005. Dan is an area editor for the Journal of the ACM, on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence, was a founding editor and member of the advisory board for the Journal of AI Research, was guest editor for Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, edited the AAAI report on the Role of Intelligent Systems in the National Information Infrastructure, and was Program Chair for AAAI-96. Dan has published two books and scads of technical papers.

Dan is an active entrepreneur with several patents and technology licenses. In May 1996, he co-founded Netbot Incorporated, creator of Jango Shopping Search and later acquired by Excite. In October 1998, Dan co-founded AdRelevance, a revolutionary monitoring service for internet advertising which was acquired by Media Metrix and subsequently by Nielsen NetRatings. In June 1999, Dan co-founded data integration company Nimble Technology which was acquired by the Actuate Corporation. In January 2001, Dan joined the Madrona Venture Group as a Venture Partner and member of the Technical Advisory Board.

Google Tech Talks
November 11, 2008

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Eclipse is great for Java development. Eclipse is great for web development. Eclipse is great for Java web development. The list goes on, but as your business becomes bigger, more specialized and more demanding, chances are that you won't find exactly what you need on that list. So what do you turn to? Eclipse. See how eBay uses the Eclipse you know and love, but also builds on top of it to handle its unique challenges.
Speaker: Michael Galpin, With introduction by Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing - Eclipse Foundation

About Michael Galpin
Michael Galpin is an architect at eBay. He has worked on various projects in the past including eBay Neighborhoods, the next generation of My eBay, as well as eBay's own web development framework, V4. He also is a frequent writer for IBM developerWorks, TheServerSide.com, and the Java Developer's Journal. He has been programming professionally for 10+ years and holds a degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology.

Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008

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Mylyn is an Eclipse project that gives tasks first-class status in the developer workspace. In this presentation Bjorn will show how task focused programming simplifies his (developer) life. Mylyn makes it easier for him to maintain focus while switching between tasks and to collaborate on tasks with geographically and time-zone disparate developers. Fair warning though: once you've started using Mylyn, you never want to return to the old ways.
by Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Eclipse Foundation

About Bjorn Freeman-Benson
Bjorn is the Director for Committer Community at the Eclipse Foundation, a position that is tailor-made for someone with his keen interest and experience in building high-quality software with geographically distributed teams. He has dabbled in applications and user interfaces, but returns, like the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, to his three foci: hardware, software and process (embedded devices, programming languages and software engineering). Bjorn has worked for OTI, Amazon.com, Rational and Gemstone, along with a career as a university professor. He has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and is happy to talk at length about his passion for orienteering and/or his love of flying.

Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008

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Building high-performance Ajax easily with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) in Eclipse has always been possible, but soon it will be downright easy. Bruce will present GWT's upcoming Eclipse plugin that helps novices get started and lets experts fly.
Speaker: Bruce Johnson, Google

Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008

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Plug-ins are everywhere in Eclipse so come learn about how to develop them! Depending on the audience, for the first half of the talk, I will discuss what a plug-in is and what tooling is provided around developing plug-ins. For the second half, I will discuss tips and tricks that can save you time in developing plug-ins and will also talk about some lesser known, but extremely useful, parts of PDE.
Speaker: Chris Aniszczyk, Code9

About Chris Aniszczyk:
Chris Aniszczyk is the technical lead for the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) project at Eclipse. Chris also commits on various other Eclipse projects, has the honor to represent the committers on the Eclipse Board of Directors and sits on the Eclipse Architecture Council. Chris's passions are blogging, software advocacy, tooling and anything Eclipse. He's always available to discuss open-source or Eclipse over a frosty beverage.

Google Tech Talks
June 24, 2008

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ECF is a communication framework and an increasing set of integrated tools. ECF provides APIs useful for the development of Equinox-based servers, RCP applications, and Eclipse-based development tools. The provider architecture supports the use of existing communicati