Descripción: Google Tech Talks January, 31 2008 ABSTRACT Professional satisfaction is a question of creating what you want, not just waiting for it to appear. This tech talk, by one of the country's leading career coaches, shows how the process works. From my recent book: "The process of creating a life that works for you does not unfold logically. It proceeds in fits and starts, involves unlearni...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks March, 20 2008 ABSTRACT Clustering is the task of finding groups in data. While traditional clustering algorithms typically measure similarity between objects by considering all attributes/features/dimensions of data objects, projected clustering algorithms attempt to find clusters that may exist only in subspaces, i.e., subsets of attributes. The problem of finding projected c...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks June, 26 2008 ABSTRACT The Semantic Web presents the vision of a distributed, dynamically growing knowledge base founded on formal logic. Common users, however, seem to have problems even with the simplest Boolean expression. So how can we help users to query a web of logic that they do not seem to understand? One frequently proposed solution to address this problem is the us...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks June 14, 2008 ABSTRACT Increasingly, R users have access to multiprocessor machines or multiple-core CPUs. However, base R does not natively support parallel processing; this can force R users to wait while computationally intensive work is done on a single processor or core and other processors or cores lie idle. NetWorkSpaces for R (NWS-R) is a Python-based tuple coordin...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks January, 29 2008 ABSTRACT We present an algorithm to convert standard digital pictures into 3-d models. This is a challenging problem, since an image is formed by a projection of the 3-d scene onto two dimensions, thus losing the depth information. We take a supervised learning approach to this problem, and use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to model the image depth cues as well ...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks January, 7 2008 ABSTRACT Modern software pervasively uses structurally complex data, for example web-traversal code operates on graphs that encode web pages, and IDEs manipulate program representations such as abstract syntax trees. The standard approach to generating test suites for such software, manual generation of the inputs in the suite, is tedious and error-prone. This ...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks June 14, 2008 ABSTRACT Seattle Conference on Scalability: Scalable multiprocessor programming via transactional memory As power restrictions have limited performance advances in a single core, new generations of processors are providing a steadily increasing number of cores on a single die. Effectively utilizing such processors requires that programmers write concurrent...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks February, 29 2008 ABSTRACT I will present recent work for acquiring, rendering, and displaying photoreal models of people, objects, and dynamic performances. I will overview image-based lighting techniques for photorealistic compositing and reflectance acquisition techniques which have been used to create realistic digital actors in films such as "Spider Man 2" and "Superman R...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks December, 11 2007 In elections employing electronic voting machines, we have observed that poor procedures, equipment failures, and honest mistakes pose a real threat to the accuracy of the final tally. The event logs kept by these machines can give auditors clues as to the causes of anomalies and inconsistencies; however, each voting machine is trusted to keep its own audit and...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks February, 21 2008 ABSTRACT It is will be too costly to design many of these chips at the polygon or even gate level, so they must be highly programmable. Furthermore, they should not just be FPGAs as we now know them because with that many transistors, we should specialize more for power efficiency. I envision FPGA-like chips where the computational elements combine CPUs with m...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks March, 26 2008 ABSTRACT Timothee Cour - Research Scientist Movies and TV are a rich source of highly diverse and complex video of people, objects, actions and locales "in the wild". Harvesting automatically labeled sequences of actions from video would enable creation of large-scale and highly-varied datasets. To enable such collection, we focus on the task of recovering scen...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks July 7, 2008 ABSTRACT Urbi is a middleware for concurrent and distributed programming, based on a new parallel and event-driven script language called 'urbiScript'. Using a familiar and easy-to-use syntax, the language offers several concurrent abstractions rooted in the language semantics, together with an integrated scheduler and a distributed component architecture cal...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks April, 18 2008 ABSTRACT 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. Inf...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks November, 14 2007 In Search of Speed and Flexibility. PyPy and the Art of Generating Virtual Machines We all want our favorite dynamic language to be faster, to be even more dynamic and to pick up nifty ideas from its peers. But this is so much work! There ought to be a better way to implement dynamic languages that enables growth and necessary change with less effort and mor...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks August, 18 2008 ABSTRACT Matt dances badly on the internet and he is quasi-famous for it. Want to learn more about traveling the world, getting someone else to pay for it, bad dancing, and becoming a YouTube sensation? Come hear Matt talk about his adventures or read/see more at wherethehellismatt.com. Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo. Spea...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks December, 5 2007 Colonial rule left many scars on Africa and with tools like Google maps those of the cartographers can now be clearly viewed from cyberspace. With ubiquitous satellite coverage, the random nature of African borders is more evident than ever. Nations initially created on a whim with boundaries that cut through language and ethnic groups are now dealing with lega...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks January, 10 2008 ABSTRACT Syllabus and Recommended Literature This tech talk series explores the enormous opportunities afforded by the emerging field of quantum computing. The exploitation of quantum phenomena not only offers tremendous speed-ups for important algorithms but may also prove key to achieving genuine synthetic intelligence. We argue that understanding higher bra...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks July 7, 2008 ABSTRACT Current statistical speech translation approaches predominantly rely on just text transcripts and do not adequately utilize the rich contextual information such as prosody and discourse function that are conveyed beyond words and syntax. In this talk I will introduce a novel framework for enriching speech translation with prosodic prominence and dialog act...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks March, 6 2008 ABSTRACT The extensive use of automated testing has been a breakthrough practice in improving the quality of software produced by developers. By now, many companies have experimented with the use of automated functional tests and unit tests. Those that have had good experiences with it rave about it and cannot imagine having been successful without their automate...

Descripción: Google Tech Talks March, 13 2008 ABSTRACT Many visual perception tasks are fundamentally NP-hard computational problems. Solving these problems robustly requires thinking through combinatorially many hypothesis. Despite this, our human visual system performs these tasks effortlessly. How is this done? I would like to make two points on this topic. First, formulating visual thinking as NP-hard co...