November 18th, 2008
Git
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks October, 12 2007 ABSTRACT When you have hundreds of people simultaneously patching 25000 files of the Linux Kernel in sometimes conflicting ways, you might need some scheme or plan to sort all that out before you can build your next kernel and reboot. The Linux team uses "git" for their source code repository management, a homegrown solution that is optimized for highly distributed development, working with huge sets of files, merging independent work at multiple levels, and seeing who broke what. (Git has also since been notably adopted by the Cairo, x.org, and Wine teams, and is being transitioned to by the Mozilla codebase.) In my talk, I describe what "git"; is and isn't, and why you should use it instead of CVS, Subversion, SVK, Arch, Darcs, Mercurial, Monotone, Bazaar, and just about every other repository manager. I'll also walk though the basic concepts so that the manpages might start making sense. If I have time, I'll even do a live walkthrough, where you can watch how fast I make typos. Speaker: Randal Schwartz
The Web That Wasn't
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks October, 23 2007 ABSTRACT For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside. The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown's Intermedia system. We'll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in the recent technological past. Speaker: Alex Wright Alex Wright is an information architect at the New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Previously, Alex has led projects for The Long Now Foundation, California Digital Library, Harvard University, IBM, Microsoft, Rollyo and Sun Microsystems, among others. He maintains a personal Web site at http://www.alexwright.org/
Wuala - a distributed file system
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks October, 30 2007 ABSTRACT After three years of research and development on a distributed storage system, we are ready to unveil the result: Wuala. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free. In the talk, I will explain what Wuala is and how it works, and I will also show a demo. All attendees will also get an invitation code to join the early alpha version. Speaker: Dominik Grolimund I am 26 years old and have studied computer science at ETH Zurich. In 1998, I founded my software company Caleido, and developed the Caleido Address-Book, a professional contact management software, of which over 35'000 licenses have been sold so far in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In 2003, I did an exchange semester at the TU Delft, the Netherlands, as part of the Unitech exchange program, focusing on business and management. In 2004, a six-month internship followed with Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey in the US, where I worked in the 'Intelligent Vision & Reasoning' department, developing a prod...
Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks August 30, 2007 ABSTRACT Quicksilver hides almost unbounded power beneath the interface of a keyboard-driven launcher. Using a basic grammatical model, it allows you to move beyond basic search and work effortlessly with applications, data, and the web. Quickilver is above all a prototype intended to explore new forms of interaction. In this talk, we will explore the motivation behind Quicksilver, highlights of its implementation, lessons learned from its design, and the ways it might inform the future of navigation for the desktop and the web. Speaker: Nicholas Jitkoff Credits: Speaker:Nicholas Jitkoff
Gerd Leonhard Tech Talk at Google London
November 18th, 2008

Gerd Leonhard is a Music & Media Futurist, Author, Speaker, Advisor, and Digital Media Entrepreneur. The Wall Street Journal calls Gerd one of the leading media futurists in the world. He is the Co-Author of the influential book "The Future of Music" (2005, Berklee Press), as well as the author of "Music2.0" (released 2/2008 www.music20book.com), and of "Open is King - The Future of Media beyond Control" (late 2008).
Ruby 1.9
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks February, 20 2008 ABSTRACT Ruby 1.9 Speaker: Yukihiro Matsumoto Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matsumoto Yukihiro, a.k.a. Matz, born 14 April 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. He was born in Osaka Prefecture, in western Honshu. According to an interview conducted by Japan Inc., he was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school. He graduated with an information science degree from Tsukuba University, where he associated himself with research departments dealing with programming languages and compilers. As of 2006, Matsumoto is the head of the research and development department at the Network Applied Communication Laboratory, an open source systems integrator company in Shimane prefecture. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served as a missionary for the church. Matsumoto is married and has four children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto
Seattle Conference on Scalability: CARMEN: A Scalable Scienc
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks June 14, 2008 ABSTRACT CARMEN is a $9M project building a scalable science cloud. Its focus is on supporting neuroscientists who will use it to store, share and analyze 100s of TBs of data. Understanding how the brain works is a major scientific challenge which will benefit medicine, biology and computer science. Globally, over 100,000 neuroscientists are working on this problem. However, the data that forms the basis for their work is rarely shared even though it is difficult and expensive to produce. The CARMEN project (www.carmen.org.uk) is addressing these challenges by developing a scalable cloud architecture to enable data sharing, integration, and analysis supported by metadata. An expandable range of services are provided in the cloud to extract value from raw and transformed data. This promotes the sharing of analysis services as well as data, and allows services to execute close to the data on which they operate. This is essential to avoid having to ship vast quantities (TBs) of data out of the cloud to the user's machine for analysis. Internally, the CARMEN cloud is built as a set of Web Services. Through experience of a wide variety of e-scientific projects over the past 8 years, we have identified a core set of generic services that we believe are needed to support science. These services, their scalability issues and novel features are: - Data repository. Most of the primary data is time series signal data. Searching for patterns (such as neuronal spikes) is a key requirement. CARMEN uses a novel parallel search infrastructure to find patterns quickly, even in vast quantities of data. - Metadata repository. Users need to be able to quickly search metadatametdata describing tens of thousands of datasets in order to locate data that is of interest. Ontologies are used to structure experimental metadata, and techniques are needed to quickly search this type of data. - Service repository and dynamic deployment. A novel feature of the architecture is that the analysis services are stored in a repository in the cloud. Users can write services in a variety of languages, package them as web services and then upload them into the cloud. These are then dynamically deployed on compute nodes as required to meet user requests. - Workflow Enactment Engine. Users can build workflows from the available services in order to orchestrate the entire process of analysis. These are then executed in the cloud. - Security. Scientists wish to control precisely who has access to their data and services. This service ensures that these desires are met. The talk will describe the design of the CARMEN system and show how it addresses the key scalability issues. It will cover the cloud services, explaining how each is designed to scale up to support thousands of users analysing TBs of data. We will present results from the CARMEN prototype to illustrate solutions and issues. Speaker: Paul Watson Paul Watson is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the North East Regional e-Science Centre. He graduated in 1983 with a BSc (I) in Computer Engineering from Manchester University, followed by a PhD in 1986. In the 80s, as a Lecturer at Manchester University, he was a designer of the Alvey Flagship and Esprit EDS systems. From 1990-5 he worked for ICL as a system designer of the Goldrush MegaServer parallel database server, which was released as a product in 1994. In August 1995 he moved to Newcastle University, where he has been an investigator on research projects worth over $20M. His research interests are in scalable information management, in particular parallel database systems and data-intensive e-science. Slides for this talk are available at http://groups.google.com/group/seattle-scalability-conference
IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks August 5, 2008 ABSTRACT Estimating geographic information from an image is an excellent, difficult high-level computer vision problem whose time has come. The emergence of vast amounts of geographically-calibrated image data is a great reason for computer vision to start looking globally on the scale of the entire planet! In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we will leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet. We represent the estimated image location as a probability distribution over the Earth's surface. We quantitatively evaluate our approach in several geolocation tasks and demonstrate encouraging performance (up to 30 times better than chance). We show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for numerous other image understanding tasks such as population density estimation, land cover estimation or urban/rural classification. Speaker: James Hays James Hays received his B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003. He has been a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department since 2003 and is advised by Alexei A. Efros. His research interests are in computer vision and computer graphics, focusing on image understanding and manipulation leveraging massive amounts of data. His research has been supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
jQuery
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks April, 3 2008 ABSTRACT jQuery is a JavaScript library that stands out among its competitors because it is faster, focuses on writing less code, and is very extensible. In this talk, I will explore jQuery and how to use it. I will start off talking about the basics of using jQuery. Then, I will talk about building plugins. Finally, time permitting, I will take apart some plugins and talk about how they work, and I will show the nitty gritty details of the library. Speaker: Dmitri Gaskin Dmitri Gaskin drinks code with his cereal for breakfast every morning. He's a jQuery whiz and a Drupal know-it-all. He contributes patches for both Open Source projects. In the Drupal world, he maintains many modules, is on the security team, and is involved in the upcoming Summer of Code as a mentor and administrator. Dmitri has given many talks on Drupal and jQuery, in such places as Logitech, Drupalcon and live on a radio show out of L.A. When Dmitri isn't coding, a very rare occurrence, he is playing and composing contemporary music. And attending classes in the 6th grade. (He's only 12.)
If You Had Everything Computationally Where Would You Put it, Financially?
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks May 5, 2008 ABSTRACT Technology has transformed investment and trading over the past 30 years. Markets have become computer networks, brokers are disintermediated by direct access and algo trading. Reporters are disintermediated when investors have access to primary sources at the same time they do. An ever larger view of exploitable economic and business activity can found on the web. Dr. Leinweber brings an unusually broad and deep view to these issues, from both a sell- and buy-side perspective. Speaker: David Leinweber David Leinweber is Haas Fellow in Finance. His professional interests focus on how moderninformation technologies are best applied in trading and investing. As the founder of two financial technology companies, and a quantitative investment manager he is an active participant in today's transformation of markets. He is an advisor to investment firms, stock exchanges, brokerages, and technology firms in areas related to financial markets , and a frequent speaker and author on these subjects. His book, "Nerds on Wall Street" will be published by Wiley in 2008. He graduated from MIT, in physics and computer science and also has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. But on a good day, it's hard to tell.
Factor: an extensible interactive language
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks October 27, 2008 ABSTRACT Factor is a general-purpose programming language which has been in development for a little over five years and is influenced by Forth, Lisp, and Smalltalk. Factor takes the best ideas from Forth -- simplicity, succinct code, emphasis on interactive testing, meta-programming -- and brings modern high-level language features such as garbage collection, object orientation, and functional programming familiar to users of languages such as Python and JavaScript. Recognizing that no programming language is an island, Factor is portable, ships with a full-featured standard library, deploys stand-alone binaries, and interoperates with C and Objective-C. In this talk, I will give the rationale for Factor's creation, present an overview of the language, and show how Factor can be used to solve real-world problems with a minimum of fuss. At the same time, I will emphasize Factor's extensible syntax, meta-programming and reflection capabilities, and show that these features, which are unheard of in the world of mainstream programming languages, make programs easier to write, more robust, and fun. Speaker: Slava Pestov Slava was born in the former USSR and emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 7. He moved to Ottawa, Canada when he was 18 to study for a Bachelors and Masters degree in Mathematics. He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. An early adopter of Java, Slava wrote the popular jEdit text editor, then went on to design and implement the Factor programming language. At his day job he hacks on web apps, optimizing compilers, garbage collectors, and everything in between.
Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: JSR-305: Java...
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks August 8, 2007 ABSTRACT Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: JSR-305: Java annotations for software defect detection This talk will describe the current status of JSR-305, Java annotations for software defect detection. This JSR will define several standard Java annotations for properties such as @Nonnegative and @Nonnull that can be used to document your design intentions in a way that be interpreted by multiple software tools (such as FindBugs and IntelliJ). In addition, the talk (and JSR) will discuss the need for inherited and default JSR-305 annotations and propose a way to provide them. We'll also discuss our proposal to define meta-annotations, that allow...
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex: Wiring Hacker Synapses
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks June 24, 2008 ABSTRACT Eclipse Day at the Googleplex Wiring Hacker Synapses: Collaborative Coding and Team Tooling in Eclipse by Scott Lewis, Composent & Mustafa K. Isik 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 communications services, such as Google Talk and UI integration with web-based services, and other Eclipse-based tools. For example, for the upcoming Ganymede release, ECF is working on real-time shared editing of source code to support distributed team use cases like code reviews and collaborative debugging.
Kilim: Fast, lightweight, cheap message passing in Java.
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks June, 11 2008 ABSTRACT Kilim: Fast, lightweight, cheap message passing in Java. A million actors, 3x faster than Erlang. The message passing (MP) paradigm is often seen as a superior alternative to the typical mix of idioms in concurrent (shared-memory, locks) and distributed programming (CORBA/RMI). MP eliminates worries endemic to the shared-memory mindset: lock ordering, failure-coupling, low-level data races and memory models. It simplifies synchronization between data and control planes (no lost signals or updates), and unifies APIs for local and remote process interaction. Curiously however, there are no efficient frameworks for intra-process message-passing, except for Erlang. This talk describes a Java framework called "Kilim" to fix this state of affairs. Kilim provides: 1. Extremely lightweight user-level threads (actors) with automatic stack management, obtained via CPS transformation. 2. A simple type system that ensures actor isolation by controlling pointer aliasing in messages at compile time, and by ensuring linear ownership of mutable message objects. This permits safe, zero-copy communication. 3. A compact run-time library containing typed mailboxes (with optional flow control), user-definable scheduling and python style generators. Kilim is portable; one of our explicit goals was to not require changes to the Java language syntax or to the JVM. Kilim scales comfortably to handle hundreds of thousands of actors and messages on modest hardware. It is fast as well -- task-switching is 1000x faster than Java threads and 60x faster than other lightweight tasking frameworks, and message-passing is 3x faster than Erlang (currently the gold standard for concurrency-oriented programming). Speaker: Sriram Srinivasan Sriram Srinivasan has 19 years of experience delivering a variety of systems spanning wireless sensors, messaging systems, middleware (he was a principal engineer of the Weblogic Application server) and large-scale applications such as cargo planning systems and network management systems. He is currently on leave from industry, pursuing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in mixing programming languages, concurrenct & distributed systems and modal logics.
Google TechTalk: "Google, Интернет, Россия, Бизнес" В.Долгов
November 18th, 2008

Google TechTalk, весна 2007 Владимир Долгов: "Google, Интернет, Россия, Бизнес" МФТИ, 3 апреля 2007 года Содержание: Введение, обзор лекции. Что есть Интернет, его развитие. Роль Сети в нашей жизни. История создания компании Google. "В поиске деньги есть!". Модель компании. "Гуглотрясение". Продукты Google: Spell Check, Google News, Google Translate, , Picasa, Desktop, Mobile, GTalk, Calendar, Google Apps и службы Google для вашего домена. Реклама и реклама в Интернет. История развития, тенденции. Особенности реклами в поисковых системах и партнерской сети. Подход Google к рекламе, рекламные продукты Google. AdWords, AsSense, Google Network. Партнерство - прежде всего. Принципы Google в рекламе. Как Google делает мир лучше - Book Search. Описание проекта.
Scrum et al.
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks September 5, 2006 Ken Schwaber co-developed the Agile process, Scrum. He is a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto. Ken has been a software developer for over thirty years. He is an active advocate and evangelist for Agile processes. ABSTRACT Scrum is an amazingly simple process that causes many, many changes when it is implemented. This seminar presents the basic framework of Scrum and some of the implementation issues associated with it. Credits: Speaker:Ken Schwaber
CGAL: The Open Source Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks March, 3 2008 ABSTRACT Introduction Project mission statement, history, internal organization, partners, CGAL in numbers. What's in CGAL A survey on available data structures and algorithms, as well as examples how and by whom they are used. Topics include Triangulations, Voronoi diagrams, Boolean operations on polygons and polyhedra, arrangements of curves and their applications, Mesh generation, Geometry processing, Alpha shapes, Convex hull algorithms, Operations on polygons, Search structures, Interpolation, Shape analysis, fitting, and distances, Kinetic data structures... Generic Programming Paradigm CGAL data structures are C++ template classes and functions, usually taking several template parameters (with default values for ease of use). This gives developers an incredible flexibility to adapt the data structures to their needs, which is important internally for code reuse, and important for end users, as they typically integrate CGAL in already existing applications. Parts of CGAL are also interfaced with languages and software like Python, Java, Scilab, Qt and the Ipe drawing editor. Exact Geometric Computing Paradigm We present how to make geometric algorithms correct, robust, and nevertheless fast, by combining floating point arithmetic with exact arithmetic, and clever filtering mechanisms to switch between these two modes. These mechanisms can be used for geometric predicates, as well as for geometric constructions, which instead of a discrete return value generate new geometric entities. Conclusion and Outlook A wrapup, and a sneak preview on algorithms that might make it into future releases of CGAL. Speaker: Andreas Fabri, PhD, GeometryFactory As member of the initial development team of the CGAL project, Andreas is one of the architects of the CGAL software. For several years he chaired the CGAL Editorial Board. In 2003, Andreas founded the GeometryFactory as spin-off of the CGAL project, offering licenses, service and support to commercial users. Andreas received his PhD in 1994 from the Ecole des Mines de Paris, while working on geometric algorithms for parallel machines at INRIA. Speaker: Sylvain Pion, PhD, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Sylvain got involved in the CGAL project during his PhD, which he received in 1999 at INRIA. He worked then on providing generic solutions to numerical robustness issues arising in geometric algorithms. Later on he worked on the efficiency of some fundamental geometric algorithms such as 3D Delaunay triangulations. He is now also involved in C++ standardization, and is working on parallel geometric algorithms. He is employed as researcher at INRIA, and is the current chair of the CGAL Editorial Board.
Merb, Rubinius and the Engine Yard Stack
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks October 20, 2008 ABSTRACT In this talk we will explore a few of the open source projects we work on here at Engine Yard. I will give a detailed overview of the Merb web framework and what it brings to the table. We will also discuss Rubinius, an alternate ruby VM based on SmallTalk 80 blue book that also uses LLVM for low level optimizations. We will also explore the 'stack' we are working on at EY which includes our own variant of Gentoo linux as well as a full stack of software dedicated to running ruby applications as efficiently as possible. Merb, like Ruby on Rails is an MVC framework. Unlike Rails, Merb is ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic, preferring plugins that add in support for a particular feature rather than trying to produce a monolithic library with everything in the core. While trying to keep the core as minimal and clean as possible, this hasnt meant a sacrifice of features. Merb has a very comprehensive set of features, which are continually improving. Rubinius is a project to develop the next generation virtual machine for the Ruby programming language, drawing on the best virtual machine research and technology of the last 30 years. It implements the core libraries in Ruby, making a system easily accessible for development and extension. Rubinius is also an excellent platform for experimenting with cutting-edge technology like software transactional memory. Speaker: Ezra Zygmuntowicz Lead contributor to the Merb framework and is a co-founder of EngineYard.com, a scalable Rails hosting service, Ezra is the author of the Rails Deployment book for the Pragmatic programmers and has contributed many open source Ruby and Rails related projects such as BackgrounDrb, ez-where, Merb and Rubinius. He was a speaker at The Rails Edge, the 2006, 2007 & 2008 RailsConf and the 2007 SDForum Ruby conference as well as The Ruby Hoedown and RubyEast. He will also be a Keynote speaker at the upcoming Merbcamp (www.merbcamp.com) on October 11-12th in San Diego, CA.
Google TechTalk: "Google, Интернет, Бизнес" В.Долгов
November 18th, 2008
Google TechTalk: "Интернет сегодня". E.Соколов
November 18th, 2008
Applets Reloaded: the New Java Plug-In
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks August 28, 2008 ABSTRACT This presentation will highlight the new capabilities available to the applet developer, including integrated JNLP support, per-applet control over Java virtual machine command-line arguments and Java Runtime Environment version selection, a rewritten Java/JavaScript bridge, revised support for accessing and modifying the DOM, crossdomain.xml support, and more. Multiple demonstrations will illustrate the new possibilities available to the developer. Speaker: Ken Russell Ken Russell is the architect of the new Java Plug-In at Sun Microsystems. His background and interests include high-performance 3D graphics and dynamic languages, especially the Java programming language. He holds a Bachelor's degree in CS/EE from MIT and a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the Media Lab, MIT.
Powered by YouTube - Tech Talk Panel
November 18th, 2008

External Speakers: Bobby Joe, Software Developer, Slide Brian Muller, Flash Developer, Slide Michael Fortson, Internet Architect, Qik Brad Jefferson, CEO and Co-Founder, Animoto Vincent Rubino, Director of Engineering, Gaia Online Jeremy Wasser, Director of Community Services, Helio https://sites.google.com/site/poweredbyyoutube/
Emacs Org-mode - a system for note-taking and project planning
November 18th, 2008

Google Tech Talks July 15, 2008 ABSTRACT Org-mode is a large Emacs sub-systems that has been integrated into Emacs with the version 22.1 release. From it original intend, Org-mode is a system for structured note-taking and project planning. It uses strictly plain text files, making it a truly portable, system-independent solution. The project-planning features are implemented using a fairly simple outlining paradigm, upon which meta-data concepts like due dates, priorities, TODO states and tags are overlayed in a non-intrusive way. Besides outlining the system and its basic concepts, I will give background information into the history of Org-mode and discuss the properties of such an evolved system compared to a top-down designed one. Finally, I will also briefly touch on some technical aspects that may be interesting for Emacs wizards and developers. Speaker: Carsten Dominik
















