techtalk
Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on git, the source control management system he created two years ago.
The Go Programming Language
Google Tech Talks October 30, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Rob Pike What is Go? Go is a new experimental systems programming language intended to make software development fast. Our goal is that a major Google binary should be buildable in a few seconds on a single machine. The language is concurrent, garbage-collected, and requires explicit declaration of dependencies. Simple syntax and a clean type system support a number of programming styles. For more on Go including FAQs, source code, libraries, and tutorials, please see: golang.org
Your Brain at Work
Google Tech Talk November 12, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by David Rock. In his new book "Your Brain at Work," coach David Rock depicts the story of two people over one day at the office, and what's happening in their brains that makes it so hard to focus and be productive. Not only does he explain why things go wrong, but how you can train your brain to improve thinking and performance at work. Based on interviews with 30 neuroscientists, he's developed strategies to help you work smart all day. Learn how to: · Maximize your mental energy by understanding your brain's limits · Overcome distractions · Improve your focus through understanding the nature of attention · Reduce stress levels with brain-based techniques · Improve how you collaborate by understanding the social needs of the brain You can learn to be more productive, less stressed and stay sane by understanding your brain. David Rock is a thought leader for the brain-based approach to coaching. David coined the term 'NeuroLeadership' and co-founded the NeuroLeadership Institute, Journal and Summit. He is also the founder and CEO of Results Coaching Systems, which helps Fortune 500 clients worldwide improve thinking and performance. He has authored four books, most recently 'Your Brain at Work'. He is on the advisory board and faculty of international business school CIMBA, and a guest lecturer at Oxford University. He consults organizations including Ericsson, Publicis, NASA, Accenture, EDS and the US Federal ...
Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification
Google Tech Talk October 26, 2010 Presented by Gabe Zichermann. ABSTRACT Gamification is fundamentally rewriting the rules of engagement for product design and marketing. From Foursquare to Farmville and from Nike to the Navy, game mechanics like points, badges, levels, challenges, rewards and leaderboards are being used in ever greater numbers. But what does this mean for "traditional" marketing & UI/UX and how do you leverage this trend in your engagement strategy? Moreover, how do we measure success, and why will every company have a Chief Engagement Officer in the next few years? Find out more in this in-depth discussion with Gamification Expert, Gabe Zichermann -- author of "Game-Based Marketing" and the Gamification.co blog, and Chair of the Gamification Summit. GABE ZICHERMANN is an author, highly rated public speaker and serial entrepreneur. His most recent book,Game-Based Marketing (Wiley, 4/2010) has achieved critical and industry acclaim for its detailed look at innovators who blend the power of games with brand strategy. His next book on game mechanics is a detailed technical look at architecture and implementation. Gabe is also the Chair of the Gamification Workshops and Summit, upcoming events that bring together the leading minds in Gamification and Engagement Science - gsummit.com. A resident of NYC, Gabe is a board member of StartOut.org, advisor to a number of startups and Facilitator for the NYC chapter of the Founder Institute.
Emacs Org-mode - a system for note-taking and project planning
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
JavaScript: The Good Parts
Google Tech Talks Web Exponents presented by Doug Crockford February 27, 2009 blog post: google-code-updates.blogspot.com JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. This session will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable and maintainable. Speaker: Douglas Crockford Douglas Crockford is a product of our public education system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is interested in Blissymbolics, a graphical, symbolic language. He is developing a secure programming language. He ...
Node.js: JavaScript on the Server
Google Tech Talk July 28, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Ryan Dahl, the creator of the node.JS open source project. It is well known that event loops rather than threads are required for high-performance servers. Javascript is a language unencumbered of threads and designed specifically to be used with synchronous evented I/O, making it an attractive means of programming server software. Node.js ties together the V8 Javascript compiler with an event loop, a thread pool for making blocking system calls, and a carefully designed HTTP parser to provide a browser-like interface to creating fast server-side software. This talk will explain Node's design and how to get started with it.
Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action
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
Factor: an extensible interactive language
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 ...
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be
Google Tech Talks November 18, 2008 ABSTRACT Electrical power is, and will increasingly become, the desired form of energy for its convenience, safety, flexibility and applicability. Even future transportation embraces electric cars, trains, and chemical fuel production (jet fuel, hydrogen, etc.) based upon an abundant electrical supply. Although existing energy sources can and should be expanded where practical, no one source has shown to be practical to rapidly fulfill the world's energy requirements effectively. Presently there is an existing source of energy ideally suited to electrical energy production that is not being exploited anywhere in the world today, although its existence and practicality has been know since the earliest days of nuclear science. Thorium is the third source of fission energy and the LFTR is the idealized mechanism to turn this resource into electrical energy. Enough safe, clean energy, globally sustainable for 1000's of years at US standards. This talk is aimed at explaining this thorium energy resource from fundamental physics to today's practical applications. The presentation is sufficient for the non-scientist to grasp the whole subject, but will be intriguing to even classically trained nuclear engineers. By providing the historical context in which the technology was discovered and later developed into a power reactor, the story of thorium's disappearance as an energy source is revealed. But times have changed, and today, thorium ...
Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?
Google Tech Talks April, 25 2008 ABSTRACT In February of 2008, Matt Leacock released Pandemic, a board game where players cooperate to save the world from deadly diseases that threaten to wipe out humanity. The game has been enthusiastically received, with its first printing selling out in less than a month. Matt will discuss how being an interaction designer affected the game design process as well as how cooperative games can point to new models for engagement in online systems. Pandemic's BoardGameGeek page is www.boardgamegeek.com Speaker: Matt Leacock Matt Leacock is a principal designer at Yahoo! Inc. When he's not designing social platforms and products for Yahoo!, he dabbles in board game design. Matt's ludography (list of game designs) is here: www.boardgamegeek.com Matt's work bio is here: www.socialtext.net
jQuery
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 LA 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.)
Building a More Efficient Ruby Interpreter
Google Tech Talk December 11, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui from Phusion. The Ruby programming language powers a significant portion of today's websites and is still growing in popularity. However, its implementation is not as efficient as it could be, and in this talk we will explain how Ruby Enterprise Edition addresses some of these issues. Ruby has a relatively high memory usage compared to eg C++, and we've found that this is partially caused by the fact that memory for program code is not shared between multiple interpreter instances as is possible in C++ programs. One way to battle this problem is by leveraging copy-on-write virtual memory semantics. However, Ruby's garbage collector hostile to this technique. We will explain how we've made the garbage collector copy-on-write friendly, how we've leveraged Linux kernel features during the development of this enhancement, how our Phusion Passenger web app deployment product leverages copy-on-write and how much memory one can save. Another problem the fact that Ruby's userspace threading implementation severely degrades in performance in the face of large thread stacks. Several contributors have identified the source of this problem: Ruby copies the entire thread stack during a context switch. We will explain how they've identified this problem, what obstacles we've faced during the development of a patch and just how significant the improvement is.
Computational Analysis Methods and Issues in Human Cognitive Neuroscience
Google Tech Talk January 14, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Bradley Voytek. There is a massive, relatively uncoordinated effort underway to map out the relationship between brain and behavior. Human neuroimaging experiments abound with approximately 30000 neuroimaging studies performed in 2008 alone. Most of the data from these experiments are analyzed on an individual desktop or small, local cluster. Neuroimaging data contains information about neural activity in both time and space and can easily exceed 1GB per subject. In order to analyze the functional properties of neuronal networks these data can be decomposed in a variety of ways (behavioral condition, principal and independent components, phase and frequency components, graphs and digraphs, etc.). This exponentially increases analysis time and database sizes creating bottlenecks in the analysis work flow. I will discuss a variety of neuroimaging methods in terms of the sources of the signals measured, what these signals actually inform us about how the brain gives rise to cognition and behavior, and how this information can inform medical diagnosis and treatment. Furthermore I will highlight how advances in computational processing have improved data analysis and discuss the computational roadblocks that impede research progress.
Speed Up Your JavaScript
Google Tech Talk June 4, 2009 ABSTRACT Web Exponents: Speed Up Your JavaScript Presented by Nicholas C. Zakas. As an interpreted language, JavaScript is filled with hidden performance issues that conspire to slow down your code and ruin the user experience. Learn exactly what is fast, what is slow, and what you can do to squeeze that last bit of performance out of your JavaScript code. Nicholas C. Zakas is the author of Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 2nd Edition (Wrox, 2009), co-author of Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition (Wrox, 2007), and a contributor to Even Faster Web Sites (O'Reilly, 2009). Nicholas is principal front end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage and is also a contributor to the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. The Web Exponents Series is hosted by Steve Souders
Erlang
The programming language Erlang, new if even known at all to most computer programmers, secretly celebrates its 20th birthday year 2007. Erlang was developed with goals such as high-availability, "prototypeability"/maintainability and scalability over an at design time unknown number of CPUs. All goals are still challenges in software development. The scalability property has however reached another dimension due to the past few years development in the field of common and affordable multi core processors. This talk will cover the history of Erlang, demonstrate major design goals with a few programming examples and also touch on the subject of the future of Erlang. The speaker, Mr Lennart Ohman,...
Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right
Google Tech Talk January 24, 2011 Presented by Sebastian Deterding ABSTRACT Foursquare, GetGlue, Nike+, Badgeville: From reading news to fulfilling your hearts' desires, more and more "gameified" applications and "gamification" vendors doll out points and badges to users, promising anything from increased user engagement and retention to plain mind control. While some hold that adding such game elements to non-game applications opens a new decade of design, others criticize current implementations as shallow "pointsification" and overselling of a new digital snake oil. What lessons do games really offer for user experience design? Which criticisms are valid? And what can designers interested in "gameifying" an application do to steer clear of the worst pitfalls? In this talk, researcher and designer Sebastian Deterding provides an overview of the current gamification movement, its most troubling blind spots, the motivational powers of games, and how to design for a playful experience that is truly meaningful to its users. Sebastian Deterding - Sebastian Deterding is a user experience designer and game researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he currently pursues a PhD on the motivational psychology of gameified applications. He speaks and publishes internationally on gamification, social games, and the social contexts of video games at events such as the Gamification Summit, Gamescom, reboot, Playful, or DiGRA. His work has been covered by The Guardian, the ...
Learning from StackOverflow.com
Google Tech Talk April 24, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Joel Spolsky Until recently, searching for help on highly technical programming problems has been a mess. A lot of what the search engines found was old discussions in forums, where you have a lot of wrong answers and out-of-date answers that you have to sift through yourself. You also found a lot of answers at sites that were hidden behind a pay wall, which uncloaked themselves for Google and then demanded membership fees to see the answers. StackOverflow.com is a programmer's Q&A site that launched last September to address these problems. It incorporates more modern ideas about community such as voting and public editing, and even a few ideas from game design, to create a much more successful way to get help with programming problems. In a few short months, it has grown to 14 million page views a month and reaches 3 million unique programmers every month. The lessons we've learned in creating a successful Q&A site has many implications for search which I'll share in this talk.
- Startups - Cal Tech Talk
TWiST #135: Jason Speaks at Cal Tech www.facebook.com Jason recently spoke at California Institute of Technology's Entrepreneurship Club to a group of students and entrepreneurs, offering advice, inspiration and some anecdotes to learn from. Support This Week in Startups by joining our new producer program at twistlist.co! 1:00-2:00 How many people in the crowd want to be entrepreneurs when you grow up? 2:00-3:30 Jason gives a brief history of his career as an entrepreneur. 3:30-5:30 The importance of ideas, action and iteration. 5:30-6:30 Why pivoting is underrated and hard work is paramount. 6:30-8:30 How many entrepreneurs here agree that it's hard, lonely work? 8:30-10:30 Why Twitter is a great example of successful product iteration. 10:30-12:30 It's not about the idea, it's about the space. 12:30-15:00 How Jason learned the hard way that you can't fundamentally change people and what to look for in startup employees. 15:00-15:45 Why consensus can hurt a business. 15:45-19:30 The trend of investors looking for people who actually build the product (developers and designers). 19:30-22:15 Money is free--if you have a good idea. 22:15-25:00 Don't underestimate the importance of a good domain name. 25:00-28:00 Jason's past companies, Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc., and his current company, Mahalo. 28:00-30:30 Discovering that video was the differentiator in how well pages on Mahalo did. 30:30-35:30 Question from the audience: How do you make a company ok with ...
Agile Testing
Google Tech Talks December 9, 2005 Elisabeth Hendrickson ABSTRACT As more teams are adopting Agile practices such as XP and Scrum, software testing teams are being asked to become "Agile" as well. But what does that mean? Is the Agile label yet another buzzword? Or could it be Agile practices are actually changing the way software is built? In this talk Elisabeth Hendrickson shares her perspective on how test teams can be more Agile based on her experiences working as a tester on Agile teams. Along the way, she'll provide an overview of how Agile practices differ from traditional practices and discuss what those differences mean for independent test teams. Credits: Speaker:Elisabeth Hendrickson
Ruby 1.9
Google Tech Talks February, 20 2008 ABSTRACT Ruby 1.9 Speaker: Yukihiro Matsumoto Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matsumoto Yukihiro, aka 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. en.wikipedia.org
Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet
Google Tech Talk (more info below) April 26, 3011 Presented by Jim Gettys. ABSTRACT VOIP and teleconferencing often perform much more poorly on today's Internet than the Internet of a decade ago, despite great gains in bandwidth. Lots of fiber, cheap memory, smart hardware, variability of wireless thoughput, changes in web browser behaviour, changes in TCP implementations, and a focus on benchmarking Internet performance solely by bandwidth, and engineer's natural reluctance to drop packets have conspired to encourage papering over problems by adding buffers; each of which may introduce latency when filled. Buffering mistakes have been made in all technologies: operating systems, home routers both wired and wireless, broadband equipment, corporate networks, 3G networks and parts of the core Internet itself. The mistaken quest to never drop packets has destroyed interactivity under load, and often results in actual higher packet loss, as TCP's congestion avoidance algorithms have been defeated by these buffers. The lessons of the "RED manifesto" of 1997 have been forgotten or never learned by a new generation of engineers. Full solutions require careful queue management, and that management should be everywhere; we no longer have the luxury to think that this is a problem solely of Internet routers. I will describe some of the mitigations and solutions to this problem, and how you can at least make your home network and systems behave the way they should. More info at www ...
Microgrids: Providing Energy Services Locally
Google Tech Talks March 25, 2009 ABSTRACT Two stylized alternative visions of how the power system might evolve to meet future requirements for the high power quality and reliability (PQR) electricity service that modern digital economies demand will be contrasted, a supergrids paradigm and a dispersed paradigm. Some of the economics of the dispersed vision are explored, and perspectives are presented on both the choice of homogeneous universal power quality up-stream in the electricity supply chain and on the extremely heterogeneous requirements of end-use loads. The characteristics of one microgrid paradigm for providing heterogeneous PQR, the CERTS Microgrid, will be described. Microgrid demonstrations in the US and Japan will be highlighted. Finally, analysis of the economics of possible microgrid installations in California and New York states will be explained using some example buildings, including data centers Speaker: Chris Marnay Chris Marnay is Staff Scientist and Leader of the Technology Evaluation, Modeling, and Assessment Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has worked or 25 years at Berkeley Lab, and he also assists the UC San Diegos Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs with campus sustainability implementation. For almost a decade, he has led development of the DER Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) that finds optimal combinations of on-site generation and other equipment to meet useful energy service requirements. These methods are ...
Developing iPhone Applications using Java
Google Tech Talks October 14, 2008 ABSTRACT Apple's iPhone has resulted in significant interest from users and developers alike. Apple's SDK for the iPhone is based on Objective-C as the development language as well as Cocoa for the GUI. Unfortunately Apple's license agreement for the iPhone SDK prohibits the porting of the Java virtual machine to the iPhone. In this presentation we introduce an Open Source Java-to-Objective-C cross-compiler as well as a Java-based implementation of the Cocoa library. With the help of these tools, iPhone applications can be written in pure Java. Using the Java version of Cocoa, it is possible to run a Java-based iPhone application as a Java desktop/applet application that can be cross-compiled to run natively on the iPhone. The talk will discuss the challenges of the Java-to-Objective-C cross-compiler as well as the Java-based version of Cocoa. Details are available at www.xmlvm.org Speaker: Arno Puder Arno Puder is an Associate Professor at the San Francisco State University. Prior to his current position, he worked for AT Labs Research. His interests include middleware, ubiquitous computing, and applications for sensor networks. He is one of the founders of the Open Source CORBA implementation called MICO.
How to Steal a Botnet and What Can Happen When You Do
Google Tech Talk September 10, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Richard A. Kemmerer. Botnets, which are networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security threats on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, which is a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims. In this talk, we report on our efforts to take control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected. While botnets have been hijacked before, the Torpig botnet exhibits certain properties that make the analysis of the data particularly interesting. First, it is possible (with reasonable accuracy) to identify unique bot infections and relate that number to the more than 1.2 million IP addresses that contacted our command and control server during the ten day period. This shows that botnet estimates that are based on IP addresses are likely to report inflated numbers. Second, the Torpig botnet is large, targets a variety of applications, and gathers a rich and diverse set of information from the infected victims. This allowed us to perform interesting data analysis that goes well beyond simply counting the number of stolen credit cards. In this talk we will discuss the analysis that we performed on the data collected ...
How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters
Google Tech Talks January 24, 2007 ABSTRACT Every day around the world, software developers spend much of their time working with a variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Some are integral to the core platform, some provide access to widely distributed frameworks, and some are written in-house for use by a few developers. Nearly all programmers occasionally function as API designers, whether they know it or not. A well-designed API can be a great asset to the organization that wrote it and to all who use it. Good APIs increase the pleasure and productivity of the developers who use them, the quality of the software they produce, and ultimately, the corporate bottom line....
Contributing with Git
Google Tech Talks October 27, 2008 ABSTRACT Source code versioning is an invaluable tool for software development: - users can easily track the newest versions, - maintainers can easily track down which commit introduced a bug (often making it easier to come up with a fix), - new developers get more documentation than just a big chunk of source code, - etc In my talk I want to stress the importance of source code versioning in a related context: when contributing changes to an Open Source project, which is typically a moving target, it can take a few revisions of the patches until they are accepted. I present several scenarios and workflows, and describe how Git can help with them. Speaker: Johannes Schindelin Johannes studied mathematics with a strong bias to number theory, trying to stay away from applied science as far as possible. Failing, he went on to a software company, where he gave up after finding that code quality played a lower role than pure politics. So he went back to university (Wuerzburg, Germany) to get a PhD in neurogenetics, and after a brief stint at psychology (St Andrews, UK) he now works on image processing (MPI Dresden, Germany).
Kilim: Fast, lightweight, cheap message passing in Java.
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 ...
IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image
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 BS 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 ...
Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era
Google Tech Talks February 6, 2009 ABSTRACT Over the last several decades computer architects have been phenomenally successful turning the transistor bounty provided by Moore's Law into chips with ever increasing single-threaded performance. During many of these successful years, however, many researchers paid scant attention to multiprocessor work. Now as vendors turn to multicore chips, researchers are reacting with more papers on multi-threaded systems. While this is good, we are concerned that further work on single-thread performance will be squashed. To help understand future high-level trade-offs, we develop a corollary to Amdahl's Law for multicore chips [Hill & Marty, IEEE Computer 2008]. It models fixed chip resources for alternative designs that use symmetric cores, asymmetric cores, or dynamic techniques that allow cores to work together on sequential execution. Our results encourage multicore designers to view performance of the entire chip rather than focus on core efficiencies. Moreover, we observe that obtaining optimal multicore performance requires further research BOTH in extracting more parallelism and making sequential cores faster. This talk is based on an HPCA 2008 keynote address. Speaker: Mark D. Hill Mark D. Hill (www.cs.wisc.edu is professor in both the computer sciences department and the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, where he also co-leads the Wisconsin Multifacet (www.cs.wisc.edu ...
One Laptop Per Child
Google Tech Talks April 12, 2007 ABSTRACT The mission of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) movement is to ensure that every school-aged child in the lesser-developed parts of the world is able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning. The OLPC Association focuses on designing, manufacturing and distributing XO laptops to children in lesser developed countries, initially concentrating on those governments that have made commitments for the funding and program support required to ensure that all of their children own and can effectively use a laptop. Initially the...
Building a JavaScript-Based Game Engine for the Web
Google Tech Talk June 11, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Paul Bakaus. There are many professional game engines out there for consoles, PCs, and mobile handhelds. However, there is one big empty gap, even in 2010: Not a single game engine targets desktop and mobile browsers natively without the use of plugins. In this session, Paul will talk about the challenges of building a pure browser-based gaming engine, how web programming concepts like event-driven architecture need to be considered, and what it means to fully utilize the open web stack—HTML5, client- and server-side JavaScript, external Stylesheets, server-side JavaScript and, of course, Canvas—to squeeze every millisecond of rendering time. We will go into the details of our own upcoming Aves Engine for isometric real-time games and will give you a very solid idea of what needs to be done to build graphically rich, real-time, full featured games for the web. Paul Bakaus is the CTO of the Germany-based startup Dextrose AG, and his corporate work mostly focuses on UX, UI and tricky JavaScript challenges. He is best known for creating jQuery UI, the popular official UI framework for jQuery, where he was the driving force behind many of its plugins.
Changes to JavaScript, Part 1: EcmaScript 5
Google Tech Talk May 18, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Mark Miller, Waldemar Horwat, and Mike Samuel. Slides for this talk are available from google-caja.googlecode.com Today's JavaScript is a decent language for writing small scale scripts. But even for beginners, it has too many minefields between what beginners learn and what they need to know. And JavaScript is now increasingly used for serious software engineering projects -- straining to carry a load it was not designed for. After 10 years, the world of JavaScript standards is moving again. The next version, EcmaScript 5, is in "final draft standard" status with implementations about to appear. The "Harmony" agreement sets the direction for future versions beyond EcmaScript 5. The "Secure EcmaScript" working group is working towards an EcmaScript 5 subset suitable for the security needs of inline gadgets, mashups, and more. In this first talk, we'll explain changes in EcmaScript 5, the problems they're meant to address, the de-facto standards they codify, and how these changes are likely to affect web applications. Waldemar Horwat has been involved with JavaScript standardization and implementation since the 1990's when he was working on Netscape's implementation. He is a former editor of the standard and wrote parts of the existing ECMAScript Edition 3 standard. He participates in the ECMA TC39 committee and is the Google representative at the ECMA General Assembly. Mark S. Miller is a research scientist at Google ...
Gerd Leonhard Tech Talk at Google London
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).
High Performance Web Sites and YSlow
Google Tech Talks November 13, 2007 ABSTRACT Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance Team has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. They focus on the front-end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. In this talk I'll go in-depth on these best practices and the research behind them. I'll also demonstrate YSlow and do some live performance analysis of popular web sites. Relevant links: Exceptional Performance: developer.yahoo.com YSlow: developer.yahoo.com Speaker: Steve Souders Steve Souders holds down the job of Chief Performance Yahoo! at Yahoo! He's been at Yahoo! since 2000, working on many of the platforms and products within the company He ran the development team for My Yahoo! before reaching his current position. As Chief Performance Yahoo!, he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He builds tools for performance analysis and evangelizes these best practices and tools across Yahoo!'s product teams.
Cannons to the Planets
Google Tech Talk December 15, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Dr. John Hunter, President of Quicklaunch, Inc. Quicklaunch is dedicated to launching rocket propellant and other consumables into orbit using a hydrogen gas gun. Quicklaunchers are related to the SHARP launcher, originally at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. More than 90% of the mass required for manned Mars and Lunar exploration is propellant. The Quicklaunch breakthrough will result in costs less than $250/lb to propellant depots in Low Earth Orbit. These low costs will enable manned space exploration of the solar system in our lifetime. Johns talk will include the history of gun launch to space, from the popularizers to the practitioners. A brief physics overview will be given on hydrogen gas guns as well as electric guns. An animation will portray a Quicklauncher delivering propellant to a depot in Low Earth Orbit. There will be plenty of time for questions and answers.
An Overview of the Coming C++ (C++0x) Standard
Google Tech Talks October 31, 2008 ABSTRACT The C++ language has started the formal approval process with the recent release of its Committee Draft, ie 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.
Digging Beyond User Preferences
Google Tech Talks July, 16 2008 ABSTRACT Many of the applications you develop are applications you would use. This makes it easy to know what will work and what won't. At some point, however, you'll find yourself developing something that you would only occasionally use, and suddenly you're treading in dark places. You know user research is important, you know the experience of using the product should be positive, if not delightful. But sometimes the findings you get are pretty difficult to translate into a decision about the software. Mental models are diagrams that represent the underlying philosophies and emotions that drive people's behavior, matched up with the ways you think you can support them with your software. Rather than knowing "I like to go to movies alone," you'll learn the myriad reasons why. (Eg "I like to give the director the attention and respect he deserves, because when I wrote a play in college, people didn't pay attention very well, they didn't get the point, and I felt frustrated.") Knowing the motivating philosophy opens up different avenues for supporting the behavior. You could, for example, offer additional means for this type of moviegoer to "get the point" of the movie. Mental models are useful as structures for attaching these ideas to sets of philosophies and for generating new ideas in places where there are gaps. In this presentation, author Indi Young will introduce you to mental models and show you one that was developed at Google for ...
Mainstreaming Psychedelics: From FDA to Harvard to Burning Man
Google Tech Talk November 17, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Rick Doblin, Ph.D., Executive Director MAPS. We're now in the midst of a worldwide renaissance in psychedelic research, after decades of political suppression. Scientists from around the world will present their new findings at the largest psychedelic conference to take place in the US in 17 years, on April 15-18, 2010, in San Jose, CA (www.maps.org ). Even media reports, which usually mention in passing the widespread use of psychedelics by the counterculture in the 1960s, are more hopeful than alarming. In this talk, we'll review the factors which led to the backlash and the lessons to be learned, discuss how the FDA opened the door to research around the world, how the ghost of Timothy Leary was buried at Harvard, and how Burning Man struggles to respond to people who have difficult psychedelic experiences. We'll conclude by explaining how non-profit drug development, initially of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), can transform psychedelics into FDA-approved prescription medicines and can lay the groundwork for the successful, long-term integration of psychedelics into the mainstream of medicine, religion, art, creativity, and celebration. Rick founded MAPS in 1986. His dissertation [www.maps.org (Public Policy, Harvards Kennedy School of Government) was on "The Regulation of the Medical Use of Psychedelics and Marijuana," and his masters thesis [www.maps.org (Harvard) focused ...
Compiling and Optimizing Scripting Languages
Google Tech Talks March 18, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Paul Biggar, Department of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin. Scripting languages offer unique challenges to compiler writers. Challenges to compilation include undefined and changing language semantics, and run-time code generation. However, optimizing compilers face greater challenges still. Scripting languages offer many run-time features which are difficult to optimize, including run-time typing, run-time aliasing, run-time class and function definitions and run-time code generation. I discuss these problems, and a great number of their solutions, in relation to phc (phpcompiler.org), our optimizing ahead-of-time compiler for PHP.
Eclipse Day at the Googleplex: Wiring Hacker Synapses
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.
Thorium Remix 2009 - LFTR in 16 Minutes
thoriumremix.com Thorium is readily available & can be turned into energy without generating transuranic wastes. Thorium's capacity as nuclear fuel was discovered during WW II, but ignored because it was unsuitable for making bombs. A liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is the optimal approach for harvesting energy from Thorium, and has the potential to solve today's energy/climate crisis. This 16 minute video summarizes 197 minutes worth of Google Tech Talks on the subject of Thorium & LFTR. Source material... The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be www.youtube.com Aim High: Using Thorium Energy to Address Environmental Prob www.youtube.com Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor www.youtube.com This edit was created back in 2009, when the best video resources available on the subject were Google Tech Talks. Since then I've shot numerous lectures on the subject and created a higher quality summary. Please help propagate the newer version... www.youtube.com ...so that people might find it before this older resource.
Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel
Google Tech Talks June, 5 2008 ABSTRACT The Linux Kernel, who is developing it, how they are doing it, and why you should care. This talk describes the rate of development for the Linux kernel, and how the development model is set up to handle such a large and diverse developer population and huge rate of change. It will detail who is doing the work, and what companies, if any, are sponsering it. Finally, it will go into why companies like Google, and any other that uses or depends on Linux, should care about this development. Lots of numbers and pretty graphs will be shown to keep the audience awake. Speaker: Greg Kroah Hartman Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer for the USB, driver core, sysfs, and debugfs portions of the kernel as well as being one half of the -stable kernel release team. He currently works for Novell as a Fellow doing various kernel related things and has written a few books from O'Reilly about Linux development in the past.
Building Software at Google Scale Tech Talk
Google Tech Talk March 21, 2012 Presented by Michael Barnathan, Software Engineer, Google Greg Estren, Software Engineer, Google Pepper Lebeck-Jobe, Software Engineer, Google ABSTRACT At past Google NYC Tech Talks, we learned about tools that helped Google engineers automate quality testing, so that Google products could be released frequently without extensive manual testing phases or manual invocations of tools like JUnit, WebDriver, or JavaScript Test Driver. This talk covers the Google Build System, which Google engineers use to build software from a unified, language-agnostic, continuously integrated code base, quickly and at scale. When a developer initiates a build, the build system automatically computes the minimal number of artifacts that need to be built and determines the optimal strategy for producing them as fast as possible using the resources of many worker machines. On average, each build request triggers thousands of source file compilations, while still completing within seconds. At Google, all software components are compiled from source, in a highly parallelized fashion, possibly across thousands of machines dedicated to software compilation. Build artifacts that compose software components are also shared across build requests, such that if a developer builds a component and another developer builds a similar component, the artifacts in common between them are not built twice. This talk will discuss in detail how all this "magic" works. More than ...
MakerBot
Google Tech Talk June 1, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Adam Mayer. This talk is about MakerBot, a new low-cost, open-source CNC fabrication robot produced by MakerBot Industries. MakerBot is an evolution of the RepRap project. Adam Mayer, one of the three founders of MakerBot Industries, will be on hand to present and demonstrate MakerBot and answer questions. Adam Mayer is one of the three founders of MakerBot Industries, and one of the core members of NYC Resistor, a hacker collective in downtown Brooklyn.
The Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor: Why Didn't This Happen (and why is now the right time?)
Google Tech Talk December 16, 2011 Presented by Kirk Sorensen
Building Crossplatform Mobile Apps with the Rhodes Framework
Google Tech Talks March 4, 2009 ABSTRACT Rhodes is an open source Ruby-based MVC framework for building locally executing, device-optimized mobile applications which run on all smartphone devices. It is similar concept to frameworks such as Rails, Merb and Django but is much lighterweight in order to run locally on smartphones with limited memory and resources. Rhodes is primarily targeted at applications that work with synchronized local data from server application backends, using the other source component RhoSync . Rhodes also allows you to take advantage of native device capabilities such as GPS, PIM contacts and camera. Yet the majority of your interface development is done by modifying HTML templates. Rhodes is available for iPhone, Windows Mobile and Research in Motion, Symbian and Android smartphones. In this session we'll demonstrate building a mobile app from scratch which runs on all of these devices. Rhomobile is the open mobile framework company. Our mission is to build open source components to facilitate building crossplatform mobile apps quickly and with a great user experience. Our components include the Rhodes framework, the RhoSync synchronization server and the RhoVer mobile app provisioning server. Speaker: Adam Blum Currently CEO of stealth mode mobile software platform startup. Formerly the VP of Engineering of Mobio and Engineering director for Good Technology. Ultramarathoner, author and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon West and UC Berkeley.
Podcars: Using networking ideas to transport people.
Google Tech Talks November 20, 2008 ABSTRACT Podcars are car sized vehicles on guideways elevated over streets. Podcar systems have network topology where each pod is routed the fastest way from origin to destination. High capacity is achieved through short inter-vehicle distances. The direct travel to any destination results in high mean travel speeds, rivaled only by a car in uncongested streets. Podcars use electricity directly off the grid and are very energy efficient. The talk will give a broad description of the technology and the market situation and present a sample network for the Googleplex. Speaker: Bengt Gustafsson Bengt Gustafsson, CEO of Beamways, a Swedish startup developing a Podcar system. Bengt's background is in the software industry where he has developed novel user interface generators, language interpreters and database engines.
The Structured Search Engine
Google Tech Talk January 19, 2011 Presented by Andrew Hogue. ABSTRACT Structured search is about giving the search engine a deeper understanding of documents and queries and how they relate to real-world entities. Using this knowledge, we can build search products that lead users directly to their answers, or assemble disparate data into a more unified interface that helps users make better decisions. This talk will present a variety of ways in which a better understanding of structure and semantics is helping Google push the boundaries of search. Andrew Hogue is a Senior Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager in the Search Quality group at Google New York. He has worked on a wide array of projects including question answering, Google Squared, sentiment analysis, local and product search, and Google Goggles. His is interested in the areas of structured data, information extraction, and machine learning, and their applications to search and search interfaces. Prior to Google, he earned a M.Eng. and BS in Computer Science from MIT. This Tech Talk was presented at one of the Google NYC Tech Talk series. For more information, or to attend future events at the Google NYC Engineering Office, see www.meetup.com
Design Tech Talk Series Presents: OO Design for Testability
Google Tech Talk October 6, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Miško Hevery. We design our code for performance, maintenance, simplicity, extensibility and other goals, but most of us do not think about testability as a design goal, yet verifying the correctness of our code is of great importance. What does it mean to have testable code, and what kind of trade offs does one have to think about when designing for testability. Turns out that testable code is well designed code, and it has many of the characteristics we search for such as low cohesion, separation of concerns, proper encapsulation and many others.
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