Google Tech Talks August 4, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Dr. Eric Ding, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health Drawing on 130 years of data on 15,361 major league baseball players, Dr. Eric Ding observed a steady rise in BMI and increased death risk among the U.S.'s baseball players. Dr. Ding will talk about how he used collaborative databases and internet research to aggregate and analyze large scale longitudinal data from across 130+ years of Major League Baseball. His study was featured in CBS News, ABC News, and USA Today.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Tech Talk July 28, 2010 ABSTRACT Much has been made of having more expressive languages for the JVM. The recent explosion of interest in alternative JVM languages has shown there's a need for something better. But have Scala, Groovy, Fantom achieved this goal? We'll look at two language cases for the JVM: JRuby, which brings Ruby to the JVM; and Mirah, which attempts to implement Ruby's apparent features directly atop JVM types and code. In each case there have been gains and losses. Ruby often provides beautiful abstractions, but sometimes requires odd things of the JVM that influence performance. The dynamic capabilities are incredibly expressive, but we often need more static structure to enforce typing guarantees or integrate with the platform. On top of all this, much of Ruby's dynamism makes it very difficult to optimize on the JVM. Can we get those features in another way? Mirah may be one answer. It takes as a starting point the "apparent features" of Ruby, and as an end point the basic structures of the JVM, and attempts to tie them directly together. With a fairly simple compiler, Mirah can almost mimic the most common Ruby abstractions, but with static typing guarantees and no runtime library requirements. It provides a Ruby-like way to write Java, the ultimate goal of so many JVM languages. In the end, a combination of the two languages probably leads to truth. But what will that combination look like? Charles Oliver Nutter has been programming most of his life, as a Java developer for the past decade and as a JRuby developer for over four years. He co-leads the JRuby project, an effort to bring the beauty of Ruby and the power of the JVM together. Charles believes in open source and open standards and hopes his efforts on JRuby and other languages will ensure the JVM remains the preferred open-source managed runtime for many years to come.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faculty Summit July 29-30, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives. Each year Google hosts leading academics from universities across the globe though our Faculty Summit program. Faculty Summits are designed to provide researchers with a chance to learn more about what Google does in each region and how we support university programs, as well as provide valuable networking time for academics and engineers.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faculty Summit 2010 July 30, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Vint Cerf.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faculty Summit 2010 July 29, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Betsy Masiello, Policy Manager. The Web has enabled unprecedented levels of communication and sharing, expanding access to information around the globe, while also raising broad concerns about the future of individual privacy. This talk will explore a range of frameworks that can be used to understand privacy today, and the fundamental engineering challenges that follow in designing privacy into information products.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faculty Summit 2010 July 29, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Eric Grosse. Earning people's trust while making the world's information accessible is a security and privacy challenge of unique scale. We'll look at some of the major risk, architectural and operational issues in protecting your data, including which aspects of the software development lifecycle, access control, and detection systems get greater emphasis here compared to traditional environments.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faculty Summit 2010 July 29, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Dirk Balfanz. Passwords can leak through a variety of channels: users tend to re-use passwords across web sites, get phished, attacked by malware, etc. Most would agree that password-based authentication is not very secure. So why do we still live in an online world dominated by passwords? In my talk I will point out some of the challenges we face when moving away from password-based authentication. I will explain what roles OpenID and OAuth play in this move, security issues we faced in the past with these protocols, and where we're headed in the world of "Internet Identity."

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faculty Summit 2010 July 30, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Damon Horowitz. As our thinking about the web evolves from being document-centric to being people-centric, our thinking about search must evolve as well. It is no longer sufficient to organize and access the world's online information -- we must also consider how to organize and access the information that remains in peoples' heads. We will discuss Aardvark, a social search engine acquired by Google in February 2010. Aardvark is motivated by the simple observation that sometimes you want a person, not a web page, to answer your question. With Aardvark, users ask a question, either by instant message, email, web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person in the user's extended social network most likely to be able to answer that question. As compared to a traditional web search engine, where the challenge lies in finding the right document to satisfy a user's information need, the challenge in a social search engine like Aardvark lies in finding the right person to satisfy a user's information need. Further, while trust in a traditional search engine is based on authority, in a social search engine like Aardvark, trust is based on intimacy. I will describe how these considerations inform the architecture, algorithms, and user interface of Aardvark, and how they are reflected in the behavior of Aardvark users.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Faulty Summit 2010 July 29, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Ulfar Erlingsson, Manager, Security Research. Software-as-a-service can provide great benefits, such as ubiquitous, reliable access to data, but cloud computing also raises new challenges and opportunities for computer security. Large-scale Web services must address both traditional security concerns, such as user authentication and key management, as well as newer issues like those raised by the need to maintain users' privacy. At the same time, cloud computing has innate security advantages, such as its use of easily updated and malleable software, which enables instrumentation ranging from individual specialization to large-scale execution summarization. This talk will briefly outline some of these issues and potential research topics in cloud security, with examples from Google's past and current technology efforts used to give context.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...

Google Tech Talk July 29, 2010 ABSTRACT C++ has been through many battles and won most of them. Invariably it has been patched with more armor, given more makeshift weaponry, and sent back to battle. Many contenders have tried to spell its demise, but C++ has remained undefeated ruler in one niche: high-performance systems with difficult modeling challenges. Between the halt of Moore's law for serial speed and the continued demand for performance, one thing has become clear: a replacement for C++ must be good at what C++ is good at, and good at what C++ is bad at. The D programming language is that contender. It packs much more punch in a much smaller package. Better yet, D has the flexibility to compete against other languages on their own turf. This talk gives an introduction to the D programming language along with its motivation and basic tenets. The person who asks the more intriguing question wins a signed copy of the recently-published "The D Programming Language". Andrei Alexandrescu coined the colloquial term "modern C++", used today to describe a collection of important C++ styles and idioms. His eponymous book on the topic, Modern C++ Design (Addison-Wesley, 2001), revolutionized C++ programming and produced a lasting influence not only on subsequent work on C++, but also on other languages and systems. Andrei's work has garnered appreciation in both industrial and academic circles through is work on C++ and on Machine Learning applied to natural language. Since 2006, Andrei has been second-in-command to Walter Bright, the D programming language inventor and initial implementer. Andrei co-designed many important features of D and authored a large part of D's standard library, as well as the recent book "The D Programming Language". Andrei holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BS in Electrical Engineering from University "Politehnica" Bucharest. He works as a Research Scientist for Facebook.

Posted On: 07 Jul, 2012

Continue...