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Games Everywhere : The Larger Role for Web Platforms and Services for Games & Serious Games

Uploads by googletechtalks — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:12:47 +0000

Games Everywhere : The Larger Role for Web Platforms and Services for Games & Serious Games

Google Tech Talk June 14, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Ben Sawyer, Co-Founder, President, Digitalmill. Videogames have always been a business at the edge of technology and change. Today, however, as games burst beyond the living room, and traditional forms and platforms of play they are turning up everywhere. With the rise of serious games which make use of videogames and videogame technologies in areas beyond entertainment, there is even larger requirement for videogames to change form and integrate with platforms and systems that were previously never considered relevant to game development. As games move to more pervasive forms, spanning both entertainment and non-entertainment fields, we need to define and understand this gamut of activity and the technologies that can support them. What new models, design, and engineering patterns exist that are, and increasingly going to be essential to a world where games are everywhere? Drawing on experiences with large organizations, non-traditional videogames forms, and analysis of the commercial videogame industry this talk not only illuminates the wider gamut of videogame activity but where there are unique needs and opportunities, especially for cutting edge Web services and platforms, that until better supported are, in fact, holding back the larger ascendency of games into everyday life. Slides can be viewed here: www.bit.ly

11
ratings

Time:
55:49
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Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?

Uploads by googletechtalks — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:18:47 +0000

Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?

Google Tech Talk May 27, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Anders Sandberg. The idea of creating a faithful, one-to-one computer copy of a human brain has been a popular philosophical thought experiment and science fiction plot for decades. While computational neuroscience and systems biology are currently very far away from this goal, the trends towards large-scale simulation, industrialized neuroinformatics, new forms of microscopy and powerful computing clusters point in this direction and are enabling new forms of simulations of unprecendented scope. In this talk I will discuss current estimates of how close we are to achieving emulated brains, technological requirements, research challenges and some of the possible consequences.

111
ratings

Time:
58:55
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The Neural Circuitry of Perception & Genetic and Hormonal Influences on Cognition

Uploads by googletechtalks — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:46:15 +0000

The Neural Circuitry of Perception & Genetic and Hormonal Influences on Cognition

A Google Tech Talk May 5, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Michael Goard, PhD, and Emily Jacobs, PhD. The majority of the human brain is comprised of a single structure, the neocortex, responsible for a range of cognitive functions, from sensory perception to abstract thought. However, despite this diversity of functions, the neocortex has a simple architecture it is comprised of numerous repeated motifs of a single stereotyped neural circuit. This talk will serve as an introduction to the structure and function of the neocortical circuit, particularly focusing on how it processes sensory input in order to generate cohesive perception of the external world. This will be followed by a description of recent experiments demonstrating how the neocortex can process sensory input in different ways depending on the behavioral state of the animal. Finally, there will be a discussion of how understanding neocortical function will lead to innovations in medicine, computing, and artificial intelligence. The study of neuroscience is devoted to understanding how the brain functions uniformly across members of a species, but a critical question centers on how cognitive processes differ between members of a species, or in an individual under varying environmental conditions. In short, why do some people excel where others falter? This talk introduces two factors that contribute to individual differences in cognition: genes and hormones. This concept is examined through recent experiments …

24
ratings

Time:
01:02:24
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12Blocks: A Simple Block Language that lets Kids Program Sophisticated Multi-core Robots

Uploads by googletechtalks — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:32:38 +0000

12Blocks: A Simple Block Language that lets Kids Program Sophisticated Multi-core Robots

Google Tech Talk May 12, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Hano Sander Hano Sander built a simple programming language that's used by kids to explore robotics. His talk will focus on using the block based paradigm to write programs for TBot – a wireless, speech enabled robot that communicates to form swarms- and fits in a child's hand. He will show plenty of demos and explore how robots can be used in the classroom. Hanno Sander caught the entrepreur bug after graduating from Stanford. He's now developing sophisticated robots and software in New Zealand. He has co-authored the official guide for the Parallax Propeller and co-founded the OneRobot.org foundation, a non-profit bringing robots to classrooms. Also see the Hanno's Google Tech Talk on Dancebots here: www.youtube.com

31
ratings

Time:
41:13
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UpSizeR: Synthetically Scaling Up a Given Database State

Uploads by googletechtalks — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:45:30 +0000

UpSizeR: Synthetically Scaling Up a Given Database State

Google Tech Talk April 12, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by YC Tay. E-commerce and social networking services must ensure that their systems are scalable. Engineering for rapid growth requires intensive testing with scaled-up datasets. Although such a larger dataset is synthetically generated, it must be similar to a real dataset if it is to be useful. This talk presents UpSizeR, a tool for scaling up relational databases. Given a database state D and a positive number s, UpSizeR generates a synthetic state D' that is s times the size of D, yet similar to D in terms of query results. UpSizeR does this by extracting inter-column and inter-row information from D. UpSizeR can also be used by an enterprise to make a synthetic copy (s=1) of its proprietary dataset for a vendor, or scale down a production dataset (s less than 1) for non-production testing. Experiments with Flickr data shows good agreement between crawled data and UpSizeR output for various sizes. However, UpSizeR currently cannot scale the social network topology in Flickr. This leads to the Attribute Value Correlation Problem: If D records data from a social network, how do the social interactions affect correlation among attribute values in D? Bio — YC Tay received his BSc from the University of Singapore and PhD from Harvard University. He is a professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (www.comp.nus.edu.sg His main research interest is performance …

8
ratings

Time:
55:41
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402 Payment Required

Uploads by googletechtalks — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:15:04 +0000

402 Payment Required

Google Tech Talk April 23, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Daniel A. Nagy. Since the early days of the Web, the holy grail of charging viewers for content has eluded developers and publishers alike. All of the implemented solutions have very serious shortcomings, of which users hating them is one of the most pervasive. In the presentation, the reasons of this failure are explored and a somewhat novel approach is demonstrated where economics sets the goals for engineering. The talk focuses on issues such as – Micropayment – Mental accounting and associated costs – User experience and interface design Daniel A. Nagy is an information security researcher interested in the application of economics-based designs to real-life problems of telecommunication security. His background is Telecommunications Engineering (MS) and Applied Mathematics (PhD). His home page is: www.epointsystem.org

23
ratings

Time:
53:53
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Changes to ECMAScript, Part 2: Harmony Highlights – Proxies and Traits

Uploads by googletechtalks — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:05:23 +0000

Changes to ECMAScript, Part 2: Harmony Highlights – Proxies and Traits

Google Tech Talk April 20, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Tom Van Cutsem. We discuss two proposed language features for inclusion in ECMAScript-Harmony. The first, dynamic proxies, enables Javascript programmers to create proxy objects that can intercept property access, assignment, enumeration, etc. It is a powerful metaprogramming mechanism that provides a standard API for creating generic wrappers for transparent access control, implementing legacy API adaptors, profilers, lazy initialization, etc. The second part of the talk introduces a traits library for ECMAScript 5. Traits are a more robust alternative to multiple inheritance or mixin-based composition. Based on ECMAScript 5's new "property descriptor" API, we built a portable lightweight library that supports trait-based object composition. We discuss the limitations of introducing traits using a library approach and highlight the benefits of direct support for traits in ECMAScript-Harmony. Talk slides are available here: es-lab.googlecode.com Part 1 of this talk series is available here: www.youtube.com Tom Van Cutsem is a post-doc researcher at the University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium. His research focus is on programming language design and implementation, with an emphasis on metaprogramming, concurrent and distributed programming. He is co-designer of the distributed scripting language AmbientTalk. Tom is currently on a six-month Visiting Faculty appointment at Google in MTV, cooperating with Mark Miller on …

20
ratings

Time:
53:08
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Chemistry on the Web: How Can we Crowdsource Chemistry to Solve Important Problems?

Uploads by googletechtalks — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:40:23 +0000

Chemistry on the Web: How Can we Crowdsource Chemistry to Solve Important Problems?

Google Tech Talk April 6, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Dr Matthew Todd, School of Chemistry, University of Sydney. Open Science: how can we crowdsource chemistry to solve important problems? Science shaped itself in the founding days of learned societies: individuals or teams competed, in secret, with paper-based communication in subscription journals. Why are we all still doing science like this? The internet has had a major impact in our sharing of data by traditional means, but it has not yet radically changed the way we actually perform science. My lab is involved in a new project a government/WHO-funded research project that is completely open, where we are trying to solve a serious problem in public health through basic research in organic chemistry. The project involves a wonder drug used to treat a tropical disease but we need to improve it, and fast: www.nature.com With an eye on the bigger issue, we propose open methods can allow science to happen faster than traditional means, but we do not yet have the tools to make this happen. This talk is about hard science and soft human nature. It is also an appeal for decent tools scientists need to collaborate properly. The over-riding requirement: low barrier to entry.

29
ratings

Time:
53:53
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How the Internet can Green the Electrical Grid

Uploads by googletechtalks — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:59:09 +0000

How the Internet can Green the Electrical Grid

Google Tech Talk April 13, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by S. Keshav. Several powerful forces are gathering to make fundamental and irrevocable changes to the century-old grid. The next-generation grid, often called the `smart grid,' will feature distributed energy production, vastly more storage, tens of millions of stochastic renewable-energy sources, and the use of communication technologies both to allow precise matching of supply to demand and to incentivize appropriate consumer behaviour. These changes will have the effect of reducing energy waste and reducing the carbon footprint of the grid, making it `smarter' and `greener.' In this talk, I will demonstrate that the concepts and techniques pioneered by the Internet, the fruit of four decades of research in this area, are directly applicable to the design of a smart, green grid. This is because both the Internet and the electrical grid are designed to meet fundamental needs, for information and for energy, respectively, by connecting geographically dispersed suppliers with geographically dispersed consumers. Keeping this and other similarities (and fundamental differences, as well) in mind, I propose several specific areas where Internet concepts and technologies can contribute to the development of a smart, green grid. I hope that our work will initiate a dialogue between these two communities. (joint work with Catherine Rosenberg, University of Waterloo) Project site: blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca S. Keshav is a Professor …

20
ratings

Time:
01:08:21
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Mission to “Mars”

Uploads by googletechtalks — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:16:55 +0000

Mission to "Mars"

Google Tech Talk April 5, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by David D. Levine. In January 2010 I spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. Although the Martian conditions were simulated, the science was real, as were the isolation, hostile environment, and problems faced by the six-person crew. Although my official title was Crew Journalist, I soon found myself repairing space suits, helping to keep the habitat running, and having interplanetary adventures I'd never before imagined. My talk on the experience is profusely illustrated with photographs and has gotten rave reviews. Please see bentopress.com for more information. My name is David D. Levine and I'm a science fiction writer. I've sold over 40 short stories to all the major markets, including Asimov's and Analog, and I've won a Hugo Award, been nominated for the Nebula, and won or been shortlisted for many other awards as well as appearing in numerous Year's Best anthologies. I retired in 2007 after a 25-year career as a technical writer, software engineer, and user interface designer for Tektronix, Intel, and McAfee and now spend my days writing, traveling, and getting into trouble. For more on me, see www.bentopress.com

23
ratings

Time:
57:22
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