In October 2007, Google announced that it was partnering with IBM to provide largescale cluster computing resources to undergraduate computer science students along with a creative commons licensed curriculum. Using the cluster and curriculum as a starting point, students have been able to develop some compelling projects.

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At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O'Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby the same question: "What is Cloud Computing?". Here's what we got. (more)

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Google Tech Talks March, 6 2008 ABSTRACT Today's mobile devices have inherited many of the characteristics of desktop computing - including the assumptions that the user's full attention can be focused on the interface and that the user has the manual dexterity to spare for it. These assumptions result in users who run into doorways while typing an e-mail on their mobile phone. When faced with these interface difficulties in our experiments, users sometimes exclaim "I want my device to read my mind!" In this talk, we will demonstrate several prototypes that exploit pattern recognition and good interface design to simulate reading the user's mind by guessing their intent. In addition, we describe preliminary work on an actual brain computer interface. Informed by our own wearable computer use since 1993, my group investigates what mobile users claim to do with their devices, what they actually do with their devices, what they want to do, and the mobile interface challenges that interfere with the fulfillment of users' desires. We are currently exploring a successful modern incarnation of a wearable computer, the RIM Blackberry equipped with a Bluetooth earpiece, focusing on its mini-QWERTY keyboard. We have developed a technique called Automatic Whiteout++ that can eliminate 25% of mini-QWERTY users' "fat finger" typing errors, without using a dictionary. We will also discuss Dual Purpose Speech agents, which "listen in" on the user's conversation to help schedule appointments, remember small "notable" pieces of information, and communicate with remote assistants. Finally, we will describe our preliminary research on BrainSign, a direct brain interface where the user communicates through natural language. Speaker: Thad Starner Bio: Thad Starner is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing. Thad was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as an intelligent personal assistant. Starner's work as a PhD student would help found the field of Wearable Computing. His group's prototypes and patents on mobile MP3 players, mobile instant messaging and e-mail, gesture-based interfaces, and mobile context-based search foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services. Thad has authored over 100 scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), pattern discovery, human power generation for mobile devices, and gesture recognition, and he is a founder and current co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. His work is discussed in public forums both in the United States and internationally, such as CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, The New York Times, Nikkei Science, The London Independent, The Bangkok Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

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Google Tech Talks December, 6 2007 ABSTRACT This tech talk series explores the enormous opportunities afforded by the emerging field of quantum computing. The exploitation of quantum phenomena not only offers tremendous speed-ups for important algorithms but may also prove key to achieving genuine synthetic intelligence. We argue that understanding higher brain function requires references to quantum mechanics as well. These talks look at the topic of quantum computing from mathematical, engineering and neurobiological perspectives, and we attempt to present the material so that the base concepts can be understood by listeners with no background in quantum physics. This first talk of the series introduces the basic concepts of quantum computing. We start by looking at the difference in describing a classical and a quantum mechanical system. The talk discusses the Turing machine in quantum mechanical terms and introduces the notion of a qubit. We study the gate model of quantum computing and look at the famous quantum algorithms of Deutsch, Grover and Shor. Finally we talk about decoherence and how it destroys superposition states which is the main obstacle to building large scale quantum computers. We clarify widely held misconceptions about decoherence and explain that environmental interaction tends to choose a basis in state space in which the system decoheres while leaving coherences in other coordinate systems intact. Speaker: Hartmut Neven

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Google Tech Talks July 24, 2008 ABSTRACT Faculty Summit 2008 - Day 1 Power and Green Computing - Bill Weihl Google continues to grow, and the infrastructure that underpins that growth depends on electricity. We will discuss a number of the challenges and opportunities in making our infrastructure greener. How can we make our servers and data centers more energy efficient? How can we reduce the environmental impact of the energy that we do consume? Speaker: Bill Weihl

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Lecture 1 in a five part series introducing mapreduce and cluster computing. See http://code.google.com/edu/content/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.html for slides and other resources.

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Microsoft surface computer (uploaded by tintucvienthong.com)

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Google Tech Talks July 24, 2008 ABSTRACT Faculty Summit 2008 - Day 1 Computing at Scale: Challenges & Opportunities - Urs Hoelzle, Rob Pike, Ed Lazowska, & Jeannette Wing The frontiers of computer science are being increasingly impacted by computing at very large scale: that is on very large scale computing systems (perhaps in the cloud) with possibly significant dependence on large scale data sets and/or on systems with shared use by vast populations. This panel will explore the potential opportunities and challenges in computer science research in this space. Speakers: Urs Hoelzle, Rob Pike, Ed Lazowska, & Jeannette Wing

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Google Tech Talks September 2, 2008 ABSTRACT In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as an attractive tool for delivering web-based services. Cloud computing enables rapid deployment of new services and allows those services to scale dynamically, in response to changing user demand. However, the range of cloud computing applications is constrained by limitations of the Internet service model. New network level services are needed to enable advanced applications that include real-time, person-to-person communication. This talk discusses how to add a dynamic network layer to cloud computing infrastructures, to enable the rapid introduction of new network services in support of advanced applications. Speaker: Jonathan S. Turner Jonathan S. Turner received the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Northwestern University in 1979 and 1981. He holds the Barbara and Jerome Cox Chair of Computer Science at Washington University, is Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Applied Research Lab. The Applied Research Laboratory creates experimental networking technology to validate and demonstrate new research innovations. The Lab's current projects center on extensible networking technology with a particular focus on high performance platforms for overlay hosting services. Professor Turner served as Chief Scientist for Growth Networks, a startup company that developed scalable switching components for Internet routers and ATM switches, before being acquired by Cisco Systems in early 2000. Turner is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of ACM and a fellow of the IEEE. He received the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award from the IEEE in 1994 and the IEEE Millenium Medal in 2000. He has been awarded 30 patents for his work on switching systems and has many widely cited publications.

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Google Tech Talks January, 25 2008 ABSTRACT In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. A new generation of software libraries and algorithms are needed for the effective and reliable use of (wide area) dynamic, distributed and parallel environments. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile--time and run--time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run--time environment variability will make these problems much harder. We will focus on the redesign of software to fit multicore architectures. Speaker: Jack Dongarra University of Tennessee Oak Ridge National Laboratory University of Manchester Jack Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He now holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, has the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Turing Fellow in the Computer Science and Mathematics Schools at the University of Manchester, and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published approximately 200 articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda and he is coauthor of several books. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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Lecture 2: The MapReduce programming model. See http://code.google.com/edu/content/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.html for slides and other resources.

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Google Tech Talks September 28, 2006 Craig Warren Smith, a Seattle native, is a former Harvard (Kennedy School) professor, a founder of the global movement to close the Digital Divide, and for 30 years a Buddhist teacher. In the mid-1990s as a consultant to Bill Gates, he led a strategic planning process that helped Microsoft and its founder find the distinct role of philanthropy in its corporate culture. ABSTRACT Can the next generation of technologies advance the spiritual development of individuals and communities? The speaker, director of the Spiritual Computing Research Group (www.spiritualcomputing.com), will argue that several trends -- Web 2.0 innovations, neuroscience's interactions...

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Google Tech Talks December, 13 2007 ABSTRACT This tech talk series explores the enormous opportunities afforded by the emerging field of quantum computing. The exploitation of quantum phenomena not only offers tremendous speed-ups for important algorithms but may also prove key to achieving genuine synthetic intelligence. We argue that understanding higher brain function requires references to quantum mechanics as well. These talks look at the topic of quantum computing from mathematical, engineering and neurobiological perspectives, and we attempt to present the material so that the base concepts can be understood by listeners with no background in quantum physics. In this second talk, we make the case that machine learning and pattern recognition are problem domains well-suited to be handled by quantum routines. We introduce the adiabatic model of quantum computing and discuss how it deals more favorably with decoherence than the gate model. Adiabatic quantum computing can be understood as an annealing process that outperforms classical approaches to optimization by taking advantage of quantum tunneling. We also discuss the only large-scale adiabatic quantum hardware that exists today, built by D-Wave. We present detailed theoretical and experimental evidence showing that the D-Wave chip does indeed operate in a quantum regime. We report about an object recognition system we designed using the adiabatic quantum computer. Our system uses a combination of processing steps, where some are executed on classical hardware while others take advantage of the quantum chip. Both interest point selection and feature extraction are accomplished using classical filter operations reminiscent of receptive field properties of neurons in the early visual pathways. Image matching then proceeds by maximizing geometrical consistency and similarity between corresponding feature points, which is an NP-hard optimization problem. To obtain good solutions, we map this to the problem of finding the minimum energy in an Ising model in which the vertices represent candidate match pairs, bias terms reflect feature similarity, and interaction terms account for geometric consistency. The adiabatic quantum computer is then employed to find a low energetic minimum of the Ising dynamics. We conclude with a look towards which type of machine learning problems maybe most suitable for mapping to a quantum computing architecture. Speaker: Hartmut Neven Speaker: Dr. Geordie Rose Geordie Rose is a founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and physics-based processor design, and has been invited to speak on these topics in venues ranging from the 2003 TED Conference to Supercomputing 2005. His innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology has received coverage in BC Business, The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, USA Today, MIT Technology Review magazine, the Harvard Business Review and Business 2.0 magazine, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. He has received several awards and accolades for his work with D-Wave, including being short-listed for a 2005 World Technology Award. Dr. Rose holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a BEng in Engineering Physics, specializing in semiconductor engineering. Since the inception of D-Wave in 1999, Dr. Rose, as founding CEO, raised over $45M on behalf of the company, including a round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) — the first ever investment by a top-tier US venture capital firm in quantum computing.

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Check out this mind-bending demo, Andy Wilson's PlayTogether surface computing system. Wilson's previous work on the PlayAnywhere interface used a table-top projection PC combined with an infrared camera to let virtual computer graphics interact with real-world objects in real time. The PlayTogether system builds on that concept, using two networked table-top systems to let people play a virtual game of chess in two locations, using real pieces and a real board on either end, with each player's opponent's pieces projected onto his board. Wilson even demoed a three-dimensional variant of his table-top system (this project didn't even have a name) that allowed users to put three-dimensional objects on a table top, then drive a virtual computer-based car over them. As the car drove over each object, a separate LCD display showed a 3-D rendered car jumping over instant computer models of the real-world objects that had been placed in its path. It's almost impossible to describe without seeing it, so I took some video. For more videos from Popular Mechanics visit: http://www.popularmechanics.com/video?src=syn&mag=pop&dom=youtube&chan=home&link=rel_46 Everything from the World of Popular Mechanics: http://www.popularmechanics.com/?src=syn&mag=pop&dom=youtube&chan=home&link=rel_47 Subscribe to Popular Mechanics: http://subscribe.hearstmags.com/subscribe/splits/popularmechanics/pop_328x90_perissue_01_home?src=syn&mag=pop&dom=youtube&chan=home&link=rel_48 -

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Agenda: A workshop by Princeton University`s Center for Information Technology Policy brings together experts from computer science, law, politics and industry to explore the social and policy implications of `computing in the cloud`. "Computing in the cloud" is one name for services that run in a Web browser and store information in a provider's data center — ranging from adaptations of familiar tools such as email and personal finance to new offerings such as virtual worlds and social networks. Introductory remarks: David Robinson, H. Vincent Poor, Ed Felten

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Google Tech Talks March, 24 2008 ABSTRACT Yang Li - RESEARCH SCIENTIST Pervasive or ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) applications can support people's everyday activities in the physical world by leveraging advances in sensor technologies and computing infrastructures. Designing ubicomp applications is challenging because our everyday activities are more complex, dynamic and less structured than the tasks supported by traditional desktop computing. Ubicomp design is difficult, time-consuming, and requires a high level of technical expertise, especially with sensor technologies. To address this, I created a set of rapid prototyping tools and frameworks. My early work with Topiary introduces high-level abstractions, such as maps and scenarios, for designers to easily model location contexts and specify location-based behaviors. Topiary also allows a design to be tested in the field via a Wizard of Oz approach, without deploying a location sensor infrastructure. My recent work is focused on activity-based ubicomp prototyping, a process for enabling long-term activities (such as keeping fit)—a larger unit for design than the tasks that are the focus of traditional design. To support such a process, I created ActivityDesigner, a system that allows designers to create functional prototypes of ubicomp applications based on field observations, and easily deploy and test these prototypes in situ. Speaker: Yang Li - RESEARCH SCIENTIST Yang Li is a research associate in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He works in the areas of human-computer Interaction and ubiquitous computing, focusing on activity-based ubiquitous computing, rapid prototyping tools and pen-based interaction techniques. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher in EECS at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his PhD in computer science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Lecture 3: The Google File System. See http://code.google.com/edu/content/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.html for slides and other resources.

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Coaxing computers to perform basic acts of perception and robotics, let alone high-level thought, has been difficult. No existing computer can recognize pictures, understand language, or navigate through a cluttered room with anywhere near the facility of a child. Hawkins and his colleagues have developed a model of how the neocortex performs these and other tasks. The theory, call Hierarchical Temporal Memory, explains how the hierarchical structure of the neocortex builds a model of its world and uses this model for inference and prediction. To turn this theory into a useful technology, Hawkins has created a company called Numenta. In this talk, Hawkins will describe the theory, its biological basis, and a software platform created by Numenta that allows anyone to apply this theory to a variety of problems. Part of this theory was described in Hawkins' 2004 book, "On Intelligence". This talk is by the Chairman of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and co-founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, and is co-sponsored by Calit2 at UCSD, the Jacobs School's Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)department, and the Institute for Neural Computation (INC).

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Google Tech Talks January, 10 2008 ABSTRACT Syllabus and Recommended Literature This tech talk series explores the enormous opportunities afforded by the emerging field of quantum computing. The exploitation of quantum phenomena not only offers tremendous speed-ups for important algorithms but may also prove key to achieving genuine synthetic intelligence. We argue that understanding higher brain function requires references to quantum mechanics as well. These talks look at the topic of quantum computing from mathematical, engineering and neurobiological perspectives, and we attempt to present the material so that the base concepts can be understood by listeners with no background in quantum physics. In this third talk we review the history of the theory that quantum effects are essential to understanding brain function. We look at the theory of Penrose and Hameroff and its refutation by the decoherence calculations of Tegmark. Our experiments with pattern recognition using a quantum computer teach new lessons on which type of problems the brain may solve by quantum processes and how the data flow might look. Specifically, we conjecture that computations that are not time-critical and which require the solution of a global optimization problem are good candidates for brain processes facilitated by quantum phenomena. We then study situations in which coherence could be maintained to be of behavioral relevance as well as recent findings that show the relevance of coherence in basic biological processes such as photo synthesis and enzyme function. We advance a speculative theory that mental states induced by tryptamines might come about by enhancing the propensity of the brain to relegate certain computations to quantum annealing. We argue that by virtue of being a physical substrate the brain exists in a global superposition with the environment and participates in information exchange via fundamental physical interactions. This regime becomes relevant in situations in which neural dynamics is less driven by sensory input or behavioral affordances. Studying multiple corpora of reports describing experiences mediated by the psychoactive brew ayahuasca, we argue that our model outperforms a more mainstream neurobiological explanation based on neural assemblies. Speaker: Hartmut Neven

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Lecture 4: Clustering Algorithms with MapReduce. See http://code.google.com/edu/content/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.htmlfor slides and other resources.

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Follow the video responses to continue the video in it's entirety. . . The presentation that Adam Greenfield gave at Keio University's DMC Institute, Tokyo, Japan on July 15, 2006. The topic is Adam's then recently published book "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing."

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Lecture 5: Parallel Graph Algorithms with MapReduce. See http://code.google.com/edu/content/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.html for slides and other resources.

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Noah checks out Nvision 2008: Virtual one-on-one with Dwayne Wade; A world record for a Lan Party; Wii on Steroids; Nitrogen Cooled GPUs ... and more

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http://live.pirillo.com - Datalore brought up an excellent point during a conversation with Wirelesspacket and myself recently. The future of the Operating System most definitely IS in Cloud computing.

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A Computing System for the World's Information: A Look Behind the Scenes at Google Jeff Dean When collecting, indexing, and organizing large amounts of information using thousands of unreliable computers, one quickly discovers that the right software infrastructure can make all the difference. In this talk, we'll discuss our underlying computing hardware, and the design principles and implementations of GFS, MapReduce and BigTable, three internal systems that are used at Google for a wide variety of purposes. Speaker Bio:Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented a number of search quality improvements, built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure, and worked on a variety of internal and external developer tools.

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