 | How to Learn http://live.pirillo.com - Brian writes: "I've been watching your videos on YouTube for a few month now. I've been learning Java for a year now, and I've got some tips for learning computer programming. Hopefully, these will apply to other things, as well." |
 | No Time to Think Google Tech Talks March, 5 2008 ABSTRACT Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it. Speaker: David M. Levy David Levy earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1979 and a Diploma in Calligraphy and Bookbinding from the Roehampton Institute (London) in 1983. For more than fifteen years he was a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where his work, described in "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (Arcade, 2001), centered on exploring the transition from paper and print to digital. During the year 2005-2006, he was the holder of the Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the Library of Congress. A professor at the UW Information School since 2000-2001, he has been investigating how to restore contemplative balance to a world marked by information overload, fragmented attention, extreme busyness, and the acceleration of everyday life. |
 | Rapid Prototyping of Ubiquitous Computing Applications: Tools & Frameworks 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. |
 | A quantum computer can determine who wins a game faster than a classical comp... Google Tech Talks April, 2 2008 ABSTRACT Imagine a game where two players go back and forth making moves and at the end of a fixed number of moves the position is either a win or a loss for the first player. In this case, if both players play best possible, it is determined at the first move who wins or loses. To figure out who will be the winner you need not look at all of the N final positions but only at N^0.753. I will show that with a quantum computer the exponent can be reduced to 0.5. The technique involves quantum scattering theory and illustrates how ideas from physics can be used to design quantum algorithms that outperform even best possible classical algorithms. Speaker: Edward Farhi Professor of Physics; Director, Center for Theoretical Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Interests: Edward Farhi was trained as a theoretical particle physicist but has also worked on astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. His present interest is the theory of quantum computation. As a graduate student, Farhi invented the jet variable "Thrust," which is used to describe how particles in high energy accelerator collisions come out in collimated streams. He then worked with Leonard Susskind on grand unified theories with electro-weak dynamical symmetry breaking. He and Larry Abbott proposed an (almost viable) model in which quarks, leptons, and massive gauge bosons are composite. With Robert Jaffe, he worked out many of the properties of a possibly stable super dense form of matter called "Strange Matter" and with Charles Alcock and Angela Olinto he studied the properties of "Strange Stars." His interest then shifted to general relativity and he and Alan Guth studied the classical and quantum prospects of making a new inflationary universe in the laboratory today. He, Guth and others also studied obstacles to constructing a time machine. More recently, Farhi has been studying how to use quantum mechanics to gain algorithmic speedup in solving problems that are difficult for conventional computers. He and Sam Gutmann proposed the idea of designing algorithms based on quantum walks, which has been used to demonstrate the power of quantum computation over classical. They, along with Jeffrey Goldstone and Michael Sipser, introduced the idea of quantum computation by adiabatic evolution, which has generated much interest in the quantum computing community. This group was tied for first in showing that there is a problem that cannot be sped up by a quantum computer. In 2007, Farhi, Goldstone and Gutmann showed that a quantum computer can determine who wins a game faster than a classical computer. Edward Farhi continues to work on quantum computing but keeps a close eye on particle physics and recent developments in cosmology. Biographical Sketch: Edward (Eddie) Farhi went to the Bronx High School of Science and Brandeis University before getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978. He was then on the staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at CERN in Geneva Switzerland before coming to MIT, where he joined the faculty in 1982. Farhi has given lectures on his own research at many of the major physics research centers in the world. At MIT, he has taught undergraduate courses in quantum mechanics and special relativity. At the graduate level he has taught quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, particle physics and general relativity. Farhi won three teaching awards at MIT and in 2000, 2001, and 2002 he lectured the big freshman physics course, "8.01." In July 2005, he was appointed the Director of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics. Selected Publications: Professor Farhi's publications are available online from the SPIRES HEP Literature Database (particle physics) and arXiv.org e-Print archive (quantum computing). |
 | c.ronaldo teaching kids! cristiano ronaldo teaches kids at the man utd academy |
 | Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: The Java Memory... Google Tech Talks March 21, 2007 ABSTRACT This talk describes the Java Memory Model and how it affects the ways concurrent software should be written. Recent changes to the memory model, which were incorporated into JDK 5, redefined the semantics of threads, synchronization, volatile variables, and final fields. The new memory model provides efficient and provably correct techniques for safely and correctly implementing concurrent operations. These techniques are compatible with existing good programming practice, although care needs to be taken in a couple of corner cases. Most programmers can avoid depending on low-level details and instead just use the high-level concurrency abstractions... |
 | Urbi: a new parallel & event-driven script language for robotics, games and more Google Tech Talks July 7, 2008 ABSTRACT Urbi is a middleware for concurrent and distributed programming, based on a new parallel and event-driven script language called 'urbiScript'. Using a familiar and easy-to-use syntax, the language offers several concurrent abstractions rooted in the language semantics, together with an integrated scheduler and a distributed component architecture called UObject, based on C++ or Java. urbiScript acts as an orchestrator to build interactions/behaviors between distributed UObjects. Successful applications of Urbi are now mostly in robotics, especially in the upcoming Robocup'08 events, but extensions to video games and complex systems programming are envisioned. Graphical tools have recently been added to the Urbi suite to create hierarchical finite state machines and to provide advanced debugging features. J.C. Baillie, the author of Urbi, will give a detailed technical presentation of the key aspects of this new technology, and show demonstrations of the "Urbi Studio" graphical tools with the Aibo robot. See http://www.gostai.com/ Speaker: Dr. Jean-Christophe Baillie Dr. Jean-Christophe Baillie graduated in Computer Science and Physics from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He received the PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Paris 6 and Sony Computer Science Lab and then founded the Cognitive Robotics Lab in ENSTA/ParisTech. During 4 years he worked on developmental robotics research with an extension of the Talking Heads experiment initiated by Luc Steels (Sony CSL). During the course of his researches, he designed Urbi as a tool to control complex robotics systems like the Aibo. In 2006, he founded Gostai, to further develop the Urbi technology and he is now directing the company, while keeping an active part in the R activities. He received in 2007 the "Pierre Faurre" award from the Polytechnique Foundation. |
 | Visual Thinking with Graph Network Google Tech Talks March, 13 2008 ABSTRACT Many visual perception tasks are fundamentally NP-hard computational problems. Solving these problems robustly requires thinking through combinatorially many hypothesis. Despite this, our human visual system performs these tasks effortlessly. How is this done? I would like to make two points on this topic. First, formulating visual thinking as NP-hard computation tasks has an important advantage: visual routines can be analyzed precisely to identify their behaviors independently of their implementations. Second, I will show there is a class of graph optimization problems which can be implemented using a distributed network system with physical (and plausible biological) interpretation. I will demonstrate this graph based approach for: 1) image segmentation using Normalized Cuts with explanations for illusory contours, visual pop out and attention; 2) salient contour grouping Speaker: Jianbo Shi Jianbo Shi was born in Shanghai, China. Since then he has been moving. He studied Computer Science and Mathematics as an undergraduate at Cornell University where he received his B.A. in 1994. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1998, for his thesis on Normalize Cuts image segmentation algorithm. He joined The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 as a research faculty, where he lead the Human Identification at Distance(HumanID) project, developing vision techniques for human identification and activity inference. In January 2003, he joined the Department of Computer & Information Science at University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor. His current research focus on human behavior analysis and image recognition-segmentation. His other research interests include image/video retrieval, and vision based desktop computing. His long-term interests center around a broader area of machine intelligence, he wishes to develop a "visual thinking" module that allows computers not only to understand the environment around us, but also to achieve higher level cognitive abilities such as machine memory and learning. |
 | Kids Funny kids |
 | Kids Mix 94.1fm An autograph signing at the 94.1fm Kids Mix in Las Vegas, where a portion of the proceeds go to The Childrens Miracle Network |
| Oceanfrontier Hideaway | |
| Sheraton Suites Philadelphia Airport | |
| The Boulders Resort and Golden Door Spa | |
| Coral Beach Club |
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