http://www.ted.com Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. A multi-ovation demo from TED2008.
The Xbox 360 Security System and its Weaknesses
On January - 7 - 2009
Google Tech Talks
August 11, 2008
ABSTRACT
After the disaster of the original Xbox, Microsoft put a lot of effort in designing what is probably the most sophisticated consumer hardware security system to date. We present its design, its implementation, its weaknesses, how it was hacked, and how to do it better next time.
Speaker: Michael Steil
Michael Steil has been involved with various embedded systems hacking projects, like the Xbox, the Xbox 360 and the GameCube. In 2006, he has spoken at Google about the flaws in the security system of the original Xbox.
Speaker: Felix Domke
Felix Domke is the principal author of the Xbox 360 hack and the Linux port. He has also significantly contributed to hacking the dbox2, the GameCube and the Wii, and porting Linux to the respective platforms.
GAMEFACE : Developing Typefaces for the Xbox 360 and Other Devices
On January - 7 - 2009
Google Tech Talks
July, 15 2008
ABSTRACT
The Xbox 360 game platform was released with a great deal of fanfare surrounding its new product design and user interface. The developers saw the need for a tight brand consistency with print, packaging, and product interface, and chose to commission a new typeface family for use throughout the brand. Steve presents the path to the Xbox 360′s new look from the type designer’s perspective: the evolution of the product, the design brief, the creative process, and the unique challenges of developing a font for less than optimal screen displays. Steve also discusses the business and technology of fonts, the work for the Android platform and, most importantly, why type matters in an age of multimedia and text messaging.
Speaker: STEVE MATTESON
STEVE MATTESON is the Director of Type Design for Ascender Corporation and has created fonts for use in various screen display environments and print publishing since 1987. A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, Steve has an extensive background in typography, design and printing which he has applied to his development of high quality typefaces.
His work can be found in user interface designs (such as Windows Vista, Xbox 360 and Google’s Android Platform); in publishing (such as Pescadero Pro, Andy and Endurance Pro); and for corporate branding (such as Symantec, Microsoft and Alcon Labs). He resides in Louisville, CO with his wife, 2 kids and 2 Labrador Retrievers.
A partial showing of Steve’ Portfolio can be found here: http://ascendercorp.com/portfolio_commercial.html
and here: http://ascendercorp.com/portfolio_custom.html
Probability for Life Science, Lecture 1, Math 3C, UCLA
On December - 30 - 2008
A math course for life science majors covering elementary probability, probability distributions, random variables, and limit theorems.
Lecturer: Herbert Enderton, Ph.D., Harvard University. Dr. Enderton is Logic Colloquim Chairman for the UCLA Logic Center — http://www.logic.ucla.edu/.
UCLA course Probability for Life Science, Math 3C, Fall 2008
* See all UCLA Math 3C classes in this series: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5BE09709EECF36AA
* See more courses from UCLA: http://www.youtube.com/uclacourses
* See more from UCLA’s main channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ucla
ABOUT UCLA MATH:
The American Mathematical Society honored UCLA’s math department and its “first-rate faculty of internationally recognized mathematicians” with the 2007 Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department.
UCLA’s department is “an outstanding model of all that a mathematics department can be,” the society declared, adding that “UCLA has become one of the biggest pipelines to mathematical careers in the United States.”
More than 1,000 scholars a year participate in programs that bring together mathematicians and scientists from the fields of biology, the physical sciences, medicine, engineering and others, as well as from industry and national laboratories.
http://www.math.ucla.edu/
Postsingular: A Science-Fictional Vision of What’s Next
On December - 30 - 2008
Google Tech Talks
May, 20 2008
ABSTRACT
Rudy Rucker’s latest novel, Postsingular, describes an Earth blanketed with a light mesh of nanomachines, about one per square millimeter. The mesh makes everything “visible” on the Web. What happens then? Rudy will read a bit from the novel, describe the underlying ideas, and answer questions about his science-fictional visions of what’s next.
Speaker: Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is a writer who spent twenty years as a computer science professor at San Jose State University. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books, including The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, which argues that everything is a gnarly computation. He’s currently writing a trilogy of novels in which nanotechnology changes everything. The first, Postsingular, appeared from Tor Books in Fall, 2007, and is also available for free download on the web. The second, Hylozoic, will appear from Tor in 2009.
Homemade Science Museum
On December - 30 - 2008
Inside Robert Little’s backyard workshop, you’ll find the wonder-world of science on display. Seriously. (#900, 11/27/04)
Why Earth Science
On December - 30 - 2008
The earth sciences are central to all aspects of life – get a quick glimpse in this 6 min video.
“Science and the taboo of psi” with Dean Radin
On December - 30 - 2008
Google Tech Talks
January, 16 2008
ABSTRACT
Do telepathy, clairvoyance and other “psi” abilities exist? The majority of the general population believes that they do, and yet fewer than one percent of mainstream academic institutions have any faculty known for their interest in these frequently reported experiences. Why is a topic of enduring and widespread interest met with such resounding silence in academia? The answer is not due to a lack of scientific evidence, or even to a lack of scientific interest, but rather involves a taboo. I will discuss the nature of this taboo, some of the empirical evidence and critical responses, and speculate on the implications.
Speaker: Dean Radin
Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and four-time former President of the Parapsychological Association. He holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a masters degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs and GTE Labs, mainly on human factors of advanced telecommunications products and services, and held appointments at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and Boundary Institute. At these facilities he was engaged in basic research on exceptional human capacities, principally psi phenomena.
People Recognition – A Leapfrog in Organizing Videos
On December - 30 - 2008
Google Tech Talks
October 2, 2008
ABSTRACT
Shifting from its initial purely entertainment-centric agenda, video is becoming an important media for communication, saving generic facts and personal memories. Viewdle is considering face recognition in real-life videos as one of the three material steps ahead (along with tracking location and timecodes) towards effective organization of videos. The presentation will focus on algorithmic and engineering approaches to address practical challenges of object recognition in low-resolution professional and user-generated videos. One of such approaches is multimodal fusion from several sources of information to achieve best-possible tagging and people-recognition-in-video experience. Viewdle outlines several key principles for “fusing” decisions from combination of heterogeneous sources such as video track, audio track (speech-to-text), OCR data (Optical Character Recognition). A real case of recognition in video taken by smartphone will be demonstrated.
Viewdle presentation builds a bridge from generic problems of information retrieval in video to well-understood products such as video search/discovery, search engine optimization, and organization of mobile videos.
Speaker: Viewdle Representative
Viewdle is a facial-recognition based video indexing and search platform. It combines technology from video, audio, and text indexing to deliver a semantically accurate video search experience. Viewdle is looking inside every frame to identify and deliver factual, contextually-relevant results at a level of granularity not possible with existing video search tools. Viewdle launched in September 2007 at TechCrunch40 in San Francisco where it was one of the 40 presenters selected from 800+ startups Worldwide. Since then the company has expanded beyond white-label B2B offering to consumer-facing widgets and facebook application for organizing personal videos. Viewdle was a “Best Technology Innovation/Achievement” Crunchies 2007 Award finalist. The Company was also selected from among 45 contenders to be one of the eight presenting companies for Venture Night at the LIFT08 conference held in Geneva, Switzerland February 2008. Most recently Viewdle was named the 2008 Start-Up of the Year in Europe by the Plugg Conference. Viewdle technology is currently used by ThomsonReuters.
Movie/Script: Alignment and Parsing of Video and Text Transcription
On December - 30 - 2008
Google Tech Talks
March, 26 2008
ABSTRACT
Timothee Cour – Research Scientist
Movies and TV are a rich source of highly diverse and complex video of people, objects, actions and locales “in the wild”. Harvesting automatically labeled sequences of actions from video would enable creation of large-scale and highly-varied datasets. To enable such collection, we focus on the task of recovering scene structure in movies and TV series for object/person tracking and action retrieval. We present a weakly supervised algorithm that uses the screenplay and closed captions to parse a movie into a hierarchy of shots and scenes. Scene boundaries in the movie are aligned with screenplay scene labels and shots are reordered into a sequence of long continuous tracks or threads which allow for more accurate tracking of people and actions across shot boundaries. Scene segmentation, alignment, and shot threading are formulated as inference in a unified generative model and a novel hierarchical dynamic programming algorithm that can handle alignment and jump-limited reorderings in linear time is introduced. We present quantitative and qualitative results on movie alignment and parsing, and use the recovered structure for tracking and naming of characters as well as retrieval of common actions in several episodes of popular TV series.
If time permits we will also present our recent results on approximate inference with eigenvalue optimization.
Speaker: Timothee Cour – Research Scientist
Timothee Cour is a fifth year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in Computer Science. He completed his undergraduate education at the Ecole Polytechnique in France, majoring in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. His research advisor is Prof. Ben Taskar and he also worked closely with Prof. Jianbo Shi.
