Virtual Machine-Based Replay Debugging

E Christopher Lewis discusses replay debugging which allows the debugging of non-deterministic and difficult to reproduce bugs.

Replay debugging is non-invasive. The developer need not worry that debug mode will change the scheduling of threads, the order in which locks are acquired, or the timing out of connections with external processes/machines.

In addition, replay debugging supports reverse execution which allows developers to move backwards from the manifestation of a bug to its origin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvMlihjqlhY

Brains, Meaning and Corpus Statistics

Tom Mitchell, who is head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon, discusses how the human brain represents ideas. His ongoing research is trying to answer questions such as...

- Are brain representations similar across people?
- Can we actually predict brain representations?

His research involves regression analysis of data collected from fMRI scans and word co-occurance statistics using Google's trillion-token corpus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbTf2nE3Lbw

The Web That Wasn't

Alex Wright discusses the history of the world wide web including precursors and proposed alternatives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8

H.G. Wells in the 1930s wrote an essay about a global brain where recorded information would become increasingly connected and a new kind of intelligence would emerge,  "networked encyclopedia".

Teilhard de Chardin talked of unfettered access to information.  Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term "global village", was one of Chardin's students.

Paul Otlet founded an institution in Belgium which attempted to liberate information inside of books using index cards.  Tracked usage which became part of the cataloged record in order to relate one document to another.  Global information warehouse.

Also covers Eugene Garfield who inspired the idea of page ranking.