Thursday, June 24, 2010

YouTube - Do My Thoughts Deceive Me? Human Factors and Design

Google Tech Talk
December 16, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Jason H. Wong.

Our brains are not as reliable as we would like to think. Human factors is the science of understanding human cognition and designing systems to work within its limitations. A lot of time and effort has gone into understanding how our brains work (and when they don't). However, we continue to make fundamental design errors that not only go against cognitive science principles but common sense as well. This talk will explore some of the quirkier aspects of our cognition, from visual attention to memory and decision making. There will be copious examples of design gone wrong along with discussions of how to understand how we think and how to avoid making design mistakes in the future.

Dr. Jason H. Wong is a Human Factors Scientist with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC). He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from George Mason University in Human Factors and Applied Cognition, where he conducted research on visual attention and working memory. He was awarded the Department of Defense SMART Scholarship in 2007. This paved the way for his work at NUWC, where Dr. Wong examines the human-computer interaction aspects of complex systems, develops efficient submariner training methodologies, and creates cognitive models to simulate human performance.

YouTube - Do My Thoughts Deceive Me? Human Factors and Design

Friday, January 1, 2010

The Java Memory Model


Covers the Java Thread Specification as revised in JSR-133.   Discusses legal compiler optimizations and transformations.

Meet Google Founder Larry Page

Google Co-Founder Larry Page talks about robotics and artificial intelligence.

Page encourages university computer science professors to tackle hard problems. Page's father worked on AI in the 1970s when work was done on computers with 64K memory. Page believes most AI problems are not that complex and can be successful with proper scale (i.e. large amounts of data and processing power).

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

Expanding the Frontiers of Computer Science

The number of incoming freshman who intend to major in computer science has plumeted in recent years despite an exponential growth in the job market.

Dr. Mehran Sahami talks about how Stanford University is revamping its computer science ciricculum to meet the challenge.

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

Daniel Reda - An Introduction to Biotechnology and Bioinformatics

This talk features amazing video showing DNA being replicated in real-time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It83JKAxejM

Thursday, December 31, 2009

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