Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley

Join us for Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley's Talks on Computing Systems.

"Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everyting"

Presented by: Jim Gemmell

Date: November 24, 2009
Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Room 118
For directions to the campus click here.

Abstract:
What if you nev...er had to forget anything? Trends in storage, sensing and computing will bring about an e-memory revolution in the next 10 years that will enable you to record as much of your life as you want, in previously unimaginable detail. Everything you see and hear, every step you take, every heartbeat, all of it could be captured digitally. You could have Total Recall. Total Recall will revolutionize our health, our learning, and our productivity. It will change the story we pass on to posterity, taking us to a level of “digital immortality.” The consequences to society will be profound: some good and some bad. But good or bad, our experience with the MyLifeBits research project and the CARPE research community has convinced us that the e-memory revolution is inevitable.

Jim Gemmell, co-author of the new book Total Recall, will explain how the trend to storing virtually everything in one’s life – Total Storage –will drive a market for storage like never before.

About the Speaker
Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, currently working on the next generation of search. Previously, Jim's research focus was MyLifeBits, part of the CARPE research community, whose first and second workshops he was proud to chair. Jim has also done research on the topics of personal media management/enhancement, telepresence, and reliable multicast. His research has led to features in Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, and Bing.com. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. For more about Jim, see his web page at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/jgemmell/


Remote attendees can connect via Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro and login as a "guest": cmusv.acrobat.com/tocs
This seminar is open to the public.

View our upcoming schedule of talks at http://sv.cmu.edu/tocs.

To unsubscribe to this mailing list please send a note to stacy.marshall@sv.cmu.eduRead More

Join us for Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley's Talks on Computing Systems.

"Augmented Social Cognition: Using Social Web Technology to Enhance the Ability of Groups to Remember, Think and Reason"

Presented by: Ed Chi

Date: December 1, 2009
Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, Room 118
For directions ...to the campus click here.

Abstract:
We are experiencing a new Social Web, where people share, communicate, commiserate, and have conflicts with each other. As evidenced by systems like Wikipedia, Twitter, and delicious.com, these environments are turning people into social information foragers and sharers. Groups interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense of topic areas from "Obama and healthcare policy" to "Islam."

PARC's Augmented Social Cognition researchers -- who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, CSCW, and other disciplines -- focus on understanding how to "enhance a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason". Through Social Web systems like social bookmarking sites, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.

Here we summarize recent work and early findings such as: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and metadata.

About the Speaker
Ed H. Chi is the area manager and a senior research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group. He leads the group in understanding how Web2.0 and Social Computing systems help groups of people to remember, think and reason. Ed completed his three degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota, and has been doing research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been featured and quoted in the press, including the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated Press.

With 19 patents and over 50 research articles, his most well-known past project is the study of Information Scent --- understanding how users navigate and understand the Web and information environments. Most recently, he leads a group of researchers at PARC to understand the underlying mechanisms in online social systems such as Wikipedia and social tagging sites. He has also worked on information visualization, computational molecular biology, ubicomp, and recommendation/search engines. In his spare time, Ed is an avid Taekwondo martial artist, photographer, and snowboarder.

Remote attendees can connect via Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro and login as a "guest": cmusv.acrobat.com/tocs
This seminar is open to the public.

View our upcoming schedule of talks at http://sv.cmu.edu/tocs.

To unsubscribe to this mailing list please send a note to stacy.marshall@sv.cmu.edu

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Join us for thesecond annual Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley International Thanksgiving Potluck! All students, faculty and staff, please join us as we celebrate Thanksgiving as one community!

We will provide turkey, mashed potatoes and beverages, you provide the scrumptious side dishes to go along with it! We are such a ...diverse community, and we would love to have that diversity represented in the foods you bring! So please bring your favorite dishes, foods you celebrate your holidays with, and any other yummy items!
We need:
Side Dishes (rice, noodles, stuffing, casseroles, etc)
Veggies (salads, cooked veggies, tofu, etc)
Desserts

Please post what you are bringing in your response, so folks can plan accordingly. We look forward to seeing you there! Questions, email Gerry Elizondo gerry.elizondo@sv.cmu.eduRead More

Time/date: Thursday 7pm, November 12, 2009

Place CM SV room 118

Title

Putting a New Spin on Lidar Imaging
Speaker

Bruce Hall, President of Velodyne
Abstract

Velodyne’s Lidar sensor approaches Lidar imaging in a whole new way. Unlike traditional single laser sensors that provide a trickle of data, the Velodyne sensor uses ...64 lasers to provide a comparable flood.

The spinning sensor fires its lasers at over 1.3 million times per second, capturing distance pixels by timing how long it takes each pulse of light to bounce off objects. The result is a rich, 360 degree 3-D point cloud that is used for autonomous navigation, 3-D mapping, scene capture, and other applications.

The sensor was used on 5 of the top 6 teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge race for autonomous vehicles. It is currently in use capturing 3-D highway data for multiple states in the U.S. Perhaps most notably it was used to capture the outdoor scenes in the Radiohead video “House of Cards.”

This session gives a brief background of Velodyne and shows its new sensor, called the HDL-64E, in action.
Biography

Bruce Hall:
Bruce Hall was named president of Velodyne in July 2003 to provide strategic leadership and to drive Velodyne's growth. He is responsible for running the day-to-day operations of the company, in particular spearheading the company's development of new products.

With over 22 years of executive experience, Hall brings a solid technical background and strong business management experience to this leadership role. Prior to joining Velodyne, Bruce held positions as a Gartner Group Research Analyst, Senior Director of Product Management for Xevo Corporation and Vice President of Marketing at InCert Software and Trigent Software. In these positions, he was responsible for defining the companies' products and services, as well as defining and implementing marketing strategies including positioning, business development and partner enablement.

Along with his brother Dave, Mr. Hall participated in the first two DARPA Grand Challenges as Team D.A.D., and brought to market the HDL-64E LIDAR sensor that was in use by all the top teams in the subsequent DARPA Urban Challenge.

In the course of his career, Hall has testified before Congress, been interviewed by television news sources including "Nightline", and been quoted in countless publications. Hall earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in business from Boston University. He is married and the father of two daughters and a son. Read More