ABSTRACT

Story Driven Modeling (SDM) is a systematic software development approach based on scencario analysis on model level. Usual text book approaches start with the derivation of a domain level class diagram from textual requirements specifications. This does not work. Class diagrams structure programs not your domain. Thus SDM proposes to analyse requirements with the help of usage scenarios. These scenarios are elaborated into a flip book of object diagrams that models how the runtime data of the desired application shall be organized. The Fujaba UML tool supports the modeling with such story boards and as a result it generates automatic JUnit tests that setup the modeled scenario, invoke the described functionality and compare the resulting object structure with the object diagram modeled in the initial scenario. The talk will present this approach with a live demo of the approach on a simple example.

Speaker: Albert Zundorf

Duration : 0:40:38

[youtube nwcsj_Iz4ao]

ABSTRACT

Arms races among invertebrates, intelligence gathering by the
immune system and alarm calls by marmots are but a few of nature’s
security strategies that have been tested and modified over billions of
years. This provocative book applies lessons from nature to our own
toughest security problems—from global terrorism to the rise of infectious
disease to natural disasters.
Written by a truly multidis-
ciplinary group including
paleobiologists, anthropologists,
psychologists, ecologists, and
national security experts, it
considers how models and
ideas from evolutionary
biology can improve national
security strategies ranging
from risk essment, security
analysis, and public policy to
long-term strategic goals.

Speaker: Terence Taylor
Terence Taylor is the Director of the ICLS and the Chairman of its Board of Directors. He has held leadership positions at The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the United Kingdom ’s Ministry of Defense and the United Nations. Mr Taylor established the US office of the IISS and served as its first President and Executive Director for 5 years. He was a career officer in the British army with experience in many parts of the world including UN peacekeeping and counter-terrorist operations. He is an expert in international security policy, with a special emphasis in risk essment and non-proliferation.

Mr. Taylor served as the co-director of the project entitled “Safeguarding the Advances and Managing the Risks: the Future of the Life Sciences” during his time at IISS — US. This effort, over the period of three years, led to the emergence of the International Council for the Life Sciences as an independent organization to help develop and promote global biosafety and biosecurity standards. He serves on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Forum on Microbial Threats and is an adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Mr. Taylor was also a member of the National Research Council Steering Committee on Genomic Databases for Bioterrorism Threat Agents and served as Chairman of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Risk Analysis of the World Federation of Scientists.

Terence Taylor is a regular contributor to a variety of publications including The Washington Quarterly, International Herald Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, in addition to authoring numerous book chapters on humanitarian law and biological weapons. He frequently conducts television and radio interviews on the major national and international broadcasting networks including CNN, BBC, and NPR. In October 2006, Mr. Taylor was appointed to the five-member special advisory group for the UN Secretary-General’s initiative on biotechnology.

Speaker: Rafe Sagarin
Rafe Sagarin is ociate Director for Ocean and Coastal Policy at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University . Rafe is a marine ecologist who has studied responses of marine communities and wetlands to climate change, illegal fishing, pollution and other human impacts. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he studied the large scale distribution of marine organisms on the Pacific coast of North America. He has served as a Geological Society of America Congressional Science Fellow in the office of U.S. Representative Hilda Solis. He has also convened a working group and is publishing a volume on using biological evolution as a guide for improving societal security systems.

Rafe has taught ecology and global change science and policy at California State University Monterey Bay and at University of California , Los Angeles . His research has appeared in Science, Nature, Ecological Monographs, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Foreign Policy and other leading journals.

Duration : 1:18:3

[youtube job2avPAbgU]

ABSTRACT

We present an algorithm to convert standard digital pictures into
3-d models.

This is a challenging problem, since an image is formed by a projection of the 3-d scene onto two dimensions, thus losing the depth information. We take a supervised learning approach to this problem, and use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to model the image depth cues as well as the relationships between different parts of the image. We show that even on unstructured scenes (of indoor and outdoor environments, including forests, trees, buildings,
etc.), our algorithm is frequently able to recover fairly accurate 3-d models.

We use our method to create visually pleasing 3-d flythroughs from the
image. We also present a few extensions of these ideas, such as additionally incorporating triangulation (stereo) cues, and using multiple images to produce large scale 3-d models. We also apply our methods to two robotics applications: (a) high speed offroad obstacle avoidance on an autonomously driven remote-controlled car, and (b) having a robot unload items from a dishwasher.

To convert your own image of an outdoor scene, landscape, etc. to a 3-d model, please visit: http://make3d.stanford.edu

Joint work with Min Sun and Andrew Y. Ng.

Speaker: Ashutosh Saxena
Ashutosh is a PhD candidate with Prof. Andrew Y. Ng in the Computer
Science department in Stanford University. He received his B. Tech.
from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur) in 2004.

His research focuses on machine learning approaches to problems in
computer vision and in robotic manipulation. Using data-driven machine
learning techniques, he developed algorithms for creating 3-d models from
a single image, and algorithms for robotic manipulation tasks such as
opening doors, and grasping previously unseen objects.

Duration : 0:58:38

[youtube bWbEsDbfayc]

ABSTRACT

Contemporary society is experiencing a steady stream of new electronic gadgets, software products, and web applications. In this flood of functionality, users have adapted to rely less on manuals (if they are present at all) and shift their learning to trial and error, common paradigms, and experimentation. To accommodate this style of use — or perhaps driving this behavior – developers have successfully abstracted much of the technological complexity and transformed it into intuitive user interfaces often avoiding the need for reading lengthy manuals and formal training. Is it possible to adopt the same trial-and-error experimentation habit not only for using gadgets, but also for application development? We claim that intuitive aggregation and combination of software gadgets makes this possible.

In this talk, we will show the use of current technology in building a consumer oriented development tool appropriate for individuals not formally trained in programming. We demonstrate that the complexity of existing system and scripting languages i.e.; syntax, semantics, control and data flow, data structures, data types, and programming components can be successfully replaced with analogies intuitively accessible to a much wider consumer population based exclusively on their use and understanding of user interfaces in popular web applications. We present a demo of Geppeto — a consumer tool for gadget-based application development. Composing gadgets with Geppeto does not require programming experience or reading of convoluted manuals. The presented research is sponsored by Google Inc. and the Croatian Ministry of Science.

Speaker: Sinisa Srbljic
Professor Sinisa Srbljic, Ph.D., is currently a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, and the project leader of the Geppeto project. His career also spans Silicon Valley where he worked on large-scale distributed systems at AT Labs. He was visiting the University of Toronto, where he worked on the NUMAchine multiprocessor project, and the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include Web computing, gadget composition, and consumer programming. In teaching, he is involved in the theory of computing, programming language translation, service-oriented computing, and network middleware systems.

Speaker: Marin Silic
Marin Silic, B.Sc., is currently a computer science Ph.D. candidate and research istant at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He works on web architectures for composing gadgets as a part of the Geppeto project. As a Google intern in the Spreadsheets group he developed a one-second load application for Google Spreadsheets.

This Google Tech Talk was hosted by Boris Debic.

Duration : 0:29:30

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