Google Tech Talk August 7, 2012 Presented by Cagri Yildirim, Adu Bhandaru, Sergiu Toarca, and TV Raman ABSTRACT ChromeVox is a Chrome extension that augments Chrome with complete spoken feedback for a blind user. In addition to providing out-of-the-box accessibility on Chrome OS, Chrome Vox is being used by engineering teams across Google to test accessibility. This summer, Serge, Cagriy and Adu have worked on significantly enhancing the ChromeVox developer experience as outlined below. Serge: Refactor Code For Better Health Serge has extensively refactored the ChromeVox codebase --- this has set us up to evolve ChromeVox rapidly this coming year. In the process, he has also eliminated many performance issues in ChromeVox. Adu: Better Focus Management A commonly occuring accessibility problem within complex Google Web Apps is the failure to consistently set focus --- especially when switching among tasks in a complex workflow. Thus, when a Web application presents a confirmation dialog in response to a user action, exiting that dialog often fails to restore focus; this type of failure can leave a blind user "lost in space". While we continue to educate engineers across Google to manage focus consistently, Adu devised a solution within ChromeVox to restore focus when possible --- this has a significant impact on the overall usability of complex Web Apps when using ChromeVox. Cagriy: Leveraging The ChromeVox Platform In addition to adding spoken output to Chrome, ChromeVox ...

Google Tech Talk June 19, 2012 Google NYC Presented by John Micco ABSTRACT John Micco, a member of the Engineering Tools group at Google, will describe the continuous integration system built to help manage testing automation at Google. Continuous integration systems play a crucial role in modern software development practices, keeping software working while it is being developed. The basic steps most continuous integration systems follow are: 1. Get the latest copy of the code. 2. Build the system 3. Run all tests. 4. Report results. 5. Repeat 1-4. This works great while the codebase is small, code flux is reasonable and tests are fast. As a codebase grows over time, the effectiveness of such a system decreases. As more code is added, each clean run takes much longer and more changes gets crammed into a single run. If something breaks, finding and backing out the bad change is a tedious and error prone task for development teams. At Google, due to the rate of code in flux and increasing number of automated tests, this approach does not scale. Each product is developed and released from 'head' relying on automated tests verifying the product behavior. Release frequency varies from multiple times per day to once every few weeks, depending on the product team. With such a huge, fast-moving codebase, it is possible for teams to get stuck spending a lot of time just keeping their build 'green' by analyzing hundreds if not thousands of changes that were incorporated into the ...

Google Tech Talk July 25, 2012 Google NYC Presented by Noah Snavely ABSTRACT We live in a world of ubiquitous imagery, in which the number of images at our fingertips is growing at a seemingly exponential rate. These images come from a wide variety of sources, including Google Maps and related sites, webcams, and millions of photographers around the world uploading billions and billions of images to photo-sharing websites. Taken together, these sources of imagery can be thought of as constituting a distributed camera capturing the entire world at unprecedented scale, and continually documenting its cities, mountains, buildings, people, and events. This talk will focus on how we might use this distributed camera as a fundamental new tool for science, engineering, and environmental monitoring, and how a key problem is *calibration* -- determining the geometry of each photo, and relating it to all other photos, in an efficient, automatic way. I will describe our ongoing work on using automated 3D reconstruction algorithms for recovering such geometry from massive photo collections. Noah Snavely is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, where he has been on the faculty since 2009. He received a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2008. Noah works in computer graphics and computer vision, with a particular interest in using ...

Google Tech Talk August 13, 2012 Presented by Philip Guo. ABSTRACT A month ago, Philip Guo wrote a memoir documenting his Ph.D. experiences and released it online for free (pgbovine.net ). As the first comprehensive account of an entire modern Ph.D. experience, over 50000 people have read it, and hundreds have sent him heartfelt email responses. In this informal talk, Philip will recount some of the most valuable lessons he has learned in the past six years of working on his Ph.D. Philip will be delighted to take audience questions and provide a candid perspective on research, internships, job hunting, and career development for Ph.D. students. All Ph.D. interns -- and all undergrad interns who are considering pursuing a Ph.D. -- will benefit from this talk. About the Speaker: Philip Guo just joined Google last month and is working with Peter Norvig on building tools to improve the teaching of programming and computer science. In his previous life, he received SB and M.Eng. degrees in EECS from MIT (2006) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford (2012).

Google Tech Talk June 26, 2012 Presented by Andrey Breslav. ABSTRACT Some years ago "alternative" programming languages for the JVM lived mostly in research labs and garages, industry knew about some of them, sometimes even used them, but never produced them. Recently, the trend has changed: new languages are backed by industrial vendors. To put it another way: the time has come for a new JVM language, and there are a few projects competing in this field. One of them is Kotlin, backed by JetBrains, a leading IDE vendor. Kotlin is a modern statically typed language targeting JVM and JavaScript and intended for industrial use. The main goal behind this project is to create a language that would be a good tool for developers, ie will be safe, concise, flexible, 100% Java-compatible and well-supported by IDE and other tooling. Kotlin is an open-source project started developed JetBrains with the help of the community. This session demonstrates the key features of Kotlin and provides a comparison to other "alternative" JVM languages. Among others things, it covers: Static null-safety Extension functions Higher-order functions and type-safe builders Smart casts: Kotlin's lightweight pattern matching Making Java APIs better with Kotlin Developing mixed Kotlin/Java projects About the Speaker: Andrey Breslav is the lead language designer working on Project Kotlin at JetBrains (kotlin.jetbrains.org He also works on making the Java language better, serving as a Java Community ...