Saturday, July 23, 2011

Enlightening TED Talks on Computer Science

TED is a nonprofit organization that has dedicated itself to the concept that good ideas are worth spreading. To promote these great ideas, TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) has a yearly conference in Long Beach, California. While the conference is too expensive for most people to attend, at $6000 per person, TED has used the Internet to share talks from the conference since 2006.

These are free of charge to the public and an amazing resource for professionals in many fields. Computer scientists will find these 20 TED speeches (not ranked in any particular order) informative, challenging, and stimulating. Maybe an idea worth spreading will help you make the connection you’ve been looking for in your own computer science research.

Given below are list of 20 highly informative speeches Computer Science speeches by the stalwarts of Computer

1. George Dyson on birth of Computers

Have you ever heard the real stories about the dawn of computing? Sure, you have probably memorized important dates and can talk about things like vacuum tubes and punch cards, but do you really know what went on at the beginning? In this enlightening talk, computer historian George Dyson reveals fascinating and sometimes funny anecdotes about the beginning of computing.

2. Kwabena Boahen on a computer that works like a brain

Kwabena Boahen’s team at Stanford is working on computer technology that works less like a computer usually does, and more like the human brain does. He discusses the inefficiencies associated with traditional computing and ways that they might be overcome using reverse engineering of the human nervous system.

3. Jeff Han demos his breakthrough touchscreen | Video on TED.com

Jeff Han’s incredible speech from 2006 shows the future of touch-screen interfaces. His scalable, multi-touch, pressure-sensitive interface allows people to use the computer without the barriers of having to point and click all the time.

4. Paul Debevec animates a photo-real digital face | Video on TED.com

Paul Debevec explains the process behind his animation of Digital Emily, a hyper-realistic character. Digital Emily is based on a real person named Emily, and created using an advanced 360-degree camera setup.

5. Stephen Wolfram : Computing a theory of everything

In this mind-boggling speech, Stephen Wolfram, a world-renowned leader in scientific computing, discusses his life’s mission. He wants to make all of the knowledge in the world computational. His new search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, is designed to take all of the available information on the web and make instant computations of that information accessible to the world.

6. Dennis Hong: My seven species of robot 

As artificial intelligence technology continues to evolve, the quest continues to create robots that are truly useful on a scientific and on an ordinary, day-to-day level. Dennis Hong’s RoMeLa lab at Virginia Tech presents seven distinctly different robots in this talk. Make sure you watch all the way to the end to discover his secrets of creativity.
7. Gary Flake : Is PIVOT the turning point for web exploration??

Gary Flake believes that the whole of all data we have is greater than the sum of its parts. He and the staff at Microsoft Live Labs have created a fascinating new tool called Pivot that enables people to browse the web not by going from page to page, but by looking at large patterns all at once.

8. Margaret Wertheim on beautiful math of corals

Crochet would not ordinarily seem to be a topic that computer scientists should be concerned about. But as Margaret Wertheim explains, crochet was an ideal medium to represent the hyperbolic, non-Euclidean geometry that Nature puts on display daily in coral reefs. Her idea that mathematicians and scientists need to keep their minds open to “play” as a tool for encouraging creativity is one that computer scientists should heed.

9. Lalitesh Katragadda : Making Maps to fight disasters and build economies

In this brief talk, Lalitesh Katragadda discusses the value of new computer tools such as Google Mapmaker to make maps of the 70% of Earth still unmapped. He explains that after natural disasters, it can be difficult for aid to reach these unmapped areas. Using Google Mapmaker, people can take the initiative to map local areas for global access.

10. Henry Markram builds a brain in a super computer

Henry Markram is a computer scientist who is leading a team of scientists on a mission to build a brain. They want to design a complete, functioning supercomputer model of the human brain in order to improve diagnostics and better understand how the brain works.

11. David Hanson : A robot that shows emotion

In his brief speech, David Hanson introduces the audience to his new robots that are able to express emotion and respond to human emotion using complex software. By responding to the emotion of humans, the robots actually exhibit something that appears to be empathy.

12. Demo : Stunning Data visualisation in the allosphere

The AlloSphere is a three-story sphere created by Joann Kuchera Morin and a team of artists and computer scientists, located at the University of California-Santa Barbara. In this fascinating six-minute tour, Kuchera Morin shows the audience possible applications, from mapping the human brain to converting abstract concepts into sight and sound.

13. Paul Rothemund details DNA folding | Video on TED.com

Paul Rothemund uses the simple metaphor of origami to explain how he and his team have discovered the process of DNA folding. According to Rothemund, using this process, we can start to design tiny, self-replicating machines. The implications for computer science are enormous.

14. Torsten Reil builds better animation

Torsten Reil’s speech discusses the complex software his company has created to make animated characters in video games and movies more realistic. By adding a simulated nervous system and artificial intelligence to animations, they are able to achieve a much more believable result.

15. David Merrill shows Sift Tables

Remember those ABC blocks we all had when we were kids? What if they could change, so that they weren’t just ABC blocks, but they were equation blocks, or color blocks, or story blocks? That is what MIT graduate student David Merrill has invented with Siftables, interactive computer blocks that communicate with one another.

16. Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas

Alan Kay has been a pioneer in computer science since the 1960s, helping companies like XeroxPARC, Apple, Atari, Disney, and HP change the way we use technology. This insightful and inspiring talk reveals new ways that we can use computers to educate the next generation.

17. Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing

Jeff Hawkins created the Palm and Treo PDAs, but his passion lies in brain research. He believes that brains work as a kind of deep memory system instead of as a series of processes. In this talk, he discusses how the future of computers depends on being able to study, understand, and mimic the way the brain really works.

18. Peter Hirshberg on TV and the web | Video on TED.com

Peter Hirshberg has spent the last 25 years studying the emergence of the Internet and helping businesses adapt to the medium’s changing demands. In this engaging talk, he discusses the evolution of television alongside the evolution of computers. He also explores the reasons why the Web has made the computer so much more than a fancy replacement for TV.

19. Blaise Aguera y Arcas shows Photosynth

Microsoft software engineer Blaise Aguera y Arcas shows the audience at TED his new software Photosynth. Photosynth is a powerful new interface which allows photos from all over the Web to be linked together in a spatial manner.

20. Tim Berners Lee : The year data opened world wide

Any serious student of computer science knows that Tim Berners-Lee’s most well-known accomplishment is the invention of the World Wide Web. His continued mission is to inspire others to use it for good—that is, for governments, schools, and scientists to make as much raw data as possible available to the public. This TED talk explores some of the results from 2009.

Aptly said ............. "IDEAS WORTH SPREADING..."

                                                                                  Adeiu

PS : Source : Internet (Obviously) and TED

1 comment:

  1. And find them all in one youtube playlist here http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF7032F8EB1A4F9E2

    ReplyDelete