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A math course for life science majors covering elementary probability, probability distributions, random variables, and limit theorems.

Lecturer: Herbert Enderton, Ph.D., Harvard University. Dr. Enderton is Logic Colloquim Chairman for the UCLA Logic Center — http://www.logic.ucla.edu/.

UCLA course Probability for Life Science, Math 3C, Fall 2008

* See all UCLA Math 3C classes in this series: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5BE09709EECF36AA
* See more courses from UCLA: http://www.youtube.com/uclacourses
* See more from UCLA’s main channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ucla

ABOUT UCLA MATH:
The American Mathematical Society honored UCLA’s math department and its “first-rate faculty of internationally recognized mathematicians” with the 2007 Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department.

UCLA’s department is “an outstanding model of all that a mathematics department can be,” the society declared, adding that “UCLA has become one of the biggest pipelines to mathematical careers in the United States.”

More than 1,000 scholars a year participate in programs that bring together mathematicians and scientists from the fields of biology, the physical sciences, medicine, engineering and others, as well as from industry and national laboratories.

http://www.math.ucla.edu/

Google Tech Talks
May, 20 2008

ABSTRACT

Rudy Rucker’s latest novel, Postsingular, describes an Earth blanketed with a light mesh of nanomachines, about one per square millimeter. The mesh makes everything “visible” on the Web. What happens then? Rudy will read a bit from the novel, describe the underlying ideas, and answer questions about his science-fictional visions of what’s next.

Speaker: Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is a writer who spent twenty years as a computer science professor at San Jose State University. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books, including The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, which argues that everything is a gnarly computation. He’s currently writing a trilogy of novels in which nanotechnology changes everything. The first, Postsingular, appeared from Tor Books in Fall, 2007, and is also available for free download on the web. The second, Hylozoic, will appear from Tor in 2009.

Inside Robert Little’s backyard workshop, you’ll find the wonder-world of science on display. Seriously. (#900, 11/27/04)

The earth sciences are central to all aspects of life – get a quick glimpse in this 6 min video.

Google Tech Talks
January, 16 2008

ABSTRACT

Do telepathy, clairvoyance and other “psi” abilities exist? The majority of the general population believes that they do, and yet fewer than one percent of mainstream academic institutions have any faculty known for their interest in these frequently reported experiences. Why is a topic of enduring and widespread interest met with such resounding silence in academia? The answer is not due to a lack of scientific evidence, or even to a lack of scientific interest, but rather involves a taboo. I will discuss the nature of this taboo, some of the empirical evidence and critical responses, and speculate on the implications.

Speaker: Dean Radin
Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and four-time former President of the Parapsychological Association. He holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a masters degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs and GTE Labs, mainly on human factors of advanced telecommunications products and services, and held appointments at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and Boundary Institute. At these facilities he was engaged in basic research on exceptional human capacities, principally psi phenomena.

Google Tech Talks
March, 26 2008

ABSTRACT

Timothee Cour – Research Scientist

Movies and TV are a rich source of highly diverse and complex video of people, objects, actions and locales “in the wild”. Harvesting automatically labeled sequences of actions from video would enable creation of large-scale and highly-varied datasets. To enable such collection, we focus on the task of recovering scene structure in movies and TV series for object/person tracking and action retrieval. We present a weakly supervised algorithm that uses the screenplay and closed captions to parse a movie into a hierarchy of shots and scenes. Scene boundaries in the movie are aligned with screenplay scene labels and shots are reordered into a sequence of long continuous tracks or threads which allow for more accurate tracking of people and actions across shot boundaries. Scene segmentation, alignment, and shot threading are formulated as inference in a unified generative model and a novel hierarchical dynamic programming algorithm that can handle alignment and jump-limited reorderings in linear time is introduced. We present quantitative and qualitative results on movie alignment and parsing, and use the recovered structure for tracking and naming of characters as well as retrieval of common actions in several episodes of popular TV series.

If time permits we will also present our recent results on approximate inference with eigenvalue optimization.

Speaker: Timothee Cour – Research Scientist
Timothee Cour is a fifth year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in Computer Science. He completed his undergraduate education at the Ecole Polytechnique in France, majoring in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. His research advisor is Prof. Ben Taskar and he also worked closely with Prof. Jianbo Shi.

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven’t yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people and if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn’t yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes.

A motherboard can appears as frightening apparatus. Not only is it the framework of your entire system, one wrong move, and you can kill expensive components, even the entire machine. But never fear! Tiger has done these kinds of motherboard installs hundreds of thousands of times – and you can too! Here he’ll show you how to safely and correctly install the foundation for your killer system in another installment of our world-renowned Tiger How To: Install a Motherboard. Watch, Learn, and Enjoy!

To learn more visit http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=13&name=Motherboards

Google Tech Talks
April, 3 2008

ABSTRACT

Computer games are an increasingly popular application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and conversely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial games. Although games are typically associated with entertainment applications, there are many “serious” applications of gaming, including military, corporate, and advertising applications. There are also what the so called “humane” gaming applications—interactive tools for medical training, educational games, and games that reflect social consciousness or advocate for a cause. Game AI is the effort of taking computer games beyond scripted interactions, however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Such systems learn about the player(s) during game play, adapt their own behaviors beyond the pre-programmed set provided by the game author, and interactively develop and provide a richer experience to the player(s).

In this brown bag, I will discuss a range of CBR approaches for Game AI. I will discuss differences and similarities between character-level AI (in embedded NPCs, for example) and game-level AI (in the drama manager or game director, for example). I will explain why the AI must reason at multiple levels, including reactive, tactical, strategic, rhetorical, and meta, and propose a CBR architecture that lets us design and coordinate real-time AIs operating asynchronously at all these levels. I will conclude with a brief discussion on the very idea of Game AI: is it feasible? realistic? and would we call it “intelligence” if we could implement all this stuff?

Speaker: Dr. Ashwin Ram
Dr. Ashwin Ram is an Associate Professor and Director of the Cognitive Computing Lab in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, and an Adjunct Professor in Psychology at Georgia Tech and in MathCS at Emory University. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1989, his MS from University of Illinois in 1984, and his BTech from IIT Delhi in 1982. He has published 2 books and over 100 scientific articles in international forums. He is a founder of Enkia Corporation which provides AI software for information assurance and decision support.

Google Tech Talks
June 6, 2008

ABSTRACT

Tim, Founder of the Thousand Parsec project, will explore the universe of Free and Open Source computer games, drawing on his personal experience as a case study for successfully building and contributing
to an Open Source game project. Many areas will be covered including many which are of interest to people who don’t normally play games! Discover the variety and creativity of some existing FOSS games, learn
about how commercial games are using FOSS and finally, *how to start your own game project*.

Speaker: Tim Ansell
Tim Ansell has given talks about FOSS gaming at a number of conferences and organised the Gaming Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2007 and 2008.

Tim is an avid FOSS game developer, founding the Thousand Parsec project 7 years ago in 2001. Originally getting involved in FOSS development via a game project called WorldForge, he now believes that games are a very important part of the FOSS ecosystem.

More info at http://blog.mithis.net/archives/games/82-techtalk-gamingforfreedom

Slides available at http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://blog.mithis.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/techtalk6-pdfable.pdf