Google Tech Talk
Andrew Smart
Sorry for the short notice. This is today in an hour and a half.
Thought I'd let you know if you are interested.
-Andrew Smart
Google will be holding a Tech Talk on Wednesday, September 15
(TOMORROW!), at 5:30 p.m. in the Engineering Building #302.
Pizza and sodas will be served!
Google Street View sends cars to photograph the world. Jeremy
Pack will give an overview of the technical challenges facing
the Street View team in collecting, processing and sharing this
imagery with the world. Special attention will be paid to
automatic face and license plate blurring and correcting for
inaccurate geographical data or GPS readings.
Jeremy Pack is a software engineer at Google, and is working on
a Master's Degree in Computational Mathematics at Stanford
University. He graduated from Utah State University in 2006.
creatorbri
Andrew Smart
> Would have loved to be there, but I missed this announcement. :(
I do apologize. I'll try to spread word quicker next time I hear about
things like this.
It was an interesting presentation; he covered a lot of material and
stories. As a few interesting facts off the top of my head:
*Google Maps gets its data from many sources. Some of the road
maps from certain companies have "watermarks" (roads that don't
exist). There is an entire city in the U.K. on Google Maps that
does not exist in real life! Due to licensing restrictions
Google has to use the entire set of data, including those
watermarks! I assume this is so that the companies can
determine if someone is copied their data.
*Their first van was quite complicated, full of computers,
expensive, used LIDAR, and required lots of maintenance. They
cut out quite a bit of things, including the LIDAR due to cost
and complexity. In an upcoming revision of the car, they
putting LIDAR back in.
*They plan on redoing Utah soon, as it was one of the first
states they went through; the quality for Utah is quite low.
Their equipment has improved quite a bit since then.
He covered a lot of math and algorithms. Pretty interesting stuff. He
presented on Google Maps a year or two ago so I assume he'll come back
again later. This presentation was far more interesting than the last;
there were many new things and improvements.
-Andrew Smart