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Google Research Picks for Videos of the Year

December 11, 2006

Posted by Peter Norvig

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Everyone else is giving you year-end top ten lists of their favorite movies, so we thought we'd give you ours, but we're skipping Cars and The Da Vinci Code and giving you autonomous cars and open source code. Our top twenty (we couldn't stop at ten):

  1. Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge: Sebastian Thrun stars in the heartwarming drama of a little car that could.
  2. The Graphing Calculator Story: A thriller starring Ron Avitzur as the engineer who snuck into the Apple campus to write code.
  3. Should Google Go Nuclear?: Robert Bussard (former Asst. Director of the AEC) talks about inertial electrostatic fusion.
  4. A New Way to Look at Networking: Van Jacobson as the old pro discovering that the old problems have not gone away.
  5. Python 3000: Guido van Rossum always looks on the bright side of life in this epic look at the future of Python.
  6. How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Daniel Wilson stars in this sci-fi horror story.
  7. The New "Bill of Rights of Information Society": Raj Reddy talks about how to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
  8. Practical Common Lisp: In this foreign film, Peter Seibel introduces the audience to a new language. Subtitles in parentheses.
  9. Debugging Backwards in Time: Starring Bil Lewis in this sequel to Back to the Future.
  10. Building Large Systems at Google: Narayanan Shivakumar takes us behind the scenes to see how Google builds large distributed systems. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but without the Oompa-Loompas.
  11. The Science and Art of User Experience at Google: Jen Fitzpatrick continues the behind-the-scenes look.
  12. Universally Accessible Demands Accessibility for All of Humanity: McArthur "Genius Award" Fellow Jim Fruchterman talks about accessibility for the blind and others.
  13. DNA and the Brain: Nobel Laureate James Watson explains how the key to understanding the brain is in our genes.
  14. Steve Wozniak: This one-man show is playing to boffo reviews.
  15. Jane Goodall: The celebrated primatologist discusses her mission to empower individuals to improve the environment.
  16. Computers Versus Common Sense: Doug Lenat reprises his role as the teacher trying to get computers to understand.
  17. The Google Story: David Vise talks about his book on Google.
  18. The Search: John Battelle talks about his book on Google.
  19. The Archimedes Palimpsest: Like Da Vinci Code, only true.
  20. The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less: With Barry Schwartz. Hmm, maybe I should have made this a top three list?

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