Byron Reeves - Professor in the Dept. of Communication at Stanford University

Byron Reeves (twitter: @byronreeves) on Gaming for Work. In this intriguing video (Part 2 of 2), Byron speaks on using games and virtual worlds to change the way people work and businesses compete. Presentation titled “Work Sucks – Games are great“. Filmed July 31st, 2009 in Palo Alto at the fbFund HQ by Shaun Tai of SHAUN TAI Films (ZTY MEDIA), ©2009.

ABOUT BYRON REEVES

Byron is the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industrial affiliate program, Media X. He is an expert on the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses, and has published over 100 scientific papers about media and psychology. His research has been the basis for a number of new media products for companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, in the areas of voice interfaces, automated dialogue systems, and business process simulations. He is currently working on the application of multi-player game technology to behavior change and the conduct of serious work, and is Co-Founder of Seriosity, Inc., a company building enterprise software inspired by game psychology.

ABOUT FBFUND REV

fbFund is a fund focused on continuing to create incentives for the development of applications on Facebook Platform. Initially, the fund will make available $10 million in capital which may grow over time.

We are forming this fund to help grow the Facebook application ecosystem. By decreasing the barrier to start a company, we hope to entice an even larger group of people to become entrepreneurs and build a compelling business on Facebook Platform. We hope this is also a funding model that other venture capitalists will follow.

For more information, please visit fbFund.com

Accelerate. Integrate. Interface. 10-100x High Performance Computing

For many high performance applications the alternative to the multicore rack is to use an accelerator assist to each multicore node. There are a number of instances of these accelerators: GPGPU, Specialized processors (i.e. IBM’s Cell) and FPGAs.

At Maxeler we’ve found that the FPGA array technology wins out on performance for most relevant applications. Given the initial area-time-power disadvantage of the FPGA in (say) a custom designed adder this is a surprising result. The sheer magnitude of the available FPGA parallelism overcomes the initial disadvantage.

Details of event:

Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium
4:15PM, Wednesday, May 13, 2009
HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu

Topic: Accelerating computation with FPGAs with a seismic computation example.

About the speaker:

Michael Flynn is now Professor Emeritus of EE at Stanford. He directed the Architecture and Arithmetic group in CSL for many years. He is now Senior Adviser and Board Chairman at Maxeler.