

Q&A with Professor Hal Abelson of MIT - l0stman
http://research.google.com/university/relations/visiting-faculty/professor-hal-abelson.html

======
logicalmind
"I had students two years ago who did a project which is way more obvious now
than it was two years ago; it turns out you can tell people are gay by
analyzing their social networks."

This is one of the reasons I use social networking so sparingly. It seems like
it would be fairly easy to do analysis based on a large stream of social
networking information and use that to determine traits of a person that they
did not intend to share. I'm sure that a lot of it is used for targeted
purposes, like advertising, but it can also be dangerous. Maybe I'm just
paranoid.

------
brlewis
Earlier he was using Kawa Scheme on Android at Google Research. I wonder if
the educational program will use it.

~~~
varenc
I hope I can say this...but the answer is yes! internally at least.

~~~
cdibona
You can!

------
wallflower
I think if Google got Android into the schools it might even make CS more
attractive for women. If it meant you could build a cool app for your friends.

" What we're working on, having passed the gauntlet of Google’s trademark
lawyers, is called App Inventor for Android, and the idea is to make it easy
for beginning computer science students, non-computer science students, maybe
eventually high school students, to build mobile apps."

------
genieyclo
<http://research.google.com> is new for me; thanks for introducing me to it

------
rjett
When I read interviews like this, it makes me realize just how cool it must be
to work at Google.

~~~
cemerick
Depends on your status, methinks. The guys in Adwords customer support aren't
having so much fun.

------
toadstone
when i read this, i involuntarily started every one of his answers with a
haughty HA!

