Geppeto: Promoting End-users to Gadget Developers

Google Tech Talks May, 28 2008 ABSTRACT The Google Gadgets platform has over 220.000 gadgets and more than ten million end-users. What if gadget users were presented an intuitive development system and also became gadget developers? Having non-programmers building gadgets may be a significant win given that more developers will build more diverse Gadgets which could lead to even wider user adoption. More importantly, this gives end-users the opportunity to personalize gadgets whose value others could easily appreciate. Furthermore, end-users have more specific domain knowledge allowing them to share highly targeted domain-specific gadgets. And although end-users may not be programmers and they may not know HTML and JavaScript, they do know how to use gadgets. The challenge we are therefore facing is to make building gadgets as simple as using gadgets. In this talk, we present and demo Geppeto: End-User Tool for Gadget Composition, a research project which received a Google Research Award. In our research, we focus on a gadget development methodology which is simple enough for end-users, think in terms of iGoogle Gadget Maker, but still expressive enough to go beyond a predefined set of gadget templates. The key aspect of our methodology is developing new gadgets by composition. Speaker: Ivan Zuzak Ivan Zuzak is an ex-Google intern and worked on inter-gadget communication for Google Gadgets. He is currently a computer science Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He is working on web architectures for composing gadgets as a part of the Geppeto project. Speaker: Jakov Krolo Jakov Krolo is currently a computer science Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He is working on web architectures for composing gadgets as a part of the Geppeto project. Team member: Ivan Gavran Ivan Gavran is an ex-Google intern and worked on machine translation. He is currently a computer science Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He is working on architectures for distributed translation memory as a part of the Unified Translation Memory project. Team lead: Sinisa Srbljic Professor Srbljic is currently a professor at the School of electrical engineering and computing, University of Zagreb and the project lead on the Geppeto project. His career also spans Silicon Valley where he worked on large-scale distributed systems at AT research labs, and a research at UC Irvine and University of Toronto. This Google Tech Talk was hosted by Boris Debic.