Q&A with Professor Hal Abelson of MIT

"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.

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

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."

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

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

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