Since they have tens of thousands of followers, it "would be hard to fit everyone into their actual offices," says the intro video. It is an intriguing use of the Hangout feature. You don't have to be a Stanford student, or even enrolled in the class, or even know something about AI. All you have to do is add Norvig to your Google+ circle, ask your question on their YouTube channel now and tune in tomorrow.

Stanford has been offering many online classes, like other universities around the world. The class is more fully described here in this post on IEEE Spectrum.

On May 14, a group of 75 Silicon Valley technologists, computer science students and others met at Stanford for a Cloud to Street hackathon designed to create tools Egyptian activists have requested.

This hackathon resulted in three workable prototypes.

"In addition to the constitutional crowdsourcing platform, the Hackathon produced a web platform to allow interested citizens to train themselves to monitor the September 2011 Parliamentary elections. The third was an interactive tool to inform Egyptian citizens about candidates for that election, and once they are elected, to inform Parliamentarians of their concerns and rate them on their efforts to delivers."

One of the attending activists, Ahmed Salah, reminded participants that the two qualities any successful tool created for democracy activists in Egypt need to be have are, they must be "free (since most activists are unemployed) and they need to be secure (to prevent people like him from being thrown in prison)."

According to We are all Khaled Said, Cloud to Street hopes to organize a second hackathon in the coming month, this one to be held in Cairo.

Perhaps it's the usual mistrust people assign to corporate executives. Yet Jobs is no stranger to controversy around saying one thing - and then announcing another. As it turns out, two Stanford researchers have recently been studying the truthiness of CEOs and devised a formula for red-flagging deceptive CEO statements. Jobs seems to get a mixed score.

In How Can You Tell When A CEO Is Lying? the researchers present us with a few indicators:

• Lying executives tend to overuse words like "we" and "our team" when they talk about their company and avoid saying "I"
• Overuse of words that express positive emotion ('fantastic,' 'superb,' 'outstanding,' 'excellent')
• When the CEO does not answer the question directly; refers to others

This would be like asking a CEO if they plan to put video on the iPod, and getting an answer about what "people" think of watching video on an iPod. As an example of CEO misdirection, NPR has their own to compare with the researchers' "referral to others" point:

For instance, in 2002 NPR interviewed Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar, who later went to prison for securities fraud, about his company's auditing practices.

Here's what he said: "There's no one out there today in the world of public companies who has the former chief accountant for the SEC running their audit committee. We do. There's no one out there who has the pre-eminent governance leader, professor [Jay] Lorsch, for example, running their governance committee. We do."

In other words, Kumar was asked, "Can your books be trusted?" And he replied by saying, "We hire the very best auditors." Larcker says that can be a big warning sign.

The researchers acknowledge their methodology is not foolproof. But others have applied their own methodology to Apple's CEO (specifically, his statements) and reached their own conclusions.

Today, cNet reaches back to 2003 to call Jobs an all-out liar:

• In 2003, in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference, Jobs said Apple wouldn't do well in the cell phone business. Flash forward a few years.
• During that same interview, he said Apple was not working on a tablet. "There are no plans to make a tablet," Jobs said. "It turns out people want keyboards.... We look at the tablet, and we think it is going to fail." Apparently, Apple filed a patent in 2004 for a tabletlike device. It may have been related to the iPhone, but to completely write off the tablet concept seems a tad suspect (of course, touch-screen technology has changed between 2004 and 2010).

This was along the lines of a February post where Brian Chen detailed Jobs' skills at verbal misdirection and broke down individual statements:

(...) Not Interested in the Cellphone Business In that same interview with Mossberg, Jobs said he didn't feel Apple would fare well in the cellphone business.

"I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cellphones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cellphone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cellphones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA."

Of course, in hindsight that quote served as a clue that Apple wasn't making a traditional cellphone, but rather a brand new device that fused the characteristics of an iPod, a PDA and a cellphone into one. The result was the iPhone. Still, a tricky statement nonetheless. (...)

In the above example, Jobs breaks one of the key indicators of the Stanford researchers' deception model by using an "I" statement, but then combines it with overuse of team language. This could all be nothing more than a case of seeing what someone says when they don't really want to answer your question. However, in the ongoing game of rumors and product announcements a company's relationship with its customers, media, and investors might be seen as an economy of confidence.

Do you think Jobs passes the researchers' truthiness test? If you're thinking that the only way we could know for sure is if there were a program to analyze CEO statements, the researchers are already a step ahead. Larcker and Zakolyukina have used their data to create a "speech detector" that issues red flags when signs of deception pop up. But until we get our hands on a CEO Lie Detector, we can read the results of their study in this .PDF.

Image from today's Live Blog: Apple's "Back to the Mac" Event (iLife, OS X Lion, New Macbook Air).

ReadWriteWeb will be reporting from the 15th Stanford Accel Symposium on February 25th. Hosted by Accel (the VC firm that funded Facebook, Etsy, and dozens of other companies we write about here) and Media X at Stanford, the event boasts some big name speakers, such as the CEOs of eBay and WPP.

Who Will Speak?

The keynote talks will be delivered by:

• John Donahoe, CEO, eBay Inc.
• Sir Martin Sorrell, Chairman and CEO, WPP

The speakers and panelists include:

• Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Founder, Brightcove, Inc.
• Adam Bain, President of Audience Network, Fox
• Jim Bankoff, CEO, SB Nation
• Matthew Barzun, National Finance Team for Barack Obama and former Chief Strategy Officer, CNET Networks, Inc
• John Battelle, Chairman and CEO, Federated Media
• Rob Bearden, former President, Jboss; President, Springsource
• Dave Berman, President of Worldwide Sales and Service, WebEx
• Tim Cadogan, CEO, OpenX
• Duke Chung, CEO, Parature
• Scott Dietzen, SVP of Communications and Products, Yahoo!
• Curt Hecht, President, Vivaki Nerve Center
• Chris Hughes, Facebook, and Architect of Obama's Digital Campaign Strategies
• Bob Muglia, President Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corp.
• Raghu Ramakrishnan, Chief Scientist for Audience and Research Fellow at Yahoo, Inc.
• Mark Read, Strategy Director, WPP
• Mike Schroepfer, VP Engineering, Facebook
• Quincy Smith, CEO, CBS Interactive
• David Thompspn, CEO, Genius Inc., former CMO, WebEx
• Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO, Arista Networks
• Zack Urlocker, VP of Products, Sun Microsystems
• Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps; former COO, eBay, Inc.
• Jeff Weiner, President, LinkedIn; former EIR, Accel Partners

What Will They Talk About?

Here are just some of the topics these big names will cover:

1. The Obama Administration's Impact on Innovation Sectors
2. Digital Media Advertiser and Technology Priorities in a Downsizing World
3. Trends in Data Center Infrastructure and Cloud Computing
4. Will the Recession Strengthen Open Source or Destroy Profitability?
5. SaaS Crossing the Chasm: Are We There Yet?

What Questions Would You Ask if You Were There?

Tell us in the comments. We will select the best questions and ask them at the conference and then report on the answers. Please be specific: ask a question that relates to one of the above topics; if you want, choose which panelist you would like us to direct your question to.

A group of Stanford University researchers specializing in artificial intelligence, Saxena and Siddharth Batra, and Assistant Professor Andrew Ng, created this new technology they're calling ZunaVision. The embedding technology is driven by an algorithm that first analyzes the video while paying close attention to the section of the scene where the image or video will be embedded. It then subtly alters the color, texture, and lighting of the embedded object to better fit it in with the surroundings. As other objects pass in front of the embed, it disappears from view and as the camera pans and zooms, the algorithm shape-shifts the object accordingly. The appropriate shadows are also added for a more realistic feel. The end result is an embed that looks as if it was there all along, instead of being some obvious insert or overlay that is clearly not a part of the scene.

This type of technology is nothing new to the big Hollywood studios - they've been using similar methods for years in order to do special effects. Until now, however, there hasn't been a way for people to perform these kinds of advanced video edits without investing serious money into professional video editing software. But with ZunaVision , anyone and everyone can accomplish this same task in minutes, with only a click of the mouse.

Revolutionizing Video Ads?

Videographers are already thinking of creative and imaginative ways to use this technology to liven up their videos and amateur films, but the real financial potential of ZunaVision lies in advertising. With ZunaVision, anyone with a video camera could potentially earn money by agreeing to place corporate logos or ads within their videos before uploading them to the internet. That could be a hugely successful venture if the technology was adopted by Google, for example, to become the "AdSense for Video" and integrated with their video-sharing site YouTube.

At the moment, YouTube is experimenting with different methods of monetization, including overlay ads on embeds, post-roll ads, and allowing publishers to bid for sponsored placement of their videos on the site. These methodologies are still too new to provide any conclusive data as to their success just yet. ZunaVision seems to be just as promising, if not more so, than any of these current experiments.

The ZunaVision site features several example of these in-video embeds, which you can see here - there are well over a hundred examples of both user-gen videos and clips from TV and film that demonstrate the technology's potential.

You can sign up and try ZunaVision for yourself by clicking here.

We would love to hear any other tips, from those of you who have created your own Facebook apps. Please leave a comment below.