This sounds interesting, and it’s highly statistical:
Organizing the world’s information
(the world is bigger than you think!)
Craig Neville-Manning
Engineering Director and Senior Research Scientist
Google Inc.
Columbia University Computer Science
2005 Distinguished Lecture Series
Monday, September 12, 2005
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Schapiro Center Davis Auditorium, 4th Floor CEPSRABSTRACT:
Google indexes over 10 billion documents, including web pages,
images, scanned books, video, satellite and aerial photos, maps,
scholarly articles, and business listings. It makes this information
available on the internet and to wireless devices. We help
individuals organize their personal data: email and local documents.
Using natural language processing and optimization techniques, we
place ads on behalf of advertisers on search results pages and on
content pages across the internet. Doing all of this at scale with
consistent speed and accuracy pushes the boundaries of computer
science: we conduct research on distributed systems, information
retrieval, machine learning, user interfaces, and so on. During this
talk, I will discuss some of these challenges, our solutions, and
some of the issues we’re grappling with right now. I’ll also discuss
initiatives like the Maps API, which enable others to build
applications on top of Google technology.Background reading: http://labs.google.com/papers/
BIOGRAPHY:
Craig Neville-Manning founded Google’s first remote engineering center,
located in midtown Manhattan, where he is an Engineering
Director. Prior to joining Google four years ago as a Senior Research
Scientist, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science
Department at Rutgers University, and was a post-doctoral fellow in
the Biochemistry department at Stanford University. His research
interests center on using techniques from machine learning, data
compression and computational biology to provide more structured
search over information. Dr. Neville-Manning received his PhD from the
University of Waikato in New Zealand.