Peter Norvig

Google
Peter Norvig
At Google engineers and researchers are not two different groups of people. This culture is very unique to Google and Google shows off the product prototypes developed using this approach online at Google Labs. Most of these prototypes are built by Google employees who use 20% of their working time at Google to work on their own ideas.

Google has expanded from searching webpages to searching videos, books, places and even files on your own desktop. This expansion is made possible though Google's understanding and classification of information, facilitated by the application of algorithms in the domains of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. Google has also made use of innovative technologies such as AJAX to improve the accessibility of web interfaces.

Some of the products that have come out of the Google Labs experiment are Google Suggest which autocompletes queries as they're typed. Google Sets is another feature where you can specify two or more keywords and generate a whole set depending on the commonality and relationship between the two objects. Personalised search varies the results returned depending upon your profile and preferences. Google Maps allows users to explore territories by dragging the map in the direction they are interested in.

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Peter Norvig is the Director of Search Quality at Google Inc. He is a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. Previously he was head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists performing NASA's research and development in autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis, neuro-engineering, collaborative systems research, and simulation-based decision-making. Before that he was Chief Scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet comparison shopping service; Chief designer at Harlequin Inc; and Senior Scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Dr. Norvig received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Faculty Member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.

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This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

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