The Computer Science Colloquium

Pedro J. Moreno
(Google)

"Organizing the world's information (the world is bigger than you think!) "

Google indexes over 10 billion documents, including web pages, images, scanned books, video, satellite and aerial photos, maps, scholarly articles, business listing. 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/

BIO: Pedro J. Moreno is a senior researcher at Google. His main interests are in the practical applications of speech recognition technology to many applications of web search. In the past Dr. Moreno has being involved in the design of HP Labs audio indexing engine SpeechBot. He has also worked in the areas of text processing, image classification, bioinformatics and bio signal interpretation. He has a Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University and was a former Fullbright scholar.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc. and Netlogic, Inc.