21 cool projects from Google Research

March 3, 2010 Duncan Marketing

Peter Norvig – Director of Research at Google presented the keynote at SMX Expo.

Peter Norvig is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. At Google Inc he was Director of Search Quality, responsible for the core web search algorithms from 2002-2005, and has been Director of Research from 2005 on.  At the SMX West conference he gave a keynote about what Google Research is working on, some of the big successes and what’s on the horizon.  This was written during the session.

21 projects from Google research in 15 minutes:

1. Person Finder – after Chili earthquake.  Find and connect with loved ones that you cannot reach.
2. PowerMeter - Plug in device and monitor how much power you are using each day.  People using cut power by 20%
3. Earth Engine – Google Earth overlay – new deforestation, forest etc
4. Trike and snowmobile for google maps
5. User Photos in Streetview – user uploaded and geolocated
6. Image Swirl – search query for similar images
7. Web-Scale Image Annotation-  set of images and queries that trigger images and match them up (different languages)
8. Image Rotation Captcha – making it easier…using image rotation…move to straight up
9. Goggles – runs on phone w/camera and google with tell you what it is..or business card and make a contact
10. Discoutinuous Video Scene-carving – modify aspect ratio for video
11. Sharing Cluster Data – share data to academic community (data on jobs running in our clusters)
12. App Inventor for android – introductory program development environment on how to program on the phones – high schools and colleges
13. Speech Recognition – working now on phones
14. Punctuation /Capitalization in Transcribed Speech
15. Translating phone – coming…text translation through voice to text to language
16. Low-Resource MT: Yiddish
17. Sound Understanding – in development.  Go to Youtube – want something that sounds like a rooster…done with stabilized auditory image..image processing algorithms
18. Google Squared – building a db of attributes by bundling together
19. Clustering of words within a context – Whistler – all words associated
20. Attribute Extraction – Basic foods and attributes associated
21. Browser Size – overlay over any web page. Show what percentage of browsers can view the page

Norvig – we are pushing very hard to do things useful.  Some of the biggest things that have come out of the 20% project (gmail and adsense).  20% of a Googlers time can be spent on special projects.

Things top of mind – Education search, not just in the next five minutes but help during the course of a semester or the year.  Less about short-term search and more about a path to find an answer.

Something that is way over hyped is page rank especially with the advent of real-time search.

Last question – Do you have a solution to email overload?  We are working on it…who knows what the future holds for email, may not even be email.  Could be Wave or Buzz.

Google is constantly pushing the boundaries and building applications / functions that initially they may not see the application. The hope is that one day they might solve a problem.

Google, Norvig, SEO,