Posted by Kevin McCurley, Research Team It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Randy Pausch, who taught computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy was well-known by many within the research community, including quite a number of us here at Google. Alfred Spector, our Vice President of Research, was his Ph.D. advisor. Rich Gossweiler, a Senior Research Scientist, was his first Ph.D. student. Several other former colleagues and coauthors )Joshua Bloch,

Posted by Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer, and Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research The emergence of extremely large datasets, well beyond the capacity of almost any single computer, has challenged traditional and contemporary methods of analysis in the research world. While a simple spreadsheet or modest database remains sufficient for some research, problems in the domain of "computational science,

Posted by Jeff Walz and Kevin McCurley The world's research and educational infrastructures are tightly intertwined. Research universities enable students to participate in research activities, and research contributes to the vitality of the educational experience. At Google, we also recognize the importance of education to our research and engineering activities. In addition to our own in-house activities,

Posted by Ashok C. Popat, Research Scientist Statistical methods of text analysis have become increasingly sophisticated over the years. A good example is automated topic analysis using latent models, two variants of which are Probabilistic latent semantic analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation . Earlier this year, Amit Gruber , a Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,

Posted by Jeremy Brewer We've gotten an incredible amount of positive feedback about Sky in Google Earth , which lets Google Earth users explore the sky above them with hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies taken from astronomy imagery. From the start though, we have wanted to open the sky up to everyone. As a first step, we've been hard at work developing tools to let astronomers add their own imagery, and we think we've come up with something that does the job nicely.

Posted by Andy Connolly and Ryan Scranton At Google we are always interested in creating new ways to share ideas and information and applying these techniques to different research fields. Astronomy provides a great opportunity with an abundance of images and information that are accessible to researchers and indeed, anyone with an interest in the stars. With the release of the Google Earth 4.

Posted by Michael Lancaster and Josh Estelle, Software Engineers Whenever we talk to university researchers, we hear a consistent message: they wish they had Google infrastructure. In pursuit of our company mission , we have built an elaborate set of systems for collecting, organizing, and analyzing information about the web. Operating and maintaining such an infrastructure is a high barrier to entry for many researchers.

Posted by Ziv Bar-Yossef and Kevin McCurley, Research Team The pace of innovation on the World Wide Web continues unabated more than fifteen years after the first servers went live. The web was initially used by only a small community of scientists, but there are now over a billion people on the planet who use the web in their lives. The World Wide Web grows and changes as a young organism might, reflecting the social forces of the users and information producers.

Posted by Kevin McCurley, Research Team We've recently launched a Google Research web site that we'll be updating to provide information about research activities at Google. Among other things, one thing you'll find there is the ability to search and view videos of talks at Google . One of the best features of working at Google is the rich variety of talks that we can attend, both technical and general interest. Most of these are videotaped for later viewing.