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 Phil Long Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence in which, naturally enough, the aim is to get computers to learn: things like improving performance over time, and recognizing general tendencies among a number of specific cases. We have many ways to exploit Machine Learning programs, and a lot of data to give them. Machine Learning helps us to estimate what content users like most, what content is even legitimate, and how to match ads to content.

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.

Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer We care a lot about scalability at Google. An algorithm that works only on a small scale doesn't cut it when we are talking global access, millions of people, millions of search queries. We think big and love to talk about big ideas, so we're planning our first ever conference on scalable systems. It will take place on June 23 at our Seattle office.

Posted by Shumeet Baluja, Michele Covell, Pedro Moreno & Eugene Weinstein Text isn't the only source of information on the web! We've been working on a variety of projects related to audio and visual recognition. One of the fundamental constraints that we have in designing systems at Google is the huge amounts of data that we need to process rapdily. A few of the research papers that have come out of this work are shown here. In the first pair of papers,

Posted by Peter Norvig Everyone else is giving you year-end top ten lists of their favorite movies, so we thought we'd give you ours , but we're skipping Cars and The Da Vinci Code and giving you autonomous cars and open source code. Our top twenty )we couldn't stop at ten(: Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge : Sebastian Thrun stars in the heartwarming drama of a little car that could.

Posted by Lilly Irani & Jens Riegelsberger, User Experience team 9am Mountain View, California. 6pm Zurich, Switzerland. The two of us sit separated by thousands miles, telephones tucked under our ears, talking about this blog post and typing words and edits into Google Docs . As we talk about the title, we start typing into the same paragraph - and Lilly gets a warning: "You've edited a paragraph that Jens has been editing!

Posted by Proud Googlers We're usually a modest bunch, but we we couldn't help but let you know about some honors and awards bestowed on Googlers recently: Ramakrishnan Srikant is the winner of the 2006 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award for his work on pruning techniques for the discovery of association rules, and for developing new data mining approaches that respect the privacy of people in the data base. Henry Rowley and Shumeet Baluja, along with CMU professor Takeo Kanade,

Posted by Alex Franz and Thorsten Brants, Google Machine Translation Team Here at Google Research we have been using word n-gram models for a variety of R&D projects, such as statistical machine translation , speech recognition, spelling correction , entity detection, information extraction, and others. While such models have usually been estimated from training corpora containing at most a few billion words,

Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager As we noted earlier , we're hosting our first-ever Conference on Test Automation in London in September. We've heard from many interested parties, and now have 13 excellent presentations lined up. Now we are soliciting people who want to attend. Because we expect lots of interest and space is limited, we're asking everyone who's interested to write a short note )400 words or less( on why you want to be there.

Posted by Michele Covell & Shumeet Baluja, Research Scientists Euro ITV )the interactive television conference( took place in Athens last week. The presentations included a diverse collection of user studies, new application areas, and exploratory business models. One of the main themes was the integration of multiple information sources. For example, during a time-out in a live sporting event, some viewers may enjoy reviewing highlight footage,

Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software Engineer I remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. students to write a binary search, and then dissected one of our implementations in front of the class. Of course it was broken, as were most of our implementations. This made a real impression on me, as did the treatment of this material in his wonderful Programming Pearls )Addison-Wesley, 1986; Second Edition, 2000(.

Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist Because we want to provide everyone with access to all the world's information, including information written in every language, one of the exciting projects at Google Research is machine translation. Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars. Several research systems, including ours,