02-18

Show and Tell, Search and Research

Given a query where the answer is sitting on a single web page, search engines do a decent job of identifying that web page. Some queries, however, are difficult to express in text: an image is worth a thousand query terms. At other times, a textual query is sufficient, but it's difficult to type (walking, driving). And some research tasks don't have a simple answer already computed: it's necessary to synthesize an answer from multiple sources. I'll talk about some of the research projects at Google directed at solving these problems, including Google Goggles, Search by Voice, and Google Squared, and some of the other challenges that we're tackling that go beyond returning ten blue links.

Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist, responsible for developing new high-precision search techniques for use in the Google search engine. He went on to found Google's first satellite software engineering center, located in New York City, where he is currently an Engineering Director. Nevill-Manning joined Google from the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Prior to Rutgers, Nevill-Manning was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department of Stanford University, where he developed eMOTIF, a software suite used by many pharmaceutical research laboratories to identify the role of particular proteins within cells.

Nevill-Manning has published 41 research papers and received a National Science Foundation Career Grant. A native of New Zealand, Nevill-Manning earned a BS in Computer Science from Canterbury University and a PhD in Computer Science from Waikato University.