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Two views from 2009 Google Faculty Summit

The 5th Computer Science Faculty Summit was held by Google last week at their Mountain View campus. This summit was attended by approximately 100 faculties from the schools in the Western hemisphere.

The meeting focused on a collection of technologies that serve to connect and empower people. In the Agenda, voice recognition, responding to crises, power monitoring, collaborative data management and presentations on technologies for automated translation of human language were included.

In the meeting there was also discussion about technologies to make personal systems more secure, and how to teach programming using Android phones. You can read more information of the topics in the Faculty Summit Agenda or check out introductory presentation.

Professor Deborah Estrin, a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and an expert in large-scale sensing of environmental and other information, and Professor John Ousterhout, an expert in distributed operating systems and scripting languages

Google Faculty asked a few of the faculty to provide their perspective on the summit, thinking their views may be more valuable than their own. Professor Deborah Estrin, a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and an expert in large-scale sensing of environmental and Professor John Ousterhout, an expert in distributed operating systems and scripting languages gave their views on the summit. Read full information about Google Faculty Summit 2009.

Professor Deborah Estrin’s perception:

Professor Estrin told that Google has produced a spectacular array of technologies and services that have changed the way we create, access, manage and share information. A very broad range of people samples and experiences Google’s enhancements and new services on a daily basis.

Professor Estrin told that he first attended Google Faculty Summit in 2007 and this was his second summit. He liked this summit very much then in 2007. He told that Google faculty talked with them as colleagues instead of just visitors.

Estrin had not processed all the impressions, facts, figures and URLs but there were few things that impressed him most. They are as follows:

• Google seed and sponsor all sorts of creative works, from K-12 computer science learning opportunities to the open data kit that supports data-gathering projects worldwide.
• The way Google simultaneously launches production services while making great advances in really hard technical areas such as machine translation and voice search, and how these two threads are fully intertwined and feed off of one another.
• The commitment of company to think high and support their employees on their concerns and take cares in the larger geopolitical sphere. From the creation of Flu Trends to the support of a new "Crisis Response Hackathon" (an event that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to jointly sponsor to help programmers find opportunities to use their technical skills to solve societal problems), Googlers are not just encouraged to donate dollars to important causes — they are encouraged to use their technical skills to create new solutions and tools to address the world’s all-too-many challenges.

Professor John Ousterhout perception:

I spent Thursday and Friday this week at Google for their annual Faculty Summit. After listening to descriptions of several Google projects and talking with Googlers and the other faculty attendees, I left with two overall takeaways. First, it’s becoming clear that information at scale is changing science and engineering. If you have access to enormous datasets, it opens up whole new avenues for scientific discovery and for solving problems. For example, Google’s machine translation tools take advantage of "parallel texts": documents that have been translated by humans from one language to another, with both forms available. By comparing the sentences from enormous numbers of parallel texts, machine translation tools can develop effective translation tools using simple probabilistic approaches. The results are better than any previous attempts at computerized translation, but only if there are billions of words available in parallel texts. Another example of using large-scale information is Flu Trends, which tracks the spread of flu by counting the frequency of certain search terms in Google’s search engine; the data is surprisingly accurate and available more quickly than that from traditional approaches.

My second takeaway is that it’s crucial to keep as much information as possible publicly available. It used to be that much of science and engineering was driven by technology: whoever had the biggest particle accelerator or the fastest computer had an advantage. From now on, information will be just as important as technology: whoever has access to the most information will make the most discoveries and create the most exciting new products. If we want to maintain the leadership position of the U.S., we must find ways to make as much information as possible freely available. There will always be vested commercial interests that want to restrict access to information, but we must fight these interests. The overall benefit to society of publishing information outweighs the benefit to individual companies from restricting it.

Source: Google Official Blog