THIS WEEK's COLLOQUIUM POSTPONED:

Abstract

THIS COLLOQUIUM IS POSTPONED, and WILL PROBABLY TAKE PLACE NEXT WEEK INSTEAD. STAY TUNED. THERRE IS NO COLLOQ ON WED DEC 1.

Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science.Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user interface design. In this talk, I'll go over some challenges in these areas, discuss some interesting applications related to search that Google has developed over the past few years.

William Coughran is currently serving as VP Engineering at Google Inc, working on large-scale distributed computing and infrastructure systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. Prior to joining Google, he founded and served as CEO and other executive roles at Entrisphere in Silicon Valley. Before that, he was part of Bell Labs including being the head of the Computing Sciences Resea years, and highlight some of the behind-the-scenes pieces of infrastructure that have been built in order to operate Google's services.