Title: Applied computer science at Google

Speaker: Arun Swami

Affiliation: Google, USA.

Date: January 13, 2009

Abstract:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Towards that end, a number of concepts from Computer Science have been applied in interesting ways. In this talk, we discuss the application of these concepts. In particular, we attempt the challenges imposed by the scale of the data that Google works with. We will leave lots of time for questions from the audience

About the speaker:

Arun Swami graduated in computer science from IIT Bombay with the president's Gold medal in 1983. He earned his Masters degree in 1985 and a PhD in 'Optimization of large join queries' from Stanford University in 1989. Prior to Google, Arun worked at Adobe, Xerox PARC, SGI, IBM, and a number of startups including one he founded. He has published extensively in the areas of data mining and query optimization. His paper on data mining is ranked among the top 20 most cited papers in Computer Science.

Arun was a key member of the team that started IBM's research in data mining and has published seminal work in this area. He has created innovative systems using data mining, personalization technology, database algorithms and optimization algorithms. A common theme of many problems he has worked on is that they are hard analysis or optimization problems dealing with large amounts of data. Arun has provided technical leadership and worked with customers and venture-backed firms in a number of settings.