Google Researcher Speaks on Company’s Latest Innovations

UC Berkeley alumnus Peter Norvig, Google's director of machine learning, search quality, and research, spoke in front of nearly 65 students, staff and community members yesterday about some of Google's newest innovations and the future of data analysis.

Norvig spoke at length about Statistical Machine Translation, a computer translation program currently under development.

He said the goal of this program is to improve translation, making it more accurate and human-like rather than choppy and literal.

Google competed this past year against companies such as IBM, testing their program's ability to translate from Arabic and Chinese to English, Norvig said.

The translation program is an example of how the ability to utilize large amounts of data is helping to expand the resources available to users, he said.

Google is also currently developing what Norvig described as "sets", in which the user types in a few different words and receives a list of related words.

This technology would help searches be more accurate, he said.

Another new project that Google is developing is one that Norvig said he hopes will help them better understand users. It is the creation of user trend graphs that track the volume of different searches at different times of the year.

"This is only an idea of new things we are working on, and the ways in which technology can be used. There is so much data and there are so many things you can do with it," Norvig said.

Norvig's experience in computer science and at Google made his speech memorable and important for people interested in the field, said Gary Baldwin, executive director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

"Google is a huge success story. There is so much behind-the-scenes research that people may not be aware of. With these enormous resources, Google is always trying to do things like improving communications in new and better ways as we come to live in a more global community," he said.

Anand Kulkarni, an industrial engineering and operations research graduate student, said he attended the event because he is interested in machine learning and information extraction.

"Coming from someone at Google, news on developments in those areas is that much more valuable," he said.

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