Google Web Search: As Director of Search at Google
from 2002 to 2005 it was my
responsibility to maintain and improve the quality of our core web search
algorithms during a time of twenty-fold growth and increased scrutiny from
webmasters, the public, and the press.
Google Research: As the Director of Research at Google
(starting in 2005) I oversaw the birth and growth of world-leading teams in machine
translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. More recently, as one of multiple
research directors, I worked on education, democratization of AI, and growing the support network for start-up companies around the world.
You can see a CACM article
on our approach to research.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. With
Stuart Russell, co-author of what has been the leading textbook in AI
since 1995 (in four editions), with over 500,000 copies sold and over 48,000 citations.
At the Open Syllabus project, it is a top-ten book in computer science.
NASA: Remote Agent and Mars Exploration Rovers. My
division developed the Remote Agent
experiment that flew on the Deep Space 1 spacecraft. This
was the first use of autonomous planning, scheduling, and fault
identification onboard a spacecraft. It won the 1999 NASA Software of
the Year award and was cited in two AAAI Presidential addresses (by
Nils Nilsson and by Ron Brachman) as one of the top achievements in
the history of AI. The Remote Agent also served as a proving ground
for some of the automated planning software that my team brought to
the tremendously succesful Mars Exploration
Rovers, or MER (which flew after I left NASA).
Junglee: Comparison ads and shopping site. I was
employee #8 at Junglee, one of the first web metasearch sites for
classified ads and shopping. I was responsible for maintaining the
algorithms, dictionaries and grammar rules for text-based extraction.
I then co-led a small team that produced a second-generation
development environment (in Java instead of Perl), and built the
shopping tool that became the Yahoo Shopping site,
and thereafter Junglee's most important product line, prior to
our acquisition by Amazon.com.
Paradigms of AI Programming. This book has been called"The best book on programming ever written".
That is a subjective opinion (and I for one would disagree), but there seems to be a consensus that this is one of the 3 or 4 top
books on Lisp programming.
Open source software. In addition to the commercial software I've
helped develop at Google, Junglee, and elsewhere, I've also donated open
source software that has had an impact:
My Pytudes repository of Python notebooks has 18,000 stars on github and has been widely used.
I oversaw the development of code to accompany the AI textbook. Many volunteers and Google Summer of Code programmers contributed. The project has over 9,000 stars on github.
I developed JScheme (nee SILK), a Scheme implemented in Java, that has been used by
over 1,000
students and many professionals. Tim Hickey and the late Ken Anderson took over most of
the development after the initial versions.
