Google: A Computer Scientist's Playground

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Science and Engineering Division

presents a Google seminar

Google: A Computer Scientist's Playground

Dr. Niels Provos
Google's Infrastructure Group, Software Engineer

DATE: Tuesday, October 12, 2004
TIME: 4:30 to 6:00 p.m.
ROOM: Chesebrough Auditorium

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. This
talk describes some of the challenges in these areas and discusses
interesting applications related to search that Google has developed over
the past few years. The talk highlights some of the behind-the-scenes
pieces of infrastructure that we've built in order to operate Google's
services. Along the way, I'll share some interesting observations derived
from Google's web data.

Bio:
Niels Provos joined Google in 2003 and is currently working as Software
Engineer in the Infrastructure group. He received a Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan in 2003 where he studied experimental and theoretical
aspects of computer and network security with Peter Honeyman at the Center
of Information Technology Integration. He is a member of the Honeynet
project and an active contributor to open source projects.