Google Faculty Summit

This week I attended the two-day 2009 Google Faculty Summit at the Googleplex. Here are some highlights:

• Quite some time was spent presenting Google.org, which is an umbrella organization for Google's activities for doing good. Apparently, Google has a statute to use one percent of its profits and equity for this. Previously, Google.org acted more like a classical philantropy, giving money, but is now shifting to doing things where Google's core competencies can come into play. One prominent example is Google Flu Trends.
• Other technologies that much time was spent on were Android and Wave. The latter is still not ready, but the demo was cool, and Lars Rasmussen, the presenter, is a really funny guy -- check out this older Wave video on Youtube. (It seems that together with his brother Jens, he initiated both Wave and Google Maps; that's really impressive.) What I liked most was automatically translated instant messaging between people who do not speak the same language.
• There was also an interesting talk by Brad Chen on Native Client, a way of running native code in a browser in a -- hopefully -- secure way. Brad's claim that security (broadly construed, I really think he meant that -- one will be able to judge from the video once it goes online whether I misunderstood him) is easy was ridiculous, though.
• The technical talk on Google's approach to machine translation by Franz Josef Och was one of the best, in my opinion.
• A talk on Google Book Search spent a considerable amount of time explaining the terms of the settlement that was recently reached with authors and publishers. Personally, I still have a too lively recollection of Brewster Kahle's criticisms he made at his recent Cornell talk to be happy about all this.
• There were also nice round table discussions. I joined the one where Alon Halevy answered questions on the Fusiontables project. It's a really cool project (and there seems to be a great opportunity to combine FusionTables with Cornell's Youtopia project, once the Fusiontables API becomes available), but it is really still work in progress and a lot of essential features are not available yet.
• There was a talk on Youtube.EDU by Obadiah Greenberg from Youtube. It is an effort in which many leading universities put videos of entire courses online and make them available for free to everyone. It's an amazing resource. Youtube.EDU can display the most subscribed universities. The top three are Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. They now offer hundreds of courses on Youtube.EDU; for example, MIT has moved its OpenCourseWare initiative to Youtube. Virtually all of Cornell's peers have fully embraced Youtube.EDU and we, in Computer Science (which accounts for a large part of the course materials on Youtube.EDU), are not part of this at all. It's a real pity, we may be missing the boat here.
  

I won't say more on the talks here; I expect the videos to be available on Youtube soon; once that's the case, I'll add links to them.

Overall, the summit was perfectly organized, and all the Googlers showed a great sense of humor as well as humility. (Some things went wrong here at last year's summit, judging from the videos that one can find on Youtube.)