Search Engines Through the Ages: A Brief History of How We Seek Information

Anna Patterson, Ph.D.
VP of Engineering and Artificial Intelligence for Google
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
7:00 – 8:15 pm, BCC Auditorium

Google’s Dr. Anna Patterson will explore, “Search Engines Through the Ages: A Brief History of How We Seek Information,” 7 p.m., Wed., Oct. 22, at Berkeley City College’s Auditorium, 2050 Center St. The event is free and open to the public. Reserve your ticket at http://tinyurl.com/annapatterson. Details about the event are at http://www.msri.org/general_events/20903.

 

Accessing information has radically changed through the advent of the internet, as have searching for—and finding—knowledge, news, and gossip. Dr. Patterson takes us back in time before “to google” became the synonym for searching the web, and looks at the different ways we’ve searched for information, from taxonomies to text to algorithms, and beyond. She explains these changes, presents the latest developments in internet search engines and how current developments will impact the future.

 

Dr. Patterson is Vice President of Engineering and Artificial Intelligence for Google. She was the architect of one of Google’s largest search serving systems TeraGoogle and also led efforts in Web Search, Ads and Shopping. The focus of her current work is on text understanding.

 

Her talk is part of the “Not on the Test: The Pleasures and Uses of Mathematics” series of six public lectures in 2014–15, which are jointly presented by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and Berkeley City College (BCC). They are made possible with funding from the Simons Foundation.