IC Colloquium : Google Engineering Center Zurich: Technology and Innovation for Web Search
Event details
| Date | 29.10.2012 |
| Hour | 16:15 › 17:30 |
| Speaker | Thomas Hofmann, Google |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
Zurich is home to one of the largest Google development centers worldwide, which today hosts more than 800 engineers. Active projects span over many product areas, including Web Search, Online Advertising E-Commerce, You Tube, Google Maps, and Gmail, just to name the largest ones. In this talk, I will present highlights of projects in the broader area of Web search, which have been highly impactful for our users, but which also involve many interesting computer science challenges. Examples include freshness in ranking, entity linking, location inference, transit routing, and interactive data exploration.
Biography
Thomas Hofmann received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1997 and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at MIT and at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute. From 1999 until 2004 he was Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Between 2004 and 2006, he held a position as a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, while also serving as the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems. He is also co-founder and former CEO & Chief Scientist of Recommind Inc, a privately owned, global company focusing on enterprise search, predictive technologies and text analytics. Since July 2006, Thomas is Director of Engineering at Google based out of Zurich. He has helped grow the Zurich engineering center from about 50 to more than 1000 employees. During the 6+ years at Google, he has lead projects in various areas, including Web search, e-commerce, and internet advertising. His scientific interests are in machine learning, natural language understanding, and information retrieval. He has published 60+ scientific papers in these areas. Since 2012, he is also an adjunct professor in Computer Science at ETH Zurich.
Zurich is home to one of the largest Google development centers worldwide, which today hosts more than 800 engineers. Active projects span over many product areas, including Web Search, Online Advertising E-Commerce, You Tube, Google Maps, and Gmail, just to name the largest ones. In this talk, I will present highlights of projects in the broader area of Web search, which have been highly impactful for our users, but which also involve many interesting computer science challenges. Examples include freshness in ranking, entity linking, location inference, transit routing, and interactive data exploration.
Biography
Thomas Hofmann received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1997 and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at MIT and at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute. From 1999 until 2004 he was Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Between 2004 and 2006, he held a position as a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, while also serving as the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems. He is also co-founder and former CEO & Chief Scientist of Recommind Inc, a privately owned, global company focusing on enterprise search, predictive technologies and text analytics. Since July 2006, Thomas is Director of Engineering at Google based out of Zurich. He has helped grow the Zurich engineering center from about 50 to more than 1000 employees. During the 6+ years at Google, he has lead projects in various areas, including Web search, e-commerce, and internet advertising. His scientific interests are in machine learning, natural language understanding, and information retrieval. He has published 60+ scientific papers in these areas. Since 2012, he is also an adjunct professor in Computer Science at ETH Zurich.
Links
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- Host : Prof. Christoph Koch
Contact
- Christine Moscioni / Simone Muller