Google Technology RoundTable

• Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture, by Luiz Barroso, Jeffrey Dean, and Urs Hoelzle
• Jeff Dean's page
• Amit Singhal's page
• Video: Jeff Dean: Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions

Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives

Alfred joined Google in November of 2007 and is responsible for the research across Google and also a growing collection of special initiatives - typically projects with high strategic value to the company, but somewhat outside the mainstream of current products.

Previously, Alfred was Vice President of Strategy and Technology for IBM's Software Business. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Services and Software Research across IBM. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems, and was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in highly reliable and scalable distributed computing.

Alfred received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and his AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems.

Jeff Dean, Google Fellow

Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow working in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Jeff has designed and implemented large portions of the company's advertising, crawling, indexing and query serving systems, along with various pieces of the distributed computing infrastructure that underlying most of Google's products. At various times, Jeff has also worked on improving search quality, statistical machine translation, and various internal software development tools. He has had significant involvement in the engineering hiring process.

Prior to joining Google, Jeff was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval. Earlier, he worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Jeff is an author of more than 20 publications and a co-inventor on more than 25 patents. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Economics (summa cum laude) from the University of Minnesota and received his MS and PhD in computer science from the University of Washington.

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Amit Singhal has worked in the field of search for over fifteen years, first as an academic researcher and now as Google engineer. His research interests include information retrieval, its application to web search, web graph analysis, and user interfaces for search. At Google, Amit works with the Search Quality team, the team responsible for Google's search algorithms. Prior to joining Google in 2000, Amit was a senior member of technical staff at AT&T Labs.

Amit has an undergraduate degree in India from IIT, Roorkee, a MS from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from Cornell University, all in Computer Science. At Cornell, he studied Information Retrieval with the late Gerard Salton, one of the founders of the field. Amit has co-authored more than thirty scientific papers and numerous patents.