Workshops and Conferences

Our goal is to foster collaboration and innovation by sponsoring and organizing events that bring the academic community together.

We host Faculty Summits, workshops, and we sponsor research symposia that highlight the latest and best research from scientists and engineers across the globe. Our researchers serve on conference committees and journal editorial boards, actively participate in professional societies, host faculty speakers and interns onsite, and publish widely across top conference venues. These activities are a great way for us to collaborate with and learn from our academic colleagues; they also give the academic community the opportunity to learn more about our innovation and technology.

Our outreach spans the globe as we contribute to regional and international initiatives in core areas relating to our mission.

Add Research at Google to your circles on Google+ to stay in touch with our academic conference involvement, and to read about Google's research, innovation and people.

Conference Spotlight: Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)

Researchers from various groups across Engineering at Google will be in attendance at the Web Search and Data Mining conference, WSDM (“wisdom”), this February in Rome. WSDM brings together experts in search and data mining on the Web and the Social Web. Google values the exchange of ideas at this highly selective, single-track conference. In 2013 we’ll be presenting 6 papers, with topics ranging from sharding social networks to optimizing budget constrained spend in search advertising. If you’re participating in the next WSDM conference, we look forward to seeing you there.

Past Event Spotlights:

NIPS 2012

NIPS 2012 takes place in South Lake Tahoe from December 3rd - 8th. NIPS brings together researchers in all aspects of neural and statistical information processing and computation, and their applications, for a highly selective, single-track meeting that includes nightly poster presentations of refereed papers. Google's Research Director Fernando Pereira is reprising his role as general co-chair of the conference, and Googlers will be in attendance presenting papers, tutorials and workshops. We will also be supporting the co-located Women in Machine Learning Workshop, and hosting a Google Doctoral Forum for PhD students onsite.

OSDI 2012

Google was in Hollywood recently for the premier computer systems research conference, OSDI. Google had a large presence, with 26 authors winning the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award for "Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database". We were also very proud to see that Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat were jointly recognized with the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, for their contributions to computer systems research-- in part because of the profound impact they've had on industry and the systems research community, through work that includes GFS, MapReduce and BigTable.

SoCC 2012

The 2012 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) took place in San Jose, CA from October 14th-17th. SoCC was the third in a new series of symposia that bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners interested in cloud computing. This was the first year that SoCC was held independently (SoCC was previously held in conjunction with SIGMOD and SOSP), which is indicative of the explosive growth in and importance of cloud technologies. Google’s Alfred Spector was this year’s general chair and our technical team members attended and gave tutorials.

VLDB 2012

From August 27th - 31st, Google engineers and researchers joined peers from industry and academia at VLDB 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference featured a robust schedule of talks, tutorials, demonstrations and workshops, and Google had representation throughout the different elements in addition to sponsoring the conference and hosting our fifth Doctoral Forum. We were glad to contribute to and learn from others interested in data management and databases; congratulations to Googler Gurmeet Singh Manku who received the VLDB 10-Year Best Paper Award for "Approximate Frequency Counts over Data Streams."

UAI Conference on Catalina Island, August 2012

Google was at the 28th conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), one of the premier venues for research related to probabilistic models and reasoning under uncertainty. This year's conference set several new records: the largest number of submissions (304 papers, last year 285), the largest number of participants (216, last year 191), the largest number of tutorials (4, last year 3), and the largest number of workshops (4, last year 1). The event featured an invited talk on the causality by Judea Pearl, winner of the 2011 Turing Award, and two papers by Googlers: "Latent Structured Ranking," by Jason Weston and John Blitzer and "Hokusai - Sketching Streams in Real Time," by Sergiy Matusevych (Yahoo!), Alex Smola and Amr Ahmed. You can read more about Google’s presence at the conference in this Research blog post.

NA Faculty Summit in Mountain View, CA, July 2012

Our annual Computer Science Faculty Summits bring together leading faculty and Google researchers to explore current research ideas and discuss future challenges. This year, we welcomed around 100 faculty members from over 65 universities globally to our Mountain View campus from July 25 - 27. Participants engaged in two days of talks, sessions, and panels on interactions in an increasingly digital world. The future of education was also a hot topic, and an online education panel featured talks by Peter Norvig, Daphne Koller, and Bradley Horowitz. There are countless new ways in which we interact with devices, each other, and the world around us, and vast potential for further innovation in this space. You can read reflections here.