Current challenges from the perspective of Google

2010 Google Faculty Summit: Opening Remarks, same video from Techminer

The challenges are: Innovation begins with

• commitment to advancing technology
• rich domain of work due to our mission (Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. )
• grand challenge problems
• internal consensus that production issues are often as challenging / fun as pure invention
• technical leverage
  • a focus on services
  • google common distributed system
  • empiricism and a holistic approach to design

Blurring of the border between research and engineering

Scale / prodigiousness

• giga: 10^9, tera: 10^12, peta: 10^15, exa: 10^18, zetta: 10^21
• publicized: bigtable of 70 petabytes, 10M ops/sec
• warehouse computing possibilities? 100 x 10 x 20 x 20 x 40 = 16 000 000 nodes
• some representative numbers
  • storage: 10^18 → 10^20-21
  • users: 10^9 → 10^10
  • devices: 10^? → 10^12 (100 per user)
  • network: 10^20, now → 10^21/year, 32KB/sec for 1B people
  • apps: 10^5 → 10^6-7 or more
• e.g. embedded car systems: 30-50 ECUs, 100M lines of codes

Research Challenges in Ideal Distributed Computing

• alternative design that would give better energy efficiency at lower utilization
• server OS design aimed at many highly-connected machines in one building
• unifying abstractions for exploiting parallelism beyond inter-transaction parallelism and map-reduce
• latency reduction
• a general model of replication including consistency choices, explained and codified
• machine learning techniques applied to monitoring/controlling such systems
• automatic dynamic world-wide placement of data & computation to minimize latency and/or cost given constraints on government regulations
• building retrieval systems that efficiently and usabily deal with ACLs
• holistic models of privacy
• the user interface to a user’s diverse processing and state

Totally Transparent Processing

• the set of all user devices
• the set of all human languages
• the set of all modalities (text, voice, image, video)
• the set of all corpora (normal web, deep web, books, periodicals, blogs, geo-data, health data, scientific data)

“Hybrid” Intelligence Research Challenges in Transparent Computing Hybrid intelligence

• endless applications, with new user interface implications
• addressing limits to data
• techniques to integrate user-feedback in acceptable fashions
• approaches to new signal
• explanation, scale, and variance minimization in machine learning
• information fusion/learning across diverse signals - The Combination Hypothesis, more generally
• usability: devices and subpopulations
• privacy

Domains of Applications

• search engines
• translation
• speech recognition
• vision
• remedial education / personal health / epidemology / economic prediction / societal/environmental optimization / social networks in ever more clever/useful ways / humanities and social sciences / multi-player gaming

Focused Program: Culuromics

• Digital Humanities Culturomics
• Goal: Advance the field of culuromics as an important interface between history, linguistics, sociology, and theoretical and computational sciences

Focused Program: Worldly Knowledge

• World Knowledge: extracting facts in context
• Goal: Teach computers to learn how to read about specific places and the people and events associated with them

Focused Center Program: AMP Lab (Berkeley)

Bringing Technology to Schools & Universities

Technology Leadership: Google Code University