Google’s New Research Roundtable Series

While I might not always understand what goes on behind the iron curtain at Google, I am always impressed with their innovations, their spirit as well as their philosophy of open thinking…and the new Google Research Roundtable Series is no exception.

Google Research is not like most industrial research labs. For one thing, we strive to build systems that are used in the real world. We provide our researchers with an environment where they can think freely and have a real impact.

Rather than just confining research opportunities to a select few, Google expects all engineers to be engaged in the innovation process. Engineers are expected to spend 20% of their time working on a project of their own choosing - Google News and Gmail are just two of the many interesting projects that have emerged this way. labs.google.com gives us a chance to showcase some of our newer technologies, and provides a way for users to give us feedback on what you think of them.

Google also encourages our people to engage the scientific community, publishing their results in top journals and conferences and contributing to open source software projects. These contributions are far from “simply academic”; many of our published technologies - Chubby, GFS, MapReduce, and Bigtable - have become integral parts of the world’s most advanced computing infrastructure. That computing infrastructure provides us with the capability to address problems that others can only dream about, using some of the most interesting data in the world. Some places talk about petabyte datasets in the abstract; we work with them on a regular basis.

For more technical information on some Google projects, see the Google Research Roundtable page.

Google started out as our founders’ graduate school research project. From those humble beginnings, Google has grown to be the world’s most advanced search engine - and a lot more. We continue to hire the brightest people we can find, and we turn them loose to organize the world’s information and make it more useful.