Google Web Search: As Director of Search at Google from 2002 to 2005 it was myresponsibility to maintain and improve the quality of our core web searchalgorithms during a time of twenty-fold growth and increased scrutiny fromwebmasters, the public, and the press.
Google Research: Asthe Director of Research at Google(starting in 2005) I oversaw the birth and growth of world-leading teams in machinetranslation, speech recognition, and computer vision. More recently, as one ofmultipleresearch directors, I worked on education, democratization of AI, and growing the support network for start-up companies around the world.You can see aCACM articleon our approach to research.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. WithStuart Russell, co-author of what has been the leading textbook in AIsince 1995 (in four editions), with over 500,000 copies sold and over48,000 citations.At theOpen Syllabus project, it is a top-ten book in computer science.
NASA: Remote Agent and Mars Exploration Rovers. Mydivision developed theRemote Agentexperiment that flew on theDeep Space 1 spacecraft. Thiswas the first use of autonomous planning, scheduling, and faultidentification onboard a spacecraft. It won the 1999 NASA Software ofthe Year award and was cited in two AAAI Presidential addresses (byNils Nilsson and byRon Brachman) as one of the top achievements inthe history of AI. The Remote Agent also served as a proving groundfor some of the automated planning software that my team brought tothe tremendously succesfulMars ExplorationRovers, or MER (which flew after I left NASA).
Junglee: Comparison ads and shopping site. I wasemployee #8 at Junglee, one of the first web metasearch sites forclassified ads and shopping. I was responsible for maintaining thealgorithms, dictionaries and grammar rules for text-based extraction.I then co-led a small team that produced a second-generationdevelopment environment (in Java instead of Perl), and built theshopping tool that became the Yahoo Shopping site,and thereafter Junglee's most important product line, prior toour acquisition by Amazon.com.
Paradigms of AI Programming. This book has beencalled"The best book on programming ever written".That is a subjective opinion (and I for one would disagree), but there seems to be a consensus that this is one of the 3 or 4 topbooks on Lisp programming.
Open source software. In addition to the commercial software I'vehelped develop at Google, Junglee, and elsewhere, I've also donated opensource software that has had an impact:
MyPytudes repository of Python notebooks has 18,000 stars on github and has been widely used.
I oversaw the development ofcode to accompany the AI textbook. Many volunteers and Google Summer of Code programmers contributed. The project has over 9,000 stars on github.
I developedJScheme (nee SILK), a Scheme implemented in Java, that has been used byover 1,000students and many professionals. Tim Hickey and the late Ken Anderson took over most ofthe development after the initial versions.
