Date: Wednesday 2/10/2010
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Type
of Talk: Corporate Connection/FoCS

Speaker/Affiliation: Peter Norvig

, Director of Research/Google

Date/Time: Wednesday 2/10/2010 4 PM

nLocation: ACES 2.302, Avaya Auditorium

Host: Hanah Kim (Google), Na

ncy Hatchett (UT)

Talk Title: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

n
Talk Abstract: In decades past, models of human language were wrought

from the sweat and pencils of linguists. In the modern day, it is more co

mmon to think of language modeling as an exercise in probabilistic inductio

n from data. Similar remarks hold for models in other fields, including co

mputer vision. This talk gives examples of the data available in large repo

sitories of text, images, and videos, and shows some tasks that can be a

ccomplished with the resulting models.

Speaker Bio: Peter Norvig is a

Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Asso

ciation for Computing Machinery. At Google Inc he was Director of Search Qu

ality, responsible for the core web search algorithms from 2002-2005, and
has been Director of Research from 2005 on.

Previously he was the hea

d of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, mak

ing him NASA''s senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional
Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the

University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the Univ

ersity of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which h

e received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He h

as over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificia

l Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, inc

luding the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading te

xtbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common

Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intell

igent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerp

oint Presentation and the world''s longest palindromic sentence.