Dr Craig Nevill-Manning: Will present a technical talk at the University of Waikato on August 27.
Google has entered the lexicon as the default term for web searching, but there’s a lot more to it than the ten blue links we’ve come to expect on the screen. Researchers at Google are currently exploring new search formats, and innovative ways to identify and deliver answers to complex search questions.
Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director at Google New York and University of Waikato alumnus, will present a technical talk on this topic at the University of Waikato’s Department of Computer Science on August 27.
“If the answer to your question is sitting on a web page, Google aims to get you to that answer as fast as possible – and we can often do it before you've finished asking the question!” he says.
“Some queries, however, are difficult to express in text: an image is worth a thousand query terms, and you can use your cell phone camera to take that image. At other times, a textual query is sufficient, but it's difficult to type when you're walking or driving.
“And some research tasks don't have a simple answer already computed: it's necessary to synthesize an answer from multiple sources.”
In his talk, Dr Nevill-Manning will introduce Google research projects including Google Goggles, Search by Voice and Google Squared, and discuss some of the other challenges Google is currently tackling.
The talk has been organised in conjunction with the University of Waikato Student Chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery, the world’s largest association to advance computing as a science and a profession.
Dr Nevill-Manning is being honoured this year with a University of Waikato Distinguished Alumni Award.
Dr Nevill-Manning will deliver his technical talk “Search, Research, Show and Tell” at 11:00 am on Friday August 27 in SG.02 at the University of Waikato. Please contact Gina Roberts at [email protected] or on 07 383 4911 if you would like to attend.