This blog is primarily meant to be at the crossroads of A.I and Web Search. I guess the previous posts were more or less on the theory of probabilistic models. This time we digress a bit for some Stanford news.
Last week, Marissa Mayer was over at Stanford to give a talk at the Stanford IEEE Chapter to a packed audience. Marissa is the VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google. I have always been a fan of Marissa's and it was great to meet her in person.
Her talk revolved around the early Google days and the general philosophy that Google typically follows with its product launches and strategy. She explained these with interesting real life anecdotes. She fielded plenty of questions from all sides of the park and also stuck around for more questions after the talk.
Some of the points I remember are,
* launch early
* listen to the data
* its ok to be unconventional
* solve big problems
When someone in the audience asked her about her thoughts on the Semantic Web, she made the distinction between the 'semantic web' and 'understanding semantics'. The former being hand built ontologies to enforce some form of structure and the latter being understanding meaning and intent. She seemed to think the latter had promise.
This is exactly my stand on the topic. (Incidentally, I work at Powerset which does the latter as well)
She also touched upon Google's ambitions with respect to Books, Machine Translation, Earth etc.
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