First Robots

Posted by Sumit Agarwal, Maryam Kamvar, & Michael Stoppelman With 4 seconds left to go, the Team Cheesy Poofs robot shouldered its way onto the 3 foot platform, pivoted 90 degrees into scoring position, and rapid-fired 10 balls directly into the 3-point goal. They won the match, and the Google Silicon Valley Regional Championship for US FIRST, a non-profit "For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" (FIRST).Google jumped...

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Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director, Google ResearchYou know the Google story: small start-up of highly-skilled programmers in a garage grows into a large international company. But how do you maintain the skill level while roughly doubling in size each year? We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees. An alternative strategy (popular in the dot-com boom period) is to justify...

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An experimental study of P2P VoIP

Posted by Neil Daswani & Ravi Jain, Google; and Saikat Guha, Cornell UniversityVoIP (Voice-over-IP) systems are one of the fastest growing means of communication on the Internet, enabling free or low-cost phone calls. But to date, researchers have had little data to work with to learn how to build VoIP systems better. Some of these systems are proprietary, and obtaining data about their operational characteristics has been particularly challenging. For instance, even though the Skype network has tens of millions of users, it has been hard...

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Teamwork for problem-solving

Posted by Corinna Cortes, Head, Google Research NY Google Research is about teamwork with outstanding engineers to solve novel and challenging problems that have an impact. But it's also about being at the forefront of scientific innovations. We're an active part of the research community, and we like to interact with researchers and scientists in academia. We're happy to serve as a hub for researchers to come and discuss their latest findings and get exposed to the large-scale problems and challenges that we face. Robert Tarjan, John Lafferty,...

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