We're usually a modest bunch, but we we couldn't help but let you know about some honors and awards bestowed on Googlers recently:
- Ramakrishnan Srikant is the winner of the 2006 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award for his work on pruning techniques for the discovery of association rules, and for developing new data mining approaches that respect the privacy of people in the data base.
- Henry Rowley and Shumeet Baluja, along with CMU professor Takeo Kanade, received the Longuet-Higgins prize for "a contribution which has stood the test of time," namely their 1996 paper Neural Network based face detection. The award was given at the 2006 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference.
- Team Smartass, consisting of Christopher Hendrie, Derek Kisman, Ambrose Feinstein and Daniel Wright won first place in the ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming) programming contest, using a combination of C++, Haskell and 2D. Third place went to Can't Spell Awesome without ASM, a team consisting of Google engineer Jon Dethridge, former Google interns Ralph Furmaniak and Tomasz Czajka, and Reid Barton of Harvard. They got the judges at the functional programming conference to admit "Assembler is not too shabby."
- Peter Norvig was named a Berkeley Distinguished Alumni in Computer Science, and gave the keynote commencement address. We'd also like to congratulate Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo Research, who was a co-recipient of this award.
- Simon Quellen Field's book Return of Gonzo Gizmos was a selection of the Scientific American Book Club.
- Google summer intern Rion Snow (along with Stanford professors Dan Jurafsky and Andrew Ng) got the best paper award at the 2006 ACL/COLING (computational linguistics) conference for his paper titled Semantic taxonomy induction from heterogenous evidence.
- Google summer intern Lev Reyzin won the outstanding student paper award at ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) for work with Rob Schapire of Princeton on How Boosting the Margin Can Also Boost Classifier Complexity.
- As we mentioned earlier, Michael Fink, Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja won a best paper award for Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification.
- Update 13 Oct 2006: Paul Rademacher has been named one of the top innovators under 35 by MIT's Technology Review. He was cited
for his mashup of Google Maps and Craig's List housing data at housingmaps.com. - Update 31 Oct 2006: We forgot Alon Halevy, who won the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award for Querying Heterogeneous Information Sources Using Source Descriptions with Anand Rajaraman and Joann J. Ordille.
