Google breaks out the Ph.D. Googlers, equips them with titanium slide rules, and sends them out to throw down with Mensa.
Now that would be something to see on Google Video, or during the Google break on the half-hour at Current TV (“Hi, this is Kinga, and over the last 30 minutes you’ve been Googling for ‘slide rule smackdown’; what’s up with that? Let’s take a look. Oh snap.”)
At Google Research, the Ph.D.s have more important topics on their agendas. They recently launched a blog of their own, as noticed by Philipp Lenssen.
Google Research Director Peter Norvig wrote in the opening blog post how Google’s Research Lab differs from the typical research labs at other companies:
First, Google Engineering is different: it contains many world class Ph.D. researchers. For example, the top download from the ACM digital library last month was The Google File System, written by Google Ph.D.s who happen to be “engineers” (although in their previous jobs, two were at research labs and one was a grad student). This week’s cover story in Nature describes work by Google Earth engineers in partnership with colleagues at CMU and NASA Ames.
Second, Google Research is different: we also have lots of world class Ph.D.s (and a few non-Ph.D.s). Yes, we write papers and prove theorems, but we’re all here because we want to discover and build useful things that will change the world.
Some of the Google Ph.D.s are working on current projects, while others, Norvig noted, are working on goals for the year 2020. Much of that work is alongside engineers rather than apart from them, a distinction Norvig cited as a key difference between Google and other firms with such research labs.
But will they post another blog entry before the end of February? The drama builds…
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
