SIAM SSC talk: A Computer Scientist's Playground by Bill Coughran, Vice President of Engineering, Google

Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computing disciplines, from lower level systems issues like computer architecure and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, computational science, and user interface design. Dr Bill Coughran will go over some challenges in these areas, discuss interesting applications related to search that Google has developed over the past few years, and highlight some behind-the-scenes pieces of infrastructure that have been built in order to operate Google's services.