Google Book Search Developments and Research Opportunities

Dan Clancy

Google

Notice:  hosted by Vinay Chaudhri

Date:  Tuesday August 11, 2009 at 16:00

Location:  EJ228 (SRI E building)  (Directions)

Google Book Search is an ambitious project that Google started 6 years ago with the simple goal of working to index all of the worlds books and make them fully searchable. Since the beginning of the project, Google has digitized over 10 million books and recently has agreed to a settlement of an on-going lawsuit with Authors and Publishers. The lawsuit will enable Google to provide access to many of these books that users can only see snippets from today. This will unlock millions of books to users throughout the United States. Another of the benefits of the settlement is the ability of our library partners to create two research centers that would contain all of these books for computational analysis over the corpus. In this talk I will provide a brief overview of the book search project and some of the technical challenges we faced, a short overview of the settlement and then discuss in more detail some of the research opportunities that may exist if the agreement is approved.

Dr. Daniel J. Clancy, PhD, is the Engineering Director for Google Book Search. The goal of the Google Book Search project is to digitize the world’s books and make them searchable online. Google is working with both publishers and libraries as part of this project. Prior to coming to Google in January 2005, Dr. Clancy was the Director of the Exploration Technologies Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center. The Directorate supports over 700 people performing both basic and applied research in a diverse range of technology areas intended to enable both robotic and human exploration missions. Technology areas include Intelligent Systems, High-end Computing, Human-Centered Systems, Bio/Nanotechnology, Entry Systems and others. In this role, Dr. Clancy played numerous roles at the agency level including participating in the team that developed the agency’s plan to return men to the Moon and eventually Mars. Dr. Clancy received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in artificial intelligence. While in school, Dr. Clancy also worked at Trilogy Corporation, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Xerox Webster Research center. Dr. Clancy received a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University in 1985 in computer science and theatre.

Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in order to sign in and be escorted to the conference room. SRI is located at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park. Visitors may park in the visitors lot in front of Building E, and should follow the instructions by the lobby phone to be escorted to the meeting room. Detailed directions to SRI, as well as maps, are available from the Visiting AIC web page.