I am part of the Google speech team.

So we make that microphone button on your Android phone

do something.

So more specifically, I am a senior staff research scientist

here at Google, and I lead the acoustic modeling group.

That's part of the speech team.

And so I've been doing speech recognition

research for about 20 years.

I've been at other places before here.

I worked for about three years in Japan in the ATR--

the Advanced Telecommunications Research labs,

which is sort of like a Bell Labs of Japan.

And I worked at AT&T research for about five and 1/2 years,

and I had a bit of a stint at IBM research

in upstate New York for about a year and a half.

And I've been at Google for almost exactly eight years.

And speech recognition is sort of a typical hard

applied science.

So there's a lot of math a lot of statistical modeling.

And as a result of it, we like to process

large amounts of data, and so that

brings about a large amount of computer science.

And so Google looked like a very interesting place to work.

So I was intrigued by this place when

I was offered the opportunity to do something there.

About eight years ago, I looked at it,

and it certainly is a very different culture

from what I was used to.

So when I came from is the typical research

lab where there are somewhat of the ivory tower syndrome

where you sit together with all the other PhDs

and, you know, you're doing exhaustive research,

and then there's the development group that's somewhere else,

and we don't really talk to each other.

And there's a bit of finger pointing

going back and forth where the researchers would say,

they never take our new idea.

And the development group would say

that whatever code we get from research is such a mess,

we have to all re-implement this.

And both of those is true, but it doesn't really work well.

And as a result of it, you don't really

have an outlet that is built for your product.

So you would live off publications, largely,

and that's one way to get your stuff out

and that would be exciting.

But, so now I'm looking at this Google place

that is clearly very different.

Actually, one of the concerns I had for real

is that, are these guys all sitting on colorful skippy

balls high fiving each other and saying awesome all day long?

Which is not really something I enjoy,

because I did enjoy the hard science of what I was doing.

Also in retrospect, what I think is very different from Google

to do other places, I think, is sort of the three aspects,

I think.

There's a people component to it,

which is we are extremely collaborative

between engineering and research.

In fact, we make hardly any distinction,

where it's hard to distinguish whether somebody is a software

engineer or a researcher.

And it's just because, if you want to get your stuff out,

it has to be engineered.

And if you're an engineer and you engineer something,

you might run into a problem and you

have to research on how to solve that correctly.

And so that's a nice environment where people are collaborative

and there's no hang ups about what department

you're in or what your title is exactly.

and you really jointly get something out.

I think the second aspect of it is a product.

Your stuff really gets used by a lot of people.

There's a real path to get whatever

you code to get in the hands of people,

and actually, people use it.

And not only is it sort of a satisfaction

that somebody will use your code.

There's some interesting stuff that it brings up for research.

I mean, it gives you signals to look at on how people are using

things, whether it's working for them or not.

And you can really focus on a user

and sort of make their experience

better, which is an interesting research setting in itself.

Sort of, how do you make use of those signals

to improve your product?

And the third thing is sort of impact, because you know,

you really can improve people's lives.

We did some, you know, I work in the speech teams.

Working with some deaf people and giving them

opportunities they never had before is exciting.

You really, I think, have a more profound impact

on somebody's life.

And I think a lot of Googlers have

this mean altruistic streak where they really

like the fact that their stuff can

do something good for somebody.

And that brings a lot of excitement about.

So that might sound a little naive,

and naive can be bad, because I have colleagues that

look like they're 13-year olds.

And I know they're not, but they look like that to me.

And they think that the normal world is whatever our Google

environment is, and even if you tell them that's not true,

you can't really convince them.

And we have this rich food culture,

as you might have noticed.

I literally heard a complaint to somebody that said,

do they have to really put truffle oil and everything?

There's somewhat of a bubble here, that's true.

But in general, I think it's a pretty happy place to work.

So more specifically to speech, I

think that it is really this kind of company in this mindset

that it's not surprising that it took speech, I think,

from when I joined eight years ago from sort of user torture.

You know, where it's like, say or press one for sales,

or say or press two for, you know.

To now, we're sitting at home and looking at an ad,

and people are like, I like this cellphone

because it has voice recognition,

as a feature that they actually want.

So again, sort of this user focus, I think,

is a positive thing.

And I think, in more general, it's not just the speech thing

where it's been lucky that they had some success.

Information retrieval, Google search has been applied

and really is useful to people, I think machine translation,

I think there are many, many more areas to come.

So don't just take it from me.

I think we have a very interesting panel

with various other people in various other areas

that you can quiz and we can discuss things.

Some.

Of the things I think that we will talk about a little

before we go in our Q&A session is

to discuss this whole collaboration, which I think

is contrasting some of our relationships internally,

as well as with the research community outside.

So let's start with introductions, I guess,

of the panel.

So how about we go from left to right.

So I'll let you guys do it.

UMESH SHANKAR: My name's Umesh Shankar.

I've been at Google for about seven years, previous to which

I did my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.

I entered Berkeley as a systems student

and fairly quickly ended up focusing

on security and privacy, which is

what I still do here at Google.

I'm a software engineer.

I lead the data protection engineering group,

so we spend pretty much all our days

figuring out how to make sure that all

the private information that Google stores stays that way.

And as far as I'm concerned, Google

is really the most interesting place

to work on security and privacy, because we don't really

have that many theoretical attacks.

Most of the stuff that most people think of as theoretical

is real.

And there's really no playbook for how

to do data protection at the scale

that we want to do it at with the performance and usability

requirements that we have.

I mean, it's just been an incredible learning experience

for me here.

And to a degree that I never really thought I would,

I've used almost everything I learned in graduate school.

EUGENE WEINSTEIN: Hi, I'm Eugene Weinstein,

and I think I'm one of the 13-year-old looking people that

Michiel was--

MICHIEL BACCHIANI: You wish.

EUGENE WEINSTEIN: Well, I don't know, you might disagree,

but in the sense that I've never really worked-- well,

some small internships aside, I've

never really worked at another company other than Google.

So I was lucky enough to be able to do

kind of the applied part of my Ph.D. Here as an intern

while I was a Ph.D. Student at NYU,

and I joined here full time about 3 and 1/2 years ago,

and I work on speech with Michiel.

So I work a lot on the internationalization side

of speech.

So at Google, internationalization

is a big thing.

We can't just get away with making our products

work in English anymore.

But for speech, this is like a whole new ball game.

Because it's not just, like, translating some strings,

right?

We have to model new languages, right?

So this is a difficult thing.

So I kind of enjoyed being able to scale things up

in that respect.

Now, voice search supports 40 languages,

we just launched four new ones a couple of weeks ago.

So that's been so that's been really fun to work on.

And the other scale issue that I've

gotten to work on that I think has been really

meaningful to me is the work that I've

done with keeping speech models fresh.

The things that people are talking about

and the ways in which they say them are changing, right?

As demographics change, things come

into and out of popularity, and people

change the way they search for things with their voice.

And we have to take the petabytes of data that's

coming in from users of our products

and we have to make sure that we're

servicing the user in a way that's

still current and relevant.

And so to me, it's been really fun to take the, let's

say, theoretical things that I learned about in grad school

and apply them at this ridiculous scale

that I could never even conceive before I came here.

So it's been really fun.

OKSANA YAKHNENKO: Can you hear me?

I can't hear myself.

So, my name is Oksana Yakhnenko.

I've been at Google for a little bit over two years.

I joined in like December, 2010.

I have my Ph.D. In computer science

and I was mostly working on machine learning

and applications to various things

like text classification, computational biology,

and computer vision.

And then I've been [INAUDIBLE] in computer vision

for about a year and a half.

And one of the reasons, when I got on the job market,

I was a little bit disillusioned with academia, in terms of,

I publish a paper and you spend so much time writing this paper

and you so much work in the paper.

And then you have like four citations and that's kind

of the end of it.

I mean, sometimes you have more than that,

but I actually felt like my work was affecting

a very small niche of people.

So basically, I started looking for a place where

I could actually do some more impact.

And now I have joined a group in Knowledge,

so we work in search.

And specifically, my group, we don't really

do anything that you guys see directly,

but we work sort of behind the scenes,