Distinguished Lecture Series
Funded by the National Security Agency
Carriage House Conference Center, Washington DC
The MAA, with the generous support of the NSA, is proud to present a series of public lectures. The series features some of the foremost experts within the field of mathematics, known for their ability to make current mathematical ideas accessible to non-specialists, and provides a fabulous and fun learning opportunity for both professionals and students, as well as anyone interested in learning more about current trends in mathematics and the relationship between mathematics and broader scientific, engineering and technological endeavors.
The series will take place in the Carriage House, the MAA’s newly-renovated, high tech conference center.
Modeling Similarity in the Age of Data
Kevin McCurley
Google Research
November 19, 2009, 6:30pm
Mathematical Association of America Carriage House
1781 Church Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
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The process of applying mathematics to the real world is undergoing a radical change through our ability to gather data at a massive scale. This is particularly true at Google, where we routinely process petabytes of human language, and interact with many millions of users. In this talk I'll describe some surprising realizations that arose from this data while trying to improve part of our search quality. It turns out that everything I thought I knew about similarity was wrong, and I should have been talking to psychologists.
Kevin McCurley is a Research Scientist at Google, where he has worked since 2005. He previously held positions at IBM Almaden Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and University of Southern California. He has published in the areas of information retrieval, algorithms, parallel computing, cryptography, and number theory.