At its core, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The breadth of this mission, coupled with our services based delivery model, provides Google great opportunities to perform research and to innovate in many areas of technology. In this presentation, I will summarize our approach to innovation and the results we have achieved in many domains; for example, translation, speech, and vision. I will also discuss some of our focus areas moving forward, and our general approach to research organization. I will conclude by discussing our interactions with the research world around us, a world with which we desire strong, mutually beneficial connections.

Alfred joined Google in November of 2007 and is responsible for the research across Google and also a growing collection of special initiatives ? typically projects with high strategic value to the company, but somewhat outside the mainstream of current products.

Previously, Alfred was Vice President of Strategy and Technology IBM's Software Business, and prior to that, he was Vice President of Services and Software Research across IBM. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in highly reliable, highly scalable distributed computing.

Alfred received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems.