As Google continues to expand its workforce, preserving its engineers' talent
and fostering creativity has been key to the company’s continued success. The 20% project is designed to maintain that piece of Google’s philosophy and culture. Furthermore, the 20% project allows Google to maintain the start up feel in a 20,000+ sized company and attracts a diverse pool...
[read more]
As Google continues to expand its workforce, preserving its engineers' talent
and fostering creativity has been key to the company’s continued success. The 20% project is designed to maintain that piece of Google’s philosophy and culture. Furthermore, the 20% project allows Google to maintain the start up feel in a 20,000+ sized company and attracts a diverse pool of skilled engineers. During this talk, you will hear from a panel of engineers that have worked on various 20% projects. You will have the opportunity to listen to their successes, how they got involved in their respective projects, and how ideas have come to fruition.
----------
Marc Donner
20% Project:
Google Art Project
(
<a href="
http://googleartproject.com/">
http://googleartproject.com/</a>)
Marc Donner was born in a log cabin on the lower East Side of Manhattan in the second half of the twentieth century. After high school he emigrated to Los Angeles where he studied electrical engineering at Caltech before taking a job at NASA working on planetary radar. He then joined IBM's research lab where he worked on a nine-million-pixel display. After a while he wandered off to CMU where he earned a PhD in computer science by programming Ivan Sutherland's six-legged walking robot. A talk on juggling by Claude Shannon inspired him to propose a juggling robot, which IBM Research graciously funded. While that work was going on he sponsored work on what ultimately became the IBM TrackPoint. He then got involved in large-scale distributed computing, which led to a trip to Morgan Stanley, where he built their intranet, re-engineered their back office, and eliminated all of their data center printing, amounting to about two million pages of paper and two million frames of microfiche each day. This then led to some entertaining projects in the marketing department and then in the research department where he led the development of a number of interesting financial modeling engines.
Today he's an engineering director at Google looking after the interests of the infrastructure networking software engineers as well as helping with cybersecurity and advising Google's work with major museums on the GoogleArtProject.com, all while writing articles about science fiction for an engineering magazine.
