Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/

If you’re in Vancouver next Thursday (July 27th), you should consider stopping by the BC Genome Sciences Centre at 6:00.

Speaker: Narayanan ‘Shiva’ Shivakumar, Founding Director of Google’s Seattle-Kirkland R&D center

Title: Google - Behind the Scenes

Abstract:
Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google’s various products, and make the products scalable and reliable. .

Bio:
Narayanan Shivakumar (’Shiva’) is a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. Currently, he is excited about a variety of search and webcrawling technologies (including Google Sitemaps). Earlier, he was the Director of Engineering responsible for many of Google’s advertising products (including AdSense — Content, Search networks) and Google’s enterprise products (including Google Search Appliances). Before Google, he cofounded Gigabeat, an online music startup funded by Kleiner Perkins and Silicon Valley angels, later acquired by Napster. He graduated with a BS from UCLA and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. His dissertation on large-scale data mining and media processing, won the 1999 Arthur Samuel Dissertation Award by the Stanford Computer Science Dept.