The final From the Labs was presented by Alan Eustace and Jason Shellen.

Alan began by stating that google is focused on innovation which is why the have small teams [to promote spontaneity] and give their 20% time to allow engineers free to pursue projects they are passionate about. They demoed two recent efforts

The first was an image recognition engine that could identify the sex of people by their faces using machine learning. They had trained it with over 2 billion images and it's accuracy had gotten up to 90%. The long term goal is to enable scenarios such as 'identify the people in this picture' and then other pictures with this person in them'. That would be very cool if they can actually get that to work correctly.

The second project that was demoed was the Google Reader. Actually, it wasn't really demoed. It was announced. Like everyone else I tried to use it by navigating to the site but it was so abominably slow, I gave up.


 

Sunday, 09 October 2005 05:36:12 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
The site was slow right after launch due to a configuration issue. The problem was fixed soon after, and things should be pretty zippy now.

(full disclosure: I am a frontend engineer on Google Reader. I'm not going to every blog posting this comment, but I am curious what you have to say about it)
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