As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
I went through multiple early scientist phases: ornithology, botany, palynologist, marine biologist. But at 16, I discovered computer science. It was a single path after that.
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Explain your work in one easy paragraph.
I try to understand what people do when they’re searching for information. That is, what strategies and tactics they employ when looking for something simple (say, the population of London) and what they do differently when they try to find something more complex (the distribution of dog breeds in London over the past 200 years). How do people think about their search processes? What do they do as they search?
Did you have to overcome any particular challenges to get where you are today?
As a first generation university student, I pretty much had to figure it out on my own.
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on in your career?
Working on Google search is plenty exciting. In many ways, it’s a global computer system with many AI subsystems and enough practical philosophical questions to choke a conceptual horse. Trying to understand what knowledge is and how it is made is enough to make a philosopher weep. But at the end of the day, we have to ship the code and make it work. Dealing with that day in and day out is pretty exciting.
What achievement are you most proud of?
Generally speaking, all of the studies I’ve done to understand how ordinary people think about information, knowledge and wisdom. We professional scientists think we’ve got special access to knowledge, but there are more kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing than we typically admit. Understanding this – in all its manifestations – has been deeply satisfying.
Were you good at science at school?
I was. In my younger days, I was the prototypical biology nerd. Then I became a teenage hacker, beguiled by the power of building computational systems that could do unimaginable things.
Is there a discovery or achievement you wish you’d made yourself?
Basically, any surprising result in computer science and cognitive psychology makes me envious. Examples: the size of human working memory; the confirmation-bias effect; multi-resolution image representations.
If you could have a conversation with any scientist, living or dead, who would it be?
Isaac Newton, for all the obvious reasons, but also because we could chat in English.
What scientific development do you hope to see in your lifetime?
Deep, knowledge-based, explainable AI systems.
Do you have an unexpected hobby, and if so, please will you tell us about it?
I collect writings about pre-European-contact California. I wanted to know what California was like before. The answer is that it was a heavily managed landscape – not what I was expecting.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months?
No question: the BBC natural world documentaries. Thanks David Attenborough and the BBC for allowing people to understand how transcendent our planet really is.
OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…
Of all the search skills, knowing how to find a piece of text on a page (by using Control+F or CMD+F) is amazingly useful. It makes you a faster and more accurate searcher. And 90 per cent of the internet-using population don’t know how to do this. If you are among them, do yourself a favour and teach it to yourself. Your online searching will never be the same again.
is senior research scientist for search quality and user happiness at Google. His book, : A Google insider’s guide to going beyond the basics, is out now
