Urs Hölzle (German pronunciation: [ˈʊrs ˈhœltslɛ]) is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. He is the senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. As Google’s eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google’s development processes and infrastructure
.. Before joining Google, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a master’s degree in computer science from ETH Zurich in 1988 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship that same year. In 1994, he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, where his research focused on programming languages and their efficient implementation. Via a startup founded by Hölzle, David Griswold, and Lars Bak (see Strongtalk), that work then evolved into a high-performance Java VMnamed HotSpot, acquired by Sun’s JavaSoft unit in 1997 and from there became Sun’s premier JVM implementation.[2]
He led the design of Google’s very efficient data centers which are said to use less than half the power of a conventional data center.[3] In 2014 he received The Economist’s Innovation Award for his datacenter efficiency work.[4] With Luiz Barroso, he wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines.[5] In June 2007, he introduced the Climate Savers Computing Initiative together with Pat Gelsinger which aims to halve the power consumption of desktop computers and servers.
Also in 2007, he and Luiz Barroso wrote “The Case for Energy Proportional Computing” which argued that servers should be designed to use power in proportion to their current load, because they spend much of their time being only partially loaded. This paper is often credited for spurring CPU manufacturers to make their designs much more energy efficient.[6] Today, energy proportional computing has become a standard goal for both server and mobile uses.
In 2011, Hölzle announced a shift in Google.org’s alternative energy investment strategy, dropping development of “solar thermal” electricity (for example with BrightSource Energy) because ST was not keeping pace with the rapid price decline of another solar technology – photovoltaics.[7]
In 2012, Hölzle introduced “the G-Scale Network” on which Google had begun managing its petabyte-scale internal data flow via OpenFlow, an open source software system jointly devised by scientists at Stanford and the UC Berkeley and promoted by the Open Networking Foundation. The internal data flow, or network, is distinct from the one that connects users to Google services (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.). In the process of describing the new network, Hölzle also confirmed more about Google’s making of its own networking equipment like routers and switches for G-Scale; and said the company wanted, by being open about the changes, to “encourage the industry — hardware, software and ISP’s — to look down this path and say, ‘I can benefit from this.'” He said network utilization was nearing 100% of capacity, a dramatic efficiency improvement.[8]
He is credited for creating Google Gulp for April Fool’s Day in 2005.
He is member of the National Academy of Engineering,[9] and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009)[10], the AAAS (2017)[11], and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.[12] He is also a board member of the US World Wildlife Fund.[13]
Eric Veach: Google
Eric Veach is a Canadian computer scientist, and who won a technical Academy Award.[1][2]
He won his 2014 academy award for work in colour perception, as applied to computer graphics, described in his 1997 PhD thesis.[1][3]He told CTV News he hadn’t done any work in computer graphics for 15 years. Veach had worked at Pixar, but, more recently, he had been a senior developer at Google.[2]
His PhD thesis, Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation, is highly cited.[3]
In 2008, the University of Waterloo, the institution where he earned his Bachelor of Mathematics, in 1990, awarded him a J. W. Graham Medal, an annual award granted to a distinguished alumnus who had studied computer science there.[2] His PhD is from Stanford University.
Veach is a strong believer in environmental causes and served as the vice-chair of the Rainforest Trust.[4]
Farhad Manjoo named Veach and two of his non-American colleagues, at Google, in an article entitled, “Why Silicon Valley Wouldn’t Work Without Immigrants”.[5] Manjoo’s article attempted to explain why newly inaugurated President Donald Trump‘s attempts to squeeze off the flow of immigrants to the USA was dangerous. He argued that America disproportionately benefitted from allowing big brained foreigners like Veach to find work.
Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail
Software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services
Google said a year ago it would stop its computers from scanning the inboxes of Gmail users for information to personalize advertisements, saying it wanted users to “remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount.”
.. But the internet giant continues to let hundreds of outside software developers scan the inboxes of millions of Gmail users who signed up for email-based services offering shopping price comparisons, automated travel-itinerary planners or other tools.
.. One of those companies is Return Path Inc., which collects data for marketers by scanning the inboxes of more than two million people who have signed up for one of the free apps in Return Path’s partner network using a Gmail, Microsoft Corp. or Yahoo email address. Computers normally do the scanning, analyzing about 100 million emails a day. At one point about two years ago, Return Path employees read about 8,000 unredacted emails to help train the company’s software, people familiar with the episode say.
.. Letting employees read user emails has become “common practice” for companies that collect this type of data, says Thede Loder, the former chief technology officer at eDataSource Inc., a rival to Return Path. He says engineers at eDataSource occasionally reviewed emails when building and improving software algorithms.
.. Gmail is especially valuable as the world’s dominant email service, with 1.4 billion users. Nearly two-thirds of all active email users globally have a Gmail account.. Gmail has more users than the next 25 largest email providers combined.
Google Sets Rules to Curtail Employee Debates
Internet giant bans ‘trolling’ on internal message boards and ad hominem attacks against co-workers
Google said it would discipline any employees discriminating against or attacking colleagues or engaging in discussions that are “disruptive to a productive work environment,” according to a copy of the guidelines reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The rules aim to curb so-called trolling, in which people are deliberately provocative or offensive online in order to elicit strong reactions, as well as “blanket statements about groups or categories of people.”