In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at these publicatio

ns, but here are some summaries:

Speech Recognition
"Google Search by Voice: A Case Study," by Johan Schalkwyk, Doug Beeferman, Fran
coise Beaufays, Bill Byrne, Ciprian Chelba, Mike Cohen, Maryam Garrett, Brian St
rope, to appear in Advances in Speech Recognition: Mobile Environments, Call Cen
ters, and Clinics, Amy Neustein (Ed.), Springer-Verlag 2010.
Google Search by Voice is a result of many years of investment in speech at Goog
le. In our book chapter, â Google Search by Voice: A Case Study,â we describe the bas
ic technology, the supporting technologies, and the user interface design behind
Google Search by Voice. We describe how we built it and what lessons we have le
arned. Google search by voice is growing rapidly and being built in many languag
es. Along the way we constantly encounter new research problems providing the pe
rfect atmosphere for doing research on real world problems.
Computer Architecture & Networks & Distributed Systems
"Energy-proportional Datacenter Networks," by Dennis Abts, Mike Marty, Philip We
lls, Peter Klausler, Hong Liu, International Symposium on Computer Architecture,
ISCA, June 2010.
Google researchers have called on industry and academia to develop energy-propor
tional computing systems, where the energy consumed is directly proportional to
the utilization of the system. In this work, we focus on the energy usage of hig
h-bandwidth, highly scalable cluster networks. Through a combination of an energ
y-efficient topology and dynamic fine-grained control of link speeds, our propos
ed techniques show the potential to significantly reduce both electricity and en
vironmental costs.
Economics & Market Algorithms
"Quasi-Proportional Mechanisms: Prior-free Revenue Maximization," by Vahab S. Mi
rrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Uri Nadav, Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symp
osium, LATIN, April 2010.
Say a seller wishes to sell an item, but the buyers value it vastly differently.
What is a suitable auction to sell the item, in terms of efficiency as well as
revenue? First and second price auctions will be efficient but will only extract
the lower value in equilibrium; if one knows the distributions from which value
s are drawn, then setting a reserve price will get optimal revenue but will not
be efficient. This paper views this problem as prior-free auction and proposes a
quasi-proportional allocation in which the probability that an item is allocate
d to a bidder depends (quasi-proportionally) on their bids. The paper also prove
s existence of an equilibrium for quasi-proportional auctions and shows how to c
ompute them efficiently. Finally, the paper shows that these auctions have high
efficiency and revenue.
"Auctions with Intermediaries," Jon Feldman, Vahab Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, M
allesh Pai, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC, June 2010.
We study an auction where the bidders are middlemen, looking in turn to auction
off the item if they win it. This setting arises naturally in online advertiseme
nt exchange systems, where the participants in the exchange are ad networks look
ing to sell ad impressions to their own advertisers. We present optimal strategi
es for both the bidders and the auctioneer in this setting. In particular, we sh
ow that the optimal strategy for bidders is to choose a randomized reserve price
, and the optimal reserve price of the centeral auctioneer may depend on the num
ber of bidders (unlike the case when there are no middlemen).
Computer Vision
"Discontinuous Seam-Carving for Video Retargeting," Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kw
atra, Mei Han, Irfan Essa, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR, June 2
010.
Playing a video on devices with different form factors requires resizing (or ret
argeting) the video to fit the resolution of the given device. We have developed
a content-aware technique for video retargeting based on discontinuous seam-car
ving, which unlike standard methods like uniform scaling and cropping, strives t
o retain salient content (such as actors, faces and structured objects) while di
scarding relatively unimportant pixels (such as the sky or a blurry background).
The key innovations of our research include: (a) a solution that maintains temp
oral continuity of the video in addition to preserving its spatial structure, (b
) space-time smoothing for automatic as well as interactive (user-guided) salien
t content selection, and (c) sequential frame-by-frame processing conducive for
arbitrary length and streaming video.
Machine Learning
"Random classification noise defeats all convex potential boosters," Philip M. L
ong, Rocco A. Servedio, Machine Learning, vol. 78 (2010), pp. 287-304.
A popular approach that has been used to tackle many machine learning problems r
ecently is to formulate them as optimization problems in which the goal is to mi
nimize some â convex loss function.â This is an appealing formulation because these o
ptimization problems can be solved in much the same way that a marble rolls to t
he bottom of a bowl. However, it turns out that there are drawbacks to this form
ulation. In "Random Classification Noise Defeats All Convex Potential Boosters,"
we show that any learning algorithm that works in this way can fail badly if th
ere are noisy examples in the training data. This research motivates further stu
dy of other approaches to machine learning, for which there are algorithms that
are provably more robust in the presence of noise.
IR
"Clustering Query Refinements by User Intent," Eldar Sadikov, Jayant Madhavan, L
u Wang, Alon Halevy, Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference,
WWW, April 2010.
When users pose a search query, they usually have an underlying intent or inform
ation need, and the sequence of queries he or she poses in single search session
s is usually determined by the user's underlying intent. Our research demonstrat
es that there typically are only a small number of prominent underlying intents
for a given user query. Further, these intents can be identified very accurately
by an analysis of anonymized search query logs. Our results show that underlyin
g intents almost always correspond to well-understood high-level concepts.
HCI
"How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?", Anne Aula,
Rehan Khan, Zhiwei Guan, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in C
omputing Systems, CHI , April 2010.
Seeing that someone is getting frustrated with a difficult search task is easy f
or another person--just look for the frowns, and listen for the sighs. But could
a computer tell that you're getting frustrated from just the limited behavior a
search engine can observe? Our study suggests that it can: when getting frustra
ted, our data shows that users start to formulate question queries, they start t
o use advanced operators, and they spend a larger proportion of the time on the
search results page. Used together, these signals can be used to build a model t
hat can potentially detect user frustration.