Craig Nevill-Manning
Going Google in New York
Director of Google
Engineering New York
BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, University of Canterbury
PhD in Computer Science, University of Waikato
By Diana Moir
Craig Nevill-Manning (left) with Craig Silverstein,
Director of Technology and the first to join the NY Google staff. When Canterbury computer science graduate Craig Nevill-Manning was asked
to set up a world-class software engineering office for Google Inc in New York, his biggest challenge was to persuade people to leave good jobs to come to a brand-new office, without knowing who else might join.
That was in April 2003. A year later, after pursuing several key people for top positions, holding a recruiting reception for 200 people in the lobby of the 25-storey building on Broadway where the new office is housed, more than 30 people work for Google Engineering New York. As Google's Director of New York Engineering, Nevill-Manning has been interviewed by a number of news outlets including The New York Times, the financial news cable network, CNBC, and ComputerWorld .
The challenge was nothing new to Nevill-Manning.
A former assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, he still supervises graduate students, assesses doctoral dissertations, serves on grant panels for the US National Science Foundation, gives invited talks at computer conferences all over North America and reviews papers for academic publications.
After graduating BSc (Hons) in 1989, Nevill-Manning worked full-time as a programmer in Christchurch for two years before completing a PhD in computer science at the University of Waikato (1996). His doctoral dissertation concerning the problem of detecting structure in sequences led to SEQUITUR, a revolutionary new technique that infers structure from a diverse range of sequences in space and time, including natural speech and music. This research was written up in the prestigious Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research in 1997, and led to a postdoctoral fellowship in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University (1996-1998).
At Stanford he developed the eMOTIF research system that is currently being licensed to more than 10 biotechnology companies within the United States. eMOTIF allows biochemists to identify the function of newly discovered proteins by recognizing particular patterns of amino acids.
Nevill-Manning then moved to Rutgers, where he combined teaching with research into computational biology, information retrieval and data compression.
An earlier acquaintance with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, the Internet search engine, led to a job offer in 1999 that he couldn't refuse.
“At Google I have access to more computer-readable information and computing resources than anyone has had before. It's exciting to think up new ways of making this information useful to people around the world.”
Recently, he produced a feature that provides definitions of terms.
“For example, typing ‘define: iwi' (without the quotes) into Google gives nine definitions from various sources.”
He also came up with “Froogle”, a product search that enables browsers to sort by price or restrict to particular categories.
“Canterbury University reinforced my love of intellectual challenges and of building artefacts — in this case, software artefacts — that better people's lives,” Nevill-Manning says.
“As an undergraduate I became interested in questions relating to information retrieval, and investigating ways of automatically discovering structure in sequences of various kinds.
“These interests continue to the present day, and have led to research in the related areas of data compression and machine learning, which have had immediate practical benefits in the fields of biology and agriculture, among others.
“I'm fortunate to be working in a job where my research interests combine with practical benefits for people.”