International Keynote Presentation

Move quickly. Launch. Improve.

12:10pm 16 September 2010

Craig Nevill-Manning
Craig Nevill-Manning

Engineering Director, Google

Over the 50 year life of the New Zealand Computer Society, computers have become much faster, and programming a given task has become much easier. As a consequence, people have increasingly become the bottleneck: more than ever, developers are limited chiefly by their own creativity and judgement. Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, claims that the three virtues of a programmer are “laziness, impatience and hubris”. It has never been easier, given cloud-based infrastructure and APIs, for developers to take shortcuts (laziness), build a quick prototype (impatience), and make their creations available to the world (hubris). Craig will discuss Google’s “launch early and iterate” approach to product development, including how they are applying it to humanitarian crisis response, and how they work to foster a culture of rapid innovation.

About Craig Nevill-Manning

Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google’s first remote engineering center, located in midtown Manhattan, where he is an Engineering Director. He also invented Froogle, a product search engine.

Prior to joining Google in 2001 as a senior research scientist, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry department at Stanford University. His research interests center on using techniques from machine learning, data compression and computational biology to provide more structured search over information.

Dr. Nevill-Manning graduated with a BSc in computer science from the University of Canterbury. He received his PhD from the University of Waikato where he worked on the Weka machine learning suite.