1. A view from the conference session rooms at WWW:
    The 20th International World Wide Web (WWW 2011) conference attracted top researchers, students, developers and web-focused companies to the historic host city of Hyderabad, India, March 28 - April 1. The comprehensive program featured 90 research papers, 89 posters and 25 demos, while leaving enough time to explore India and enjoy the Cricket World Cup (Congrats India!).

    I was extremely impressed by the number and variety of results in social network analysis that were presented at the conference. This new field and its possible applications to behavior
    al networks will undoubtedly impact the way in which we analyze data in the future.

    As an active member of the global web community, Google contributed to the conference in several ways. In addition to being a gold sponsor, one Googler served as panel chair and another Googler as a track co-chair. Furthermore, several Googlers were reviewers.

    Googlers co-authored the following papers:
    Milgram-Routing in Social Networks by Silvio Lattanzi*, Alessandro Panconesi and D. Sivakumar
    SEISA: Set Expansion by Iterative Similarity Aggregation by Yeye He and Dong Xin*
    Efficiently Evaluating Graph Constraints in Content-Based Publish/Subscribe by Andrei Broder, Shirshanka Das, Marcus Fontoura*, Bhaskar Ghosh, Vanja Josifovski, Jayavel Shanmugasundaram*
    Context-Sensitive Query Auto-Completion by Ziv Bar-Yossef* and Naama Kraus

    In addition, Googlers presented the following poster and demo:
    Detecting Group Review Spam by Arjun Mukherjee, Bing Liu, Junhui Wang, Natalie Glance*, Nitin Jindal*
    Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Political Misinformation in Microblog Streams by Jacob Ratkiewicz, Mark Meiss*, Michael Conover, Bruno Concalves, Snehal Patil, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer

    And Googlers gave the following tutorials:
    Google Cloud services for Big Data by Patrick Chanezon*, Rajdeep Dua*
    Managing Crowdsourced Human Computation by Panagiotis Ipeirotis, Praveen Paritosh*
    Web-Based Open-Domain Information Extraction by Marius Pasca*

    Finally, Googlers co-organized the following workshops:
    AIRWeb Workshop on Web Quality (WebQuality 2011)
    Organizers: Carlos Castillo, Zoltan Gyongyi*, Adam Jatowt, Katsumi Tanaka
    Program Committee Members: James Caverlee, Gordon Cormack, Matt Cutts*, Brian Davison, Dennis Fetterly, Andrew Flanagin, Miriam Metzger, Andrew Tomkins*, Masashi Toyoda, Steve Webb, Min Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou

    DiversiWeb 2011: First International Workshop on Knowledge Diversity on the Web
    Organizers: Elena Simperl, Denny Vrandecic, Devika Madalli and Enrique Alfonseca*

    We're pleased to add to the conversation and advancement of the state of the web. We’re already looking forward to WWW 2012 in Lyon.

    Au revoir!

    Silvio Lattanzi
    Research Scientist


    * Denotes a Googler.

    A view from our booth at WWW:
    Each year, WWW 2011 brings together thinkers from industry and academia who are interested in the web and what it might become in the future. Hyderabad, nicknamed Cyberabad, was a fitting host city as it is a major hub of India's booming high tech industry. In March, I traveled to Hyderabad to interact with conference goers, represent Google and meet my peers from around the world.

    At the conference, I spent time at the Google booth, which looked like a miniature version of a Google office, complete with bean bags, Legos and cartoon animals drawn on the whiteboard. A major draw to our booth was "Query Hunt", a game in which players are challenged to find the shortest possible query that can return each of eight URLs as the top result. The game’s top scores were seriously impressive (8-9 characters per page), and one person even wrote a program to find the optimal queries (but sadly didn't win).

    When I attended WWW last year, I had not yet decided to join Google. Talking with Googlers at the conference helped me realize that I’d have access to unparalleled resources in order to do better research. This year it was fun to be on the other side of the bean bag, talking to top researchers about life inside the Googleplex.

    Finally, it was impossible to be in India that week and not notice the Cricket World Cup. On the evening of the India vs. Pakistan World Cup cricket match, we entertained 175 researchers, engineers and academic colleagues at our Google After Hours party. We served up snacks, drinks, desserts, Indian fusion music beats and a live-stream of the match.
    Wide-reaching conferences like WWW afford us the opportunity to connect with our academic and industry peers in a convivial atmosphere.

    Until next year,

    Rob Ennals
    Software Engineer


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  2. Cross posted from the Official Google Blog


    Imagine you’re a ninja, trying to master your deadly grappling hook. Or perhaps you’re a chess grand master, outsmarting your opponent’s every move. Or even a Taoist philosopher, explaining the deep truths of the world to your followers.

    It’s situations like these that you’ll face in Google Code Jam, our annual coding contest in which some of the best coders from around the world write programs to solve tough algorithmic problems. We believe that one of the best ways to sharpen your coding skills and stretch them creatively is through healthy competition. The intense experience of confronting a problem, conveying your solution to your computer and seeing the results emerge is a thrill unlike any other.

    Today we’re opening registration for Google Code Jam 2011. Coding will begin on May 6 with our qualification round, where competitors will have as much as a day to plan their approach to our first few problems. From there, the contest heats up quickly: the remaining contestants will engage in several two-and-a-half hour rounds, wrangling each time with three to four algorithmic problems that range in difficulty from simple to fiendish. For each problem, you’ll wield the programming language of your choice, crafting the perfect algorithm to pit against the gauntlet of our test data. Construct your code flawlessly and you’ll be on to the next problem; solve enough problems, and you’ll make your way to the next round. If you continue to succeed, you might find yourself sitting on a flight to the finals.

    The challenge begins in just over a month. If you’re a killer coder and you’re ready to compete, sign up on our website; while you’re there, make sure to check out the puzzles of the past few years to get a sense of what’s to come, and to hone your skills. If you’re one of the top 25 competitors, we’ll bring you to our Tokyo office to spar against your fellow coders. In the end, only one person will bring home the $10,000 top prize—and the title of Code Jam Champion.

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