Lecture By State Department's Chang Will Follow Norvig Talk

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google Inc., will discuss "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" as he presents the Hank Suz-Chi Wan Distinguished Lecture at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Rashid Auditorium of the Gates and Hillman centers.

In decades past, models of human language were wrought from the sweat and pencils of linguists. But Norvig says it now is more common to think of language modeling as an exercise in probabilistic inference from data: by observing how words and combinations of words are used, computer models can be built to determine what phrases mean.

This approach is hopeless with a small amount of data, he notes, but when millions or billions of examples are available, the hopeless suddenly becomes effective, and computer models sometimes meet or exceed human performance. His talk will give examples of the data available in large repositories of text, images and videos and show what can be done with it.

Prior to joining Google, Norvig was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. A former faculty member at the University of Southern California, he has over 50 publications in computer science, concentrating on artificial intelligence, natural language processing and software engineering.

Following Norvig's talk and reception, Ann Mei Chang, Senior Advisor for Women and Technology in the Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues at the U.S. Department of State, will discuss the Internet's potential for tackling seemingly intractable problems in developing nations. Her Distinguished Lecture, "Tech for Development: Oasis or Mirage?" will begin at 5 p.m. in the Rashid Auditorium and is jointly sponsored by TechBridgeWorld, SCS and the Heinz College.

Prior to joining the State Department, Chang spent 8 years as a senior engineering director at Google, most recently leading product development for emerging markets, with a mission to bring relevant mobile and Internet services to the half of the world's population which is not yet online.