Ever wondered what it was like to work for Google?

Extending on the workshops in Technology Development is a series of short lunchtime presentations from science and engineering graduates who have built impressive careers outside academia.  Our first speaker is Mark Cummins, a co-developer of Google Goggles.

Mark completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, working in the Mobile Robotics Group of Professor Paul Newman.  His PhD work developed the FAB-MAP algorithm for place recognition and loop closure, which was awarded best vision paper at ICRA 2008 and is the most cited publication of the last ten years in IJRR.  Most recently Mark was a senior software engineer at Google, working in the Visual Search group. This group works on a number of computer vision systems at Google, notably large-scale particular object retrieval, large-scale category recognition, robust text extraction and many other systems, with applications in products ranging from Street View to Google Goggles. Prior to joining Google, Mark was co-founder of Plink, a visual search engine company acquired by Google in 2010.  Mark is now an independent entrepreneur and is a testament to the opportunities a PhD and an agile mind can create. (Background: watch his TEDx talk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96sWzECkGCw)

Bring your lunch. The format is short (18 min) and allows informal discussion with the speaker.