NYAS

NY Academy of Sciences has an article interviewing Corinna Cortes (SVM fame, BellHead, CoI fame at AT&T and now heads Google Research in NY). She gave a talk on algorithmic challenges at Google at IBM/Columbia/NYU theory day last spring and will give related talks elsewhere like SDM 2007 and WEA 2007. The talk has nice technical pointers on problems to think about, within the context of an internet search engine/sofware company.