Univ. of Sydney Seminar: Google Maps -- Organizing the World's Information, Geographically.

Speaker: Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen, Google
Time: 12. October 2005, 2-3pm
Location: Sydney Uni, CARSLAW LECTURE THEATRE CAR173

ABSTRACT:
I will talk about the many pieces of the puzzle comprising Google Maps. We built, for example, the Google Maps site as a single page consisting almost entirely of JavaScript. (The acronym "AJAX" was later coined to describe this approach.) I will discuss the pros and cons of AJAX, and delve into some particular technical challenges we had to meet. I will also give a high-level overview of the challenges involved in working with spatial data: making it searchable, routable, and browsable. The field is relatively new to Google, and most of the challenges still lie ahead.


SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY:
Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen is a member of Google's technical staff and the lead engineer of the team that created Google Maps. He currently works out of Google's Sydney office and is actively working to expand Google's engineering presence in Australia.
Lars holds a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. In early 2003, he co-founded with his brother Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen a mapping-related startup, Where 2 Technologies, which was acquired by Google in October of 2004.