News & Views item - February 2007

 

 

Google Founder Tells AAAS Scientists They Need to Market Better. (February 19, 2007)

Google Co-founder Larry Page giving AAAS plenary Lecture.

    At this year's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) being held in San Francisco, the Co-founder with Sergey Brin of the eight-year-old search engine giant Google, Larry Page, gave an hour-long plenary lecture on Friday.

 

He told his listeners that it was his guess the human brain's algorithms weren't all that complicated and could be approximated, eventually, with a lot of computational power. In fact: "We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale," Mr Page told the packed Hilton ballroom. "It's not as far off as people think."

 

Remembering that Messrs Brin and Page have abandoned/postponed their PhD candidacies to found Google it's not surprising the thirty-three-year-old billionaire went on to tell his audience to take their scientific studies, market them better and make them readily accessible to the world. That way, the world might have a better chance of solving problems like energy consumption, poverty and global climate change.

 

"Virtually all economic growth (in the world) has been due to technological progress," Mr Page said, "I think as a society we're not really paying attention to that. Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem."   

 

Stefanie Olsen for CNET News.com reports:

To that end, Page urged the group to take on more leadership roles in society, i.e., politics, so that they could control more funding for research and development. He also said that scientists should get in the habit of investing part of their scientific grant money to marketing budgets, in order to get the word out to the media about their research.

 

Entrepreneurialism should also be more ingrained in university culture, Page said, much like it is at his alma mater Stanford University and Google's home-base, Silicon Valley.

Finally, he called on the scientists to make more of their research available digitally. Even though Google Scholar tries to open access to scientific work, it still falls short.

"Most of the works you guys have done are not represented in those searches. We have to unlock the wealth of scientific knowledge and get it to everyone. I don't care what we do, but we need to do something," he said.

Page said he hopes Internet video, like Youtube and Google Video, will evolve to include scientific lectures. He said he would like to see a "box in the back of every classroom," where professors could push a button and "whatever you said would go on Net. It's important to get all that out there."

It would be something of a fillip were the Australian scientific community to take heed of Larry Page's overall message, start getting its message to the media and the public, and begin to get some strong candidates into the federal parliament.

 

And just in passing, last year Stanford University garnered US$911 million (A$1.16 billion) in donations from its alumni. Well, it is a private university of course.