Anna Patterson

Dr. Anna Patterson - Vice President of Engineering at Google in front of Olin Library at her alma mater Washington University in St. Louis.

Anna Patterson has been described as one of the most important women in technology,^[1] winner of the 2016 ABIE Award,^[2] and one of the seminal contributors to search engines.^[3] She is currently Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures^[4] and Vice President of Engineering at Google.^[5] She is also currently a trustee at Harvey Mudd College^[6] and a trustee at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute^[7] and on the National Engineering Council at Washington University in St. Louis.^[8] She is a co-founder of Progressive Women of Silicon Valley which helps host candidates and causes in Silicon Valley.^[9]

While she was working in Google's Android organization, Patterson was responsible for a division of Google Play including Books and Search, Recommendations and Infrastructure for scaling up Android from 40 million phones to over 800 million phones.^[10] Before joining Android at Google, she was the principal architect of one of the firm's largest search serving systems - TeraGoogle - and also led efforts in web search, advertisements and shopping.^[11]

She was a co-founder of Cuil, a clustering-based search engine^[12] and wrote Recall.archive.org (part of the Wayback Machine), a history-based search engine out of the Internet Archive, which showed trends over time.^[13] She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue about this experience.^[14]

Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from Washington University^[15] and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign^[16] and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.^[17]

References