Planet Protector
Google News Maker
 |
Krishna Bharat is the scientist behind the headlines of Google News. He started the award-winning Internet service in 2001.
Bharat, PhD 96, calls Google, launched in late 1998, "a classic example of a graduate student project on steroids." Within six years the Internet upstart had become a $50 billion company and a world leader in Web advertising revenue.
"What happened in those six years? Lots of interesting technology came about," says Bharat, who joined Google in its toddler stage in 1999.
He goes on to say something the average Joe Surfer never even considers: "Web search is still a very hard algorithmic problem."
Before Google News became "a flourishing service," Bharat took a sabbatical from his regular duties to solve some of those algorithmic problems so he could take his idea to the masses.
"Google News is the realization of the idea that computers can A — automatically find news articles on the Web; B — put them together to form story clusters on a particular topic; C — figure out how important the story is," he says.
"Because computers can assemble the news together and bring in multiple points of view, it gives you a broad picture of what's happening and it's also proved to be unbiased."
Google News wasn't available around the globe until 2002 but was immediately recognized as a force with which to be reckoned. Online Journalism Review named it the Best New Friend of the Year. A year later, Google News beat BBC to win the 2003 Webby Award.
Although he studied computer science, Bharat has long been interested in journalism and developed an early interactive newspaper using Java while a Georgia Tech student in 1994. "At that point I had one user. That was me," he says, smiling. "Now Google News has literally millions of users."
While the popularity of Google News has brought Bharat acclaim, including the World Technology Award for media, it also has brought him more algorithmic problems to solve.
"Spamming is a martial art. Every time we come up with something, spammers try to outwit us," Bharat says. "Money follows users. There's a lot of money in spamming Google, probably a $40 billion industry. With that kind of money they can afford to hire PhDs.
"This is an arms race. The smarter you get, the smarter they get. There are actually spam tutorials," he says. "People have found ways to attack us. We have to constantly improve our techniques to fight spam."
Planet Protector
 |
It's been almost two decades since Dan Albritton first found himself in Antarctica collecting samples of air and ice particles high above the sky at the loneliest place on the globe. The recent discovery that a massive hole had appeared in the Earth's protective ozone layer, letting harmful ultraviolet radiation reach the planet's surface, had put a sudden urgency on uncovering what caused the small, fragile molecules called ozone to vanish.
Today he looks back with a contented smile on his face. "The ozone layer will show signs of recovery — the amount of ozone depleting chemicals in the atmosphere is declining," he says.
Albritton, EE 59, MS Phys 63, PhD Phys 67, directed the Aeronomy Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., from 1986 until his retirement in March.
During two international expeditions to Antarctica in the late '80s and early '90s Albritton and his colleagues confirmed that human-made chlorofluorocarbons — chemicals widely used as spray can propellants and refrigeration materials — caused the seasonal gap in the invisible shield functioning as the Earth's sunscreen.
Aeronomy laboratory researchers discovered why the ozone molecules above the only continent that had never been the home of spray cans or refrigerators were so particularly vulnerable to CFCs. Their findings led to substantial amendments of the Montreal Protocol, an unprecedented international agreement established in the mid-1980s to protect the ozone layer, and were the reason for the CFC phaseout.
For the past 20 years, Albritton has been at the forefront of the science-policy interface, communicating scientific findings to national and global decision makers, such as the United Nations and the U.S. Congress.
"The story of the ozone layer is a great success story. The scientific community discovered an environmental issue and, based on the scientific input, policy-makers around the world made decisions that are leading to the repair of the issue," Albritton says.
Other climate concerns such as global warming will not be as easy to solve, he cautions.
"The move out of CFCs didn't wreck society because industry was able to replace them with ozone-friendly, affordable chemicals. There is no easy way out of greenhouse gases," he says. "When it comes to solving the issue of global warming, there is no silver bullet. Many experts believe that we will likely need a basket of approaches such as fuel economy, changes of lifestyle and alternative sources of energy. After all, we didn't get an instruction manual with this planet. Instead, we are the ones writing it — page by page."
Albritton's career path that led him to become one of the world's foremost atmospheric scientists started when he left Georgia Tech in 1967 for a postdoc position at NOAA in the same blue Volkswagen Beetle he drives to this day.
©2006 Georgia Tech Alumni Association
