Blog
July 18, 2005
categories: narcissism, links
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ITConversations Podcast
ITConversations has posted a podcast of my "from the labs" talk at the O'Reilly ETech 2005 conference. At the time of this talk, Dr. Gary Flake was Director of Yahoo!s Research Lab, and he discusses the philosophy behind the Research Lab. He also demonstrates some of the new tools being developed a Yahoo!, including a collaborative prediction system (with prizes!) in which you can participate. The MP3 runs 17:25 and is 8mb in size.
And let me say, I really admire what ITConversations is doing. They provide a great service to the community, with nothing but support form the community. It's a sort of PBS for the Internet era.
Also, they plug my book on their site, which obviously pleases me.
June 18, 2005
categories: narcissism
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UMD CS Alumni Hall of Fame
I am honored to have been one of the first two inductees (along with Chuck Dyer) into the alumni hall of fame of UMD's CS department, especially since UMD has as an alumnus at least one other Internet Grand Poobah*. Also, and this is the really funny part, I was actually such a screw up in the late eighties that UMD initially turned me down for admission. My future advisor vouched for me, and got the rejection reversed. Woo-hoo for string pulling irony!
Seriously, UMD has a fantastic CS program that, while well respected in the professional CS community, often doesn't get the props that it deserves from the business community.
<snark>
*Dude, you have got to change that image on your
page.
</snark>
April 15, 2005
categories: narcissism
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Yahoo R&D Chief Joins MSN Search
In a major hiring coup, the MSN Search blog announced that Yahoo's head of Research and Development, Dr.Gary William Flake has now joined MSN. According to Oshoma Momoh, General Manager, MSN Search, Dr.Flake will be 'responsible for bridging the innovation happening between Microsoft Research and MSN and for setting the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and monetization engine.' Dr.Flake is also the first person to be directly hired as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, an elite group that has Dave Cutler and Anders Hejlsberg among other luminaries. —Slashdot.org
When this news broke, I jumped into the discussion at Slashdot; here are some of my favorite excerpts:
Quixote: Yoda sez... Begin, the search engine wars has.
deutschemonte: Hmm... fallen to the dark side, young Flake has.
me: ROFL. Thanks, you made my week. I've always wanted to be the Darth Vader of the Internets, if just for a day.
The next exchange captures a little bit of the surrealism I felt when I discovered the current Slashdot story was about me:
Mr_Silver: I'm not really sure how this is news, people move from one organisation to a rival all the time (even the very senior people).
I can only assume that it is on here because it has Microsoft in the title and gives the editors a chance to whip out the (frankly stupid) borg icon.
me: And here I thought that this morning's edition of slashdot had been personalized just for me!
Winning the Outstanding Accomplishments in Trolling Award:
Anonymous Coward: On what moral ground can one justify joining MS, knowing as we all know what a despicable, criminal company it is? Dr. Flake, you are a whore.
me: Me love you long time.
And finally, an extremely generous comment from WEFUNK:
Indeed. It's too bad that most of the comments have been cracks about his name or his new title.
Gary Flake's The Computational Beauty of Nature is a classic book that anyone interested or active in engineering or computer science should own and cherish. Not only is it the best introduction and overview to explore and link together a number of popular but often confused concepts, from Fractals and Chaos to Number Theory and Computer Science, it is a beautifully written and presented book itself - perhaps best compared in both subject matter and style to other classics like Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, or perhaps A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram - except that it is shorter and much more accessible for even the layperson to read.
I had no idea what he has been up to lately. That he had left NEC to join Overture and become head scientist for Yahoo! Labs and eventually over to MSN Search certainly seems to fit the billing of "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." better than most stories I read here. My thanks to the submitter and editor for posting this.
April 11, 2005
categories: press, narcissism
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Microsoft plucks search exec from Yahoo
Microsoft on Monday said it has hired away Gary Flake, a principal scientist at Yahoo Research Lab and former head of research at the Web portal's Overture Services division. Flake will set the "technology vision and future direction" for Microsoft's MSN portal, its Web search engine, its desktop search software and its paid search business, according to Microsoft spokeswoman Kathy Gill. —CNET / NEWS.COM
And so began the next step in my professional life...
April 1, 2005
categories: press, projects
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The Tech Buzz Game
Technology soothsayers can put their predictions to the test as part of a research project merging search-query data with a virtual, online marketplace.— eWeek
The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. It is a joint research project between Yahoo! Research Labs and O'Reilly Research.
As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time.
Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you "put your play money where your mouth is."
This was just about the last project that I worked on before leaving Yahoo.
March 31, 2005
categories: press
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Second Sight
... Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo. —Guardian Unlimited
Yes. Hell yes. Someone finally gave YRL some props.
March 1, 2005
categories: links, events
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O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference celebrates the hands-on imperative of the hacker, champions an architecture of participation on which to build the future, and shines a light on the innovations coming from non-traditional sources in an effort to get them on to everybody’s radar. While the initial impact of these innovations may seem small, their ripple effects can have a huge impact in the larger computing arena. What you touch at ETech, you’ll be using in the products, applications, and services of tomorrow.’
I’ll be speaking in the section called (surprising enough) From the Labs: Yahoo! Research Labs, on March 15th, 11:15am, in the California Ballroom B & C.
January 18, 2005
categories: writing, narcissism
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The Colours of Infinity
Self-organization, Self-regulation, and Self-similarity on the Fractal Web, Gary W. Flake and David M. Pennock. Appears in The Colours of Infinity, 2004 [ Amazon | Clearpress, UK ].
This popular science book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the cult classic documentary on fractals by the same name (Colours of Infinity) and the 80th birthday of Benoit Mandelbrot. The book updates the topic of fractals with a modern perspective, including contributions from Mandelbrot, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Prechter, Ian Stuart, and Michael Barsley.
Our chapter discusses fractal-like proterties and processes on the Web. The book includes a DVD of the complete original documentary, with soundtrack by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour.
July 7, 2004
categories: narcissism, links
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Behind the Scenes at Yahoo Labs
Gary Price interviewed me for Search Engine Watch, where the interview can be read in three parts:
- Part 1 — "Dr. Gary Flake is Principal Scientist & Head of Yahoo! Research Labs. In this wide-ranging interview, he talks about the daily work of researchers at Yahoo Labs, and what they're doing to make search better."
- Part 2 — "In this second of three parts, he talks about the challenges of indexing various types of information, and Yahoo's efforts at realizing a current hot trend -- personalized search."
- Part 3 — "In this final installment, he touches on a wide range of other search related topics."