MAGGIE JOHNSON: The way that Google
started was an academic venture.
JEFF DEAN: How do you find interesting problems
in the world?
ALFRED SPECTOR: Google depends on academia.
So many of the good ideas that we've brought forward
to the world come from academia.
JEFF DEAN: One of the real reasons to engage with academia
is to get a really fresh perspective.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We empower academics
to work on real problems.
And in the other direction, academics
bring ideas and new approaches that
are put into practice much more quickly
than in an academic environment.
JEFF DEAN: Oh, that's interesting.
That's interesting.
All of a sudden, you've knitted together
something that is really, really, tremendously powerful.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We need their help because of the problem
we're trying to solve internally.
ALFRED SPECTOR: Academia can look far out into the future.
It can take greater risks and look for really interesting
solutions that industry sometimes cannot.
DAN RUSSELL: I'm Dan Russell.
And I'm a researcher for user experience in the search group.
My job is to try to figure out how people think-- particularly
about how search works, but more generally I
work a lot with universities.
And that's my connection here with the Olsons,
is part of the university relationships program.
So I'm heavily involved in making sure
that Google connects with the academic research in the world
that's really relevant to us.
And that's how I know you guys, ultimately.
GARY OLSON: I'm Gary Olson, a faculty member at UC Irvine.
I got my Ph.D. at Stanford in cognitive experimental
psychology.
Spent most of my career at the University of Michigan,
as did Judy.
And I've been studying collaboration
since the mid '80s.
JUDY OLSEN: And I'm Judy Olson.
And I have a very similar background to Gary
in that I got my Ph.D. not at Stanford,
but the University of Michigan in cognitive psychology.
And then the tech world grew up around us,
and there are lots of interesting cognitive
things going on.
DAN RUSSELL: I think the first that Judy and Gary were working
on was this collaboration piece.
And it became very clear to me several years ago,
working at Google-- because I've been here eight years now--
that the docs work that were doing,
presentations and spreadsheets and so on,
was really in need of some deep thinking.
Now what I found interesting was when I first visited you guys,
you had been working on ShrEdit before that, the shared editing
stuff.
And that actually really impressed me.
Because then years later, when I was at CSCW, the Computer
Supported Cooperative Work conference,
I was demoing one of the first versions of Google Docs.
And I would demo this and say, look, isn't this great?
And I remember somebody coming up to me and saying,
isn't that just ShrEdit?
[LAUGHTER]
And that kind of reminded me, gee, Judy and Gary
have been doing this forever.
And we really should connect with them.
GARY OLSON: We did some carefully-controlled studies
that showed that working with this collaborative editor
really made collaborations work better.
I mean, we compared that with people just
using the white board and paper and pencil and so on.
And the shared editor review was a productivity enhancer.
So we had early evidence from the early '90s
that this was a good idea.
And it took a long time for it to be picked up
in the commercial world.
And so we're delighted that it has been.
What's interesting is there's a whole culture change that's
taken place in the last-- I don't know,
25, 3o-- years about how much more important teamwork is,
whether you're talking about in an industrial setting,
or even in universities now.
Group projects in schools of business,
schools of engineering, schools of computer science
are just much more common than they ever used to be.
I'm waiting for the first collaborative dissertation,
because it's a natural outcome.
JUDY OLSEN: But there's also a big science happening now too,
across universities.
And some of that is impossible without these kinds of tools.
GARY OLSON: Working with other people is considered cheating.
DAN RUSSELL: Yes, that's right.
GARY OLSON: Yet now we know that it's actually important,
it's valuable.
DAN RUSSELL: The cycle time, with which work gets done now
is very different.
I remember going to a talk where a student presented his work,
and it was great.
And beside me, the guy had downloaded
the data set and redone all the essential key aspects
of his algorithm and came up with a different answer.
So what happened was what took four years, all of a sudden
now was compressed into the time of the talk.
Think about what it would have been previously.
Well, I'll get back to you with the data,
and I'll reimplement it.
Maybe six months later I'll write a paper
that rebuts what we found out.
All of a sudden now we've switched from months
to an hour.
And that immediacy of data sharing,
immediacy of being able to reimplement and build
on top of the infrastructures that we have.
GARY OLSON: Because as we know, I
mean, to create the technology that makes this possible also
creates interesting new social issues about credit, sharing,
privacy, control.
So there's a whole other round of research
that's got to be done on what happens,
what are the consequences once we
can do this stuff technologically?
JUDY OLSEN: Every time we give a talk,
there are excellent questions that people
ask that all very much influence our work,
the next things that we're going to work on.
But also we find out that people who
are experts in various topics that we
find from the literature are now at Google.
And so they're a phone call away.
And they're willing to talk to us, right,
because we're part of this partnership.
And that's been totally enlightening.
GARY OLSON: But in the past, we did a sabbatical
at Microsoft Research-- I don't know, 10, 15 years ago.
We did a sabbatical at Xerox, PARC.
So we've done-- pretty much all of our sabbaticals
have been in corporate settings.
And we have very strong connections with IBM.
So we love to go back and forth between academia and industry.
I think that's a really important kind of partnership.
DAN RUSSELL: One of the things that always impresses me
when Judy and Gary come to town is that people come out
of the woodwork that I never expected.
So for example, I think the last time you were here,
people from quantitative marketing came and spoke to us.
JUDY OLSEN: Yeah.
DAN RUSSELL: And it was like, really?
I had no idea.
And it turns there was this deep connection
that I don't think any of us had anticipated.
And so there are connections like that
that emerge that you don't anticipate.
That's one of the beautiful things about this.
GARY OLSON: There's another odd connection
that Larry Page took a class from Judy from he
was an undergraduate at Michigan.
JUDY OLSEN: So I take credit for a lot
of things of how this company runs.
DAN RUSSELL: Nicely circular.
JUDY OLSEN: Yes, nicely circular.
GARY OLSON: This is just an ongoing story.
It doesn't end.
And I think that's the nature of research.
So we'll study collaboration for another 10 or 15 years
and we'll see where it goes.
But then other people will pick it up,
and the story will evolve.
DAN RUSSELL: When we started this relationship
with Judy and Gary, we had hopes for certain things
that would come out of it.
But the thing that most surprised
me was how many things came out of it
that I hadn't anticipated.
And I think that's the key idea about a lot of research.
You can go in there, you can make your spreadsheet,
make your project plan.
You will execute X, Y, and Z. And that's great.
It's the alpha, beta, deltas beyond that
you don't anticipate.
and actually have a lot of magic.
GARY OLSON: That's one of the reasons why
it's been so fun to work with you guys,
because we laid out a little plan at the beginning.
And we've done some of that, but we've
done so many other things we didn't have in that plan.
And you were supportive of doing that.
I think that was terrific.
JUDY OLSEN: It allowed the inspiration came
from people reacting to what we doing so far.
And so it's been a really good interaction.
DAN RUSSELL: I think you should watch their talk,
because it's brilliant.
There's no question about it.
Just watch it.