I know you were recently snatched up by Google. What are you working on at the moment?

I’ll be working on enabling computers to understand natural language. When you write a news article or a blog post you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating semantic meaning. It’s remarkable how search works, but it could be even more powerful if it understood the key questions you had on a detailed, semantic level, and if it actually read and understood, at least on some level, all these billions of web pages and book pages out there. So that’s the goal, as well as getting to know the user, knowing what the user’s own concerns are and what kind of information you’re looking for by actually understanding natural language. […]