Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a seminal contributor to

search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

Education

Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from

McKelvey School of Engineering The James McKelvey School of Engineering is a part of Washington University in St. Louis. Founded in 1854, the engineering school is a research institution occupying seven buildings on Washington University's Danforth Campus. Research emphasis ...

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

and her

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and

Carolyn Talcott Carolyn Talcott (born June 14, 1941) is an American computer scientist known for work in formal reasoning, especially as it relates to computers, cryptanalysis and systems biology. She is currently the program director of the Symbolic Systems Biol ...

on theorem provers.

Career

As of 2017 she was Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures and Vice President of Engineering at

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. While she was working in Google's Android organization, Patterson was responsible for a division of

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sy ...

including Books and Search, Recommendations and Infrastructure for scaling up Android from 40 million phones to over 800 million phones. She co-founded

Cuil Cuil ( ) was a search engine that organized web pages by content and displayed relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. Cuil said it had a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages.L ...

, a clustering-based search engine (which she created after leaving Google in 2007) and wrote Recall.archive.org (part of the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

), a history-based search engine out of the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

, which showed trends over time.

Awards and honors

Patterson was a winner of the 2016 ABIE Award. She also served on the board of Square Inc. She was previously a trustee at Harvey Mudd College and a trustee at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and on the National Engineering Council at

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Patterson, Anna Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Google employees McKelvey School of Engineering alumni University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni Washington University in St. Louis people