The company, which has 400 engineers and other employees in Larimer, is usually guarded about its operations. It didn't even make a formal announcement when it appointed the two executives — co-directors Jeremy Kubica and Kamal Nigam — and who provided a verbal peek behind the door.
They told an audience of several hundred businesspeople at an event at the Sheraton Station Square Hotel in the South Side that the local office, which has grown in size from when it opened in 2006, has gained prominence within the Google family.
The projects to thwart online advertising scams and to improve cellphone security underscore how the local office established itself as a solver of complex problems and has earned increased responsibility, they said.
Finding a solution for detecting and deterring online scams is “probably the biggest and clearest example of that,” said Kubica, who along with Nigam took over leadership of Google's growing presence in Pittsburgh this summer.
“It really is a constant race to stay ahead. And we've got a really talented group of engineers who are trying to find the next scam, get ahead of it and try to disable it before it impacts our users,” Kubica said.
The executives did not provide much detail about the work that is being done at Bakery Square. But Kubica spoke about the “fun challenge” in finding solutions for some of the nagging issues facing Internet and smartphone users and “constantly pushing the boundaries of technology.”
“What's really exciting about this,” Kubica said of the effort to root out scam ads “is there is innovation going on both sides.”
Screening out scam advertisements that pop up in Google searches or in emails could be tricky, according to Dave Aitel, CEO of Immunity Inc. of Miami, an Internet security firm.
“The primary objective in such an effort is you have to get everything very correct. Anything that results in false positives would result in a bad user experience,” he said. “Deep down, you have to have an extreme level of accuracy.”
For example, a parent trying to make a credit card payment for a fundraising project for their child's parent-teacher group would be unhappy if the site is marked as a scam, Aitel said.
Most email programs have software to filter out risky advertisements. And they are somewhat successful; unfiltered email would be hit by hundreds of such ads each day.
Google, which plans to expand further as anchor tenant at Bakery Square 2.0, under construction across Penn Avenue, comes the closest to accurately filtering out risky ads, Aitel said. Even though it is trying to improve, that's not the same as getting it done, he said.
Another Google Pittsburgh team, described by Nigam, is using its expertise in visual processing and automatic recognition of faces to enable “what we call ‘face unlock' on your Android phone.
“Your phone would look at you, it would recognize you and unlock your phone,” Nigam said. The security measure would protect data from unauthorized users, using face-recognition software against a photo of the phone's owner, which is stored on the device.
“That's actually a pretty cool project that everybody can understand. Understand, also, that there's really hard, innovative computer science behind it to make that kind of thing happen,” he said.
Nigam and Kubica took over as co-directors when Andrew Moore, Google Pittsburgh's founding director, was named dean of Carnegie Mellon University's school of computer science in the spring. Moore joined CMU's faculty in 1993 and helped to start Google's office on CMU's campus in 2006 and oversaw its expansion to Bakery Square in 2010.
Kubica and Nigam joined Google in Pittsburgh in 2006. Nigam, 42, has served as director of engineering projects. Kubica, 35, has served as a senior staff engineer. Both are CMU graduates.
In addition to co-leading the Pittsburgh office, they are responsible for separate groups of software engineers, with Kubica's focusing on Google's advertising business, “to improve the quality of ads users see,” he said.
Nigam's group focuses on shopping and “a large strategic initiative ... to provide users with incredibly positive shopping experiences.”
©2014 The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Greensburg, Pa.)
