Michael A. Mayor, MSE, PE

This presentation covers the science of search engine rankings developed by Google. This is a multinational, publicly traded, company very well known in the Internet, built around the hugely successful search engine. In fact, the search engine and particularly the mathematics behind it, is one of the reasons of Google’s huge success in the Internet arena. Search Engines have become an integral part of handling Big Data where searches must be conducted, preferably in seconds, over millions of entries. This talk addresses first a brief history of Information Retrieval and the early search engines, like Boolean, Vector Space, Probabilistic and Meta Search Engines and subsequently goes into an in depth explanation of the search process. The lecture continues with an explanation of the Page Ranking method and the Mathematics of Google’s PageRank. Finally, I present an overview of the massive Computer Hardware, i.e. server farms, which make possible a practical, real-time, implementation of the PageRank algorithms. Cleve Moler, the founder of Matlab, wrote an article for his October 2002 Newsletter Matlab News that cited PageRank as “The World’s Largest Matrix Computation.”  Then Google was applying the power method to a sparse matrix of order 2.7 billion. Now it is up to 8.1 billion.

Biography:

Michael A. Mayor, MSE, PE is a Consulting Scientist providing services in the areas of Information Management Systems, Secure Telecommunications, Precision Geolocation, Digital Instrumentation and RF Propagation Modeling and Analysis. Formerly, he was Vice President / Chief Scientist, Advanced Technology Research, in the Aerospace/Communications Division of ITT Defense Electronics. In this capacity, he conducted Research and Directed the Development and Deployment of a wide range of Mobile Secure Wireless Communications and Emitter Geolocation Systems and their components. These included: Radio Frequency Transceivers, Software Defined and Cognitive Radio Systems, Digital Receivers and Digital Signal Processing algorithms. These activities extended to the application of Digital Instrumentation to System Test and Validation. He authored six patents in Spread Spectrum Communications and Digital Instrumentation. He received the ITT Defense & Electronics Engineered for Life Award, for his technical contributions in Communications and Microelectronics.

He is a Life Senior Member of the IEEE and an active member of the Florida West Coast Section, where he holds the positions of Vice Chair of the joint Chapter CS/AESS and Editor of the monthly publication the SunCoast Signal. He is a Licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Virginia and holds a Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) in Systems Engineering (Communications and Signal Processing) from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania.