Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The University welcomed back one of its successful alumni yesterday — Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google. The 1986 graduate left with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and went on to help create Google Earth.
Brian McClendon, 1986 graduate and vice president of engineering for Google, discusses the technology behind Google Earth and Google Maps. McClendon detailed the various software and hardware behind Google's geo products Monday afternoon in the Apollo Room of Nichols Hall.
McClendon spoke to an audience of more than 50 faculty members and students in the Apollo Room at Nichols Hall about the development and future of Google Earth and cloud computing, which is a type of processing.
In his presentation, he discussed how drastically computers had changed between 1982, when he purchased his first Atari video game system, and 2004 when he co-created Google Earth. McClendon said early computers and game systems, such as Atari, held relatively tiny amounts of storage space compared with the storage capabilities of the modern Google. This growth in storage space has been the most notable change in modern technology, McClendon said. He said Google’s storage capacity had grown exponentially and he predicted it would continue to do so in the future.
McClendon joined Google in 2004 when the company bought Keyhole Corp., where he had previously been working. In the same year, he helped to create Google Earth. According to McClendon’s presentation, more than 30 percent of Earth’s land surface and 50 percent of its population is represented in the Google Earth program.
As the leader of the engineering group for Google’s geo products, which include Maps, Streetview and Sketchup, McClendon and his team have since created Google Ocean, Sky, Mars and Moon.
McClendon said smart phones, which commonly use open-source operating systems such as Google’s Android system, thrived with the advent of a type of processing called cloud computing. He said this would eventually make the mobile phone the future of the Internet.
The lecture attracted students and professionals eager to find ways to incorporate McClendon’s work into their own research.
“I saw it as a good opportunity to broaden my horizons and gain some exposure,” Mindy Liu, Wichita graduate student in the School of Engineering, said.
Matt Welch, Shawnee sophomore, works at Sunflower Broadband and came to the lecture to hear more about file systems, a process he uses at work.
McClendon’s presentation also drew in faculty members interested in incorporating his work into their own jobs.
Aaron Sumner, project manager for the Center for Research in Learning, and Amber Nutt, program assistant for the center, came to the lecture to find ways to help professors educate their students using cloud computing as a way of gathering information.
It all, McClendon said, was part of Google’s main mission: to organize information and to make it accessible to the world.
— Edited by Amanda Thompson
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