Jon Orwant

I was at MIT from BS through PhD, getting degrees in computer science & engineering, brain & cognitive science, and media arts & sciences. I wrote about a thousand programs while I was there, one of which turned out to be the first Internet stock-picking game. Mostly I wrote machine learning programs for electronic publishing.

Eventually I graduated and became CTO of O'Reilly, where I wrote books about software and software about books. The best book I've written is Programming Perl, although my co-authors deserve most of the credit. At O'Reilly I had the pleasure of emceeing the Internet Quiz Show at their annual Open Source Convention, although the real pleasure was writing the questions beforehand.

Next I became Director of Research at France Telecom R&D, which was strange because I'm not French, and I hate phones. Meanwhile I taught a graduate course at MIT on game design.

Now I work for Google on Book Search, helping to make the world's books discoverable and searchable. I was one of the first employees in the Boston office.

If you're visiting this page because you're interviewing with Google and found out I'm on your interview schedule, you won't find any hints here. We are not amateurs.