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.