Sergey Brin (Google & Alphabet) - Google Origins and AI Futures

**Jennifer Widom** (0:15)
Welcome, everybody. This is the closing event of our centennial year. It's pretty exciting. I'm Jennifer Widom. I'm the 10th Dean of Engineering, and you can do a little math there and figure out we deans like to stay around for a while here. It's been a great year. It's been a year of celebration, reflection, looking to the future. For those of you who haven't heard about the history, we've had engineering at Stanford since the beginning of the university 1891 We started with chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and mining and metallurgy. It was in 1925, 100 years ago, when those four departments were brought together to form a school. Those four departments are still with us today. One of them has been renamed, it's now Materials Science and Engineering rather than Metallurgy. We have five more departments and many interdisciplinary programs. We've had events throughout the year to celebrate the centennial. They've been fantastic. We started with a panel with the five deans of the ten who are still with us. That panel was moderated by Jerry Yang, who I think is here today, a great friend of the school. Our second event was on May 15th. We had a big party out on the quad. We expected 2,000 people. We got 3,000 and we didn't run out of food. We had a great showcase of projects and research. The next event was a fireside chat with Jensen Wong and John Hennessey that was actually on this very stage around the end of May. We partnered with Stanford Football and had a School of Engineering themed football game. Nobody told me when I took the job as Dean that one of my jobs would be to drive a motorized couch on national TV with Andrew Luck as my passenger. But I nailed it and that was great. We had on reunion weekend a trivia contest on the history of the school. The alums enjoyed it and now this is our closing event. If we look back on the 100 years of the School of Engineering, obviously the formation of Google was a shining moment. Sergey Brin, who you will soon meet, met Larry Page when he visited to think about coming to our PhD program. That was in 1995 They worked together on a project called Digital Libraries that was funded by the National Science Foundation. If you ever have any doubt about the impact of federal funding, Google came directly from an NSF project. We all know what happened next. They developed an algorithm called Backrub, which became PageRank. By the way, that server right there is the first server that ran the PageRank algorithm. So a bit of history right in front of you. We're going to hear more about that time shortly. But I do want to say that's only one example of the entrepreneurship that has happened across the decades and the century of Stanford Engineering. Thousands of other companies have been founded by students, by faculty, by alumni. They've generated literally trillions of dollars in economic growth. That foundation was laid by the third Dean of the School of Engineering, someone by the name of Fred Terman. Fred mentored William Hewlett and David Packard. He also mentored the Varian brothers. He also helped establish the Stanford Industrial Park, which is now known as the Stanford Research Park, still going strong today. So many breakthroughs over the years in Stanford Engineering, in aeronautics, electricity transmission, microwave radar, semiconductor work that really sparked Silicon Valley, cybersecurity that all of us rely on, internet transmission protocols that all of us rely on, and the foundations of AI, bioelectronics, lithium ion batteries, the list goes on and on, and there's surely more to come. Now, I do want to acknowledge that when we look at the work that we do, a lot of the details are really done by students, and today's event is also a class. More than half of the room here are students in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program at Stanford. I just want to say to the students, you're the sequel to our history. So thank you, students, for coming.
And today's conversation is also really about students. John Levin, the president, who you will meet shortly, and Sergey Brin were Stanford students just like all of you. Today, they're helping to find the future of technology and the future of education. So this is really an ideal way to close our centennial. Now, I want to set the stage of the early 1990s when Sergey Brin arrived as a CS PhD student, computer science. Email was just becoming the way all of us were communicating. Entrepreneurship was just beginning to accelerate. The sixth dean of the School of Engineering, Jim Gibbons, hatched the idea for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which hosts the class that's here today. The science and engineering quad was on drafting paper at best, maybe just in people's minds. And by the way, I arrived the same year that Sergey did. I joined as an assistant professor in 1993