保利的“我是如何来到这里的” guest speaker series continued this fall with Dr. David Petrou, P ' 34, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as “a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google, leading teams deploying machine intelligence directly on devices like Pixel 和 across Android generally, using privacy-preserving technologies such as Federated Learning. David believes in enhancing people’s capabilities through AI-powered augmentation. 总部设在纽约, he was a founding member of Google Goggles 和 Google Glass, has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon.”

As he conducted a roundtable discussion with 上学校 students, Dr. Petrou could probably underst和 the interests of Andy Fu’23, Marisa Triola ’24,  凯尔·威廉姆斯 ’23, 和 布里安娜·关，23岁. As a third grader, Petrou 说 he had begged his parents for a computer. After almost 16 years with Google, Petrou says he has a “front row seat on the future of technology.”

Opeyemi Laniyonu, Poly’s Director of 年度捐献, served as moderator.

The discussion began with Dr. Petrou sharing his own career journey. Dr. Petrou 说 that his father was an inventor 和 he received a great deal of encouragement from his parents. He explained that he was hired at Google to work on one project, but allowed to follow another that interested him. His curiosity led to the area of computer vision 和 one of the projects he worked on was Google Goggles. He also described for the students how the Google C++ Style Guide is used.

As a manager of 140 people at Google, Dr. Petrou 说, he “carves out time” 和 tries “to connect ideas with people 和 projects.” He asked the students if they had questions. One asked him what he thought of the metaverse. “It’s about recognizing this shift,” he 说. “Technology has a role to play, but there should be balance.” He spoke about machine learning 和 how computer science can be used to help solve problems we deal with such as climate change.

A student asked about the ethics of the metaverse. Dr. Petrou told students to consider, “Your data 和 who has access.” He added, “There are actors out there who want access to your data.”

“I really enjoyed hearing Dr. Petrou’s presentation,” 说 玛丽莎Triola, who participated in the 人工智能学者计划 今年夏天. “The advice that he provided to us helped me underst和 his path 和 education, it also inspired me to create more computer science projects for fun.”

“I was most intrigued by the work that he did at Google,” Triola 说. “He explained how he worked on Google search results, how the search engine chooses an answer to display from those results. I found this amazing because this is a technology that I often use, have wondered about.  I also was very interested by what he 说 about the metaverse, as despite it seeming amazing, there are still many concerns 和 issues to be solved if it were to become a possibility.”

凯尔·威廉姆斯, who is a member of Poly’s new Varsity Robotics Team, 说, “I’ve known that my future career is going to involve technology somehow for quite some time due to my parents, 博士和. Petrou only helped me affirm that. Projects like identifying real-world objects with your phone or mapping out all the destinations a book mentions are the ones that make me fall in love with computers all over again, I thought it was very cool that he was involved in starting both of those projects at Google.”

“我是如何来到这里的” discussions with professionals such as Dr. Petrou, prompt the imaginations of our students 和 offer them an insider’s view of the diverse career paths of Poly parents, 校友, 董事会成员.