Georges Harik

Georges Haric is an advisor at Deep Sentinel. He has held an advisory position at GV. He is one of the first 10 Google employees, having served as director of Googlettes and a distinguished engineer. As director of Googlettes, his team was responsible for product management and strategy for many of Google’s fledgling initiatives, including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Video, Picasa, Orkut, Google Groups and Google Mobile. As a distinguished engineer, Georges co-developed the targeting technology behind AdSense, was the first engineering lead for the Google Search Appliance and co-authored the original product plan for AdWords Online. Georges was also involved in the development of numerous patents relating to Google’s search engine and ad networks, and for several years was one of three members of the Google Engineer Hiring Committee, which oversaw the hiring of Google’s first few hundred engineers. Georges’ technical expertise relates to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Prior to entering the workforce, Georges earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he focused on mathematical models of genetic algorithms, programs that evolve to solve problems inspired by natural processes. While working at the University of Illinois as a research associate, Georges co-invented the first highly accurate technique for estimating the temporal complexity of genetic algorithms, published in The Gambler’s Ruin Problem, Genetic Algorithms, and the Sizing of Populations. Georges subsequently published one of the seminal papers on optimization using probabilistic modeling, Linkage Learning via Probabilistic Modeling in the ECGA. He then worked at SGI as a developer of MineSet, a data mining product. At Google, Georges co-invented and developed two very large-scale parallel machine learning programs that are used in numerous systems such as AdSense targeting and Gmail’s spam filter. Georges is currently an angel investor and advisor to various startups working in Internet applications, machine learning, advertising technology, and biotechnology. He is also the founder of imo and co-founder of hslabs, an open source artificial intelligence research lab.