UA Alumna, Director of Google Engineering to Speak on Campus

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Nan Boden, director of engineering at Google, is speaking Friday, April 8, on The University of Alabama campus as part of the department of computer science’s colloquium series and with the Alabama IEEE Computer Society.

Boden, who graduated from UA with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics, will give a talk titled, “A sampling of deep learning at Google.”

The talk will highlight recent developments and collaboration among differing work teams at Google on applying artificial-intelligence research into products.

She will speak from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in 1013 South Engineering Research Center with a brief reception in an adjacent room before the talk.

After leaving UA, she earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in computer science from the California Institute of Technology in 1988 and 1993, respectively. With the goal of adding formal business education, Boden completed her MBA at UCLA-Anderson in 2011.

Her doctoral research in “Runtime Systems for Fine-Grain Multicomputers” led directly into her work at Myricom, a successful business spin-off from Caltech that pioneered high-performance networking. Boden wrote the software that controlled the company’s first products.

Over the years at Myricom, Boden migrated from the technical side of the company into the business side, serving as executive vice president, chief financial officer and a member of Myricom’s board of directors. In 2010, she was named CEO.

She joined Google in 2013 as director of engineering at Google in Mountain View, California, working at the strategic intersection of technology and business. In her role, Boden helps develop Google’s next-generation data centers.