Alex Verstak
Alex Verstak
Alex Verstak is a Software engineer at Google working on Google Scholar.
Education
In 1998-2002 Alex was a student of Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. He graduated with a Masters of Science degree in Computer science.
Career
Verstak has been working as a Software engineer at Google since 2002.
Google Scholar
"I came to Google in 2000, as a year off from my academic job at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was pretty clear that I was unlikely to have a larger impact [in academia] than at Google — making it possible for people everywhere to be able to find information. So I gave up on academia and ran Google’s web-indexing team for four years. It was a very hectic time, and basically, I burnt out. Alex Verstak and I decided to take a six-month sabbatical to try to make finding scholarly articles easier and faster. The idea wasn’t to produce Google Scholar, it was to improve our ranking of scholarly documents in web search. But the problem with trying to do that is figuring out the intent of the searcher. Do they want scholarly results or are they a layperson? We said, “Suppose you didn’t have to solve that hard a problem; suppose you knew the searcher had a scholarly intent.” We built an internal prototype, and people said: “Hey, this is good by itself. You don’t have to solve another problem — let’s go!” Then Google Scholar clearly seemed to be very useful and very important, so I ended up staying with it."
Anurag Acharya about the idea for Google Scholar.
Members of the Google Scholar Team are: Alex Verstak, Software engineer, Robert Tansley, Software engineer, Christian DiCarlo, content partnerships.
Publications
Alex Verstak, Jian He, Layne T. Watson, Naren Ramakrishnan, Clifford A. Shaffer, Theodore S. Rappaport, Christopher R. Anderson, Kyung Kyoon Bae, Jing Jiang, William H. Tranter: S4W: Globally Optimized Design of Wireless communication Systems. IPDPS 2002
Alex Verstak, Naren Ramakrishnan, Kyung Kyoon Bae, William H. Tranter, Layne T. Watson, Jian He, Clifford A. Shaffer, Theodore S. Rappaport: Using Hierarchical data mining to Characterize Performance of Wireless System Configurations. CoRR cs.CE/0208040 (2002)
Alex Verstak, Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne T. Watson, Jian He, Clifford A. Shaffer, Kyung Kyoon Bae, Jing Jiang, William H. Tranter, Theodore S. Rappaport: BSML: A Binding Schema Markup Language for Data Interchange in Problem Solving Environments (PSEs).
CoRR cs.CE/0202027
(2002)
Jian He, Layne T. Watson, Naren Ramakrishnan, Clifford A. Shaffer, Alex Verstak, Jing Jiang, Kyung Kyoon Bae, William H. Tranter: Dynamic Data Structures for a Direct Search algorithm. Comp. Opt. and Appl. 23(1): 5-25 (2002)
Alex Verstak, Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne T. Watson, Jian He, Clifford A. Shaffer, Kyung Kyoon Bae, Jing Jiang, William H. Tranter, Theodore S. Rappaport: BSML: A binding schema markup language for data interchange in problem solving environments.
Scientific Programming 11(3): 199-224 (2003)
Jian He, Alex Verstak, Layne T. Watson, C. A. Stinson, Naren Ramakrishnan, Clifford A. Shaffer, Theodore S. Rappaport, Christopher R. Anderson, Kyung Kyoon Bae, Jing Jiang, William H. Tranter: Globally optimal transmitter placement for indoor wireless communication systems.
IEEE Trans.
Wireless Communications 3(6): 1906-1911 (2004)
Roger R. Skidmore, Alex Verstak, Naren Ramakrishnan, Theodore S. Rappaport, Layne T. Watson, Jian He, Srinidhi Varadarajan, Clifford A. Shaffer, Jeremy K.-P.
Chen, Kyung Kyoon Bae, Jing Jiang, William H. Tranter: Towards integrated PSEs for Wireless communication s: experiences with the S4W and SitePlanner projects. Mobile Computing and Communications Review 8(2): 20-34 (2004)
Dhananjay Mishra, Clifford A. Shaffer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne T. Watson, Kyung Kyoon Bae, Jian He, Alex Verstak, William H. Tranter: S4W: a problem-solving environment for wireless system design.
Softw., Pract.
Exper.
37(14): 1539-1558 (2007)
Jian He, Alex Verstak, Layne T. Watson, Masha Sosonkina:Design and implementation of a massively parallel version of DIRECT.
Comp.
Opt.
and Appl.
40(2): 217-245 (2008)
Jian He, Alex Verstak, Masha Sosonkina, Layne T. Watson: Performance Modeling and Analysis of a Massively Parallel Direct - Part 2. IJHPCA 23(1): 29-41 (2009)
Jian He, Alex Verstak, Layne T. Watson, Masha Sosonkina: Performance Modeling and Analysis of a Massively Parallel Direct - Part 1. IJHPCA 23(1): 14-28 (2009)
Alex Verstak, Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne T. Watson, Jian He, Clifford A. Shaffer, Ananth Grama: Using hierarchical data mining to characterize performance of wireless system configurations.
Advances in Software engineering 65: 66-77 (2013)
Alex Verstak, Anurag Acharya, Helder Suzuki, Sean Henderson, Mikhail Iakhiaev, Cliff Chiung-Yu Lin, Namit Shetty: On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles.
CoRR abs/1411.0275 (2014)
Anurag Acharya, Alex Verstak, Helder Suzuki, Sean Henderson, Mikhail Iakhiaev, Cliff Chiung-Yu Lin, Namit Shetty: Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals.
CoRR abs/1410.2217 (2014)