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WASHINGTON: Former US vice-president Dick Cheney said on Sunday that instead of probing CIA’s interrogation techniques, the Obama administration should use the agency to find what A. Q. Khan was up to.

Mr Cheney – an outspoken critic of the Obama administration, particularly on national security issues – took the administration head on in his pre-taped interview to Fox News, calling the investigation of CIA interrogators an ‘outrageous political act’.

‘The courts in Pakistan have ruled that A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistan nuclear weapon, who provided assistance to the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Libyans, has now been released from custody,’ Mr Cheney said.

‘It’s very, very important we find out and know long-term what he’s up to. He’s so far the worst proliferator of nuclear technology in recent history.’

The CIA, he said, had ‘agents and people’ who ought to be on that case and worry about it, but now they would be busy hiring lawyers at their own expense in order to defend themselves.

Mr Cheney said the Bush administration started the use of the Predator drones ‘very aggressively’ to target militants hiding in Fata and he was ‘very proud’ of such decisions.

‘Marrying up the intelligence platform with weapons is something we started in August of 2001. It’s been enormously successful. And they were successful the other day in killing Baitullah Mehsud, which — I think all of those are pluses.’

President Barack Obama’s decision to investigate CIA agents who carried out those policies, however, would ‘seriously undermine the morale of our folks out at the agency,’ he added. ‘(It would set) a terrible, terrible precedent.’

Asked when he was the vice-president, did he know that CIA agents were using mock executions, handguns and electric drills to interrogate the suspects and used waterboarding against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, Mr Cheney said: ‘I knew about the waterboarding, not specifically in any one particular case but as a general policy that we had approved.’

‘Do you think what they did was wrong?’ he was asked.

‘My sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed.’

Such interrogations, he said, led to the arrest of nearly all Al Qaeda members now in US custody. ‘I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.’

‘It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well,’ he added.

‘So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorisation, you’re OK with it?’ he was asked.’ I am,’ said the former vice-president.

The US administration, he said, sometimes asks the CIA people to ‘do some very difficult things’ that put their own lives at risk and they ‘do so at the direction of the president.’

If those people were subjected to investigation, ‘nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions,’ Mr Cheney warned. ‘It’s a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community.’

President Obama’s decision to investigate CIA agents, he said, was a political move with no rationale.

Mr Cheney said that only a few months ago, President Obama had assured the

CIA that there would not be ‘any look-back’ at those who were carrying out the policies of the previous administration.

‘Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party and they’re reversing course on that.’

Mr Cheney said that the other thing that ‘offends the hell out of me’, is the possibility that the Obama administration might want to investigate all those who, during the last eight years, were defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda.

‘I think it’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions without having to worry about what the next administration’s going to say about it,’ said Mr Cheney.

News By Dawn News

ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari’s media adviser Farahnaz Ispahani refuted opposition’s claims on Sunday that Pakistan People’s Party was running a media campaign against a party, and termed the allegation ‘unfortunate’ and ‘false’.

Commenting on a statement of PML-N Information Secretary Ahsan Iqbal that a special media cell working in the Presidency and within the ruling party was busy in maligning his party, she said: ‘There is no cell of any kind either in the Presidency or within the party to damage or deride any politician. Unlike other parties, the PPP will neither abandon its principles nor will it govern on the basis of the latest opinion polls.’

The adviser said the PPP invited the opposition party’s spokesperson to back up his claims on the issue.

‘As for his claim that he and his party have been holding back and have hundreds of stories to tell, we urge him and his party to bravely step forward and expose with evidence any instances of wrongdoing and corruption,’ she said.

‘The president, prime minister and the people’s federal and provincial governments remain focussed on addressing issues critical for the survival, success and stability of our great country,’ she said.

She said the PPP and its allies believed in strengthening the democratic order and institutionalising reforms for its sustainability.

News By Dawn News

Pardon the Pakistani news media going gaga over Washington’s plans to beef up, extraordinarily, its diplomatic presence in Pakistan. The plans are staggering and stupendous, for want of more descriptive adjectives. But they are, for the record, just geared to Washington’s diplomatic stake in Pakistan, lest the Pakistanis routinely clobbered in the ‘civilised western world’ for their outbursts of emotions over supposedly petty little things.

‘The Americans are coming, and coming big,’ according to media pundits in Pakistan. And none should blame them for going over the top because the figures being bandied about are, to say the very least, flabbergasting.

What’s on the drawing boards in Washington and Islamabad are the blue prints for vastly increasing the number of American personnel manning one of the most important diplomatic presence in the 21st century for the Americans in Pakistan. Apparently, Washington feels that its battery of 750 men and women stocking the American Embassy in Islamabad is far too inadequate to cope with the job on their hands. They need to be given a big injection to inflate their muscles. The magic potion said to be brewing would add at least another thousand people on what’s being described as a ‘war footing.’ That would take US diplomatic presence in Islamabad way above the current largest American diplomatic mission in Beijing, China; the number there stands at a paltry 1450.

The US Congress agrees with the mandarins at the State Department and has allocated 940 million dollars for the embassy in Islamabad and a number of American consulates, particularly those in Karachi and Peshawar. The fortress-like new consulate on Karachi’s Arabian Sea is spread over six acres of prime land, given to them at a throw-away price, of course. What are friends for, after all, and the Americans, don’t forget, have powerful friends in very high places in Pakistan.

(Meanwhile, US ambassador Anne Patterson, reacting to media reports, has said that the number of Marines in the new embassy would be less than 20. They would be accommodated in a bomb-proof facility. At present the embassy has 250 regular staff, 200 visiting American staff and 1,000 local personnel. Another 500 would be added in next three years.)

The government of Pakistan is obviously chipping into these plans with a magnanimity that our ruling elite is so well-known for, as far as their overseas ‘friends’ are concerned. They may be tight-fisted and niggardly to their own people but for minders and mentors from the world beyond Pakistan, sky is the limit.

Little wonder, therefore, that a huge parcel of 18 acres of prime land in Islamabad’s exclusive diplomatic enclave has been ‘sold’ to the American Embassy for just one billion rupees, a fraction of its market worth. What is 18 acres between friends; peanuts when you think of how magnanimously Pervez Musharraf presented the whole of Pakistan to his American mentors over just a phone call from Colin Powell. It was a friendly transaction between two soldiers.

So the fortress in Islamabad, when built, will dwarf the mini-fortress of Karachi. It will be a city in its own right, a typical American enclave on Pakistan’s soil, with its own residential colony for the staff and all the requisite paraphernalia of entertainment and security to convey the American sense in spades to its denizens.

But wait. The Pakistani pundits have nothing to grudge the Americans their plans to replicate their America on a little patch of Pakistan. What worries them is what’s at the core of these huge plans of expansion, and what kind of people are coming in droves to Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar with the obvious intent to cover all the bases in Pakistan.

Pakistan can’t seem to get rid of its perennial problem of being hyphenated with this or that of its neighbours in Washington’s esteem. It was India until not too long ago when American relations with India were taken to another, high, pedestal, with Pakistan left in a limbo to search its own station in American evaluation.

For a moment Pakistan thought it had jettisoned, for good, its hyphenated syndrome. But that feeling didn’t last long. The US is immersed deep into its Afghan adventure and Pakistan is back in its role of a key, front-line, ally. Hence Pakistan can’t be separated from Afghanistan; hence it must play out to the hilt its role of a soldier in a forward trench whose mission is to pull Washington’s chestnut out of the Afghan fire.

It doesn’t matter how Pakistan got involved in the Bush war on terror, or how Musharraf succumbed to the pressure. The ground reality, no matter how tart or unpalatable to a lot of Pakistanis, is that Pakistan is up to its eyeballs into America’s war and must pay the price of the follies of its rulers, past and present.

The US drew a seminal lesson from its involvement in World War II and that’s that America can best be protected, if not insulated from the outside world, by drawing its lines of defence in far off lands, in places wherever a threat to US security or its quest for global dominance may occur and must be pre-empted with maximum force.

The American wars in Korea and Vietnam were triggered by this policy of offence-being-the-best-defence. George W. Bush, an ardent practitioner of Pax Americana couldn’t be more articulate than coining the shibboleth of ‘taking the war to the enemy.’ The invasion of Afghanistan, on the heels of 9/11 was justified on this premise, besides being a prop to Bush’s dream of an imperial America holding the world in its thrall.

Barack Obama may be poles-apart from Bush on so many other things but shares his perception of fighting the enemy on its terrain. Add to it his own vision of winning the war in Afghanistan at any cost. So no price is too high once you commit yourself to achieving a goal; and Obama has his heart set on ferreting out victory of any sort in Afghanistan after having lost the one in Iraq.

But wars can’t be won cheap. They require elaborate logistics. Pakistan has become a cockpit of conflict and chaos spawned by its involvement in the Afghan imbroglio. So Pakistan must be primed to deliver according to Washington’s expectations. Logistics must be so arranged as to deal with Pakistan’s chaotic and turbulent scenario according to Washington’s master-plan for the area.

The logistics involve the building of fortresses bristling with hi-tech gadgetry that keeps the troublesome Pakistanis, or the Pakistani Taliban and their ilk, at a safe distance. That’s an essential tool of 21st century imperialistic reach. In the olden days of imperialism they used to occupy whole countries and convert them into colonies. Technological sophistication and advancement has offered better alternatives, dispensing with the archaic practice of outright colonies to intimidate the locals. Hence the logic and imperative for modern-day fortresses like the ones springing up from one end of Pakistan to another.

Those who have followed the American adventure in Iraq know what havoc mercenary American defence contractors wreaked there. Blackwater was a principal mercenary outfit to which the State Department outsourced its obligations in Iraq. Its gung-ho mercenaries raped and murdered Iraqis at will to such an extent that even the supine government of Noori Al-Maliki was forced to impel Washington to pull Blackwater’s notorious murderers out of Iraq.

The same Blackwater is now getting ready to replicate its Iraqi tactics in Pakistan and some of its operatives are already believed to be in action in Peshawar and its environs. The word has gone out that the Americans are keen to buy Peshawar’s lone 5-star hotel in order to accommodate the likes of Blackwater in luxury for special operations within Pakistan and beyond, in Afghanistan, of course.

The State Department has obviously drawn no lessons from its skewed Iraqi operations and seems willing to retry them in Pakistan. One shudders to think of the fallout of a lethal confrontation between the rogues of Blackwater, running berserk across the troubled North West Frontier Region just as they did in Iraq, and the trigger-happy Pakistani Taliban to whom these provocative aliens would be like red rag to an enraged bull.

The US is a global power charged with a self-anointed mission to fight wherever necessary to keep the terrorists away from its shores. Its history of such messianic adventures not only justifies war by any means but also sanctifies its actions. The question troubling the Pakistani minds is why should their rulers be so blind to this deadly game being played out on the Pakistani turf?

Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Soviet Union) is a Russian-American computer scientist best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology.^[5] As of 2009, Forbes ranks Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.^[3]

Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.

The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an “Enlightenment Man,” and someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance,” a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information “universally accessible and useful” ^[6] and “Don’t be evil.”

Sergey Brin Co-Founder & President, Technology

Sergey Brin
Co-Founder & President, Technology

Sergey Brin, a native of Moscow, received a bachelor of science degree with honors in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master’s degree. Sergey is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship as well as an honorary MBA from Instituto de Empresa. It was at Stanford where he met Larry Page and worked on the project that became Google. Together they founded Google Inc. in 1998, and Sergey continues to share responsibility for day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

Sergey’s research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen academic papers, including Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web; Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality, which he published with Larry Page; Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures; Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data; and Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations.

Sergey has been a featured speaker at several international academic, business and technology forums, including the World Economic Forum and the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. He has shared his views on the technology industry and the future of search on the Charlie Rose Show, CNBC, and CNNfn. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named “Persons of the Week” by ABC World News Tonight.

Early life and education

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Childhood in the Soviet Union

In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story, Sergey’s father explains how he was “forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities (both parents are graduates of Moscow State University). Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular…” He therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A’s. However, he said, “Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish.” The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 350 square foot apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey’s paternal grandmother. Sergey told Malseed, “I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted,” but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. “We cannot stay here any more,” he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to “mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were ‘not monsters.’” He added, “I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave…”.

Sergey’s mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, “For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son’s, for her, ‘it was 80/20′ about Sergey.” They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father “was promptly fired.” For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May, 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.

At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, “I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States.”A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. “As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority” and he remembers that his first “impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car.” Malseed adds, “On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.’”

Education in America

Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.

Brin began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993 he interned at Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica. He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.

Search engine development

During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said “We’re both kind of obnoxious.” They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they “became intellectual soul-mates and close friends.” Brin’s focus was on developing data mining systems while Page’s was in extending “the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers.” Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”

Combining their ideas, they “crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers” and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough “to cause problems for Stanford’s computing infrastructure.” But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.

As Larry Malseed wrote, “Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. … [soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist — the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money.”

The Economist magazine describes Brin’s approach to life, like Page’s, as based on a vision summed up by Google’s motto, “of making all the world’s information ‘universally accessible and useful.’” Not long after the two “cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that is today beyond the web,” such as digitizing books, and expanding health information.

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955(1955-04-27) in Washington, D.C.) is an engineer, Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc.He also sits on the Board of Trustees for Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University. He lives in Atherton, California with his wife Wendy.

Eric Schmidt
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer

Since joining Google in 2001, Eric Schmidt has helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global enterprise. Under his leadership, Google has dramatically scaled its infrastructure and broadened its offerings while maintaining a culture of strong innovation. His background uniquely prepares him to lead Google’s efforts toward technological solutions that focus on users. With founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and the rest of the executive team, Eric oversees the company’s technical and business strategy.

Prior to joining Google, Eric was the Chairman and CEO of Novell and Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun’s platform-independent programming technology. Earlier in his career, Eric was a member of the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University as well as a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Eric is a member of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a fellow in 2007. Eric also chairs the board of the New America Foundation.

Education

After graduating from Yorktown High School (Virginia), Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979, for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.

Previous and current work

Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions with IT companies, including Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He joined Sun Microsystems in 1983, led its Java development efforts and rose to become Chief Technology Officer. In 1997, he was appointed CEO of Novell.

Schmidt left Novell after the acquisition of Cambridge Technology Partners. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt. Impressed by him, they recruited Eric Schmidt to run their company in 2001 under the influence of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

Schmidt joined Google’s board of directors as chairman in March 2001 and became the company’s CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shares responsibility for Google’s daily operations with founders Page and Brin. As indicated by page 29 of Google’s 2004 S-1 Filing, Schmidt, Page, and Brin run Google as a triumvirate. Schmidt possesses the legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focuses on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization.

According to Google’s website, Schmidt also focuses on “building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum.”

Schmidt is one of the few people who have become billionaires (USD) based on stock options received as an employee in a corporation of which neither he nor a relative was the founder. In its 2006 ‘World’s Richest People’ list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 129th richest person in the world (the ranking was shared by Onsi Sawiris, Alexei Kuzmichov, and Robert Rowling) with an estimated wealth of $6.2 billion. Schmidt earned a salary of $1 in 2006.

Schmidt was elected to Apple’s board of directors on August 28, 2006.

In 2007, Schmidt was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He is also on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors.

The Schmidt Family Foundation addresses issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. Wendy Schmidt, working with Hart Howerton, a San Francisco architectural firm that specializes in large-scale land use, has inaugurated several projects on the island of Nantucket that seek to sustain the unique character of the island, and to minimize the impact of seasonal visitation on the island’s core community.

Schmidt was an informal advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning the week of October 19, 2008, on behalf of the candidate. He has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the new Chief Technology Officer position which Obama has promised to create in his administration. In announcing his endorsement for Obama, Schmidt jokingly said that with his $1.00 salary, he would be getting a tax cut.

Eric E. Schmidt was a member of President Obama’s transition advisory board. He proposed that the easiest way to solve all of the United States’ problems at once, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and, over time, attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy

On August 3, 2009 it was announced that Schmidt would resign his board member position at Apple due to a conflict of interests and growing competition between Google and Apple.

Compensation

While CEO of Google in 2008, Eric E. Schmidt earned a total compensation of $508,764, with a base salary of just $1 and other compensation of $508,763. He did not receive any cash, stock, or options.

Lawrence Edward “Larry” Page, (born March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, USA) is an American computer scientist best known as co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology. He is ranked 26th on the 2009 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and is the 6th richest person in America. In 2007 he and co-founder Sergey Brin were both ranked #1 of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World Magazine.

Larry Page
Co-Founder & President, Products

Larry Page was Google’s founding CEO and grew the company to more than 200 employees and profitability before moving into his role as president of products in April 2001. He continues to share responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin.

The son of Michigan State University computer science professor Dr. Carl Victor Page, Larry’s love of computers began at age six. While following in his father’s footsteps in academics, he became an honors graduate from the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering, with a concentration on computer engineering. During his time in Ann Arbor, Larry built an inkjet printer out of Lego™ bricks.

While in the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry met Sergey Brin, and together they developed and ran Google, which began operating in 1998. Larry went on leave from Stanford after earning his master’s degree.

In 2002, Larry was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow. He is a member of the National Advisory Committee (NAC) of the University of Michigan College of Engineering, and together with co-founder Sergey Brin, Larry was honored with the Marconi Prize in 2004. He is a trustee on the board of the X PRIZE, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.

Early life and education

Page was born into a non-practicing Jewish family in Lansing, Michigan. During an interview, Page said that “their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place.” His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to “play with the stuff lying around.” He became the “first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor.” His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked.” He said,”From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology…and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”

Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, “Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks”, (actually a line plotter) served as the president of the HKN, and was a member of the solar car team.

Academic research

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as “the best advice I ever got”. Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed “BackRub”, he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.

John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the “entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it ‘the Web would become a more valuable place’.” Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:

“At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.

“The idea’s complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. “I talked to lots of research groups” around the school, Brin recalls, “and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”

Brin and Page had originally met in March, 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer science Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends.

To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub’s web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. It relied on a new kind of technology which analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.