Victoria alumna helps give Google Maps the green light

Victoria University of Wellington alumna Anna Friedlander has gone from being a problem-solving, data-driven computer science student, to one of the 57,000 Google employees delivering search-engine functions people can’t imagine living without.

During study for her undergraduate degree at Victoria, Anna was a finalist for Google’s Anita Borg Scholarship, attending a scholars’ retreat at the Google Sydney office.

“I guess it was this experience that got me on the Google Scholars list, but it wasn’t until the second time that I was contacted by a recruiter that I realised it wasn’t a scam and that Google were interested in me,” says Anna, who completed her Master of Computer Science at Victoria in 2013.

Her Master’s research with the radio astronomy group at Victoria focused on developing new methods to automate the process of finding galaxies in astronomical images.

“Data from radio astronomy has one big similarity with other big data today: there is an almost unimaginable amount.

“Radio telescopes produce exabytes of data on hundreds of millions of objects, so automated methods of detection are absolutely crucial. Current methods find bright objects really well, but aren’t as good for finding faint sources, or those that are spread out”.

An exabyte is one billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes.

After graduating, Anna was offered a position as a software engineer at Google Sydney where she worked in the Geo Monetisation team experimenting with different advertisement formats to optimise their relevance and usefulness.

In mid-2015 Anna transferred to the Google Zurich office where she began working on the book-a-ride (taxi) mode in Google Maps Mobile, a service allowing users to compare ride service options, a project she describes as the highlight of her career to date.

“It’s amazing to know that people in places as diverse as London, Mumbai, New York, Nairobi, Rio, and Wellington have seen and used a function of the app that I helped to develop”.

While the work Anna is doing at Google may be different to her research at Victoria, she says the skills she learnt during her degree have been invaluable to her career.

“Victoria’s focus on working across disciplines and sharing knowledge from those who have different expertise has set me up to work with people who all have different functions across Google.”