Anna Patterson

In her current position since 2010, she has also served as the founder and managing partner at Gradient Ventures, Google's artificial intelligence-focused venture fund since mid 2017. She helped launch Google Play, and was the principal architect and inventor of TerraGoogle. She is the winner of the 2016 ABIE Award and has been described as one of the most important women in technology. Patterson is the Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures and oversees the fund’s investments and activities. Patterson is a Vice President of Engineering at Google and most recently helped to integrate AI into products across Google. Previously, she led teams in Android scaling up the Google Play infrastructure to serve over a billion phones. She helped launch Google Play, the world’s largest digital goods marketplace, and eventually led the product’s search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals, as well as the Books vertical. Patterson was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google’s search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results. Patterson co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Patterson co-authored a search engine at Xift, where she was a co-founder. Patterson received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy, and his wife, Carolyn Talcott.