On Tuesday, we'll have a guest lecture from Jakob Uszkoreit, an NLP researcher who leads Google's efforts on semantic parsing and structured query interpretation. If you ask your Android phone for directions to Happy Donuts, or to wake you up at noon, or how many bits in a yottabyte, your query will be interpreted by semantic parsing algorithms developed by Jakob's team.
Your assignment is to come up with one good question for Jakob. Possible topics might include:
Of course, Jakob won't be at liberty to answer everything you might want to know, but it can't hurt to ask. Please be thoughtful and creative. (A simple "What's it like to work at Google?" is lame. You can do better.)
If you can, please submit your question early — say, by Saturday night. (As usual, submit by emailing cs224u-win1213-staff@lists.stanford.edu.) That will give us a chance to organize the questions and pass them to Jakob in advance of his visit.
Have fun with this!