UCSC team gives invited tech talk at Google

Being invited to give a "tech talk" at Google is akin to giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, so Associate Professor Ben Crow of sociology and Professor Suresh Lodha of computer science were honored to take a team of students over the hill May 2 to present the UC Atlas of Global Inequality.

Graduate students Prabath Gunawardane, Eddy Chandra, Mike Patterson, and Jack Feng were joined by undergraduate interns Anton Kulikov, Erin Middleton, Ellen Liang, and Anita Graffius. All contributed to the talk, much of which used interactive web material from the atlas.

The atlas has had about 11 million hits since early 2005 and generates 1 percent of the traffic to the UCSC domain, according to Crow, who noted that it has been the top-ranked site for several years on Google searches for "global inequality" and "atlas of inequality."

Crow and the atlas team are organizing a Dec. 13-14 conference at UCSC on mapping global inequalities. More information can be found at http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/flyer.html.