As director of research at Google, Peter Norvig is intimately involved in the attempt to manage the world's information. He's a good match for the job, having spent much of his life thinking about how computers think and making them do it more efficiently. An expert on artificial intelligence, he has taught at universities, held research jobs in the corporate world and at NASA, and cowritten the influential textbook AI: A Modern Approach.

Norvig came to Google in 2001 as the director of search quality; he assumed his current position four years later. In that role, he oversees about 100 computer scientists as they work on projects as diverse as medical records management and machine translation. An untold number of Google servers housing the searchable Web provide them with a test bed. He says Google is structured to ensure that researchers are not sequestered from the rest of the company. "The main allegiance they have is to the product they're working on," he says.