Eric Schmidt

Biography

Eric Schmidt’s technical and business ingenuity has helped guide Google to its status of world’s premier search engine and one of the most successful information technology companies. With a visionary perspective of the Internet’s potential since its early days, Dr. Schmidt’s leadership at Google has provided technology that has revolutionized how the world seeks information and how people connect with each other. As chief executive officer from 2001 to 2011, Dr. Schmidt helped guide Google from a start-up company to provider of the Internet’s fastest and largest search engine used by hundreds of millions of people. He has been a driver of innovation, seeking methods to improve search performance and establishing features such as Google Maps and Gmail. Dr. Schmidt has helped grow the company that began by offering Web search in a single language into one that now offers dozens of products and services in many languages, including various forms of advertising and Web applications for diverse tasks. Today, Dr. Schmidt’s responsibilities at Google include building partnerships and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership, and advising senior leadership on business and policy issues. With a career spanning over 30 years of technology development, management, and marketing contributions, Dr. Schmidt also coauthored the lexical analyzer for UNIX while at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. This program changed how software engineers approached the problem of creating compilers. As chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun Microsystems from 1983 to 1997, Dr. Schmidt led the development of the Java platform-independent programming software that has become a key enabler of today’s Web-connected services.

Schmidt is an IEEE member, and was awarded the 2014 IEEE Founders Medal. He is also a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (US), and the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council (UK). Dr. Schmidt is currently executive chairman at Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA.