Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a contributor to search engines.
Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis[1] and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign[2] and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in artificial intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.[3]
As of 2017 she was Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures[4] and Vice President of Engineering at Google. While she was working in Google's Android organization, Patterson was responsible for a division of Google Play including Books and Search, Recommendations and Infrastructure for scaling up Android from 40 million phones to over 800 million phones.[5]
She co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine (which she created after leaving Google in 2007)[6] and wrote Recall.archive.org (part of the Wayback Machine), a history-based search engine out of the Internet Archive, which showed trends over time.
Patterson was a winner of the 2016 ABIE Award.[7] She also served on the board of Square Inc.[8] She was previously a trustee at Harvey Mudd College[9] and a trustee at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute[10] and on the National Engineering Council at Washington University in St. Louis.[11]