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The on-again, off-again Google Phone or "gPhone" rumors are likely to come to halt for the forseeable future. That's because Google's Head of Research since 2006, Dr Peter Norvig, has told journalists in the UK that he doesn't think Google has any research ambition toward hardware, saying: "You know we want to work everywhere and be neutral. That neutrality is important."

Norvig said in an interview that the biggest projects Google Research has right now are in machine translation and speech recognition, computer vision and face recognition, team recognition and so on.

gPhone or not, Norvig confirmed the importance of the mobile aspect of computing to Google:

"It’s clear mobile computing is going to become more important. We’re starting to see new platforms like the iPhone that are interesting, and it’s going to be an issue of infrastructure and hardware. Firstly getting sufficient bandwidth everywhere you go, or enough places where you go, and also having the right hardware. Secondly, having an interaction that’s more natural is important, as right now it’s really very stilted. The number keypad is especially frustrating, and displays are too small. Maybe speech recognition will become important as an input device, maybe touch style interfaces will improve, I don’t know, but it seems like there’s a lot of growth in that space and a lot of interest from users. People want to be freed from their desks and want to be connected wherever they go."

In addition to being the Director of Research at Google Inc., Norvig is a Fellow of the AAAI ACM and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. Previously he was head of Computational Sciences at NASA and a faculty member at USC and Berkeley.

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