You mentioned earlier that you were looking to recruit. Computerworld recently ran a series of stories detailing the growing stagnation of the hiring pool. Have you guys had trouble tracking down qualified candidates? Newell: Absolutely, and the majority of applicants that we see who are anywhere near qualified are not U.S. citizens -- they're people from overseas who are here on temporary visas. That's why it really hurts when the H1-B program reaches its quota. Last time I went through the recruiting process, I was looking for two people, only two people, and it took me a year to find them. We had dozens of [applicants] come through with a very good filtering mechanism in place. We had people in who had written papers. They'd refereed journals and conferences. They would come in and give us great presentations. They were buzzword-compliant -- in short, these guys were really good. And then we'd pass them out to the guys on my team to interview them, saying "Make sure they know the basics." When we'd get together afterwards and go around the table, everyone would give the thumbs-down. You get these people in who can work at a certain level, but they don't know the fundamentals. We asked ourselves, 'Is it important for these people to understand linear algebra and integral calculus? Shouldn't these people know something as basic the binary representation of -1?' Well, yes!

Hypothetical: You're given the opportunity to develop a single piece of technology to incorporate into Adobe's product line in one day -- no work, no pain, no cost. What would you develop? Newell: I would like a product out there which is able to, from a single image of an everyday scene, completely understand and recognize everything in that scene; a product that could tell me everything about all the objects, including the people and who they are, so that the necessity of tagging faces in photographs becomes obsolete. All the things that a 10-year-old would be able to tell me, I want the computer to tell me: 'That's a man running. That's a woman smiling.' Based on that product, we could build an image-retrieval system.

We're moving in that direction already, where the kind of processing that we want to do is based on the content of the image -- what's behind the image. Some of the work we have done is in face-finding; It's baby steps, the first towards realizing this dream.

And if I were to ask you what your current research project is, you would say? Newell: Baby steps.