In August, Dan Weinreb gave an interesting talk at Google on ITA Software's high-performance transaction system for airline ticket searching and pricing. ITA's software serves as the foundation for more well known travel pricing services like Orbitz who is an ITA customer. The problem ITA attempts to solve is extremely complex as explained in this slideument by Carl de Marken.
Amongst the Lisp community, ITA is famous for the signficant use of Lisp in their system, hiring well-known Lisp hackers, and using programming puzzles to filter job applicants.
Given my deep interest in all things Lisp (programming, lisp-machines, A.I., etc), Dan's blog is one of my favorite websites and someday I hope to meet him at a Boston Lisp Users meeting (if I can ever make it to one again).
Nice talk and worth watching if you're interested in this kind of thing.
