The premiere journal in Machine Learning, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), has existed in this format since 2001. It is explicitly mentioned in the petition for the boycott: https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/

Yes. The closest thing to the Nobel Prize in computing is the Turing Award, which is indeed funded by Google.

Although it is not Google who decides on who wins, and the Award would still be reputationally valuable if there were no money attached to it.

Thanks for sharing! I founded the group since I was fed up with the Computer Science Facebook group for Cornell -- while there was occasionally interesting CS content, it was flooded by a lot of stuff that's either no longer interesting to me (a lot of it is Cornell undergraduate centric, while I'm now a graduate student at MIT), or just meme/jokish in nature. My goal was to make a group with interesting, thought-provoking content and better quality discussion. If this appeals to you, feel free to join and contribute.

There's a large body of work on variations of the secretary problem. The one I know of which is most relevant to your question is section 4 of the following: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~rdk/papers/secArt4.pdf

Section 6 is particularly interesting, where you're further restricted - you want to choose multiple secretaries, but there's certain constraints on the sets you can choose. For example, the secretaries might be edges in a graph, and you can't pick a subset of edges which would result in a cycle (this is a "graphic matroid," which is an example of a mathematical object known as a matroid). The reason why this formulation of the problem is interesting is because the best known algorithm is O(sqrt(log k))-competitive (where k is the rank of the matroid), whereas it is conjectured that an O(1)-competitive algorithm exists.