Recent Accomplishments by Research Award Recipients

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Through Google’s University Relations program, we maintain strong ties with academic institutions globally, pursuing innovative research in core areas relevant to our mission. It’s especially satisfying when our award recipients are honored for the work that we have been fortunate to sponsor. Here are some recent accomplishments:

• Jimmy Lin and his student Chris Dyer (University of Maryland; Google/IBM ACCI, NSF award) just published a book on "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce", Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2010
• Raju Balakrishnan's work on SourceRank (Subbarao Kambhampati's student at Arizona State University; 2008 grant) was given the best poster award at the World Wide Web conference
• Allison Druin and Ben Bederson (University of Maryland; 2008 grant) received a Social Impact Award from ACM, 2010
• Susan Eggers (University of Washington; 2009 grant) received ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award, 2009
• Nick McKeown (Stanford University; 2008 grant) received IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communication Award, 2009
• Students from Shanghai Jiaotong University have been crowned the 2010 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Champions. Shanghai Jiaotong and 3 other Chinese universities that placed in the top 15 are Google partner universities in China, 2 of which were recipients of Google research awards
  

We're glad to have been a part of making these fantastic accomplishments possible. More information on our research award program can be found on our website.

Five more languages on translate.google.com

[Cross-posted with the Google Translate Blog and the Official Google Blog]

Posted by Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist

At Google, we are always trying to make information more accessible, whether by adding auto-captioning on YouTube and virtual keyboards to search or by providing free translation of text, websites and documents with Google Translate. In 2009, we announced the addition of our first “alpha” language, Persian, on Google Translate. Today, we are excited to add five more alpha languages: Azerbaijani, Armenian, Basque, Urdu and Georgian — bringing the total number of languages on Google Translate to 57.

These languages are available while still in alpha status. You can expect translations to be less fluent than for our other languages, but they should still help you understand the multilingual web. We are working hard to “graduate” these new language out of alpha status, just as we did some time ago with Persian. You can help us improve translation quality as well. If you notice an incorrect translation, we invite you click "Contribute a better translation". If you are a translator, then you can contribute translation memories with the Translator Toolkit. This helps us build better machine translation systems especially for languages that are not well represented on the web.

Collectively, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu have roughly 100 million speakers. We hope that these speakers can now more easily access the entire multilingual web in their own language. Try translating these and other languages at translate.google.com. Here are some phrases from the new alpha languages to get you started:

Baietz lehenengoan
میں خوش قسمت محسوس کر رہا ہوں
բախտաւոր եմ զգում
Mən şanslıyam
იღბალს მივენდობი