Downgrading VAIO from Vista to Windows XP

So, I finally got around to downgrading my Vaio SR to Windows XP and thought I'd post a helpful guide here so others can avoid the problems I encountered during the downgrade process.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Clean XP Installation Disk - If you've done any slipstreaming before, especially with drivers and want to re-use an old modified XP disk - don't! Start off with a clean XP Installation disk. I used a copy of XP Pro that I got on discount from my school.
2. nLite - Download here.
3. Service Pack 3 (Optional)

STEP ONE: DOWNLOAD THE DRIVERS

1. Download the ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI drivers here. The file should be named something like f6flpy32_85.zip. As far as I know, all the SR models have this SATA driver, but to be sure, Right-click on "My Computer", go to Device Settings, and look under IDE/ATA controllers.
   
   
   
2. Download the Intel Chipset Drivers from Vaio-Link - look for the file named "1_CHIPSET DRIVER INTEL 8.7D _ 8.7.0.ZIP." You can also download the other drivers & utilities from the Vaio-Link site, but Sony Support recently added XP drivers to their main site and that is where you will find the most up-to-date drivers, which I recommend you use. We only download this one to slipstream in order to avoid potential blue screens of death.
   
   
3. Download the remaining drivers from Sony Support. Enter your system number to see the list of drivers available for your specific model. Make sure to select Windows XP as your operating system!
   
   
   
   Download ALL drivers EXCEPT:
   - Intel® SATA Driver for Microsoft® Windows® XP Operating System
   
   Instructions for Specific Configurations:
   - For VAIO SR129E/B Users: DO NOT DOWNLOAD Intel® Wireless LAN Driver for Microsoft® Windows® XP Operating System - we have the Atheros wireless card, not the Intel wireless card.
   
   - Download EITHER the ATI Graphics Drives OR the Intel Graphics Driver - not both.
   
   
4. SR129E/B Laptops Only: Download the Atheros Wireless Card Driver here.
   
   
5. Download the Protector Suite QL Fingerprint Reader Drivers + Software - Go here for the drivers. Then, download File:9_PROTECTOR SUITE QL UPEK 5.6K _ 5.6.2.ZIP from Vaio-Link. Sony Support does offer this download as well, but it wouldn't recognize my model (SR129E) for whatever reason, so I used the Vaio-link application instead.

STEP TWO: Slipstream SP3 + the Drivers:

1. Copy the contents of your XP Installation disk onto a folder in your hard drive
   
2. Fire up nLite and select the folder above as your XP installation folder
   
3. Click Next, and Next again to get to the "Task Selection" window. Choose the following:
   
   - Service Pack (ONLY select this if your XP installation disk does not come with SP3)
   - Drivers (required)
   - Bootable ISO (required)
   
   You can also select some of the other options, such as "Remove Components", which will let you cut down the size of your installation by removing unwanted components in the XP install. Unattended will allow you to enter your password, CD key, time zone, language settings ahead of time so you don't have to wait around during the install. Options & Tweaks optimize & configure XP to your liking and are worth checking out if you have the time.
   
   
4. When you get to the screen to install the drivers, click on "Insert" and select "Multiple Drivers in Folder." First, go to the folder where you extracted the 1_CHIPSET DRIVER INTEL 8.7D _ 8.7.0.ZIP file. A window will pop up that says "Select Multiple Drivers to Integrate" and you will see two lines/options. Select the first option that ends with "1 Chipset Driver (Intel) 8.7D-8.7.0.1007\All". Don't select the line with \Vista.
   
   
5. Click Insert and Multiple Drivers in Folder again. Then, go to the folder where you extracted the f6flpy32_85.zip file (i.e. your SATA drivers). You should then see an Options box pop up like this image. You only need to select the controller corresponding to your model. Make sure that "TEXT MODE" is selected, not PnP mode!
   
   
6. Go through any optional steps and tweaks if you want and then create the Bootable ISO (or just do Direct Burn like I did) and create your new Bootable slipstreamed XP install.

STEP THREE: Install XP + Drivers + Utilities

1. First, take all the drivers you downloaded in STEP ONE and back them up somewhere, like a USB drive.
   
   
2. Then, with your XP installation disk in your CD/DVD drive, restart your computer. After the Vaio Logo shows up, you should see "Press Any Key to Boot from CD..." - Quite obvious what to do here: Press the Any Key.
   
   
3. You will then have to wait a couple of minutes while Setup loads a bunch of files. Then, if you've slipstreamed the correct SATA drivers, you should see the familiar installation screen asking you to select a drive to format/install XP on. I chose the second and largest partition and left the recovery partition intact to be safe just in case my installation went wrong.
   
   IMPORTANT: If you see a BSOD here, then the SATA driver was either not slipstreamed properly or you slipstreamed the wrong one. Go back and check to make sure everything is correct!
   
   
4. After XP formats your partition and copies over the files, the computer should restart. Don't select boot from CD this time and the XP installation should automatically begin.
   
   
5. After the installation is done, the computer will reboot again. If you've done everything correctly, then Windows XP should load - most likely in a really bad screen resolution. Don't worry just yet! This will be fixed once the graphics drivers are installed.
   
   
   IMPORTANT: If at this point, you get a BSOD or continuous restarts and messages about hardware errors, then your install of XP was not clean. If you've slipstreamed the MassStorage drivers from DriverPacks, they will conflict with the ICH9M-E/M SATA drivers for Sony HDDs and cause errors. I know it sucks to have to re-do the slipstream process, especially if you've put in a lot of add-ons and tweaks, but there doesn't seem to be a way around this problem except a clean install + minimal slipstreamed drivers.
   
   
6. Copy & Install the Sony Drivers. There is a recommended order to install this, but honestly, I just installed everything by alphabetical order and it worked just fine for me (although I left the Sony Utilities install last). Nonetheless, I will list the recommended installation order here:
   
   - RealTek Audio Driver: REDAUD-15417500-XP.EXE
   - Modem Driver: CODMOD-15680000-XP.EXE
   - Bluetooth Driver: BRDBLT-15282100-XP.EXE
   - Graphics Driver: ATDVID-15498400-XP.EXE (ATI 3470) OR INDVID-15582500-XP.EXE (Intel 4500HMD)
   - Touchpad Driver: SPDOTH-15486600-XP.EXE (Synaptics)
   - SR129E/B USERS SKIP THIS STEP: WLAN Driver: INDWLL-15374000-XP.EXE (Intel Wireless Card)
   - LAN Driver: MRDETH-15165700-XP.EXE
   - Camera Driver: RIDCAM-15458600-XP.EXE
   - SATA Registry Patch: INDSAT-15468200-XP.EXE
   - HDD Shock Protection: SODOTH-14514300-XP.EXE
   - Memory Card Readers: RIDMSC-15490300-XP.EXE + RIDMSC-15490400-XP.EXE
   
   IMPORTANT: For Sony SR129E/B users, you must install the Atheros drivers that I instructed you to download in Step 2. Extract the xp32-7.6.0.239-whql.zip file into its own folder. Then, right click on "My Computer" - go to Hardware - Then go to "Device Manager" and look under "Other Devices" with the "?" marks to see if you can find one that says "Network Controller."
   
   Right-click and select "Update Drivers", "No, not this time", "Install from a specific location," "Don't search, I will choose the driver to install" and finally "Have Disk." Navigate to the folder with the extracted Atheros driver and your wireless card should now be recognized.
   
   
7. Install the Sony Utilities.
   - Battery Care Function: SOAOTH-15327100-XP.EX
   - TPM Module: IFAOTH-14762400-XP.EXE
   - Protector Suite QL: setup.exe from the zip file downloaded from Vaio Link or UPAPWD-15459500-XP.EXE from Sony Support if you can manage to get it working (I never did).
   - Sony Notebook Utilities: SOAOTH-42800000-XP.EXE

At this point, if you have an SR with the Intel wireless graphics card, your install should be complete. Go ahead and set up the fingerprint reader if you want. It worked perfectly for me, though the 5.6 version given by Sony is not compatible with FF3. I don't use the PassBank though, so it's not an issue for me.

For SR129E/B users with the Atheros wireless card, we need to go through one additional step. If you find that you can connect just fine on your WLAN, then you don't need to follow step four.

STEP FOUR: Fix Wireless Problems (ONLY if your wireless card appears to be disabled - i.e. you have a router nearby, but it does not detect *any* networks at all)

Now, if you have the Atheros wireless card, the last step where you installed the Sony Utilities might give you some trouble with the Wireless Switch Setting Utility. It seems that every time I installed it, my wireless card would become disabled. So, the solution is to go here and download 8_WIRELESS SWITCH SETTING UTILITY 4.1_XP_ 4.1.00.ZIP. Extract and run "setup.exe" - this will UNINSTALL the WSSU.

SHUT DOWN your computer (do not restart!). Then after a few seconds, start your computer up again.

At this point, WLAN should be working properly.

FINAL RESULTS:

A clean install of Windows XP. At idle, I have about 36 processes running. You could probably prune it down by uninstalling some utilities, but I find most of the Sony utilities useful.

wPrime 32M v2.00: 36.249 s
PCMark05: 4383
3DMark06: 2144

Announcing our Q4 Research Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations and Jeff Walz, Head of University Relations

We do a significant amount of in-house research at Google, but we also maintain strong ties with academic institutions globally, pursuing innovative research in core areas relevant to our mission. One way in which we support academic institutions is the Google Research Awards program, aimed at identifying and supporting world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest.

Our University Relations team and core area committees just completed the latest round of research awards, and we're excited to announce them today. We had a record number of submissions, resulting in 76 awards across 17 different areas. Over $4 million was awarded — the most we have ever funded in a round.

The areas that received the highest level of funding for this round were systems and infrastructure, machine learning, multimedia, human computer interaction, and security. These five areas represent important areas of collaboration with university researchers. We're also excited to be developing more connections internationally. In this round, over 20 percent of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Some exciting examples from this round of awards:

Ondrej Chum, Czech Technical University, Large Scale Visual Link Discovery. This project addresses automatic discovery of visual links between image parts in huge image collections. Visual links associate parts of images that share even a relatively small, but distinctive, visual information.

Bernd Gartner, ETH Zurich, Linear Time Kernel Methods and Matrix Factorizations. This project aims to derive faster approximation algorithms for kernel methods as well as matrix approximation problems and leverage these two promising paradigms for better performance on large scale data.

Dawson Engler, Stanford University, High Coverage, Deep Checking of Linux Device Drivers using KLEE + Under-constrained Execution Symbolic execution. This project extends the recently built KLEE, a tool that automatically generates test cases that execute most statements in real programs, so that it allows automatic, deep checking of Linux device drivers.

Jeffrey G. Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Improving the Education and Career Opportunities of the Physically Disabled through Speech-Aware Development Environments. This project will investigate the science and engineering of tool construction to allow those with restricted limb mobility to access integrated development environments (IDEs), which will support programming by voice.

Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, North Carolina State University, Predictive Elastic Load Management for Cloud Computing Infrastructures. This project proposes to use fine-grained resource signatures with signal processing techniques to improve resource utilization by reducing the number of physical hosts required to run all applications.

Jason Hong and John Zimmerman, Carnegie Mellon University, Context-Aware Mobile Mash-ups. This project seeks to build tools for non-programmers to create location and context-aware mashups of data for mobile devices that can present time- and place-approriate information.

S V N Vishwanathan, Purdue University, Training Binary Classifiers using the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm. The goal of this project is to harness the power of quantum algorithms in machine learning. The advantage of the new quantum methods will materialize even more once new adiabatic quantum processors become available.

Emmett Witchel and Vitaly Shmatikov, University of Texas at Austin, Private and Secure MapReduce. This project proposes to build a practical system for large-scale distributed computation that provides rigorous privacy and security guarantees to the individual data owners whose information has been used in the computation.

Click here to see a full list of this round’s award recipients. More information on our research award program can be found on our website.

Teaching a Computer to Understand Japanese

Posted by Mike Schuster, Google Research and Kaisuke Nakajima, Google Japan

On December 7th, we launched our new Japanese voice search system (音声検索), which has been available for various flavors of English since last year and for Mandarin Chinese for the past two months. The initial Japanese system works on the Android platform and also through the Google Mobile App on the iPhone as announced in a Japanese blog and a general explanation on how to get started. For developers who want to make use of the speech recognition backend for their own Android applications there is a public API (recognizer intent API) described here.

Although speech recognition has had a long history in Japan, creating a system that can handle a problem as difficult as voice search is still a considerable challenge. Today, most speech recognition systems are large statistical systems that must learn two models from sets of examples, an acoustic model and a language model. The acoustic model represents (statistically) the fundamental sounds of the language, and the language model statistically represents the words, phrases, and sentences of the language. The acoustic model for Japanese voice search was trained using a large amount of recorded Japanese speech, with the associated transcriptions of the words spoken. The language model for Japanese voice search was trained on Japanese search queries.

While speech recognition systems are surprisingly similar across different languages, there are some problems that are more specific to Japanese. Some of the challenges we faced while developing Japanese voice search included:

• Spaces in Japanese text
  As we looked at some popular search queries in Japan we saw that Japanese often doesn't have spaces but sometimes it does. For example, if a user searches for Ramen noodles near Tokyo station they will often type: "東京駅 ラーメン" with a space in between Tokyo station and Ramen -- therefore, we would like to display it in this way as well. Getting the spaces right is difficult and we continue working to improve it.
• Japanese word boundaries
  Word boundaries in Japanese are often not clear and subject to interpretation as most of the time there are not spaces between words. This also makes the definition of the vocabulary (the words that can be recognized theoretically) extremely large. We deal with this problem by finding likely word boundaries using a statistical system which also helps us limit the vocabulary.
• Japanese text is written in 4 different writing systems
  Japanese text as written today uses Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana & Romaji, often mixed in the same sentence and sometimes in the same word, depending on the definition of a word. Try these example queries to see some interesting cases: "価格.com", "マーボー豆腐", "東京都渋谷区桜丘町26-1". We try to display the output in a way that is most user-friendly, which often means to display it as you would write it down.
• Japanese has lots of basic characters and many have several pronunciations depending on context
  To be able to recognize a word you need to know its pronunciation. Western languages in general use only ASCII or a slightly extended set of characters which is relatively small (less than 100 total in most cases). For Japanese the number of basic characters is the union of all basic characters from the four writing systems mentioned above, which is several thousands in total. Finding the correct pronunciations for all words in the very large voice search vocabulary is difficult and is often done using a combination of human effort and automatic statistical systems. This is even more difficult in the Japanese case as the number of basic characters is higher and there are a vast number of exceptions, for example consider the case of: "一人" (hitori) versus "一人前" (ichininmae). Although the phrases look very similar they have completely different pronunciations.
• Encoding issues
  Japanese characters can be written in many encoding systems including UTF-8, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP and others. While at Google we try to use exclusively UTF-8 there are still interesting edge cases to deal with. For example some characters exist in different forms in the same encoding system. Compare for example "カナ"　and "ｶﾅ" -- they both say "kana" and mean the exact same thing, the first in full-width and the second in half-width. There are numerous similar cases like this in Japanese that make normalization of the text data more difficult.
• Every speaker sounds different
  People speak in different styles, slow or fast, with an accent or without, have lower or higher pitched voices, etc. To make it work for all these different conditions we trained our system on data from many different sources to capture as many conditions as possible.

The challenges listed above are just a small portion of what we dealt with while building the Japanese voice search system. Over time, we are committed to improve the system as much as and as quickly as possible to make speech, in addition to the keyboard, a user-friendly input modality on mobile devices. We will push a first set of improved models this week.

Research Areas of Interest - Multimedia

Posted by Michele Covell, Vision Research Team

Recently, Google's research groups reviewed over 140 grant proposals across sixteen different research areas. During this process, we identified a number of strategic research topics. These topics represent critical areas of research for Google in collaboration with our university partners.

We'll be examining several of these topics in future posts but we'd like to begin by raising some of the research challenges we face in our multimedia endeavors:

• Large scale annotation: How can we learn from large, noisy sets of image/video data to automatically get human-level accurate models for label annotation?
  The images and videos that are available on the web provide massive data sets. We have some very noisy labels on that set, in terms of possible content. We have labels based on popularity of an item when considered for a particular search, on anchor text and other context, and on labels given to other content that is often associated with each item. The challenge is to make use of the sheer volume of available data to improve our recognition models and to carry appearance models from one media type to another. Further, we must be able to handle the variability in appearance and in the labels themselves.
• Image/Audio/Video Representation: How can we improve our understanding of low level representations of images that goes beyond bag of words modeling?
  Much of the current work in labeling and retrieval is based on fairly simple local descriptions of the content, putting the emphasis on classifier learning from combinations of simple models. While this classifier approach has been useful, we should also examine the basic features that we are using, to see if we can better characterize the content. Providing better inputs into our learning algorithms should reduce the size of the space over which we need to search. Possible examples include shape modeling in images, better texture/color models, and descriptions of soft segmentations of regions.
• Localization of image-/video-level labels to spatial/temporal portions of the content: Can we automatically associate image and video labels with specific portions of the content?
  The most obvious examples in this area are labels like "dog" and "explosion". However, can we also localize more complex concepts like "waves" or "suspense"? Alternately, can we automatically distinguish between labels, based on how well we are able to localize them to a particular place or time within the content?
• Large scale matching / Hashing: Can we identify matching techniques to deal with large datasets?
  We need image, video, and audio matching techniques that can effectively deal with large datasets, embedded in high-dimensional descriptor spaces, in sub-linear time. Of special interest are methods that can efficiently handle a wide range of recall/precision needs without massive increases in the data-structure sizes that are used.

We expect these questions to keep us busy for some time.

Machine Learning with Quantum Algorithms

Posted by Hartmut Neven, Technical Lead Manager Image Recognition

Many Google services we offer depend on sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning or pattern recognition. If one takes a closer look at such capabilities one realizes that they often require the solution of what mathematicians call hard combinatorial optimization problems. It turns out that solving the hardest of such problems requires server farms so large that they can never be built.

A new type of machine, a so-called quantum computer, can help here. Quantum computers take advantage of the laws of quantum physics to provide new computational capabilities. While quantum mechanics has been foundational to the theories of physics for about a hundred years the picture of reality it paints remains enigmatic. This is largely because at the scale of our every day experience quantum effects are vanishingly small and can usually not be observed directly. Consequently, quantum computers astonish us with their abilities. Let’s take unstructured search as an example. Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover’s algorithm.

Over the past three years a team at Google has studied how problems such as recognizing an object in an image or learning to make an optimal decision based on example data can be made amenable to solution by quantum algorithms. The algorithms we employ are the quantum adiabatic algorithms discovered by Edward Farhi and collaborators at MIT. These algorithms promise to find higher quality solutions for optimization problems than obtainable with classical solvers.

On the hardware side we are collaborating with D-Wave in Vancouver, Canada. D-Wave develops processors that realize the adiabatic quantum algorithm by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-squid flux qubits. This design realizes what is known as the Ising model which represents the simplest model for an interacting many-body system and it can be manufactured using proven chip fabrication methods. Unfortunately, it is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior and experimental physicists from various institutions are still in the process of characterizing the chip.

Layout of the qubits in the C4 Chimera chip employed to train the car detector. The irregular graph structure results from the fabrication process not yet rendering all qubits functional.

Today, at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009), we show the progress we have made. We demonstrate a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. It was trained with adiabatic quantum optimization using a D-Wave C4 Chimera chip. There are still many open questions but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today. Besides progress in engineering synthetic intelligence we hope that improved mastery of quantum computing will also increase our appreciation for the structure of reality as described by the laws of quantum physics.

The theory paper on which the demonstration is based can be found on the arXiv and a report describing the details of the implementation is here.

Windows 7: Understanding Network Administration and Configuration

Important differences and improvements between Windows Vista and the new Windows 7 OS when it comes to configuring networking.
Published: May 05, 2009 Updated: Jul 13, 2009 Section: Articles & Tutorials :: Common for all OSes Author: David Davis Printable Version

Introduction

At first glance there aren’t too many differences between configuring Windows 7 networking and configuring Windows Vista networking. However, there are important differences once you start using Windows 7. Let us find them out.

Navigation – getting to Windows 7 Network Configuration

How do you get to Windows 7 Network configuration? Just go to the Start Menu, then to Control Panel, and click on Network and Internet. You also can get to your network configuration, using the same navigation path in Windows Vista. However, when you get to the Network and Internet settings in Windows Vista, you will see a lot more options. Let us compare by starting with the Windows 7 Network and Internet window (shown in Figure 1, below).

Figure 1:  Windows 7 Network and Internet Configuration
As you can see this new Windows 7 configuration window offers you a few new choices and a few old choices but, overall, not a lot of choices to choose from. We are used to seeing both the Network and Sharing Center and the Internet Options but the HomeGroup is new. I will come back to HomeGroup and the new and improved Network and Sharing Center in Windows 7, below.
Now let us compare what we saw in Windows 7 to the Network and Internet configuration in Windows Vista, shown in Figure 2, below:

Figure 2: Windows Vista Network and Internet Configuration
The first thing you notice is that there are tons of options to choose from in Vista. However, I do not think that this is such a good thing as some of these seem much less important than others. For example, I don’t think that the Windows Firewall or Offline Files deserve their own section here (these are removed in Windows 7).

Windows 7 Network and Sharing Center

99% of the time, in Windows 7 or Vista, to configure networking, you are going to click on the Network and Sharing Center. It offers the most functionality and the most common tasks that a Windows Vista or 7 Administrator would perform. So, let us look at how the Network and Sharing Center differs between these two operating systems.
First, here is the Network and Sharing Center from Windows Vista that most of us are familiar with:

Figure 3: Windows Vista Network and Sharing Center
Now, let us compare that to Windows 7’s Network and Sharing Center, below in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Windows 7 Network and Sharing Center
One of the big differences is caused by these two computers being different. The Vista computer has many more network adaptors as compared to the Windows 7 computer. That aside, as you can see, the Windows 7 computer actually has many fewer options than the Vista computer. Options have been removed from the left navigation and the Sharing and Discovery options have been removed from the main window. These options have just been moved to other sections.
The Network and Sharing options have been moved to the Choose homegroup and sharing options window (which we will look at in a minute). The left navigation options shown on the Vista computer have just been moved to the level above this, Network and Internet.
What I like about the new Windows 7 Network and Sharing center is that the less related options have been moved off to reduce the clutter on the page. There are two things that I do not care for, concerning the changes with the Network and Sharing center:

• Why did they remove the Sharing and Discovery options from this page? I mean, it is not that what the Network and Sharing center should have – sharing and discovery options?
• Also, I have never cared for how in Vista or Windows 7 there are no technical networking details on the network and sharing center page. I should be able to see if I have an IP address here. I should be able to see if it is 169.254.xxx.xxx automatic (useless) IP address or if it is a real IP address. I would think that they would have added / improved this in Windows 7.

What about Windows 7 Homegroup?

Above, I mentioned Windows 7 homegroup. What is this? Well, this is new in Windows 7. A homegroup is a simple way to link computers on your home network together so that they can share pictures, music, videos, documents, and printers. There is just a single password that is used to access the homegroup, making creating it and connecting to it easy.
If you click on Choose Homegroup and Sharing Options from the Network and Sharing Center in Windows 7, you will see this window (assuming your network location is not Home):

Figure 5: Homegroup and sharing options in Windows 7
If you change your network location to Home, you will see the option to create a homegroup. Or if you come to the Choose Homegroup and sharing options page when your network location is set to home, then you can choose Create now and create your new homegroup.

Figure 6: Creating a Windows 7 Homegroup
You will be able to select what you want to share in the homegroup.

Figure 7: Viewing the Windows 7 Password to connect to the homegroup
And you will be given a single password, used on other computers, to connect to the homegroup.
When you are done, the Homegroup and Sharing center will look something like this:

Figure 8: Windows 7 Homegroup configured

Fix a network problem

My favorite change to Windows 7 networking is the update to Vista’s diagnose and repair. In Windows 7 if you want to get assistance fixing a network issue, you just click Fix a network problem. Sound simple and clear, right? That’s what I like about it.
From Windows 7 Network and Sharing, if you click Fix a Network Problem, you get this window, asking you want you want to fix:

Figure 9: Fixing a Network Problem
Windows 7 will go through and attempt to fix any network issues that you select. It will even ask you if you want to fix it as a Windows Administrator. Here is what fixing a homegroup looks like:

Figure 10: Fixing a network problem

Conclusion

Overall, I like the changes to Windows 7 networking GUI administration tools. The simplification of the interface is nice, as are the “fix a network problem tool” and the new homegroup features. I encourage you to take a look at these Windows 7 networking changes yourself.

Celebrating Computer Science Education Week

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Research and Special Initiatives and Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

[cross-posted with the Official Google Blog]

Today kicks off the nation’s first Computer Science Education Week. The goal of this week is to encourage students to learn about the discipline that powers the computers, applications and technology they use everyday. Computer Science Education Week emphasizes that our society's aspirations will be met by individuals who have an increasingly deep understanding of computer technology.

We've been thinking about ways that Google could help with computer science education for several years. After all, our search engine has been used in education since its inception — how many essays, research papers and theses begin with a Google search? Today, we'd like to summarize some of what we've been doing at Google to advance CS education. Our efforts focus on four strategic areas, with an emphasis on computing in core curriculum.

Use of Google tools to support teaching and learning
Having a web-based shared document, spreadsheet or presentation that students in a group or class can all view and edit online has had an enormous impact on collaboration in education. So we provide a free suite of our communication & collaboration applications designed especially for schools and universities. We also used our tools and infrastructure to build and support a community of teachers who have developed classroom content and activities around these applications.

Increasing the access to and quality of Computer Science curriculum
We have many people at Google who know about all areas of computer science, many with backgrounds and experience in education. With this deep base of computer science knowledge, we developed Google Code University to help faculty update their undergraduate computer science curriculum, and the Summer of Code, which gives students the opportunity to develop programs for various open source software projects.

Integrating computing curriculum across K-12 core subjects
A group of Google engineers and K-12 "teaching fellows" is working on building and testing models of curriculum to encourage innovation. These curriculum models revolve around "computational thinking", a problem-solving technique that draws on the thinking and analysis skills that computer scientists use everyday. Our goal is to integrate computational thinking across subject areas in K-12 by connecting these skills, which are already a part of core curriculum, more explicitly to computer science. We're also taking this a step further by integrating simple programming concepts in appropriate areas of core K-12 curriculum, such as algebra. Our hope is that by making computer science more visible and showing its connection to every subject area, students will experience the full power and utility of technology in areas of interest to them. Integrating CS into other subjects will also have the key added benefit of leveling the playing field, so that many more students will have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of computing.

Supporting organizations and individuals through community outreach
We've also worked for years with teachers and nonprofits to build early interest in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. Besides providing financial support and sponsorship for many external organizations, we've developed a number of scholarship and intern programs to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM and computer science. In addition to these formal programs, every day Googlers all over the world organize visits with students at nearby schools and community centers to teach, present workshops and tech talks, and to share their personal stories on how they became computer scientists and engineers.

We're absolutely delighted to be a co-sponsor of the first Computer Science Education Week. As a company, we've benefited so much from advances in computer science and the creativity of computer scientists. We also know that the next great innovators in computer science are out there, ready to be inspired to create technologies that change our world and benefit our society. We urge our children, parents, teachers and educational institutions to pay more attention to this critical field, and we will continue to do our share.

Join us for the 2010 Google GRAD CS Forum!

Posted by Hanah Kim, University Programs

[cross-posted with the Google Student Blog]

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encouraging students of underrepresented backgrounds in technology to pursue graduate study, we are pleased to host the first annual 2010 Google Graduate Researchers in Academia of Diverse backgrounds (GRAD) CS Forum. This forum will bring together students who are historically underrepresented in the field to connect with one another and with Google.

Up to 75 computer scientists will be invited to an all-expenses paid forum that will run Thursday evening through Saturday afternoon on January 21–23 at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The Google GRAD CS Forum will include technical talks from established researchers – both from Google and universities – and a unique occasion to build and strengthen networks with other emerging researchers. Students will also enjoy tours of the Googleplex, have the opportunity to meet with Google engineers in their focus areas, and have fun exploring the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eligibility Requirements

Applicants must:

• be a computer science (or related technical discipline) graduate student currently enrolled in a Masters or PhD program at a university in North America
• demonstrate academic excellence and leadership in the computing field
• maintain a cumulative GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale or 4.3 on a 5.0 scale or equivalent in their current program

The forum is open to all qualified graduate students, and is committed to addressing diversity in our company and in the technology industry. Students who are a member of a group that is historically under-represented in the technology industry are encouraged to apply, including female, Native American, African American and Hispanic students as well as students with disabilities.

Selection Process

Google engineers will select up to 75 attendees based on each applicant’s academic and technical achievements. Evidence of academic achievement and leadership experience should be evident from the resume.

How to Apply

Complete the online application and submit all required documents online. First-time users will be required to register and create an account. Please note that recommendation letters are not required.

Application Deadline: December 12, 2009

Apply now at www.google.com/jobs/students/gradforum.

Note: letters of recommendation are not required

Automatic Captioning in YouTube

Posted by Christopher Alberti and Michiel Bacchiani, Google Research

On November 19, we launched our new automatic captioning and automatic alignment feature for YouTube. These features significantly reduce the effort it takes to create captions for videos on YouTube.

With YouTube expanding its index at a breakneck speed of about 20 hours of new material uploaded each minute, access to this vast body of video material becomes increasingly challenging. This is particularly true for people with hearing disabilities. A 2005 US census showed that 7.8 million people (or about 3 percent of the US population) have difficulty hearing a normal conversation, with 1 million unable to hear at all. Hence, increased accesibility by adding captions to YouTube videos makes the corpus available to a much larger audience.

In addition to expanded accessibility for those with hearing disabilities, the combination of captions with machine translation expands YouTube accessibility across the globe. If a caption track is available, it can be translated automatically in any of the 51 currently available languages. As a result, video content otherwise not accessible due to a language barrier can now be understood by a significantly larger user population.

Although captions are available in YouTube for hundreds of thousands of videos, it remains only a fraction of the the available corpus. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of the avalanche of new video material getting uploaded is captioned. One reason for this lack of coverage is the effort it takes for a video uploader to generate captions. And this is where our new auto captioning and auto alignment features can benefit our uploaders. Auto-captioning uses automatic speech recognition technology to produce machine generated captions. Auto-alignment requires only a transcript--the uploader no longer has to sync that text with the video stream. To more concisely illustrate the use of these features, check out our help center article or this short video:



Modern-day speech recognition systems are big statistical machines trained on large sets of data. They do the best job recognizing speech in domains similar to their training data. Both the auto captioning and the auto alignment features use the speech recognition infrastructure that underlies Google Voice and Voice Search, but trained on different data. As an intial installment, for YouTube we use models trained on publicly available English broadcast news data. As a result, for now, the new features only work well on English material that is similar in style (i.e. an individual speaker who is speaking clearly).

The auto alignment features is available for all new video uploads, however the scope is limited to English material. The auto captioning feature is initially rolled out to a set of educational partners only. Although this is very limited in scope, the early launch makes the results of the system available to the viewers of this material instantly and it allows us to gauge early feedback which can aid in improving the features. We will release automatic captions more widely as quickly as possible.

Over time, we will work on improving the quality as well as the coverage of these features. Expansion will take place along two axes: additional languages will be made available and within each language we will cover much broader domains (beyond just broadcast news-like material). Since the content available in YouTube is so varied, it is difficult to set a timeline for this expansion. Automatic speech recognition remains challenging, in particular for the varied types of speech and background sounds and noise we see in the YouTube corpus. Therefore, to reach a high level of quality, we need to make advances in core technology. Although this will take time, we are committed to making that happen and to providing the larger community with the benefits of those developments.

Four Googlers elected ACM Fellows

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research

I'm excited to share that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has just announced that four Googlers have been elected ACM Fellows in its class of 2009. Jeff Dean, Tom Dean, Urs Hoelzle and Yossi Matias were chosen for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. Here at Google, we take great pride in having a tremendously talented workforce, and the talent of our team is exemplified by the addition of Jeff, Tom, Urs and Yossi to the six other ACM Fellows already at Google.

All of these Googlers are being recognized for successes both inside and outside Google. Urs' and Jeff's achievements are most directly related to innovations made while at Google, specifically in our large data centers and in harnessing their inherent parallel computation and vast storage. Tom and Yossi, on the other hand, were elected more for work done prior to Google — respectively, on how to use prediction in planning, control, and decision-making where there is both uncertainty and time constraints, and on theoretically and practically interesting techniques for analyzing and managing large data sets and data streams.

We at Google congratulate our colleagues. They serve as an inspiration to us and to our colleagues in computer science globally and remind us to continue to push the limits of computing, which has enormous benefits to our field and to society at large.

You can read more about Jeff, Tom, Urs and Yossi's achievements and the reasons for this recognition by the ACM below. The citations are the official ones from the ACM.

Jeff Dean, Google Fellow
For contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems

Dr. Jeff Dean has made great contributions to the programming and use of loosely-coupled multiprocessing systems and cloud computing. Jeff is probably best known for his work (with Sanjay Ghemawat) on the parallel/distribution computing infrastructure called MapReduce, a tremendously influential programming model for batch jobs on loosely coupled multiprocessing systems. Working with others, Jeff has also been a leading contributor to many other Google systems: the BigTable record storage system, which reliably stores diverse record data records (via portioning and replication) in vast quantities, at least two production real-time indexing systems, and several versions of Google's web serving system. The breadth of Jeff's work is quite amazing: At Digital, he co-developed a leading Java compiler and the Continuous Profiling Infrastructure (DCPI). Beyond this core systems work, Jeff has had exceedingly diverse additional activities; for example, he co-designed Google's first ads serving system, made significant quality improvements to the search system, and even has been involved in user-visible efforts such as the first production version of Google News and the production implementation of Google's machine translation system. Despite his primary accomplishments as a designer and implementer of innovative systems that solve hard problems in a practical way, Jeff also has over 20 publications in peer-reviewed publications, more than 25 patents, and is one of Google's most sought-after public speakers.

Thomas L. Dean, Staff Research Scientist
For the development of dynamic Bayes networks and anytime algorithms

Dr. Tom Dean is known in AI for his work on the role of prediction in planning, control and decision-making where uncertainty and the limited time available for deliberation complicate the problem, particularly his work on temporal graphical models and their application in solving robotics and decision-support problems. His temporal Bayesian networks, later called dynamic Bayes networks, made it possible to factor very large state spaces and their corresponding transition probabilities into compact representations, using the tools and theory of graphical models. He was the first to apply factored Markov decision processes to robotics and, in particular, to the problem of simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM). Faced with the need to solve what were essentially intractable problems in real-time, Dean coined the name "anytime algorithm" to describe a class of approximate inference algorithms and the associated (meta) decision problem of deliberation scheduling to address the challenges of bounded-time decision making. These have been applied to large-scale problems at NASA, Honeywell, and elsewhere. At Google, Tom has worked on extracting stable spatiotemporal features from video and developed new, improved features for video understanding, categorization and ranking. During his twenty-year career as a professor at Brown University, he published four books and over 100 technical articles, while serving terms as department chair, acting vice president for computing and information services, and deputy provost.

Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President of Engineering
For the design, engineering and operation of large scale cloud computing systems

Dr. Urs Hoelzle has made significant contributions to the literature, theory, and practice in many areas of computer science. His publications are found in areas such as compilers, software and hardware architecture, dynamic dispatch in processing systems, software engineering and garbage collection. Much of this work took place during his time at Stanford and later at UC Santa Barbara as a member of the faculty. Urs' most significant contribution to computer science and its application is found in his work and leadership at Google. Since 1999 he has had responsibility for leading engineering and operations of one of the largest systems of data centers and networks on the planet. That it has been able to scale up to meet the demands of more than a billion users during the past 10 years is an indication of his leadership ability and remarkable design talent. Urs works best in collaborative environments, as evidenced by his publications and in his work at Google. While it would be incorrect to credit Urs alone for the success of the Google computing and communications infrastructure, his ability to lead a large number of contributors to a coherent and scalable result is strong evidence of his qualification for advancement to ACM Fellow. The philosophy behind Google's system of clustered, distributed computing systems reflects a powerful pragmatic: assume things will break; use replication, not gold-plating, for resilience; reduce power requirements where ever possible; create general platforms that can be harnessed in myriad ways; eschew specialization except where vitally necessary (e.g., no commercial products fit the requirement). Much of this perspective can be attributed to Urs Hoelzle.

Yossi Matias, Director of R&D Center in Israel
For contributions to the analysis of large data sets and data streams

Dr. Yossi Matias has made significant contributions to the analysis of large data sets and data streams. He pioneered (with Phillip Gibbons) a new research direction into the study of small-space (probabilistic) “synopses” of large data sets, motivating their study and making key contributions in this area. Yossi’s 1996 paper (with Noga Alon and Mario Szegedy) won the 2005 Gödel Prize, the top ACM prize in Theoretical Computer Science, awarded annually. The award citation describes the paper as having “laid the foundations of the analysis of data streams using limited memory." Further, “It demonstrated the design of small randomized linear projections, subsequently referred to as ‘sketches,’ that summarize large amounts of data and allow quantities of interest to be approximated to user-specified precision.” Additionally, Yossi has made several key contributions to lossless data compression of large data sets, including a “flexible parsing” technique that improves upon the Lempel-Ziv dictionary-based compression algorithm, and novel compression schemes for images and for network packets. Large scale data analysis requires effective use of multi-core processors. For example, his JACM paper (with Guy Blelloch and Phillip Gibbons) provided the first provably memory- and cache-efficient thread scheduler for fine-grained parallelism. In addition to his academic and scientific impact, Yossi has been heavily involved in the high tech industry and in technology and product development, pushing the commercial frontiers for analyzing large data sets and data streams. He is also the inventor on 23 U.S. patents. Yossi joined Google in 2006 to establish the Tel-Aviv R&D Center, and to be responsible for its strategy and operation. Yossi has overall responsibility for Google R&D and technology innovation in Israel.