Google Ideas: joining the fight against drug cartels and other illicit networks

Violent illicit networks represent a trillion-dollar problem that affects every society in the world and claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year. For example, more than 50,000 people have died in the past five years as a result of the ongoing war in Mexico between rival drug cartels. And although data on this subject is scarce and often unreliable, in 2003 the UN estimated the value of the illicit drug market to be nearly $320 billion, greater than the gross domestic product of 88 percent of countries in the world—and that was almost 10 years ago. It’s clear that illicit networks—particularly those that are violent and coercive like drug smugglers, arms dealers and human traffickers—have a devastating human and financial impact on every nation.

We think Google can help. Eighteen months ago we launched Google Ideas with the belief that Google is in the unique position to explore the role that technology can play in tackling some of the toughest human challenges in the world. Our first area of focus was counter-radicalization; last year we convened the Summit Against Violent Extremism with former gang members, right-wing extremists, jihadists and militants as well as survivors of violent extremism. Among the many outcomes of the summit was a platform that we established as a one-stop shop for tackling violent extremism through formers and survivors.

Recently, we’ve expanded our focus to include violent illicit networks such as narco-trafficking, human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms dealing. We believe that technology has the power to expose and dismantle global criminal networks, which depend on secrecy and discretion in order to function. And for the past few months, we’ve been working with people fighting on the front line to gain a better understanding of what drives these networks and how they function.

This week, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tribeca Film Festival, we’re convening Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition (or the INFO summit) in Los Angeles, Calif. Too often illicit networks are seen only in the silos of those who study them. This summit aims to break down those silos by bringing together a full-range of stakeholders, from survivors of organ trafficking, sex trafficking and forced labor to government officials, dozens of engineers, tech leaders and product managers from Google and beyond. Through the summit, which lasts until Wednesday, we hope to discover ways that technology can be used to expose and disrupt these networks as a whole—and to put some of these ideas into practice.

We’ll be uploading videos from the summit to our YouTube channel. Keep up with the Summit via @googleideas and #infosummit2012, or take a look at the video below for a sneak peek.



Posted by Jared Cohen, Director, Google Ideas

Maker Camp on Google+ will be a blast!

From time to time we invite guests to post about items of interest, and we’re pleased to have Dale Dougherty, publisher of MAKE Magazine, join us today to talk about Maker Camp. Maker Camp is a free, online camp that encourages 13- to 18-year-olds to get creative with up to 30 different types of fun projects themed around creativity and “the art of making.” -Ed.

In the words of young maker Joey Hudy: “Don’t be bored. Make something.”

That’s the idea behind Maker Camp, a new online “summer camp” on Google+. Over the course of six weeks, 13- to 18-year-olds (as well as their parents and teachers) will have the opportunity to collaborate with popular maker personalities—including Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing, Stephen and Fritz of EepyBird (the Coke and Mentos guys), Jimmy DiResta (co-host of Dirty Money on the Discovery Channel) and Limor Fried (founder of Adafruit)—and other creative teens on fun projects themed around “the art of making.” Our goal is to encourage everyone this summer to make something and share it with their friends and family.

Making is a wonderful way to experiment and explore, to try to do new things, and mostly to let your imagination get the best of you. Making is fun (and it’s also a great way to learn, even if it is summer!). Making can be done indoors—even in a small space, like a kitchen table—but it’s also great to go outdoors to make things you can play with in the backyard or park. Making could mean traditional arts and crafts projects, or science projects, but it could also use innovative technologies and processes that enable you to create something entirely new.

Every Monday through Thursday morning, beginning Monday, July 16, a Maker Camp counselor will post how-to instructions for a new project on g.co/makercamp and Makezine.com/go/makercamp. Some of these projects will overlap with ones in MAKE’s 3D “School’s Out” special issue, our first-ever summer issue devoted entirely to kids. These projects are great for families to do together or for teens to do on their own. Many of the projects involve materials and tools that you can find around the house. Junior counselors will host a Hangout On Air in the afternoon so campers can post questions and comments and share photos and videos of their projects.



The first project at Maker Camp is our popular compressed air rocket that we first introduced in Make: Vol 15 to huge response. We featured it again in the “School’s Out” summer issue and are delighted that rocket guru Rick Schertle is our guest counselor for this project and will be with us in New York to launch Maker Camp at the New York Hall of Science.

It wouldn’t be summer camp unless you were able to meet a lot of great, new friends who share your love of making. You’ll find that other campers will inspire you to come up with new ideas for projects.

Maker Camp is free, and open to everyone with a Google+ profile (you must be over 13 to have your own Google+ profile). To participate, simply follow MAKE on Google+.

Whether you build rockets or race cars, make T-shirts or experimental music, or discover nature or new things in the community where you live, I hope that you’ll have a blast at Maker Camp.

Posted by Dale Dougherty, Publisher, MAKE Magazine

Google at SIGMOD/PODS 2012

Posted by Anish Das Sarma, Research Scientist and Jeff Shute, Software Engineer

Over the years, SIGMOD has expanded beyond a traditional "database" conference to include several areas related to information management. This year’s ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference (on Management of Data, and Principles of Database Systems), held in Scottsdale, Arizona was no different. We were impressed by the wide variety of researchers from industry and academia alike the conference attracted, and enjoyed learning how others are pushing the limits of scalability in data storage and processing. In addition to an excellent set of papers on a large number of topics, we saw a couple of recurring themes:

1) Data Visualization

• Pat Hanrahan from Stanford gave a keynote on some of the challenges involved in building systems to enable "data enthusiasts" to manage and visualize data. 

• Google’s Fusion Tables group also had a paper on this topic: Efficient Spatial Sampling of Large Geographical Tables, by Anish Das Sarma, Hongrae Lee, Hector Gonzalez, Jayant Madhavan, Alon Halevy. (This paper has been invited to a TODS special issue on best papers of SIGMOD 2012). 

• A similar effort from the University of Washington was presented as a demo: VizDeck: Self-Organizing Dashboards for Visual Analytics, by Alicia Key, Bill Howe, Daniel Perry, Cecilia Aragon.

2) Big Data

As has been the case for the last couple of years, “Big Data" has been of ever-growing interest to the entire community, particularly from industry. Google presented a talk on F1, a new distributed database system we’ve built to power the AdWords system. A complex business application like AdWords has different requirements than many systems at Google that often use storage systems like Bigtable. We have a single database shared by hundreds of developers and systems, so we need the robustness and ease of use we’re used to from traditional databases. F1 is built to scale like Bigtable, without giving up the database features we also need, like strong consistency, ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and most importantly, SQL query.

There’s been a widespread trend over the last several years away from databases, towards highly scalable “NoSQL” systems. We don’t think that trade-off is necessary, and were happy to see several other speakers advocate a similar theme -- yes, databases are useful, and developers shouldn’t need to give up database features and ease of use in the name of scalability.

This theme was supported by an industry session on Big Data featuring talks from other companies: Facebook (TAO: How Facebook Serves the Social Graph), Twitter (Large-Scale Machine Learning at Twitter), and Microsoft (Recurring Job Optimization in Scope). Googler Kirsten LeFevre was a panelist on the "Perspectives on Big Data" panel organized by Surajit Chaudhuri from Microsoft, and also featuring Donald Kossmann from ETHZ, Sam Madden from MIT, and Anand Rajaraman from Walmart Labs. Last but not the least, Surajit Chaudhuri also gave an excellent keynote outlining some of the research challenges that the new era of "Big Data and Cloud" poses.

As has been the practice for several years now, to continue generating great interest in data management research, SIGMOD has been organizing panels such as this year's "New Research Symposium" (which included Anish Das Sarma from Google as a panelist).

In addition to sponsoring the conference, many Googlers attended contributing to a robust presence and affording us the opportunity to interact with the broader information management community. We've been pushing the frontiers of science with cutting-edge research in many aspects of data management, and we were eager to share our innovations and see what others have been working on. We found Amin Vahdat's keynote on the intersection of Networking and Databases to be a highlight of Google’s participation, which also included presenting papers, participating on panels, and taking part in planning and program committees:

Program Committee Members

Anish Das Sarma, Venkatesh Ganti, Zoltan Gyongyi, Alon Halevy (Tutorials Chair), Kristen LeFevre, Cong Yu

Talks

Symbiosis in Scale Out Networking and Data Management
Amin Vahdat, Google (Keynote)

F1-The Fault-Tolerant Distributed RDBMS Supporting Google's Ad Business
Jeff Shute, Mircea Oancea, Stephan Ellner, Ben Handy, Eric Rollins, Bart Samwel, Radek Vingralek, Chad Whipkey, Xin Chen, Beat Jegerlehner, Kyle Littlefield, Phoenix Tong (Googlers)

Finding Related Tables
Anish Das Sarma, Lujun Fang, Nitin Gupta, Alon Halevy, Hongrae Lee, Fei Wu, Reynold Xin, Cong Yu (Googlers)

Papers

CloudRAMSort: Fast and Efficient Large-Scale Distributed RAM Sort on Shared-Nothing Cluster
Changkyu Kim, Jongsoo Park, Nadathur Satish, Hongrae Lee (Google), Pradeep Dubey, Jatin Chhugani

Efficient Spatial Sampling of Large Geographical Tables
Anish Das Sarma, Hongrae Lee, Hector Gonzalez, Jayant Madhavan, Alon Halevy (Googlers)

Panels

Perspectives on Big Data Plenary Session: Privacy and Big Data 
Kristen LeFevre, Google

SIGMOD New Researcher Symposium - How to be a good advisor/advisee? 
Anish Das Sarma, Google

Overall, this year’s SIGMOD was a great conference, widely attended by researchers from industry and academia, and comprised of a very interesting mix of research presentations and discussions. Google had a good showing at the conference, and we look forward to continuing this trend in the coming years.

Street View goes on a road trip through California's national parks

One hot summer day in Yosemite National Park in Northern California, I sat under a tree along a lazy river in awe of the natural beauty around me. I looked out at the majestic granite mountains, the chirping birds and the rustling leaves, and thought about how they were the same that day as they had been thousands of years ago.





View Larger Map
People around the world can now appreciate the beauty and timelessness of the wilderness through Street View. We've recently added 360-degree panoramic imagery for five of California’s national parks—including Yosemite—to Google Maps. In addition, we've refreshed Street View imagery across most of the state. You can now take a virtual road trip practically the entire stretch of California from north to south.

Redwood National Park sits near the California-Oregon border and hugs the Pacific Ocean. It’s most famous for its giant redwood trees—the tallest trees on Earth. With Street View, you can now stare up at them without straining your neck:





View Larger Map
Inland, at Yosemite National Park, you can visit historic Inspiration Point, the site famously photographed by Ansel Adams in “Clearing Winter Storm”. Panning right from the same vantage point, you can see the cliffs of El Capitan and the picturesque Bridalveil Fall waterfall flanking iconic Half Dome, a granite rock formation almost 5,000 feet tall. You can also use Street View to venture into the valley, overlook Glacier Point (visited by John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903), explore the more remote upcountry along Tioga Pass road and see the Giant Sequoias in Mariposa Grove.





View Larger Map
You’ve seen the redwoods, now see more enormous trees with a visit to Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, whose namesake trees are the most massive in the world. It would take almost 30 adults linking their outstretched arms to wrap all the way around the largest sequoias. These parks also offer rich and varied landscapes featuring everything from mountains to canyons to caverns.





View Larger Map
The name may be foreboding, but Death Valley National Park, which lies along the California-Nevada border and has the lowest elevation of any spot in North America, is home to a variety of flora and fauna and well worth a visit. With average summer temperatures in this desert environment soaring above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, most people visit in the winter, but Street View lets you check it out any time of year—no sunblock required.





View Larger Map
Slightly north of the U.S.-Mexico border is the fifth and final national park recently added to Street View: Joshua Tree National Park. The gnarly, twisted trees here seem like something straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. Plan your escapades ahead of time from your browser, then pack up your hiking shoes or your mountain bike and hit the trails in this one-of-a-kind desert landscape.





View Larger Map
This only scratches the surface of what California parks have to offer travelers looking to explore the great outdoors. We hope a virtual trip through Street View inspires you to visit these places in person as well. If you need some additional inspiration, I’ll leave you with a quote from naturalist and author John Muir:

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

View Larger Map



Driving down Highway 1 through Big Sur is the ultimate road trip in California.

Posted by Evan Rapoport, Street View Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)

Reflections on the Google Faculty Institute

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Extending the school year one day can result in a year’s worth of learning. This proved true on June 8, when the 2011 Google Faculty Institute (GFI) cohort were welcomed back for a day, to share best practices and perspectives from their funded research over the 2011-12 school year.

For the past year, the GFI Fellows collaborated across 16 California State University campuses, Stanford and UC Berkeley, to execute on ten research initiatives proposed on the final day of the conference. GFI themes of faculty collaboration, project-based learning, universal design and others were implemented in the Fellows’ projects, each of which focused on ways to enhance teaching practices through the use of educational technologies.

At the GFI Redux earlier this month, participants reviewed research initiatives, attended panel discussions, and defined plans for the 2012-13 school year. In a packed day of sessions, the cohort showcased projects ranging from mobile application development to geospatial tool utilization to the success of the flipped classroom. Some highlights of GFI projects:

• Making Teachers “Appy” presented workshops on UC and CSU campuses on mobile application development using App Inventor. While building confidence with new technologies, participants learned to create their own applications to enhance classroom instruction.

• Bird’s Eye Detective encouraged CSU pre-service teachers to explore the world from a new perspective utilizing geospatial tools including Google Earth, Google Maps, and Fusion Tables.

• Transforming STEM Educators included nine hands-on workshops on three CSU campuses, presenting creative ways to engage students in science and engineering courses through the use of technology.

• CSU Digital Learning Ambassadors are faculty creating collaborative communities and customized initiatives from the inside. Initiatives include tech infusion prizes, Hangouts on Air for academic discussions, and webinars.

The Google Faculty Institute served as a catalyst and incubator for innovative educational technology. Congratulations to the GFI Fellows on a year of excellent research and application.

Google+ app for iPad available now in the App Store

In May, we redesigned the Google+ experience for iPhone, adding full bleed photos that fall into place and bold visual elements that bring your stream to life. Today, we’re introducing new features for iPhone and an iPad app that you won’t be able to put down.

A hands-on iPad experience
The Google+ app for iPad was designed with the device in mind. Your stream styles content based on popularity, type and orientation. We’ve also added unique ways to interact with the app—lean back and try these out:

• Pinch and expand posts right in your stream to add your comments
• Use two fingers to drag a post from your stream to easily re-share it
• Start a Hangout from your iPad and stream it to your TV using AirPlay

Bring your Stream to life with the new iPad app

A new way to save the date on iPhone
We recently launched Events on Google+, and now you can create and manage them right from your iPhone. Post a comment, upload a photo or check out who’s going. Your past event invitations are saved with all the photos and posts shared by your friends, so you can relive the party anytime you want.

Plan your next event with Google+

Start a Hangout from anywhere
There’s nothing like catching up with friends face to face. Now you can start a video chat with up to nine friends anywhere, anytime with Hangouts on iPhone and iPad. Turn on ringing notifications so your friends know to join the Hangout.

Talk face to face to face from your iPhone or iPad

To get started, tap “Hangout” from the main menu, add some friends and tap “Start.” We'll ring their phones (if you want), and if someone misses the hangout, they can ring you back with a single tap.

These updates are available now from the App Store (version 3.0), so download Google+ and let us know what you think.

Posted by Bradley Horowitz, Vice President, Product

Indoor Google Maps help you make your way through museums

In the past, navigating through museums could be an art form in and of itself. But Google Maps for Android has got wayfinding inside your favorite museums down to a science. With indoor maps and walking directions for U.S. museums now available on your Android phone or tablet, you can plan your route from exhibit to exhibit, identifying points of interest along the way, including between floors.

Today, we’ve added more than twenty popular U.S. museums to our collection of over 10,000 indoor maps that we launched in November: the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and 17 Smithsonian museums—plus a zoo!

"My location" in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City

To access the floor plans, simply open Google Maps on your Android phone or tablet and zoom in on the museum of interest. To find the museum, either search for it by name using the magnifying glass icon or, if you’re already there, use the “My location” feature to orient yourself. With the “My location” feature enabled you can even get indoor walking directions.

Indoor walking directions in the National Air and Space Museum—Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

More museums are adding their floor plans to Google Maps for Android soon, including the SFMOMA, The Phillips Collection, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. If you’re interested in getting your museum’s floor plan included in Google Maps, visit the Google Maps Floor Plans tool.

Along with the Google Art Project, indoor mapping is one more way we’re working with museums to bring greater access to revered cultural and educational institutions around the world. Tap into the latest version of Google Maps for Android in Google Play, and enjoy exploring the art and science of the great indoors.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Google Maps for Mobile team

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)

Big Tent Sendai: Smarter ways to share information in a crisis

As we’ve seen in the last decade, information technology can save lives in a crisis. But even as data becomes more crucial to rescue efforts, key information like evacuation routes, shelter locations and weather alerts often remains inaccessible to the public. Time is of the essence in the wake of a disaster, and it's critical for emergency information to be available in open standards and formats to enable instant communication among first responders and affected populations.

This was the theme of our first Big Tent in Asia, held yesterday in Sendai, Japan. The event brought together tech industry leaders, non-profits, volunteers and government officials to discuss how technology can better assist in preparing for, responding to and rebuilding from disasters. This is an extremely pertinent issue for the Asia-Pacific region, as nearly 70 percent of fatalities from natural disasters occur here. And with the earthquake and tsunami last year affecting the coastal regions of Northeastern Japan, Sendai was a particularly meaningful location to discuss new ways that technology can aid the efforts of responders to reduce the impact and cost of disasters.

During the panels, the audience heard stories about how two Pakistani volunteers mapped their home country so well through Google MapMaker that the UN’s mapping agency UNOSAT adopted the maps and provided them to aid workers during the Pakistan floods. Sam Johnson, Founder of the Christchurch Student Army and Young New Zealander of the Year, talked about using Facebook to quickly coordinate relief efforts on the ground after the earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011. Twitter Japan Country Manager James Kondo talked about Japanese earthquake victims tweeting with the hashtag “stranded” in order to find help. Meanwhile representatives of open source project Ushahidi talked of “brainsourcing” reporters on the ground and remote volunteers to keep the world abreast of conditions in disasters such as the earthquake in Chile in 2010.

After the panels, conversations and debates, four key themes emerged. First, there is a conflict between traditional closed data architectures and emerging open models—and we need to close the gap between them. Second, we need to find complementary ways to embrace both authoritative data from official sources and crowdsourced data. Third, there’s a universal need for data, but they way it’s shared needs to be tailored to the local environment—for example, Internet-reliant countries vs. SMS-reliant countries. Finally, we were reminded that beyond the data itself, communication and collaboration are key in a crisis. Information isn’t worth anything unless people are taking that information, adapting it, consulting it and getting it to the people who need it.

One of the panels at Big Tent Sendai

Crisis response tools will continue to improve and more people across the globe will own devices to quickly access the information they need. But there are still major challenges we must address. As Margareta Wahlström, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction said, we can now get quick warnings and alerts to many populations on their phones, but many who receive the alerts don’t know how to act.

To see clips from Sendai and previous events, visit the Big Tent YouTube channel, where you can also join in the debate via comments, get more information on the presenters and see how different communities approach many of the same issues. We’ll hold more Big Tents in Asia soon, so please check back on our website to learn more.

Posted by Nigel Snoad, Product Manager, Google.org Crisis Response Team

Celebrate freedom. Support a free and open Internet.

On July Fourth, America celebrates its independence.

In the summer of 1776, 13 disenfranchised colonies spoke. It took days for their declaration to be printed and distributed throughout the colonies, and it took weeks for it to be seen across the Atlantic.

Today, such a document could be published and shared with the world in seconds. More than any time in history, more people in more places have the ability to have their voices heard.

Powering these voices are billions of Internet connections around the world—people on their mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. The Internet is a powerful platform that makes it easier for people to speak, to assemble, and to be heard. This is true no matter where freedom is taking root.

Yet we’ve only just begun to see what a free and open Internet can do for people and for the freedom we cherish.



Today we’re sharing a video we made to celebrate our freedom and the tools that support it. Please take a moment to watch it, share it with your friends, and add your voice.

Join us in supporting a free and open Internet.

Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President of Public Policy and Government Affairs, Americas

Google Research Awards: Summer, 2012

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education, University Relations

We’ve just finished the review process for the latest round of the Google Research Awards, which is our bi-annual open call for proposals on research in areas of mutual interest with Google. Our funding provides full-time faculty the opportunity to fund a graduate student and work directly with Google research scientists and engineers.

This round, we are funding 104 awards across 21 different focus areas for a total of nearly $6 million. The subject areas that received the highest level of support this time were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, and mobile. In addition, 28% of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Given that our program is merit-based, we make funding decisions via committees of experts, who assess each proposal by its impact, innovation, relevance to Google, and other factors. Over the past two years, we have seen significant growth in the Research Award program. This round, we had 815 proposals—up 11% from last round, which required 1,946 reviews by 654 reviewers.

Our award committees represent a microcosm of Research @ Google. Not only do we work with research scientists in making funding decisions, but also engineers—many of whom have advanced degrees in Computer Science. Our research organization has a similar make-up: both research scientists and engineers working together on innovative projects that are product-focused and relevant to our customers.

Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is October 15), please visit our website for more information.