How green is the Internet?

More than ever, people are using the Internet to shop, read, listen to music and learn. And businesses rely on Internet-based tools to operate and deliver their services efficiently. The Internet has created all kinds of new opportunities for society and the economy—but what does it mean for the environment?

We’ve been working to answer that question and enlisted the help of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to gather more data. Their study (PDF), released today, shows that migrating all U.S. office workers to the cloud could save up to 87 percent of IT energy use—about 23 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, or enough to power the city of Los Angeles for a year. The savings are associated with shifting people in the workforce to Internet-based applications like email, word processing and customer relationship software.

These results indicate that the Internet offers huge potential for energy savings. We’re especially excited that Berkeley Lab has made its model publicly available so other researchers and experts can plug in their own assumptions and help refine and improve the results.

Of course, understanding the impact of shifting office applications to the cloud is only part of the story, which is why last week we hosted a summit called “How Green is the Internet?” to explore these questions in greater detail. At the summit, experts presented data on how the growth of Internet infrastructure, including devices like phones and tablets, can impact the environment. We also saw great excitement about the potential for entirely new Internet-enabled tools in areas like transportation, e-commerce and digital content to deliver huge energy and carbon savings. We’ve posted the videos from those sessions and invite you to take a look.



One of our goals in hosting the summit and supporting the Berkeley Lab study was to identify and encourage new research on this topic. We’ll continue to work to answer some of these questions, and we hope others will too.

Posted by Michael Terrell, Senior Policy Counsel, Energy & Sustainability

2013 Google PhD Fellowships: 5 Years of Supporting the Future of Computer Science

Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google University Relations

We are extremely excited to announce the 2013 Global Google PhD Fellows. From all around the globe, these 39 PhD students represent the fifth class in the program’s history, a select group recognized by Google researchers and their institutions as some of the most promising young academics in the world. As we welcome the newest class of PhD Fellows, we take a look back at the program’s roots and hear from two past recipients.

In 2009, Google launched its PhD Fellowship Program, created to recognize and support outstanding graduate students pursuing work in computer science, related disciplines or promising research areas. In its inaugural year, 13 United States PhD students were awarded fellowships, drawn from an extremely competitive pool of applicants. The global program now covers Europe, China, India and Australia and continues to draw some of the best young researchers, reflecting Google’s commitment to building strong relations with the academic community.

Among those first recipients of the fellowship award are 2009 PhD Fellow Roxana Geambasu, Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, and 2010 European Doctoral Fellow Roland Angst, Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University and affiliated with the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication. As early recipients of the award, Roxana and Roland reflect on the impact that the Google Fellowship program had on their careers.

For Roxana, the fellowship provided the tools and connections that helped lay the foundation for her academic career. She believes industrial fellowship programs are very important, as they give students an opportunity to interact more closely with industry.

“Beyond the financial support, I think that the fellowship impacted my career in many important ways. First, the Google fellowships are regarded as highly competitive, so receiving the award was probably a big plus on my resume when I was interviewing for faculty positions.”

“Second, the award yielded a mentor within Google, Brad Chen, with whom I've kept in touch ever since, as well as opportunities to visit the campus, deliver talks and meet Google engineers. Brad and I continue to meet at conferences and discuss my work, his work and (of late) the work of my students; it’s through that relationship I’m exposed to new people from Google and gain valuable advice about faculty award opportunities.”

Roland Angst credits the award with the ability to lighten his teaching load and instead focus on his research, which ultimately prepared him for his future academic career. Like Roxanna, Roland states that the fellowship also gave him the opportunity to establish connections with people working in related topics in industry.

“In my view, programs such as the Google Fellowship Awards represent an important and integral link between industry and universities. Firstly, such programs increase the awareness in the academic world for relevant problems in industry. Secondly, these programs allow the IT industry to express their gratitude to the educational services provided by the universities on which the IT industry heavily relies on."

We welcome the latest recipients of the Global Google PhD Fellowships for 2013 with great excitement and high expectations. Recognized for their incredible innovation, creativity and leadership, we are very happy to support these excellent PhD students and offer our sincere congratulations.

Google Maps and Waze, outsmarting traffic together

We’ve all been there: stuck in traffic, frustrated that you chose the wrong route on the drive to work. But imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travelers ahead of you, calling out “fender bender...totally stuck in left lane!” and showing faster routes that others are taking.

To help you outsmart traffic, today we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day.

The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.

We’ll also work closely with the vibrant Waze community, who are the DNA of this app, to ensure they have what’s needed to grow and prosper.

The Waze community and its dedicated team have created a great source of timely road corrections and updates. We welcome them to Google and look forward to working with them in our ongoing effort to make a comprehensive, accurate and useful map of the world.

Posted by Brian McClendon, Vice President, Geo

Building A Visual Planetary Time Machine

Posted by Randy Sargent, Google/Carnegie Mellon University; Matt Hancher and Eric Nguyen, Google; and Illah Nourbakhsh, Carnegie Mellon University

When a societal or scientific issue is highly contested, visual evidence can cut to the core of the debate in a way that words alone cannot — communicating complicated ideas that can be understood by experts and non-experts alike. After all, it took the invention of the optical telescope to overturn the idea that the heavens revolved around the earth.

Last month, Google announced a zoomable and explorable time-lapse view of our planet. This time-lapse Earth enables you explore the last 29 years of our planet’s history — from the global scale to the local scale, all across the planet. We hope this new visual dataset will ground debates, encourage discovery, and shift perspectives about some of today’s pressing global issues.

This project is a collaboration between Google’s Earth Engine team, Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, and TIME Magazine — using nearly a petabyte of historical record from USGS’s and NASA’s Landsat satellites. And in this post, we’d like to give a little insight into the process required to build this time-lapse view of our planet.

Previews of the phenomena visible in these time-lapses.

First we'll describe Google’s Earth Engine system for deriving the time-series imagery. Second, we'll tell you more about CMU’s open-source “Time Machine” software for creating and streaming large, explorable time-series imagery.

Annual Composites: Distilling a Massive Dataset

Google Earth Engine brings together the world's scientific satellite imagery — over a petabyte of multispectral imagery recording over 40 years of history — and makes it available online with tools that scientists, independent researchers, and nations can use to mine this massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences on the Earth's surface using Google’s computational infrastructure. Today, the platform is used to monitor the Amazon and estimate forest carbon in Tanzania, among hundreds of other partners developing new uses for the technology.

Using Earth Engine, we first built annual global mosaics at a resolution of 30 meters per pixel for each year from 1984 through 2012. We started with a total of 2,068,467 scenes from the Landsat 4, 5, and 7 satellites, comprising 909 terabytes of data. The Earth’s atmosphere is a constantly-shifting sea of clouds, so in order to assemble a seamless cloud-free view of each year we analyzed all the images available at each location and used a simple cloud model to separate out the clouds from the ground. To help correct for atmospheric and seasonal effects, we used an additional 20TB of data from the MODIS MCD43A4 product to build a cloud-free low-resolution model of the Earth over time. We combined all this to produce a statistical estimate of the color of each pixel for every year for which data was available. Producing the final 29 global mosaics took a bit less than a day and consumed approximately 260,000 core-hours of CPU.

Some areas of the planet are almost perpetually cloudy, obscuring satellite views. In addition, before the more capable Landsat 7 began operating in 1999, coverage in some areas of the world was sparse, particularly in Asia, for various operational and technological reasons. We wrestled with how best to visualize areas with missing or cloud-obscured images from each year. In the end, after much experimentation, we chose to simply interpolate between valid image years. Other techniques, such as greying out invalid data, created distractingly large artifacts, visually drowning out the valid information. However, the downside with the approach we have taken is that it can be difficult to tell which data is original and which is interpolated. We are exploring the possibility of including a view that allows drilling down into the non-interpolated, original mosaics.

"Time Machine": An HTML5 Time-Series Exploration Tool

Once we had produced the final global images, we adapted the Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab’s open-source “Time Machine” software, which enables authoring, streaming, and exploring very-high-resolution videos. Time Machine videos take advantage of the power of HTML5 and modern web browsers: they are streamed as multiresolution, overlapping video tiles and displayed in a web page by manipulating the HTML5 <video> tag, in much the same way that Google Maps first demonstrated using the HTML <img> tag.

Examples of zoomable timelapses with hundreds of millions or billions of pixels per frame include documenting plant growth, bee colony collapse, and very-large-scale simulations of the universe. Time-lapse Earth, however, sets a new record for giant videos: each frame of the video is a global Mercator-projected map with a resolution of 30 meters per pixel at the equator, for a total of 1.78 trillion pixels per frame. That’s about a million times larger than a standard HD video stream. In order to scale to such large videos, we needed to integrate Time Machine’s data production pipeline into Earth Engine and the rest of Google’s infrastructure. Encoding the final video tiles consumed approximately 1.4 million core-hours of CPU in Google’s data centers over the course of about a day. For CMU's researchers, this would have been impossible without Google's resources.

Combining all three phases of product generation:

• Total processing time: 3 days
• Total CPU usage: 1.8 million core-hours
• Peak CPU usage: 66,000 simultaneous cores

Destination locations of top 1500 share links, weighted by number of visits.

Time-lapse Earth is powerful because it helps us to access and construct the story of our planet. That story will become richer with each release, as we continue to improve fidelity and add data. The story-teller is everyone — scientists and citizens alike provide the real value by interacting, exploring, layering their knowledge upon the globe, and sharing their insights so that we can all better understand our world.

We are especially proud of the collaboration that made time-lapse Earth possible, and believe it to be an exemplar of how industry, academia, government, and the press can benefit from working together deeply over a period of years. By drawing on the strengths of each member of the collaborative community, Google strives to integrate the world's technical expertise and knowledge in order to tackle innovative and groundbreaking projects. In doing so, it is our goal to deliver an impactful service, one that can put a focus on the dramatic effect we are having on our planet.

Remembering WEIZAC: the beginning of computing in Israel

Israel is now one of the world’s tech powerhouses, second only to Silicon Valley as a hub for startups, but it wasn’t always this way. Today, in honour of the 84th birthday of Professor Aviezri Fraenkel, we’re delighted to share a short film sharing his story of working on the WEIZAC, Israel’s first computer.


Short film produced with support from Google as part of our ongoing computing heritage series

The impetus to build a computer in Israel came from Professor Chaim Pekeris, an MIT-trained geophysicist and mathematician, who made it a condition of accepting a job at the then-fledgling Weizmann Institute. An illustrious committee was set up to consider Pekeris’s request and initially opinion was divided. In particular, Albert Einstein was skeptical a computer in Israel would receive sufficient use and queried whether the skilled resources to build it were available. It took much convincing by another committee member, mathematician and computing luminary John Von Neumann, before the project got the go-ahead.

Construction of the WEIZAC (“Weizmann Automatic Calculator”) got underway in late 1953 under the leadership of Professor Pekeris and Jerry Estrin. A protege of Von Neumann, Estrin arrived in Israel armed with design drawings based on the computer at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. After advertising for recruits, a small team of engineers and technicians was assembled, among them Aviezri Fraenkel.

It took the team a lot of ingenuity to source the necessary materials. Some were imported, but others were clever adaptations, such as the thin copper strips that came from a small local bicycle-part shop! Despite such hurdles, progress was steady, and the major components were in place by the time Estrin returned to the U.S. 15 months later.

The WEIZAC performed its first calculation in October 1955 and was soon much in demand by Israeli scientists. It remained operational until the end of 1963—50 years ago this year. Nowadays it resides in the Weizmann Institute’s Ziskind Building as a fitting memorial to where computing in Israel began.

I have fond memories of passing by the WEIZAC every day when I studied at the Weizmann Institute, where I also had the privilege to attend a class by Professor Fraenkel. With the release of this short film, I’m delighted to be learning more from him about such an important chapter in Israel’s tech history.

Posted by Yossi Matias, Senior Engineering Director, Head of Israel R&D Centre

What the ...?

Dear Google users—

You may be aware of press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to our servers. As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts.

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed—there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive. We post this information on our Transparency Report whenever possible. We were the first company to do this. And, of course, we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety—including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Posted by Larry Page, CEO and David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer

Teaching awareness at Google: Breathe easy and come into focus

This is the fourth post in a series profiling Googlers who facilitate classes as part of our g2g program, in which Googlers teach, share and learn from each other. Regardless of role, level or location, g2g's community-based approach makes it possible for all Googlers to take advantage of a variety of learning opportunities. - Ed.

Eight years ago, I loaded five boxes into my pickup truck, said goodbye to a career of crunching numbers in hotel management, and started my own massage practice in Washington state.

Soon thereafter, I started at Google as an onsite massage therapist at the Kirkland and Seattle offices, and I was ready for the challenge. But after a few years of massage work, I started to ponder alternatives to massage to further help my fellow Googlers relax and de-stress. Being able to take a moment out of one’s day to relax and decompress is not only beneficial for one’s health, but also may help people be happier and more productive in their day to day lives. So in 2011, I helped launch “MindBody Awareness,” a guided meditation class, as part of the Googler-to-Googler (g2g) program.

It’s no secret that meditation can be an excellent way to relax your body and focus the mind. A plethora of studies have supported that point. That said, one of the hardest parts of meditation is simply giving it a try. For an activity based in calmness and openness, it’s ironic how meditation can, for some, engender feelings of intimidation and even embarrassment at the outset. So we specifically designed “MindBody Awareness” for all levels so anyone can walk through the door and dive right in. Having a friendly, informal meditation class taught onsite by a fellow Googler allows for community building, and immediately relaxes participants whether they’re new to the practice or veterans.

Leading a MindBody Awareness class at our Kirkland, Wash. office

We begin each 30-minute class by going through a Qigong series that consists of 12 different positions held for 30 seconds each. This is how we begin bringing awareness of one’s body and mind into play, shedding the distractions from the outside and becoming more in tune with one’s self. The second portion of the class is a seated meditation, which incorporates changing hand positions, where chimes go off every minute to signal a change in pose. This integrates the mind and the body instead of just one or the other. The chimes help the mind stay focused, and acts as an anchor helping people return to a quiet mind if they happen to get lost in distraction. An engineer who takes my class told me “being aware of what my physical body needs while my brain is busy coding has helped me significantly reduce stress, not get so worn out, and enjoy my job.” Another Googler noted to me that he feels “having a regular chance to slow down, collect [himself] and connect mind and body contributes to a more mindful, lower stress outlook throughout the week.”

Taking a few minutes a day to sync your mind and body can help you relax and stay focused throughout the work day

Through g2g, we’ve made MindBody Awareness and other meditation classes available in 16 different cities, providing an alternative method of stress relief for Googlers around the world. To make it even easier for Googlers to access meditation classes, we offer global meditative Google Hangouts. Googlers can video conference into a meditation hangout for 30 or 60 minutes to practice meditation as a group.

Meditation class offered through the g2g program has also fostered a unique way to build a sense of community. The class has brought Googlers from varying departments together to meet new people by taking a break for 30 minutes to re-charge. The ultimate goal of the class is that Googlers get positive energy flowing that they can bring back to their desks—or anywhere for that matter!

Tips and tricks to help you de-stress

1. Focus on your breath. Take a few moments to allow your mind and body to relax even if it's just for one or two long deep breaths—make sure you can physically see your belly and chest rise. Taking just one minute a day can make a significant difference.
2. Think of your favorite things. Positive thoughts can give a way to a more positive attitude and outlook.
3. Try to focus on one thing. See if you can sit back and tackle your tasks one piece at a time, as if you were working on a puzzle piece by piece. Eventually, it will come together in a systematic way!

Posted by Amy Colvin, Massage Therapist

Powering our Finnish data center with Swedish wind energy

What do a Swedish wind farm developer, a German insurance company and Google’s Finnish data center have in common? As of today, a lot. We’ve just inked agreements with O2 and Allianz to supply our Finnish data center with renewable energy for the next 10 years—our fourth long-term agreement to power our data centers with renewable energy worldwide, and our first in Europe.

Here’s how it works: O2, the wind farm developer, has obtained planning approval to build a new 72MW wind farm at Maevaara, in Övertorneå and Pajala municipality in northern Sweden, using highly efficient 3MW wind turbines. We’ve committed to buying the entire output of that wind farm for 10 years so that we can power our Finnish data center with renewable energy. That agreement has helped O2 to secure 100% financing for the construction of the wind farm from the investment arm of German insurance company Allianz, which will assume ownership when the wind farm becomes operational in early 2015.

This arrangement is possible thanks to Scandinavia’s integrated electricity market and grid system, Nord Pool. It enables us to buy the wind farm’s output in Sweden with Guarantee of Origin certification and consume an equivalent amount of power at our data center in Finland. We then “retire” the Guarantee of Origin certificates to show that we’ve actually used the energy.

As a carbon neutral company, our goal is to use as much renewable energy as possible—and by doing so, stimulate further production. The Maevaara wind farm not only allows us to make our already highly energy-efficient Finnish data center even more sustainable, it also meets our goal of adding new renewable energy generation capacity to the grid.

Of course, using renewable energy is good for the environment, but it also makes long term financial sense. That’s why, in addition to protecting ourselves against future increases in power prices through long-term purchasing for our operations, we also invest in new renewable energy projects that will deliver a return for our money. In recent years we’ve committed more than $1 billion to such projects in the U.S., Germany and, just last week, South Africa. We’ll continue to look for similar opportunities around the globe.

Posted by Francois Sterin, Senior Manager, Global Infrastructure Team

U.K. innovators use technology to make the world better, faster

In March, we launched the U.K. Global Impact Challenge, asking British nonprofits to tell us how they’d use technology to change the world. Today, after evaluating hundreds of creative and visionary projects and narrowing the stack down to just 10 finalists, we’re announcing four inspiring Global Impact Awardees.

Three Awardees were selected by a panel of judges including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Richard Branson and Jilly Forster. Ultimately, the three recipients were selected for their unique application of technology to solve a big challenge and their ambitious but attainable vision:

• SolarAid will enable widespread access to low-cost, safe solar lighting in off-grid African communities currently reliant on kerosene lighting.
• Integrity Action will improve public infrastructure and services in war-torn countries through an online and mobile platform for citizens to report on development projects.
• CDI Apps For Good will revolutionize computing education by engaging youth in the hands-on creation of apps.

We also asked the public to help us choose one additional fan favorite to receive a £500,000 Global Impact Award. Hundreds of thousands of votes were cast between May 17-31. It was neck and neck, but the Zoological Society of London won for its plan to equip next generation camera traps with automated sensors, improving the protection of threatened wildlife.

SolarAid, CDI Apps for Good, Integrity Action and Zoological Society of London

Each of the four nonprofits will receive a £500,000 Global Impact Award and support from Google volunteers to make their project a reality. We believe technology can change the world, and entrepreneurial nonprofits are a big part of that equation. So to help the six additional finalists further develop and kick-start their projects, we’ve provided each with £100,000 in seed funding.

We look forward to the impact these incredible organizations will have on the ground, and we applaud all of the nonprofits in the U.K. and around the globe that are using technology to make the world better, faster. Who knows where we’ll take the Challenge next?

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Google Giving

The Story Behind Course Builder

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Last summer, we ran a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Power Searching. Soon after, we open sourced Course Builder, the platform that we developed on Google technologies to present the course. Since then, we have released four versions of Course Builder adding features such as user-friendly content development, administrative support, dashboards on student performance and behavior, new assessment types including peer review, accessibility, internationalization, etc. A large number of courses have been hosted on Course Builder, with many more in the pipeline.

This work started with the observation that we have all the component technology one needs to create a platform for delivering a learning experience similar to other MOOCs that were being offered on Coursera and Udacity. So we set about wiring together these components (YouTube, App Engine, Groups, Apps, Google+ and Hangouts, etc.) to create the first version of Course Builder.

As we talked with faculty and others who wanted to create online learning experiences, we saw an opportunity for Course Builder to play an important role in the MOOC space. Our goal is to provide the capability for anyone to create a MOOC or even an “OOC”. We believe that an online environment can be used for a wide variety of education-related activities beyond just the standard university course. We have implemented a feature set that supports this goal.

Our users include not only colleges and universities, but also non-profits and K12 organizations. We host academic courses such as Information Visualization and Game Theory, as well as short courses including Mapping with Google, Digital Learning in K12, YouTube Creator Academy, and Giving with Purpose. Supporting this diversity in users, content and format is why we created Course Builder.

Hosting the platform on App Engine has provided additional capabilities that are essential for our users, particularly colleges and universities. It’s possible to brand a MOOC anyway the user wants. The user also owns the relationship with the student directly, and owns any data that they collect to use anyway they like. Given Course Builder is open source, it is possible to easily add customized features. Add to that App Engine’s scalability, self-managed hosting and the extensible component architecture built into Course Builder, and you have a powerful, flexible platform that can support any number of students and any type of content.

We will continue to support this diverse user base, and work to get even more great teachers and innovative learning designers involved in experimenting in this brave new world of online learning. The potential for positive disruption and change is enormous.