Reflections on Digital Interactions: Thoughts from the 2012 NA Faculty Summit

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

Last week, we held our eighth annual North America Computer Science Faculty Summit at our headquarters in Mountain View. Over 100 leading faculty joined us from 65 universities located in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America to attend the two-day Summit, which focused on new interactions in our increasingly digital world.

In my introductory remarks, I shared some themes that are shaping our research agenda. The first relates to the amazing scale of systems we now can contemplate. How can we get to computational clouds of, perhaps, a billion cores (or processing elements)? How can such clouds be efficient and manageable, and what will they be capable of? Google is actively working on most aspects of large scale systems, and we continue to look for opportunities to collaborate with our academic colleagues. I note that we announced a cloud-based program to support Education based on Google App Engine technology.

Another theme in my introduction was semantic understanding. With the introduction of our Knowledge Graph and other work, we are making great progress toward data-driven analysis of the meaning of information. Users, who provide a continual stream of subtle feedback, drive continuous improvement in the quality of our systems, whether about a celebrity, the meaning of a word in context, or a historical event. In addition, we have found that the combination of information from multiple sources helps us understand meaning more efficiently. When multiple signals are aggregated, particularly with different types of analysis, we have fewer errors and improved semantic understanding. Applying the “combination hypothesis,” makes systems more intelligent.

Finally, I talked about User Experience. Our field is developing ever more creative user interfaces (which both present information to users, and accept information from them), partially due to the revolution in mobile computing but also due in-part to the availability of large-scale processing in the cloud and deeper semantic understanding. There is no doubt that our interactions with computers will be vastly different 10 years from now, and they will be significantly more fluid, or natural.

This page lists the Googler and Faculty presentations at the summit.

One of the highest intensity sessions we had was the panel on online learning with Daphne Koller from Stanford/Coursera, and Peter Norvig and Bradley Horowitz from Google. While there is a long way to go, I am so pleased that academicians are now thinking seriously about how information technology can be used to make education more effective and efficient. The infrastructure and user-device building blocks are there, and I think the community can now quickly get creative and provide the experiences we want for our students. Certainly, our own recent experience with our online Power Searching Course shows that the baseline approach works, but it also illustrates how much more can be done.

I asked Elliot Solloway (University of Michigan) and Cathleen Norris (University of North Texas), two faculty attendees, to provide their perspective on the panel and they have posted their reflections on their blog.

The digital era is changing the human experience. The summit talks and sessions exemplified the new ways in which we interact with devices, each other, and the world around us, and revealed the vast potential for further innovation in this space. Events such as these keep ideas flowing and it’s immensely fun to be part of very broadly-based, computer science community.

Celebrate the Kennedy Space Center’s 50th birthday with Street View

For fifty years, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been the launch point for a generation of space technology and exploration. Countless enthusiasts (including this one) grew up longing to see a space shuttle up close and walk in the paths of astronauts. Today, a collaboration between NASA and Street View is enabling people around the world to take a trip to the doorway to outer space, and see Kennedy as it transitions into a multipurpose launch complex for the next 50 years of space innovation. This location is our largest special collection of Street View imagery to date, totaling 6,000 panoramic views of the facilities, and expanding our mission to document the world’s most amazing places.

Street View fleet at Kennedy Space Center

Among the images you can now explore online with the click of your mouse are the space shuttle launch pad, Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Firing Room #4. Gaze down from the top of the enormous launch pad, peer up at the towering ceiling of the Vehicle Assembly Building (taller than the Statue of Liberty) and get up close to one of the space shuttle’s main engines, which is powerful enough to generate 400,000 lbs of thrust. From these vantage points, anyone can live out his or her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

Atlantis Orbiter in the Vehicle Assembly Building - View Larger Map

Saturn V rocket on display in the Apollo/Saturn V center - View Larger Map

Even though they recently entered retirement, you can still get an up-close, immersive experience with two of the Space Shuttle Orbiters—the Atlantis and Endeavour —with Street View.

We’d like to thank NASA for making this project possible and giving all of us the chance to digitally walk in the shoes of all of the pioneering astronauts, scientists, engineers and technicians that made our space dreams possible. To explore more of our largest special collection yet, visit our Street View gallery at maps.google.com/nasa.

Posted by Ryan Falor, Product Manager, Google Street View

Google+ Hangouts and the NFL: fantasy football, face-to-face-to-face

The 2012 NFL season is just over a month away, which means one thing for millions of fans around the world: it’s time for fantasy. Fantasy football has been around since the 1960s, and has become a great way to follow your favorite athletes—and stay in touch with the people you care about. This year, alongside the NFL, we're giving fantasy football fans a new way to connect throughout the season: Google+ Hangouts. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

• From any NFL.com/fantasyfootball page—including the Draft and Game Centers—you can now click a single button to start a hangout with your league
• Later this month, you’ll see a live indicator on NFL.com/fantasyfootball if anyone in your league is already hanging out

Because most fans select their fantasy rosters in real time, and many leagues consist of people from across the globe, we think you'll find that hangouts are a natural extension of your (healthy) obsession. Not only can you connect live with your friends on draft day; you can actually gloat celebrate in person, regardless of where your league members are located. We're also upping the number of hangout participants from 10 to 12 on NFL.com/fantasyfootball, since the standard fantasy league has a dozen players.

Fantasy football hangout (top window), live indicator on NFL.com (right), chat bar on NFL.com (bottom-left)

Fantasy football hangouts don’t stop at the draft, however. Throughout the season you’ll be able to:

• Hang out with your friends to conduct trades, review league business or just chat while watching the game on TV
• Enjoy fantasy hangouts on the go or on the couch using the new Google+ app for phones and tablets (Android, iOS)
• Get advice from top NFL Fantasy commentators as they hang out with fans and discuss the week’s results

The +NFL Network will broadcast weekly highlights from some of these commentator hangouts. And of course, you can always share fantasy articles and tips with your circles—either from the NFL’s site, or their newly-launched Google+ page.

Visit NFL.com/fantasyfootball today to sign up, and to prep for your draft via hangout. If you like football but haven’t yet played fantasy, this year’s a great time to start. After all, hangouts help make fantasy football about more than just the game; they’re a great way to build lasting relationships on any given Sunday (and every day in between).

Posted by Nikhyl Singhal, Google+ Product Director

Natural Language in Voice Search

Posted by Jakob Uszkoreit, Software Engineer

On July 26 and 27, we held our eighth annual Computer Science Faculty Summit on our Mountain View Campus. During the event, we brought you a series of blog posts dedicated to sharing the Summit's talks, panels and sessions, and we continue with this glimpse into natural language in voice search. --Ed

At this year’s Faculty Summit, I had the opportunity to showcase the newest version of Google Voice Search. This version hints at how Google Search, in particular on mobile devices and by voice, will become increasingly capable of responding to natural language queries.

I first outlined the trajectory of Google Voice Search, which was initially released in 2007. Voice actions, launched in 2010 for Android devices, made it possible to control your device by speaking to it. For example, if you wanted to set your device alarm for 10:00 AM, you could say “set alarm for 10:00 AM. Label: meeting on voice actions.” To indicate the subject of the alarm, a meeting about voice actions, you would have to use the keyword “label”! Certainly not everyone would think to frame the requested action this way. What if you could speak to your device in a more natural way and have it understand you?

At last month’s Google I/O 2012, we announced a version of voice actions that supports much more natural commands. For instance, your device will now set an alarm if you say “my meeting is at 10:00 AM, remind me”. This makes even previously existing functionality, such as sending a text message or calling someone, more discoverable on the device -- that is, if you express a voice command in whatever way feels natural to you, whether it be “let David know I’ll be late via text” or “make sure I buy milk by 3 pm”, there is now a good chance that your device will respond how you anticipated it to.

I then discussed some of the possibly unexpected decisions we made when designing the system we now use for interpreting natural language queries or requests. For example, as you would expect from Google, our approach to interpreting natural language queries is data-driven and relies heavily on machine learning. In complex machine learning systems, however, it is often difficult to figure out the underlying cause for an error: after supplying them with training and test data, you merely obtain a set of metrics that hopefully give a reasonable indication about the system’s quality but they fail to provide an explanation for why a certain input lead to a given, possibly wrong output.

As a result, even understanding why some mistakes were made requires experts in the field and detailed analysis, rendering it nearly impossible to harness non-experts in analyzing and improving such systems. To avoid this, we aim to make every partial decision of the system as interpretable as possible. In many cases, any random speaker of English could look at its possibly erroneous behavior in response to some input and quickly identify the underlying issue - and in some cases even fix it!

We are especially interested in working with our academic colleagues on some of the many fascinating research and engineering challenges in building large-scale, yet interpretable natural language understanding systems and devising the machine learning algorithms this requires.

Sparking a better conversation with Wildfire

Businesses around the world—from neighborhood restaurants to major retailers—are embracing social media to share information and forge stronger relationships with their fans and customers. We know because we are one of those businesses—on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Indeed, a social presence can complement all marketing campaigns—search, display, video, mobile, offline ads and more.

With this in mind, today we’re happy to share that the Wildfire team will be joining Google. Their co-founders, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard, launched their startup just four years ago. Since then, they and their team have built a service that helps businesses like Virgin, Cirque du Soleil, Gilt Group and Spotify manage their social efforts across numerous social websites. It’s a platform for brands to manage their pages, apps, tweets, videos, sponsorships, ads, promotions and more, all in one place.

The ultimate goal is better and fresher content, and more meaningful interactions. People today can make their voices heard in ways that were previously impossible, and Wildfire helps businesses uphold their end of the conversation (or spark a new one).

In a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way. We’ve been working towards this end for some time. For example, Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites; our Admeld service has helped to serve ads in Facebook developers’ social apps; and our DoubleClick platform enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites. On Google+, brands use services like Vitrue, Buddy Media and others to manage their pages, with many more to come.

With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services. We believe that better content and more seamless solutions will help unlock the full potential of the web for people and businesses.

Update August 15, 2012: Our acquisition of Wildfire has now closed.

Posted by Jason Miller, Product Management Director

New Challenges in Computer Science Research

Posted by Jeff Walz, Head of University Relations

Yesterday afternoon at the 2012 Computer Science Faculty Summit, there was a round of lightning talks addressing some of the research problems faced by Google across several domains. The talks pointed out some of the biggest challenges emerging from increasing digital interaction, which is this year’s Faculty Summit theme.

Research Scientist Vivek Kwatra kicked things off with a talk about video stabilization on YouTube. The popularity of mobile devices with cameras has led to an explosion in the amount of video people capture, which can often be shaky. Vivek and his team have found algorithmic approaches to make casual videos look more professional by simulating professional camera moves. Their stabilization technology vastly improves the quality of amateur footage.

Next, Ed Chi (Research Scientist) talked about social media focusing on the experimental circle model that characterizes Google+. Ed is particularly interested in how social interaction on the web can be designed to mimic live communication. Circles on Google+ allow a user to manage their audience and share content in a targeted fashion, which reflects face-to-face interaction. Ed discussed how, from an HCI perspective, the challenge going forward is the need to consider the trinity of social media: context, audience, content.

John Wilkes, Principal Software Engineer, talked about cluster management at Google and the challenges of building a new cluster manager-- that is, an operating system for a fleet of machines. Everything at Google is big and a consequence of operating at such tremendous scale is that machines are bound to fail. John’s team is working to make things easier for internal users enabling our ability to respond to more system requests. There are several hard problems in this domain, such as issues with configuration, making it as easy as possible to run a binary, increasing failure tolerance, and helping internal users understand their own needs as well as the behavior and performance of their system in our complicated distributed environment.

Research Scientist and coffee connoisseur Alon Halevy took to the podium to confirm that he did indeed author an empirical book on coffee, and also talked with attendees about structured data on the web. Structured data is comprised of hundreds of millions of (relatively small) tables of data, and Alon’s work is focused on enabling data enthusiasts to discover and visualize those data sets. Great possibilities open up when people start combining data sets in meaningful ways, which inspired the creation of Fusion Tables. An example is a map made in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, that shows natural disaster data alongside the locations of the world’s nuclear plants. Moving forward, Alon’s team will continue to think about interesting things that can be done with data, and the techniques needed to distinguish good data from bad data.

To wrap up the session, Praveen Paritosh did a brief, but deep dive into the Knowledge Graph, an intelligent model that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another-- things, not strings-- which launched earlier this year.

The Google Faculty Summit continued today with more talks, and breakout sessions centered on our theme of digital interaction. Check back for additional blog posts in the coming days.

Education in the Cloud

Posted by Andrea Held, University Relations

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a major transition from stand-alone applications that run on desktop computers to applications running in the cloud. Unfortunately, many computer science students don’t have the opportunity to learn and work in the cloud due to a lack of resources in traditional undergrad programs. Without this access students are limited to the resources their school can provide.

So today, we’re announcing a new award program: the Google App Engine Education Awards. We are excited because Google App Engine can teach students how to build sophisticated large-scale systems in the cloud without needing access to a large physical network.

Google App Engine can be used to build mobile or social applications, traditional browser-based applications, or stand-alone web services that scale to millions of users with ease. The Google App Engine infrastructure and storage tools are useful for collecting and analyzing educational data, building a learning management system to organize courses, or implementing a teacher forum for exchanging ideas and practices. All of these adaptations of the Google App Engine platform will use the same infrastructure that powers Google.

We invite teachers at universities across the United States to submit a proposal describing how to use Google App Engine for their course development, educational research or tools, or for student projects. Selected proposals will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the US, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. The application deadline is midnight PST August 31, 2012.

Big Pictures with Big Messages

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Google’s Eighth Annual Computer Science Faculty Summit opened today in Mountain View with a fascinating talk by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, leaders of the data visualization group at our Cambridge office. They provided insight into their design process in visualizing big data, by highlighting Google+ Ripples and a map of the wind they created.

To preface his explanation of the design process, Martin shared that his team “wants visualization to be ‘G-rated,’ showing the full detail of the data - there’s no need to simplify it, if complexity is done right.” Martin discussed how their wind map started as a personal art project, but has gained interest particularly among groups that are interested in information on the wind (sailors, surfers, firefighters). The map displays surface wind data from the US National Digital Forecast Database and updates hourly. You can zoom around the United States looking for where the winds are fastest - often around lakes or just offshore - or check out the gallery to see snapshots of the wind from days past.

Fernanda discussed the development of Google+ Ripples, a visualization that shows how news spreads on Google+. The visualization shows spheres of influence and different patterns of spread. For example, someone might post a video to their Google+ page and if it goes viral, we’ll see several circles in the visualization. This depicts the influence of different individuals sharing content, both in terms of the number of their followers and the re-shares of the video, and has revealed that individuals are at times more influential than organizations in the social media domain.

Martin and Fernanda closed with two important lessons in data visualization: first, don’t “dumb down” the data. If complexity is handled correctly and in interesting ways, our users find the details appealing and find their own ways to interact with and expand upon the data. Second, users like to see their personal world in a visualization. Being able to see the spread of a Google+ post, or zoom in to see the wind around one’s town is what makes a visualization personal and compelling-- we call this the “I can see my house from here” feature.

The Faculty Summit will continue through Friday, July 27 with talks by Googlers and faculty guests as well as breakout sessions on specific topics related to this year’s theme of digital interactions. We will be looking closely at how computation and bits have permeated our everyday experiences via smart phones, wearable computing, social interactions, and education.

We will be posting here throughout the summit with updates and news as it happens.

Make your mark on Google with Handwrite for Mobile and Tablet Search

Unlike searching on a desktop or laptop computer, when you're searching on a touch-screen mobile device it’s often inconvenient to type. So we strive to give you a variety of ways to interact with Google, be it by speaking your queries, getting results before you finish typing, or searching by image. Now there’s a new way for you to interact with Google: Handwrite for web search on mobile phones and tablets.

Say you’re standing on a busy street corner, in a bumpy taxi ride, talking with a friend, or sitting on the couch with your tablet. Handwrite enables you to search by just writing letters with your finger most anywhere on your device’s screen—there’s no keyboard that covers half of the screen and no need for hunt-and-peck typing.



Getting started is easy: go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on “Settings” at the bottom of the screen and enable “Handwrite.” Note that after you've saved the setting, you may need to refresh the homepage to see the feature.

On tablets, the Search settings are available as an option behind the gear icon.

Once the feature is enabled, tap the Handwrite icon on the bottom right corner of your screen to activate the writing surface. Write a few letters and you’ll see autocomplete options appear below the search box. If one of the options is what you’re looking for, just tap it to search. For longer queries, you can continue writing and use the arrows next to the autocompletions to move the right one into the search box. Since you can write anywhere, you don’t have to look back and forth repeatedly from the keyboard to the search box.

For more tips and tricks on how to use Handwrite, see our Help Center article. To make accessing Google.com faster, be sure to bookmark it and add it to your home screen.

We designed Handwrite to complement rather than replace typing: with the feature enabled, you can still use the keyboard at any time by tapping on the search box. Handwrite is experimental, and works better in some browsers than others—on Android devices, it works best in Chrome. For now, we’ve enabled Handwrite for iOS5+ devices, Android 2.3+ phones and Android 4.0+ tablets—in 27 languages.

Have fun with this new way of searching!

Posted by Rui Ueyama, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)

Super fast fiber for Kansas City

Our goal is to build products that will help improve our users’ lives. And when it comes to Internet access, it's clear what provides a better user experience:

• Fast is better than slow. On the web, nobody wants to wait for a video to buffer or a website to load.
• Abundance is better than scarcity. There’s a plethora of rich content available online—and it’s increasingly only available to people who have the speeds and means to access it.
• Choice is better than no choice. Competition and choice help make products better for users.

With that in mind, we embarked on a journey to bring ultra-high speeds to Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo. And today, we’re excited to announce Google Fiber. Google Fiber is 100 times faster than today’s average broadband. No more buffering. No more loading. No more waiting. Gigabit speeds will get rid of these pesky, archaic problems and open up new opportunities for the web. Imagine: instantaneous sharing; truly global education; medical appointments with 3D imaging; even new industries that we haven’t even dreamed of, powered by a gig.



When we asked people what they value in their Internet service, the majority of them simply said, “choice.” So we listened. Kansas Citians will choose where we install and when. We’ve divided Kansas City into small communities we call “fiberhoods.” To get service, each fiberhood needs a critical mass of their residents to pre-register. The fiberhoods with the highest pre-registration percentage will get Google Fiber first. Households in Kansas City can pre-register for the next six weeks, and they can rally their neighbors to pre-register, too. Once the pre-registration period is over, residents of the qualified fiberhoods will be able to choose between three different packages (including TV).

It’s easy to forget how revolutionary high-speed Internet access was in the 1990s. Not only did broadband kill the screeching sound of dial-up, it also spurred innovation, helping to create amazing new services as well as new job opportunities for many thousands of Americans. But today the Internet is not as fast as it should be. While high speed technology exists, the average Internet speed in the U.S. is still only 5.8 megabits per second (Mbps)—slightly faster than the maximum speed available 16 years ago when residential broadband was first introduced. Access speeds have simply not kept pace with the phenomenal increases in computing power and storage capacity that’s spurred innovation over the last decade, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to work on.

To find out more about the different service packages and the pre-registration process see our Google Fiber Blog, which we’ll regularly update with new information over the coming weeks. This is an exciting new project for Google and we can’t wait to get homes connected to Google Fiber in Kansas City—because we’re pretty certain that what people do with a gig will be awesome.

Posted by Milo Medin, Vice President, Access Services

(Cross-posted from the Google Fiber Blog)