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.

An Experiment in Music and Crowd-Sourcing

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

The Bodleian Library is the main research library at the University of Oxford. It is also one of the oldest libraries in the world, dating back to the 14th century. But the staff of the Bodleian operates very much in the 21st century, using the latest technology to solve their unique problems.

A few years ago, the library acquired a set of 4,000 popular piano pieces from the mid-Victorian period. There’s very little information available on these pieces, so Bodleian staff decided to use crowdsourcing to collect information on this corpus of music. Through a Google Focused Award, they have digitized and made the entire set of music available online.

By visiting the What’s-the-Score website, which opened yesterday, ‘citizen librarians’ can help by describing the scores and contributing to the creation of an online catalogue. They can also include links to audio or video recordings. This is the first time the Bodleian has used this approach to collect catalog information. Typically, a large group of researchers are required to find this information.

Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music at the Bodleian Libraries, commented: ‘In making the scores available online, they will not only be accessible for academic study and research but will also be there to enjoy for anyone who is interested in various aspects of Victorian music, culture and society.’

The Bodleian Library is one of dozens of recipients of Google Focused Awards. These awards are for research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These unrestricted gifts are for two to three years, and the recipients have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise. The Bodleian’s experiment in crowdsourcing to build up data on a specialized collection is timely and interesting, given the number of such collections becoming available on the web.

Google App Engine Research Awards for scientific discovery

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations and Andrea Held, University Relations Program Manager

Since its launch four years ago, Google App Engine has been the platform for innovative and diverse applications. Today, Google’s University Relations team is inviting academic researchers to explore App Engine as a platform for their research activities through a new program: the Google App Engine Research Awards.

These research awards provide an opportunity for university faculty to experiment with App Engine, which provides services for building and hosting web applications on the same systems that power Google’s products and services. App Engine offers fast development and deployment, simple administration and built-in scalability -- it’s designed to adapt to large-scale data storage needs and sudden traffic spikes.

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to support cutting-edge scientific research across the board, this call for applications welcomes university faculty’s proposals in all fields. Projects may focus on activities such as social or economic experiments, development of academic aids, analysis of gene sequence data, or using App Engine MapReduce to crunch large datasets, just to name a few.

This new award program will support up to 15 projects by providing App Engine credits in the amount of $60,000 to each project for one year. In its first year, the program is launched in a limited number of countries. Please see the RFP for details.

If your research has the potential to advance scientific discovery, generates heavy data loads, or needs a reliable platform for running large-scale apps, we encourage you to submit your proposal. Information on how to apply is available on the Google Research website. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. PST, May 11, 2012.

ACM Fellows for 2011

Posted by Alfred Spector, Google Research

Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog

Congratulations to three Googlers elected ACM Fellows

It gives me great pleasure to share that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that three Googlers have been elected ACM Fellows in 2011. The ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and the Fellows Program celebrates the exceptional contributions of leaders in the computing field. This year the society has selected Amit Singhal, Peter S. Magnusson and Amin Vahdat for their outstanding work, which has provided fundamental knowledge to the field.

The recently-named Fellows join 14 prior Googler ACM Fellows and other professional society honorees in exemplifying our extraordinarily talented people. On behalf of Google, I congratulate our colleagues. They embody Google’s commitment to innovation with impact, and I hope that they’ll serve as inspiration to students as well as the broader community of computer scientists.

You can read more detailed summaries of their achievements below, including the official citations from the ACM.

Dr. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

For contributions to search and information retrieval

Since 2000, Dr. Amit Singhal has been pioneering search as the technical lead for Google's core search algorithms. He is credited with most of the information retrieval design decisions in Google Search – a massive system that has responded to hundreds of billions of queries. More than anyone, Amit has a deep understanding of Google’s entire algorithmic system. He is responsible for prioritization and has overseen the development of numerous algorithmic signals and their progression over time. He is the clear thought and managerial leader who has led critically important initiatives at the company. Among many other things, Amit catalyzed Universal Search, which returns multi-modal results from all available corpora; he was the force behind Realtime Search, which returns results from dynamic corpora with low latency; and he championed Google Instant, which returns search results as the user types.

Prior to joining Google, Amit boasted a prolific publication record averaging 5 publications/year from 1996-9 while at AT&T Labs. Since that time, you could say Google Search has been one long, sustained publication demonstrating a constant advancement in the state of the art of information retrieval.


Peter S. Magnusson, Engineering Director

For contributions to full-system simulation

Peter has made a tremendous impact by driving full-system simulation. His approach was so advanced, it can be used in real world production of commercial CPUs and prototyping of system software. Starting in 1991, Peter began to challenge the notion that simulators could not be made fast enough to run large workloads, nor accurate enough to run commercial operating systems. His innovations in simulator design culminated in Simics, the first academic simulator that could boot and run commercial multiprocessor workloads. Simics saw huge academic success and has been used to run simulations for research presented in several hundred subsequent publications.

Peter founded Virtutech in 1998 to commercially develop Simics, and he ultimately forged and became the leader in a new market segment for software tools. With Peter at the helm, Virtutech pushed Simics beyond several performance barriers to make it the first simulator to exceed 1 billion instructions per second and the first simulator to model over 1,000 processors. Peter joined Google in 2010 to work with cloud computing.


Dr. Amin Vahdat, Principal Engineer

For contributions to data center scalability and management

Amin’s work made an impact at Google long before he arrived here. Amin is known for conducting research through bold, visionary projects that combine creativity with careful consideration of the engineering constraints needed to make them applicable in real world applications. Amin’s infrastructure ideas have underpinned the shift in the computing field from the pure client-server paradigm to a landscape in which major web services are hosted “in the cloud” across multiple data centers. In addition to pioneering “third-party cloud computing” through his work on WebOS and Rent-A-Server in the mid-90s, Amin has made important advancements in managing wide-area consistency between data centers, scalable modeling of data center applications, and building scalable data center networks.

Amin’s innovations have penetrated and broadly influenced the networking community within academia and industry, including Google, and his research has been recapitulated and expanded upon in a number of publications. Conferences that formerly did not even cover data centers now have multiple sessions covering variants of what Amin and his team have proposed. At Google, Amin continues to drive next-generation data center infrastructure focusing on Software Defined Networking and new opportunities from optical technologies. This is emblematic of Amin’s ability to build real systems, and perhaps more significantly, convince people of their value.

Congratulations to Ken Thompson

Posted by Bill Coughran, Senior Vice President of Engineering

I’m happy to share that Ken Thompson has been chosen as the recipient of the prestigious Japan Prize. The Japan Prize is bestowed for achievements in science and technology that promote the peace and prosperity of mankind.

Ken was awarded the prize along with Dennis Ritchie for their development of the UNIX operating system in 1969 while at Bell Labs. UNIX changed the direction of computing as a whole and paved the way for the development of the personal computers and the server systems that power the Internet.

It’s an enormous source of pride for us to have such amazing talent working here and Ken continues to serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. We’re excited to see what Ken will come up with next.

You can read the full press release here.

Kuzman Ganchev Receives Presidential Award from the Republic of Bulgaria

Posted by Slav Petrov, Research Scientist

We would like to congratulate Kuzman Ganchev for being the runner-up for the John Atanasoff award from the President of the Republic of Bulgaria. Kuzman recently joined our New York office as a research scientist, after completing his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The John Atanasoff award was established in 2003 and is given annually to a Bulgarian scientist under 35 for scientific or practical contributions to the development of computer and information technology worldwide and significant economic or social importance for Bulgaria. Kuzman received the award for his contributions to computational linguistics and machine learning. Kuzman is the co-author of more than 20 publications that have appeared in international conferences and journals.