Saturday, June 16, 2012
Third Market Algorithms and Optimization Workshop at Google NYC
There are fascinating algorithmic and game theoretic challenges in designing both Google’s internal systems and our core products facing hundreds of millions of users. For example, both Google AdWords and the Ad Exchange run billions of auctions a day; showing the perfect ad to every user requires simple mechanisms to align incentives while simultaneously optimizing efficiency and revenue.
We think that research in these areas benefits from close cooperation between academia and industry. To this end, last week we held the Third Market Algorithms and Optimization Workshop at Google, immediately after STOC 2012. We invited several leading academics in these fields to meet with researchers and engineers at Google for a day of talks and discussions.
As a recent winner of the Godel prize, Éva Tardos from Cornell led off with a discussion of how to achieve efficiency in sequential auctions where bidders arrive and depart one at a time instead of all bidding simultaneously.
Eyal Manor, Google engineering director for the Ad Exchange, gave an overview of the design and functioning of the exchange. This was an opportunity to have questions answered by the absolute expert, and the participants took full advantage of it!
Costis Daskalakis and Pablo Azar from MIT and Tim Roughgarden from Stanford talked about different aspects of Optimal Auctions in Bayesian Settings. Costis talked about efficient implementation of optimal auctions in a class of combinatorial auctions. Both Tim and Pablo discussed optimal auctions in Bayesian settings with limited information. Tim, our other Godel prize winner, promoted the idea of designing simple auction rules that are independent of the distributions of buyers’ valuations, and Pablo presented optimal auction rules using only the mean and standard deviation of buyers’ valuations.
Bobby Kleinberg from Cornell and Gagan Goel from Google NYC presented recent work on pricing with budget constraints. Bobby’s talk was about procurement auctions where the auctioneer acts as a buyer with a budget constraining her procurements. Gagan, on the other hand, discussed Pareto-optimal ascending auctions where the auctioneer is selling to budget-constrained buyers. This has direct applications in Google AdWords auctions as advertisers aim to increase performance while staying within budget constraints.
With our mission of organizing all the world’s information, Google needs superior algorithmic techniques to analyze extremely large data sets. We had two talks on new algorithmic ideas for Big Data. From academia, Andrew McGregor gave an introduction to the new field of graph sketching. Though a graph on n nodes is O(n^2)-dimensional, Andy described how to find interesting properties of the graph (such as connectivity, approximate Minimum Spanning Trees, etc.) using only O(n polylog(n)) bits of information. These algorithms were based on clever use of the homomorphic properties of random projections of the graph’s adjacency matrix. In the next talk, Mohammad Mahdian from Google MTV explained a new model for evolving data; even a ‘simple’ problem like sorting becomes interesting when the order of elements changes over time. Mohammad showed that even if element swaps occur at the same rate as comparisons, one can compute an ordering with Kendall-Tau distance O(n ln ln n) from the true ordering at any time, very close to the optimal Ω(n).
Later, Mukund Sundararajan from Google MTV discussed algorithmic problems in interpreting and presenting sales data to advertisers. He challenged us to design flexible human-friendly optimization algorithms that can be adopted and tuned by humans. Toward the end of the workshop, Varun Gupta, Google NYC postdoctoral researcher, gave a short presentation about the use of primal-dual techniques for online stochastic bin packing with application in assigning jobs to data centers.
We also discussed some of the main activities in the algorithms research group in New York, like the use of primal-dual techniques in online stochastic display ad allocation at Google and large-scale graph mining techniques based on MapReduce and Pregel. Corinna Cortes, Director of Research in New York, and Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Projects, gave short speeches. Corinna talked about our statistics, machine learning, and NLP research groups in New York, and Alfred challenged us to design mechanisms to take into account fairness in allocations and pricing. For more details, see the blog post by our colleague, ‘Muthu’ Muthukrishnan.
Part of what makes Google a fascinating place to work is the wealth of algorithmic and economic research challenges posed by Google advertising and large-scale data analysis systems. These challenges define research directions for the computer science and economics research communities. Workshops like this and our weekly research seminars help us continue collaborations between Google and academia. We hope to post videos of this workshop shortly, and look forward to organizing many more such events in the future.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Recap of NAACL-12 including two Best Paper awards for Googlers
This past week, researchers from across the world descended on Montreal for the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). NAACL, as with other Association for Computational Linguistics meetings (ACL), is a premier meeting for researchers who study natural language processing (NLP). This includes applications such as machine translation and sentiment analysis, but also low-level language technologies such as the automatic analysis of morphology, syntax, semantics and discourse.
Like many applied fields in computer science, NLP underwent a transformation in the mid ‘90s from a primarily rule- and knowledge-based discipline to one whose methods are predominantly statistical and leverage advances in large data and machine learning. This trend continues at NAACL. Two common themes dealt with a historical deficiency of machine-learned NLP systems -- that they require expensive and difficult-to-obtain annotated data in order to achieve high accuracies. To this end, there were a number of studies on unsupervised and weakly-supervised learning for NLP systems, which aim to learn from large corpora containing little to no linguistic annotations, instead relying only on observed regularities in the data or easily obtainable annotations. This typically led to much talk during the question periods about how reliable it might be to use services such as Mechanical Turk to get the detailed annotations needed for difficult language prediction tasks. Multilinguality in statistical systems also appeared to be a common theme as researchers have continued to move their focus from building systems for resource-rich languages (e.g., English) to building systems for the rest of the world’s languages, many of which do not have any annotated resources. Work here included focused studies on single languages to studies aiming to develop techniques for a wide variety of languages leveraging morphology, parallel data and regularities across closely-related languages.
There was also an abundance of papers on text analysis for non-traditional domains. This includes the now standard tracks on sentiment analysis, but combined with this, a new focus on social-media, and in particular NLP for microblogs. There was even a paper on predicting whether a given bill will pass committee in the U.S. Congress based on the text of the bill. The presentation of this paper included the entire video on how a bill becomes a law.
There were two keynote talks. The first talk by Ed Hovy of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California was on “A New Semantics: Merging Propositional and Distributional Information.” Prof. Hovy gave his insights into the challenge of bringing together distributional (statistical) lexical-semantics and compositional semantics, which has been a need espoused recently by many leaders in the field. The second, by James W. Pennebaker, was called “A, is, I, and, the: How our smallest words reveal the most about who we are.” As a psychologist, Prof. Pennebaker represented the “outsider” keynote that typically draws a lot of interest from the audience, and he did not disappoint. Prof. Pennebaker spoke about how the use of function words can provide interesting social observations. One example was personal pronouns like “we,” whose increased usage now causes people to feel the speaker is colder and more distant as opposed to engaging the audience and making them appear accessible. This is partly due to a second and increasingly more common meaning of “we” that is much more like “you,” e.g., when a boss says: “We must increase sales”.
Finally, this year the organizers of NAACL decided to do something new called “NLP Idol.” The idea was to have four senior researchers in the community select a paper from the past that they think will have (or should have) more impact on future directions of NLP research. The idea is to pluck a paper from obscurity and bring it to the limelight. Each researcher presented their case and three judges gave feedback American Idol-style, with Brian Roark hosting a la Ryan Seacrest. The winner was "PAM - A Program That Infers Intentions," published in Inside Computer Understanding in 1981 by Robert Wilensky, which was selected and presented by Ray Mooney. PAM (“Plan Applier Mechanism”) was a system for understanding agents and their plans, and more generally, what is happening in a discourse and why. Some of the questions that PAM could answer were astonishing, which reminded the audience (or me at least) that while statistical methods have brought NLP broader coverage, this is often at the loss of specificity and deep knowledge representation that previous closed-world language understanding systems could achieve. This echoed sentiments in Prof. Hovy’s invited talk.
Ever since the early days of Google, Googlers have had a presence at NAACL and other ACL-affiliated events. NAACL this year was no different. Googlers authored three papers at the conference, one of which merited the conference’s Best Full Paper Award, and the other the Best Student Paper:
Award Oscar Täckström (Google intern), Ryan McDonald (Googler), Jakob Uszkoreit (Googler)
Vine Pruning for Efficient Multi-Pass Dependency Parsing - Best Full Paper Award
Alexander Rush (Google intern) and Slav Petrov (Googler)
Unsupervised Translation Sense Clustering
Mohit Bansal (Google intern), John DeNero (Googler), Dekang Lin (Googler)
Many Googlers were also active participants in the NAACL workshops, June 7 - 8:
David Elson (Googler), Anna Kazantseva, Rada Mihalcea, Stan Szpakowicz
Automatic Knowledge Base Construction/Workshop on Web-scale Knowledge Extraction
Invited Speaker - Fernando Pereira, Research Director (Googler)
Workshop on Inducing Linguistic Structure
Accepted Paper - Capitalization Cues Improve Dependency Grammar Induction
Valentin I. Spitkovsky (Googler), Hiyan Alshawi (Googler) and Daniel Jurafsky
Workshop on Statistical Machine TranslationProgram
Committee members - Keith Hall, Shankar Kumar, Zhifei Li, Klaus Macherey, Wolfgang Macherey, Bob Moore, Roy Tromble, Jakob Uszkoreit, Peng Xu, Richard Zens, Hao Zhang (Googlers)
Workshop on the Future of Language Modeling for HLT
Invited Speaker - Language Modeling at Google, Shankar Kumar (Googler)
Accepted Paper - Large-scale discriminative language model reranking for voice-search
Preethi Jyothi, Leif Johnson (Googler), Ciprian Chelba (Googler) and Brian Strope (Googler)
First Workshop on Syntactic Analysis of Non-Canonical Language
Invited Speaker - Keith Hall (Googler)
Shared Task Organizers - Slav Petrov, Ryan McDonald (Googlers)
Evaluation Metrics and System Comparison for Automatic Summarization
Program Committee member - Katja Filippova (Googler)
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Ads Integrity Alliance: Working together to fight bad ads
Today StopBadware is announcing the formation of an industry partnership to combat bad ads. We’re pleased to be a founding member of the Ads Integrity Alliance, along with AOL, Facebook, Twitter and the IAB.
Since its beginnings in 2006, StopBadware has enabled many websites, service providers and software providers to share real-time information in order to warn users and significantly eliminate malware (such as viruses, phishing sites and malicious downloads) on the web. We believe that the Ads Integrity Alliance can make a similarly important contribution to the goal of identifying and removing bad ads from all corners of the web.
In 2011, Google alone disabled more than 130 million ads and 800,000 advertisers that violated our policies on our own and partners’ sites, such as ads that promote counterfeit goods and malware. You can read more about our efforts to review ads and also see the numbers over time. Other players in the industry also have significant initiatives in this area. But when Google or another website shuts down a bad actor, that scammer often simply tries to advertise elsewhere.
No individual business or law enforcement agency can single-handedly eliminate these bad actors from the entire web. As StopBadware has shown, the best way to tackle common problems across a highly interconnected web, and to move the whole web forward, is for the industry to work together, build best practices and systems, and make information sharing simple.
The alliance led by StopBadware will help the industry fight back together against scammers and bad actors. In particular, it will:
(Cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog)
Since its beginnings in 2006, StopBadware has enabled many websites, service providers and software providers to share real-time information in order to warn users and significantly eliminate malware (such as viruses, phishing sites and malicious downloads) on the web. We believe that the Ads Integrity Alliance can make a similarly important contribution to the goal of identifying and removing bad ads from all corners of the web.
In 2011, Google alone disabled more than 130 million ads and 800,000 advertisers that violated our policies on our own and partners’ sites, such as ads that promote counterfeit goods and malware. You can read more about our efforts to review ads and also see the numbers over time. Other players in the industry also have significant initiatives in this area. But when Google or another website shuts down a bad actor, that scammer often simply tries to advertise elsewhere.
No individual business or law enforcement agency can single-handedly eliminate these bad actors from the entire web. As StopBadware has shown, the best way to tackle common problems across a highly interconnected web, and to move the whole web forward, is for the industry to work together, build best practices and systems, and make information sharing simple.
The alliance led by StopBadware will help the industry fight back together against scammers and bad actors. In particular, it will:
- Develop and share definitions, industry policy recommendations and best practices
- Serve as a platform for sharing information about bad actors
- Share relevant trends with policymakers and law enforcement agencies
(Cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog)
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Find out what people are searching for with the updated Hot Searches list
People turn to search when they’re looking for answers and information, and sometimes what they want to know is on other people’s minds as well. You can learn a lot about what’s happening around the country or catch wind of a breaking news story by looking at what others are searching for.
With Hot Searches in Google Trends, you can see a list of the fastest rising search terms in the U.S. for a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind. To create the Hot Searches list which is updated on an hourly basis, an algorithm analyzes millions of searches in the U.S. and determines which queries are being searched much more than usual.
Now, Hot Searches has gotten a refresh that makes the list of searches more visual, groups related rising search terms together and lets you see more information about those searches.
With rich images and links to related news articles, you can glance at the list and instantly get an idea of why these topics are particularly hot at the moment and click to find out more about them. Unlike the previous version of Hot Searches, which always provided 20 daily results, the new page introduces a filtering system that helps us make sure that the list includes only the truly hottest news stories of the day. Also, when a few of the fastest rising search terms refer to the same news story, such as [tony awards 2012] and [audra mcdonald], they’re now aggregated into one entry, which lists all the “Related searches” that go along with the main story. Lastly, the new list also provides an indication of how many searches have been conducted for each topic in the 24 hour period when it was trending.
To find out what the hottest searches are today, whether it’s a celebrity engagement, a sports-related shakeup or news about your favorite TV series, check out the updated Hot Searches list in Google Trends.
(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)
With Hot Searches in Google Trends, you can see a list of the fastest rising search terms in the U.S. for a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind. To create the Hot Searches list which is updated on an hourly basis, an algorithm analyzes millions of searches in the U.S. and determines which queries are being searched much more than usual.
Now, Hot Searches has gotten a refresh that makes the list of searches more visual, groups related rising search terms together and lets you see more information about those searches.
With rich images and links to related news articles, you can glance at the list and instantly get an idea of why these topics are particularly hot at the moment and click to find out more about them. Unlike the previous version of Hot Searches, which always provided 20 daily results, the new page introduces a filtering system that helps us make sure that the list includes only the truly hottest news stories of the day. Also, when a few of the fastest rising search terms refer to the same news story, such as [tony awards 2012] and [audra mcdonald], they’re now aggregated into one entry, which lists all the “Related searches” that go along with the main story. Lastly, the new list also provides an indication of how many searches have been conducted for each topic in the 24 hour period when it was trending.
To find out what the hottest searches are today, whether it’s a celebrity engagement, a sports-related shakeup or news about your favorite TV series, check out the updated Hot Searches list in Google Trends.
(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)
2012 Google PhD Fellowships
A doctoral degree is arguably the ultimate end goal of a modern education. But with the research opportunities now available in industry and the lure of the start-up, why do students pursue this advanced academic achievement? For many, it's the opportunity to explore a fascinating area in great depth. Computer Science is still a young, dynamic field where an innovative researcher might hit on something that can truly change the world.
Google’s global fellowship program was created to support those willing to take on this noble endeavor. This year, the fourth year of the program, we welcome two new regions and are delighted to be supporting 40 students’ graduate studies in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, and the United States. You can click here to see a list of all of our Google Fellowship recipients.
PhD students have a unique experience. They are intently focused on a specialized area of study, with a goal of producing tangible results in a defined timeframe. The process requires sophisticated knowledge of the domain, expert planning and problem-solving skills, and the ability to communicate their work and results through publications, conferences and ultimately, in authoring a book. These are highly transferable skills of great value, no matter what path the student chooses after graduate school.
Congratulations to our fellows; we applaud you on your chosen path and look forward to the accomplishments to come.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Connecting shoppers and great stores online
Online shopping is great for many reasons, but most of all it’s a convenient and fast way to turn your intent to buy that new pair of running shoes, for example, into an actual purchase. But shoppers tell us they’re often nervous about buying from online stores they don’t know. We created the free Google Trusted Stores program to help solve this problem. When shoppers see the Google Trusted Store badge, they know in a snap they’re shopping with a reputable retailer and they can feel confident making an informed purchase.
We’ve been testing the program since last fall with about 50 online merchants and more than 10 million orders. It’s working even better than we hoped, generating positive feedback from shoppers and increasing sales for merchants. Starting today, Google Trusted Stores is open to all U.S. merchants who want to apply.
Helping shoppers choose stores they can trust
When shopping online, you may come across the Google Trusted Store badge. Hover over it and you’ll see a “report card” which shows “grades” for that merchant’s shipping and service, including more precise metrics about what the grades mean.
This badge is only awarded to online stores that deliver a great overall experience, so even if you haven’t shopped with this merchant before, you can easily tell if they are trustworthy, ship quickly and reliably, and offer exceptional customer service. If there’s a problem with your purchase, we’re here to help. When you buy from a Google Trusted Store, you can opt in to get up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection per shopper. And our dedicated customer service team is there to work with you and the merchant to assist in resolving the issue.
Helping merchants demonstrate their excellence and earn new business
Google Trusted Stores helps online stores attract new customers, increase sales and differentiate themselves by showing off their excellent service via the badge on their websites. Soon the badge will also appear on Google.com ads and in Google Shopping results.
Over the last nine months of the pilot, our tests show that participating in this program can help merchants big and small. For example, Wayfair, the largest online-only retailer of home goods and one of the top 50 largest online retailers as ranked by Internet Retailer, increased sales* on its site by 2.3 percent with Google Trusted Stores. And Beau-coup, a specialty online favors and gifts retailer, saw an 8.6 percent increase*. Take a look at our merchant success stories to learn more about how Google Trusted Stores has had a positive impact on website conversion rates and average order sizes for online retailers.
Google Trusted Stores is entirely free, both for shoppers and for online stores. We’re still testing the most helpful ways to display Trusted Stores information to shoppers, so you may see different versions, or none at all, while we conduct experiments. If you’re a merchant and would like to participate in the Google Trusted Stores program, please apply.
*Increased sales percentages are based on a combination of uplift in conversion and average order size.
We’ve been testing the program since last fall with about 50 online merchants and more than 10 million orders. It’s working even better than we hoped, generating positive feedback from shoppers and increasing sales for merchants. Starting today, Google Trusted Stores is open to all U.S. merchants who want to apply.
Helping shoppers choose stores they can trust
When shopping online, you may come across the Google Trusted Store badge. Hover over it and you’ll see a “report card” which shows “grades” for that merchant’s shipping and service, including more precise metrics about what the grades mean.
The Google Trusted Store badge and report card
This badge is only awarded to online stores that deliver a great overall experience, so even if you haven’t shopped with this merchant before, you can easily tell if they are trustworthy, ship quickly and reliably, and offer exceptional customer service. If there’s a problem with your purchase, we’re here to help. When you buy from a Google Trusted Store, you can opt in to get up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection per shopper. And our dedicated customer service team is there to work with you and the merchant to assist in resolving the issue.
Helping merchants demonstrate their excellence and earn new business
Google Trusted Stores helps online stores attract new customers, increase sales and differentiate themselves by showing off their excellent service via the badge on their websites. Soon the badge will also appear on Google.com ads and in Google Shopping results.
Google Trusted Store badge on AdWords
Over the last nine months of the pilot, our tests show that participating in this program can help merchants big and small. For example, Wayfair, the largest online-only retailer of home goods and one of the top 50 largest online retailers as ranked by Internet Retailer, increased sales* on its site by 2.3 percent with Google Trusted Stores. And Beau-coup, a specialty online favors and gifts retailer, saw an 8.6 percent increase*. Take a look at our merchant success stories to learn more about how Google Trusted Stores has had a positive impact on website conversion rates and average order sizes for online retailers.
Google Trusted Stores is entirely free, both for shoppers and for online stores. We’re still testing the most helpful ways to display Trusted Stores information to shoppers, so you may see different versions, or none at all, while we conduct experiments. If you’re a merchant and would like to participate in the Google Trusted Stores program, please apply.
*Increased sales percentages are based on a combination of uplift in conversion and average order size.
AdWords, meet AdMob
Mobile advertising has become a core part of marketers’ and publishers’ digital strategies, helping to fuel business growth and great content.
To make mobile ad buying seamless and accessible for more than a million AdWords advertisers, today we're integrating our AdMob technology directly into our AdWords system. This enables advertisers to run effective campaigns across the more than 300,000 mobile applications running ads by AdMob—all from within the AdWords interface. It also helps AdMob developers and publishers increase their revenue by giving them access to a large number of new advertisers. AdWords advertisers can now manage, measure and adjust search, display and video ads, reaching people on more than 2 million websites and hundreds of thousands of apps, across all screens.
Bringing together the best of AdWords with the best of AdMob is an important step in building integrated solutions that help all businesses get the most out of digital marketing. This complements DoubleClick Digital Marketing, our new unified ad platform for larger marketers and agencies who use DoubleClick’s ad technology, which we announced earlier this week.
As mobile usage continues to explode, businesses increasingly need to adapt their marketing strategies to mobile platforms and mobile-specific consumer trends. For more information about how AdWords is helping marketers “go mobile,” read our post on the Mobile Ads Blog.
To make mobile ad buying seamless and accessible for more than a million AdWords advertisers, today we're integrating our AdMob technology directly into our AdWords system. This enables advertisers to run effective campaigns across the more than 300,000 mobile applications running ads by AdMob—all from within the AdWords interface. It also helps AdMob developers and publishers increase their revenue by giving them access to a large number of new advertisers. AdWords advertisers can now manage, measure and adjust search, display and video ads, reaching people on more than 2 million websites and hundreds of thousands of apps, across all screens.
Bringing together the best of AdWords with the best of AdMob is an important step in building integrated solutions that help all businesses get the most out of digital marketing. This complements DoubleClick Digital Marketing, our new unified ad platform for larger marketers and agencies who use DoubleClick’s ad technology, which we announced earlier this week.
As mobile usage continues to explode, businesses increasingly need to adapt their marketing strategies to mobile platforms and mobile-specific consumer trends. For more information about how AdWords is helping marketers “go mobile,” read our post on the Mobile Ads Blog.
Hello science—meet HR
At Google we strive for innovation in all aspects of our business, and not just in the realm of technology: we apply science to organizational issues as well. But finding the right answers means asking the right questions—a skill at which academic researchers excel. Thus, a crucial piece of making science a part of HR involves sparking debate among academics and practitioners. To that end, Google’s People & Innovation Lab, or “PiLab,” hosted its 4th annual Research Summit at our headquarters in Mountain View, CA on May 10th and 11th.
Each year, the PiLab team hosts the Summit to bring social scientists from top universities together with key HR and business leaders from Google to examine complex issues like how to combat decision fatigue, how to provide incentives for creative work and how to further innovation by tapping diversity. The exchange of ideas during the Summit lays the foundation for future research.
How does this work in practice? One place we’ve explored is how to help Googlers save more for retirement. Working with attendees at past Summits, we looked at the language in our annual retirement contribution reminders to U.S.-based employees to figure out what would be most helpful. We found that small changes could influence Googlers’ savings decisions by providing them with numerical examples in the reminder emails. Googlers who received higher example savings rates subsequently contributed more to their retirement funds over time (we know Googlers’ savings because of our 401(k) matching program).
Through both internally-generated and collaborative efforts, the PiLab has conducted research that is changing the way Google as a company operates, including developing effective managers and encouraging healthy food choices. This year participants also applied their research prowess to a particularly critical Google function: making dinner (see picture). Our chefs provided instruction in making flat bread pizzas and everyone tried their hand at the task. Nothing prompts conversation like a good meal!
But what is the PiLab, you ask? The PiLab plays the unusual role of conducting applied research and development within People Operations, Google’s version of Human Resources. Doing R&D in HR isn’t a particularly common practice, but when your employees build virtual tours of the Amazon and tools to translate between 60+ languages, you need creative ways to think about productivity, performance, and employee development. The PiLab’s collection of industrial & organizational psychologists, decision scientists, and organizational sociologists have as their mission to conduct innovative research that transforms organizational practice within Google and beyond.
Additionally, the Summit provides us an opportunity to expose Googlers to cutting-edge research in the social sciences, and share the type of work the PiLab focuses on with the whole company. This year, Columbia University professor and Summit attendee Sheena Iyengar, gave a talk on The Art of Managing All Our Choices. Prof. Iyengar drew on her years of research into choice overload to address how to optimize product offerings in an era of increasing consumer choice.
By fostering conversations on the issues confronting modern organizations, the PiLab overall and the Summit in particular aim to generate new theories and to challenge existing ones. The intent is to inspire new research at Google and elsewhere and ultimately to improve HR. The Lab looks forward to more collaborations with faculty … and, of course, to pie.
The never-ending quest for the perfect map
Cross-posted on the Google Lat Long Blog
For the last decade we’ve obsessed over building great maps for our users—maps that are totally comprehensive (we’re shooting for literally the whole world), ever more accurate and incredibly easy to navigate.
Comprehensiveness
It’s a pretty limited search engine that only draws from a subset of sources. In the same way, it’s not much of a map that leaves you stranded the moment you step off the highway or visit a new country. Over the last few years we’ve been building a comprehensive base map of the entire globe—based on public and commercial data, imagery from every level (satellite, aerial and street level) and the collective knowledge of our millions of users.
Today, we’re taking another step forward with our Street View Trekker. You’ve seen our cars, trikes, snowmobiles and trolleys—but wheels only get you so far. There’s a whole wilderness out there that is only accessible by foot. Trekker solves that problem by enabling us to photograph beautiful places such as the Grand Canyon so anyone can explore them. All the equipment fits in this one backpack, and we’ve already taken it out on the slopes.
The next attribute map makers obsess over is accuracy. We still have a way to go because the world is constantly changing—with new houses, cities and parks appearing all the time—it’s a never ending job. But by cross-checking the data we have, we can significantly improve the accuracy of our maps. Turns out our users are as passionate about the quality of Google Maps as we are, and they give us great feedback on where we can do better. We make thousands of edits a day based on user feedback through our Report a Problem tool and via Map Maker, which we launched in 2008. Today we’re announcing the expansion of Map Maker to South Africa and Egypt, and to 10 more countries in the next few weeks: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.
Usability
The final element of the perfect map is usability. It’s hard to remember what digital maps were like before Google Maps went live in 2005, and the huge technological breakthroughs that transformed clicking on arrows and waiting, to simply dragging a map with a mouse and watching it render smoothly and quickly. Plus, we added one single search box. Today we have thousands of data sources that feed into our maps making them a rich and interactive experience on any device—from driving directions to transit and indoor maps to restaurant reviews.
People have been asking for the ability to use our maps offline on their mobile phones. So today we’re announcing that offline Google Maps for Android are coming in the next few weeks. Users will be able to take maps offline from more than 100 countries. This means that the next time you are on the subway, or don’t have a data connection, you can still use our maps.
The next dimension
An important next step in improving all of these areas—comprehensiveness, accuracy and usability of our maps—is the ability to model the world in 3D. Since 2006, we’ve had textured 3D buildings in Google Earth, and today we are excited to announce that we will begin adding 3D models to entire metropolitan areas to Google Earth on mobile devices. This is possible thanks to a combination of our new imagery rendering techniques and computer vision that let us automatically create 3D cityscapes, complete with buildings, terrain and even landscaping, from 45-degree aerial imagery. By the end of the year we aim to have 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people.
I have been working on mapping technology most of my life. We’ve made more progress, more quickly as an industry than I ever imagined possible. And we expect innovation to speed up even more over the next few years. While we may never create the perfect map… we’re going to get much, much closer than we are today.
For the last decade we’ve obsessed over building great maps for our users—maps that are totally comprehensive (we’re shooting for literally the whole world), ever more accurate and incredibly easy to navigate.
Comprehensiveness
It’s a pretty limited search engine that only draws from a subset of sources. In the same way, it’s not much of a map that leaves you stranded the moment you step off the highway or visit a new country. Over the last few years we’ve been building a comprehensive base map of the entire globe—based on public and commercial data, imagery from every level (satellite, aerial and street level) and the collective knowledge of our millions of users.
Today, we’re taking another step forward with our Street View Trekker. You’ve seen our cars, trikes, snowmobiles and trolleys—but wheels only get you so far. There’s a whole wilderness out there that is only accessible by foot. Trekker solves that problem by enabling us to photograph beautiful places such as the Grand Canyon so anyone can explore them. All the equipment fits in this one backpack, and we’ve already taken it out on the slopes.
Luc Vincent, engineering director, taking the
Street View Trekker for a trial run in Tahoe
AccuracyStreet View Trekker for a trial run in Tahoe
The next attribute map makers obsess over is accuracy. We still have a way to go because the world is constantly changing—with new houses, cities and parks appearing all the time—it’s a never ending job. But by cross-checking the data we have, we can significantly improve the accuracy of our maps. Turns out our users are as passionate about the quality of Google Maps as we are, and they give us great feedback on where we can do better. We make thousands of edits a day based on user feedback through our Report a Problem tool and via Map Maker, which we launched in 2008. Today we’re announcing the expansion of Map Maker to South Africa and Egypt, and to 10 more countries in the next few weeks: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.
Usability
The final element of the perfect map is usability. It’s hard to remember what digital maps were like before Google Maps went live in 2005, and the huge technological breakthroughs that transformed clicking on arrows and waiting, to simply dragging a map with a mouse and watching it render smoothly and quickly. Plus, we added one single search box. Today we have thousands of data sources that feed into our maps making them a rich and interactive experience on any device—from driving directions to transit and indoor maps to restaurant reviews.
People have been asking for the ability to use our maps offline on their mobile phones. So today we’re announcing that offline Google Maps for Android are coming in the next few weeks. Users will be able to take maps offline from more than 100 countries. This means that the next time you are on the subway, or don’t have a data connection, you can still use our maps.
The next dimension
An important next step in improving all of these areas—comprehensiveness, accuracy and usability of our maps—is the ability to model the world in 3D. Since 2006, we’ve had textured 3D buildings in Google Earth, and today we are excited to announce that we will begin adding 3D models to entire metropolitan areas to Google Earth on mobile devices. This is possible thanks to a combination of our new imagery rendering techniques and computer vision that let us automatically create 3D cityscapes, complete with buildings, terrain and even landscaping, from 45-degree aerial imagery. By the end of the year we aim to have 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people.
I have been working on mapping technology most of my life. We’ve made more progress, more quickly as an industry than I ever imagined possible. And we expect innovation to speed up even more over the next few years. While we may never create the perfect map… we’re going to get much, much closer than we are today.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
15 Google Science Fair Finalists and the Science in Action winners are off to Mountain View
It’s been a fascinating two weeks for our Google Science Fair judges. They’ve been reviewing projects which try to solve myriad problems—from helping people with hearing loss enjoy music to saving water with vacuflush toilets—and they’ve been blown away by the inventiveness of the world’s young scientists. Today, they’ve selected 15 finalists from our top 90 regional finalists. All of these students asked interesting questions; many focused on real-world problems and some produced groundbreaking science that challenged current conventions.
In July, these finalists will be coming to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to present their projects to our international panel of finalist judges and compete for prizes that include $100,000 in scholarship funds, a trip to the Galapagos Islands and more. The winners will be announced at our celebration gala beginning at 7:00 p.m. PDT July 23 and the event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel, so make sure to tune in.
In addition, this year one of our partners, Scientific American, is awarding a special Science in Action prize to a project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community. After careful deliberation by Scientific American’s independent judging panel, we are thrilled to announce that Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela from Swaziland are the winners of this award for their project, which explores an affordable way to provide hydroponics to poor subsistence farmers. In addition to the $50,000 in prize funds, Shongwe and Bonkhe will have access to a year’s mentorship to explore how their project can help the lives of subsistence farmers in Swaziland and around the world. They are also still in the running for their age category prize and the grand prize.
Congratulations to all the finalists and the Scientific American Science in Action winners. We look forward to meeting you all at Google in July.
In July, these finalists will be coming to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to present their projects to our international panel of finalist judges and compete for prizes that include $100,000 in scholarship funds, a trip to the Galapagos Islands and more. The winners will be announced at our celebration gala beginning at 7:00 p.m. PDT July 23 and the event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel, so make sure to tune in.
In addition, this year one of our partners, Scientific American, is awarding a special Science in Action prize to a project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community. After careful deliberation by Scientific American’s independent judging panel, we are thrilled to announce that Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela from Swaziland are the winners of this award for their project, which explores an affordable way to provide hydroponics to poor subsistence farmers. In addition to the $50,000 in prize funds, Shongwe and Bonkhe will have access to a year’s mentorship to explore how their project can help the lives of subsistence farmers in Swaziland and around the world. They are also still in the running for their age category prize and the grand prize.
Congratulations to all the finalists and the Scientific American Science in Action winners. We look forward to meeting you all at Google in July.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)