Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager for Google BooksWhen we started Google Book Search back in 2004, we were driven by the desire to make books searchable and discoverable online. But as that corpus grew -- we’ve now scanned approximately 10% of all books published in the modern era -- we began to realize how useful it would be for scholarly work. Humanities researchers have started to ask and answer questions about history, society, linguistics, and culture via quantitative techniques that complement traditional qualitative methods.We’ve...
Monday, 20 December 2010
Friday, 17 December 2010
Posted by Ryan Hickman and Mamie Rheingold, 20% Robotics Task ForceWith a beer fridge stocked and music blasting, engineers from across Google—and the world—spent the month of October soldering and hacking in their 20% time to connect hobbyist and educational robots with Android phones. Just two months later we’re psyched to announce three ways you can play with your iRobot Create(R), LEGO(R) MINDSTORMS(R) or VEX Pro(R) through the cloud:App Inventor...
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager, Google Books[Cross-posted from the Google Books Blog]Scholars interested in topics such as philosophy, religion, politics, art and language have employed qualitative approaches such as literary and critical analysis with great success. As more of the world’s literature becomes available online, it’s increasingly possible to apply quantitative methods to complement that research. So today Will Brockman...
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Posted by Karen Parker, App Inventor Program ManagerIn July, we announced App Inventor for Android, a Google Labs experiment that makes it easier for people to access the capabilities of their Android phone and create apps for their personal use. We were delighted (and honestly a bit overwhelmed!) by the interest that our announcement generated. We were even more delighted to hear the stories of what you were doing with App Inventor. All sorts...
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University RelationsWe've just completed the latest round of Google Research Awards, our program which identifies and supports faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest. We had a record number of submissions this round, and are funding 112 awards across 20 different areas—for a total of more than $6 million. We’re also providing more than 150 Android devices for research and curriculum development to faculty whose projects rely heavily on Android hardware.The areas that received the...
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of ResearchI am delighted to share with you that, like last year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that four Googlers have been elected ACM Fellows in 2010, the most this year from any single corporation or institution.Luiz Barroso, Dick Lyon, Muthu Muthukrishnan and Fernando Pereira were chosen for their contributions to computing and computer science that have provided fundamental knowledge to the field and have generated multiple innovations.On behalf of Google, I congratulate our colleagues,...
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Posted by Posted by Yun-hsuan Sung (宋雲軒) and Martin Jansche, Google ResearchOn November 30th 2010, Google launched Cantonese Voice Search in Hong Kong. Google Search by Voice has been available in a growing number of languages since we launched our first US English system in 2008. In addition to US English, we already support Mandarin for Mainland China, Mandarin for Taiwan, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Czech, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Zulu, along with special recognizers for English...
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff EngineerWelkom*!Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages.We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines. Underrepresented languages have also often...
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Posted by Ullas Gargi and Rich Gossweiler, Research TeamIt seems clear that the TV is a growing source of online audio-video content that you select by searching. Entering characters of a search string one by one using a traditional remote control and onscreen keyboard is extremely tiresome. People have been working on building better ways to search on the TV, ranging from small keyboards to voice input to interesting gestures you might make to let the TV know what you want. But currently the traditional left-right-up-down clicker dominates as...
Monday, 25 October 2010
Posted by Elaine Kao, Education Program ManagerOver the past year, a group of California-credentialed teachers along with our own Google engineers came together to discuss and explore ideas about how to incorporate computational thinking into the K-12 curriculum to enhance student learning and build this critical 21st century skill in everyone.What exactly is computational thinking? Well, that would depend on who you ask as there are several existing resources on the web that may define this term slightly differently. We define computational thinking...
Monday, 18 October 2010
Posted by Slav Petrov, Research ScientistThe Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '10) was recently held at the MIT Stata Center in Massachusetts. Natural Language Processing is at the core of many of the things that we do here at Google. Googlers have therefore been traditionally part of this research community, participating as program committee members, paper authors and attendees.At this year's EMNLP conference Google Fellow, Amit Singhal gave an invited keynote talk on "Challenges in running a commercial search...
Friday, 15 October 2010
Posted by Slav Petrov, Research ScientistWe 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...
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Posted by Mike Schuster & Kaisuke Nakajima, Google ResearchGoogle Voice Search has been available in various flavors of English since 2008, in Mandarin and Japanese since 2009, in French, Italian, German and Spanish since June 2010 (see also in this blog post), and shortly after that in Taiwanese. On June 16th 2010, we took the next step by launching our Korean Voice Search system.Korean Voice Search, by focusing on finding the correct web page for a spoken query, has been quite successful since launch. We have improved the acoustic models...
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Posted by Jayant Madhavan and Alon HalevyPeople today use search engines for all their information needs, but when they pose a particular search query, they typically have a specific underlying intent. However, when looking at any query in isolation, it might not entirely be clear what the underlying intent is. For example, when querying for mars, a user might be looking for more information about the planet Mars, or the planets in the solar system in general, or the Mars candy bar, or Mars the Roman god of war. The ambiguity in intent is most...
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
Posted by Murray Stokely, Software EngineerThe 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘10) was recently held in Vancouver, B.C. This biennial conference is one of the premiere forums for presenting innovative research in distributed systems from both academia and industry, and we were glad to be a part of it.In addition to sponsoring this conference since 2002, Googlers contributed to the exchange of scientific ideas through authoring or co-authoring 3 published papers, organizing workshops, and serving on the...
Monday, 11 October 2010
Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Google ResearchWhile we continue to launch exciting new speech products--most recently Voice Actions and Google Search by Voice in Russian, Czech and Polish--we also strive to contribute to the academic research community by sharing both innovative techniques and experiences with large-scale systems.This year’s gathering of the world’s experts in speech technology research, Interspeech 2010 in Makuhari, Japan, which Google...
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Posted by Phil Long, Research TeamIt is easy to find the bottom of a bowl no matter where you start -- if you toss a marble anywhere into the bowl, it will roll downhill and find its way to the bottom.What does this have to do with Machine Learning? A natural way to try to construct an accurate classifier is to minimize the number of prediction errors the classifier makes on training data. The trouble is, even for moderate-sized data sets, minimizing the number of training errors is a computationally intractable problem. A popular way around...
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Posted by Dmitriy Genzel, Software EngineerOnce upon a midnight dreary, long we pondered weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of translation lore.When our system does translation, lifeless prose is its creation;Making verse with inspiration no machine has done before.So we want to boldly go where no machine has gone before.Quoth now Google, "Nevermore!"Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Translating poetry is a very hard task even for humans, and is clearly beyond the capability of current machine...
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Posted by Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius ProgrammandiUt munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus. Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam. Cum pauci cotidie Latine loquantur, quotannis amplius centum milia discipuli Americani Domesticam Latinam Probationem suscipiunt. Praeterea plures ex omnibus mundi populis Latinae student. Hoc instrumentum convertendi Latinam rare usurum ut convertat nuntios...
Friday, 17 September 2010
Posted by Ciprian Chelba, Research TeamIt is with great sadness that we note the passing of Fred Jelinek, teacher and colleague to many of us here at Google. His seminal contributions to statistical modeling of speech and language influenced not only us, but many more members of the research community.Several of us at Google remember Fred:Ciprian Chelba:Fred was my thesis advisor at CLSP. My ten years of work in the field after graduation led me to increasingly appreciate the values that Fred instilled by personal example: work on the hard problem...
Posted by Anne Aula, Rehan Khan, and Zhiwei Guan, User Experience TeamHow does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?At Google, we strive to make finding information easy, efficient, and even fun. However, we know that once in a while, finding a specific piece of information turns out to be tricky. Based on dozens of user studies over the years, we know that it’s relatively easy for an observer to notice that the user is having...
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Posted by Hendrik Mueller, User Experience ResearcherWhen I relocated to New York City a few years ago, some of the most important health information for me to have on hand was my immunization history. At the time, though, my health records were scattered, and it felt like a daunting task to organize them -- a not-uncommon problem that many people face. For me, the solution came when Google Health became available in May of 2008, and I started using...
Monday, 13 September 2010
Posted by Matthias Grundmann and Vivek Kwatra, Google ResearchVideos come in different sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios, but the device used for playback, may it be your TV, mobile phone, or laptop, only has a fixed resolution and form factor. As a result, you cannot watch your favorite old show that came in 4:3 on your new 16:9 HDTV without having black bars on the side, referred to as letterboxing. Likewise, widescreen movies and user-videos...
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Posted by Johan Schalkwyk, Google ResearchWind the clock back two years with your smart phone in hand. Try to recall doing a search for a restaurant or the latest scores of your favorite sports team. If you’re like me you probably won’t even bother, or you’ll suffer with tiny keys or fat fingers on a touch screen. With Google Search by Voice all that has changed. Now you just tap the microphone, speak, and within seconds you see the result. No more fat fingers.Google Search by Voice is a result of many years of investment in speech at Google. We...
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Posted by Dennis Abts, Michael R. Marty, Philip M. Wells, Peter Klausler, and Hong LiuThis is part of the series highlighting some notable publications by Googlers. At Google, we operate large datacenters containing clusters of servers, networking switches, and more. While this gear costs a lot of money, an increasingly important cost -- both in terms of dollars and environmental impact -- is the electricity that drives the computing clusters and the cooling infrastructure. Since our clusters often do not run at full utilization, Google recently...
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