Partnering with Tsinghua University to support education in Western China

Posted by Aimin Zhu, China University Relations

We’re excited to announce that we’ve teamed up with Tsinghua University to provide educational support to five major universities in Western China: Qinghai, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Yunnan. Together, we aim to:

• Support faculty development by recognizing outstanding teachers, sponsoring published papers, and funding academic exchange and cooperation with other universities
• Establish specialized curricula by creating new courses focused on advanced industrial and web technologies
• Cultivate student talent by inspiring scientific and technological innovation through local activities and programs.

A ceremony held at Tsinghua today kicked off what we expect to be a long and beneficial partnership to advance educational opportunities in the region.

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1 billion core-hours of computational capacity for researchers

Posted by Dan Belov, Principal Engineer and David Konerding, Software Engineer

We’re pleased to announce a new academic research grant program: Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty. Through this program, we’ll award up to 10 qualified researchers with at least 100 million core-hours each, for a total of 1 billion core-hours. The program is focused on large-scale, CPU-bound batch computations in research areas such as biomedicine, energy, finance, entertainment, and agriculture, amongst others. For example, projects developing large-scale genomic search and alignment, massively scaled Monte Carlo simulations, and sky survey image analysis could be an ideal fit.

Exacycle for Visiting Faculty expands upon our current efforts through University Relations to stimulate advances in science and engineering research, and awardees will participate through the Visiting Faculty Program. We invite full-time faculty members from universities worldwide to apply. All grantees, including those outside of the U.S., will work on-site at specific Google offices in the U.S. or abroad. The exact Google office location will be determined at the time of project selection.

We are excited to accept proposals starting today. The application deadline is 11:59 p.m. PST May 31, 2011. Applicants are encouraged to send in their proposals early as awards will be granted starting in June.

More information and details on how to apply for a Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty grant can be found on the Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty website.

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Overlapping Experiment Infrastructure: More, Better, Faster Experimentation

Posted by Deirdre O'Brien and Diane Tang, Adwords Team

At Google, experimentation is practically a mantra; we evaluate almost every change that potentially affects what our users experience. Such changes include not only obvious user-visible changes such as modifications to a user interface, but also more subtle changes such as different machine learning algorithms that might affect ranking or content selection. Our insatiable appetite for experimentation has led us to tackle the problems of how to run more experiments, how to run experiments that produce better decisions, and how to run them faster.

Google's infrastructure supports this vast experimentation by using orthogonal diversion criteria for experiments in different "layers" so that each event (e.g. a web search) can be assigned to multiple experiments. The treatment and population sample are easily specified in data files allowing for fast and accurate experiment set up. We have also developed analytical tools to do experiment sizing and a metrics dashboard which provides summarized data within hours of experiment set up. Decision making is improved by the consistency and accuracy in metrics assured by these tools. We believe that Google's experimental system and processes described in this paper can be generalized and applied by any entity interested in using experimentation to improve search engines and other web applications.

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Ig-pay Atin-lay Oice-vay Earch-say

Posted by Martin Jansche and Alex Salcianu, Google Speech Team

As you might know, Google Voice Search is available in more than two dozen languages and dialects, making it easy to perform Google searches just by speaking into your phone.

Today it is our pleasure to announce the launch of Pig Latin Voice Search!

What is Pig Latin you may ask? Wikipedia describes it as a language game where, for each English word, the first consonant (or consonant cluster) is moved to the end of the word and an “ay” is affixed (for example, “pig” yields “ig-pay” and “search” yields “earch-say”).

Our Pig Latin Voice Search is even more fun than our other languages, because when you speak in Pig Latin, our speech recognizer not only recognizes your piggy speech but also translates it automagically to normal English and does a Google search.



To configure Pig Latin Voice Search in your Android phone just go to Settings, select “Voice input & output settings”, and then “Voice recognizer settings”. In the list of languages you’ll see Pig Latin. Just select it and you are ready to roll in the mud!

It also works on iPhone with the Google Search app. In the app, tap the Settings icon, then "Voice Search" and select Pig Latin.

Ave-hay un-fay ith-way Ig-pay Atin-lay.


Pig Latin Voice Search works on Android 2.2 (Froyo) and later Android versions. If you don't already have Google Voice Search on your Android phone, scan or tap this QR code to download it.

The list of languages and dialects now supported by Google Voice Search includes:

• US English, UK English, Australian English, Indian English, South African English
• Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Latin America
• French (France), Italian, and Portuguese (Brazil)
• German (Germany) and Dutch
• Russian, Polish, and Czech
• Turkish
• Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China and Taiwan), and Cantonese
• Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia
• Afrikaans and isiZulu
• Latin
• Pig Latin

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