Google at CHI 2011

Posted by Yang Li, Research Scientist

Cross-posted with the Technical Programs and Events Blog

Google has an increasing presence at ACM CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which is the premiere conference for Human Computer Interaction research. Eight Google papers will appear at the conference. These papers not only touch on our core areas such as Search, Chrome and Android but also demonstrate our growing effort in new areas where HCI is essential, such as new search user interfaces, gesture-based interfaces and cross-device interaction. They showcase our efforts to address user experiences in diverse situations. Googlers are playing active roles in the conference in many other ways too: participating in conference committees, hosting panels, organizing workshops and teaching courses, as well as running demos and 1:1 sessions at Google's booth.

This year's CHI takes place in Vancouver, BC, from May 7th - 12th.

PAPERS

Gesture Avatar: A Technique for Operating Mobile User Interfaces Using Gestures, by Hao Lü, Yang Li*

User-Defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction by Jaime Ruiz, Yang Li*, Edward Lank

Experimental Analysis of Touch-Screen Gesture Designs in Mobile Environments by Andrew Bragdon, Eugene Nelson, Yang Li*, Ken Hinckley

Many Bills: Engaging Citizens through Visualizations of Congressional Legislation by Yannick Assogba, Irene Ros, Joan DiMicco, Matt McKeon*

YouPivot: Improving Recall with Contextual Search by Joshua Hailpern, Nicholas Jitkoff*, Andrew Warr*, Karrie Karahalios, Robert Sesek, Nik Shkrob

Oops, I Did It Again: Mitigating Repeated Access Control Errors on Facebook by Serge Egelman, Andrew Oates*, Shriram Krishnamurthi

Deep Shot: A Framework for Migrating Tasks Across Devices Using Mobile Phone Cameras by Tsung-Hsiang Chang, Yang Li*

DoubleFlip: A Motion Gesture Delimiter for Mobile Interaction by Jaime Ruiz, Yang Li*

WORKSHOPS

Crowdsourcing and Human Computation: Systems, Studies and Platforms by Michael Bernstein, Ed H. Chi*, Lydia B. Chilton, Björn Hartmann, Aniket Kittur, Robert C. Miller

PANELS

Designing for User Experience: Academia & Industry by Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Elizabeth Buie, Jettie Hoonhout, Kristina Höök, Virpi Roto, Scott Jenson*, Peter Wright

Festschrift Panel in Honor of Stuart K. Card by Ed H. Chi*, Peter Pirolli, Bonnie John, Judith S Olson, Dan Russell*, Tom Moran

CHI Should be Replicating and Validating Results More: Discuss by Max L. Wilson, Wendy Mackay, Ed H. Chi*, Michael Bernstein, Dan Russell*, Harold Thimbleby

Transferability of Research Findings: Context-Dependent or Model-Driven by Ed H. Chi*, Mary Czerwinski, David Millen, Dave Randall, Gunnar Stevens, Volker Wulf, John Zimmerman

The Future of Child-Computer Interaction by Allison Druin, Gary Knell, Elliot Soloway, Dan Russell*, Elizabeth Mynatt, Yvonne Rogers

CASE STUDIES

From Basecamp to Summit: Scaling Field Research Across 9 Locations by Jens Riegelsberger*, Audrey Yang*, Konstantin Samoylov*, Elizabeth Nunge*, Molly Stevens*, Patrick Larvie*

COURSES

Design and Analysis of Large Scale Log Studies by Susan Dumais, Robin Jeffries*, Dan Russell*, Diane Tang*, Jaime Teevan

SIG MEETING

Participatory Culture in the Age of Social Media by Dana Rotman, Sarah Vieweg, Sarita Yardi, Ed H. Chi*, Jenny Preece, Ben Shneiderman, Peter Pirolli, Tom Glaisyer

Note: * denotes a Googler

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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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Word of Mouth: Introducing Voice Search for Indonesian, Malaysian and Latin American Spanish

Posted by Linne Ha, International Program Manager

Read more about the launch of Voice Search in Latin American Spanish on the Google América Latina blog.

Today we are excited to announce the launch of Voice Search in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Latin American Spanish, making Voice Search available in over two dozen languages and accents since our first launch in November 2008. This accomplishment could not have been possible without the help of local users in the region - really, we couldn’t have done it without them. Let me explain:

In 2010 we launched Voice Search in Dutch, the first language where we used the “word of mouth” project, a crowd-sourcing effort to collect the most accurate voice data possible.The traditional method of acquiring voice samples is to license the data from companies who specialize in the distribution of speech and text databases. However, from day one we knew that to build the most accurate Voice Search acoustic models possible, the best data would come from the people who would use Voice Search once it launched - our users.

Since then, in each country, we found small groups of people who were avid fans of Google products and were part of a large social network, either in local communities or on online. We gave them phones and asked them to get voice samples from their friends and family. Everyone was required to sign a consent form and all voice samples were anonymized. When possible, they also helped to test early versions of Voice Search as the product got closer to launch.

Building a speech recognizer is not just limited to localizing the user interface. We require thousands of hours of raw data to capture regional accents and idiomatic speech in all sorts of recording environments to mimic daily life use cases. For instance, when developing Voice Search for Latin American Spanish, we paid particular attention to Mexican and Argentinean Spanish. These two accents are more different from one another than any other pair of widely-used accents in all of South and Central America. Samples collected in these countries were very important bookends for building a version of Voice Search that would work across the whole of Latin America. We also chose key countries such as Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia to bridge the divergent accent varieties.

As an International Program Manager at Google, I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world and meet many of our local Google users. They often have great suggestions for the products that they love, and word of mouth was created with the vision that our users could participate in developing the product. These Voice Search launches would not have been possible without the help of our users, and we’re excited to be able to work together on the product development with the people who will ultimately use our products.

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Reading tea leaves in the tourism industry: A Case Study in the Gulf Oil Spill

Posted by Hyunyoung Choi and Paul Liu, Senior Economists

A few years ago, our in-house economists, Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi, demonstrated how to “predict the present” with monthly visitor arrivals to Hong Kong. We took this idea further to see if search queries could predict the future. If users start to research their travel plans some weeks or months in advance, then intuitively shouldn’t we be able to extend "predicting the present" into "predicting the future?" We decided to test it out by focusing on a region whose tourism was recently severely impacted: Florida’s gulf coast.

With the travel industry still in the midst of recovering from a deep recession, the Gulf Oil spill had the potential to do significant economic damage. Our case study on the Gulf Oil spill helped find useful insight into people’s future travel plans to Florida; in fact, we found that travel search queries actually were good predictors for trips to Florida, and destinations within Florida, about 4 weeks later.

The results we saw surprised us. Google Insights for Search suggested that at least with respect to hotel bookings (using data from Smith Travel Research, Inc.), the aggregate effect of the oil spill was modest on Florida travel, since travelers tended to shift their destinations from the affected regions on the west coast to the east coast or central regions of Florida. In particular, hotel bookings for affected areas along the Gulf coast were 4.25% less than predicted, and unaffected areas along the Atlantic coast were 4.89% greater than predicted.

You can read the full case study here or try your own hand at predicting the future!

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