Scaling Computer Science Education

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Last week, I attended the annual SIGCSE (Special Interest Group, Computer Science Education) conference in Denver, CO. Google has been a platinum sponsor of SIGCSE for many years now, and the conference provides an opportunity for hundreds of computer science (CS) educators to share ideas and work on strategies to bring high quality CS education to K12 and undergraduate students.

Significant accomplishments over the last few years have laid a strong foundation for scaling CS curriculum, professional development (PD) and related programs in this country. The NSF has been funding curriculum and PD around the new CS Principles Advanced Placement course. The CSTA has published standards for K12 CS and a report on the limited extent to which schools, districts and states provide CS instruction to their students. CS Advocacy group, Computing in the Core, even provides a toolkit for communities to follow as they urge legislators for integration of Computer Science education into core K12 curriculum.

All of this work has made an impact, but there is still more to do.

I see our priorities in CS education to be ones of awareness and access. As CS educators, we must continue to raise awareness about the tremendous demand for jobs in the computing sector, and balance misconceptions with accurate data. Many students, parents, teachers and administrators remember the hype and disillusionment of the Dotcom period and myths on outsourcing and dwindling jobs yet the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that ⅔ of all job growth in Science and Engineering will be in Computer Science employment over the next decade. (See 2010 BLS report here.) Clearing up this misconception is essential if we hope to satisfy US labor needs with recent graduates over the next several years.

Source: Gianchandani, Erwin. Revisiting ‘Where the Jobs Are’. The Computing Community Consortium Blog post on 23 May 2012. Link accessed on 8 March 2013.

Another misconception surrounds the range of CS-focused occupations that exist. The world of CS is expanding rapidly and we should celebrate the diversity of CS applications that are gaining momentum. Instead of the archetype of a sun-starved computer scientist, or software engineers working in isolation with little teamwork or communication opportunities, educators can encourage project-based learning, video game development, robotics, and graphic design as more concrete representations for abstract computational thinking.

Google believes that computing and CS are critical to our future, not only in the high tech sector, but for everyone. Our economy is becoming more and more dependent on technology-based solutions, which will require a future workforce with significant levels of CS knowledge and experience. In addition, we anticipate new career opportunities opening up in the next 3-5 years as more businesses move into the cloud and shift the way they run their IT departments.

Help us get the word out about the great opportunities in computing through organizations such as code.org, ACM, and NCWIT. Google is doing its part to support CS education and outreach through many programs including CS4HS, our Exploring Computational Thinking curriculum, and several student and teacher programs. So much opportunity, so little time!

Read More

Our Commitment to Social Computing Research: Social Interactions Focused Awards Announcement

Ed H. Chi, Staff Research Scientist

Social interactions have always been an important part of the human experience. Social interaction research has shown results ranging from influences on our behavior from social networks [Aral2012] to our understanding of social belonging on health [Walton2011], as well as how conflicts and coordination play out in Wikipedia [Kittur2007]. Interestingly, social scientists have studied social interactions for many years, but it wasn’t until very recently that researchers can study these mechanisms through the explosion of services and data available on web-based social systems.

From information dissemination and the spread of innovation and ideas, to scientific discovery, we are seeing how a deep understanding of social interactions is affecting many different fields, such as health and education. For instance, scientists now have strong evidence that social interactions underlie many fundamental learning mechanisms starting from infancy well into adulthood [Meltzoff2009], and that peer discussions are critical in conceptual learning in college classes [Smith2009]. How might these learning science findings be built into social systems and products so that users maximize what they learn on the Web?

We know that interactions on the Web are diverse and people-centered. Google now enables social interactions to occur across many of our products, from Google+ to Search to YouTube. To understand the future of this socially connected web, we need to investigate fundamental patterns, design principles, and laws that shape and govern these social interactions.

We envision research at the intersection of disciplines including Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Science, Social Psychology, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, Statistics and Economics. These fields are central to the study of how social interactions work, particularly driven by new sources of data, for example, open data sets from Web2.0 and social media sites, government databases, crowdsourcing, new survey techniques, and crisis management data collections. New techniques from network science and computational modeling, social network and sentiment analysis, application of statistical and machine learning, as well as theories from evolutionary theory, physics, and information theory, are actively being used in social interaction research.

We’re pleased to announce that Google has awarded over $1.2 million dollars to support the Social Interactions Research Awards, which are given to university research groups doing work in social computing and interactions. Research topics range from crowdsourcing, social annotations, a social media behavioral study, social learning, conversation curation, and scientific studies of how to start online communities.

We have awarded 15 researchers in 7 universities. We selected these proposals after a rigorous internal review. We believe the results will be broadly useful to product development and will further scientific research.

• Joseph Konstan, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl from University of Minnesota. Precision Crowdsourcing: Closing the Loop to turn Information Consumers into Information Contributors.
• Mor Naaman from Rutgers University, and Oded Nov from Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Examining the Impact of Social Traces on Page Visitors’ Opinions and Engagement.
• Paul Resnick, Eytan Adar, and Cliff Lampe from University of Michigan. MTogether: A Living Lab for Social Media Research.
• Marti Hearst from UC Berkeley. Understanding Social Learning Among Subgroups Within Large Online Learning Environments.
• David Karger and Rob Miller from MIT. Crowdsourced Curation of Conversations.
• Robert Kraut, Laura Dabbish, Jason Hong, Aniket Kittur from CMU. Successfully Starting Online Groups.

We look forward to working with these researchers, and we hope that we will jointly push the frontier of social interactions research to the next level.

References
[1] Aral, S., & Walker, D. (2012). Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks. Science , 337 (6092 ), 337–341. doi:10.1126/science.1215842
[2] Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students. Science , 331 (6023 ), 1447–1451. doi:10.1126/science.1198364
[3] Aniket Kittur, Bongwon Suh, Bryan Pendleton, Ed H. Chi. He Says, She Says: Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia. In Proc. of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2007), pp. 453--462, April 2007. ACM Press. San Jose, CA.
[4] Meltzoff, A. N., Kuhl, P. K., Movellan, J., & Sejnowski, T. J. (2009). Foundations for a New Science of Learning. Science , 325 (5938), 284–288. doi:10.1126/science.1175626
[5] Smith, M. K., Wood, W. B., Adams, W. K., Wieman, C., Knight, J. K., Guild, N., & Su, T. T. (2009). Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions. Science , 323 (5910), 122–124. doi:10.1126/science.1165919

Read More

Learning from Big Data: 40 Million Entities in Context

Posted by Dave Orr, Amar Subramanya, and Fernando Pereira, Google Research

When someone mentions Mercury, are they talking about the planet, the god, the car, the element, Freddie, or one of some 89 other possibilities? This problem is called disambiguation (a word that is itself ambiguous), and while it’s necessary for communication, and humans are amazingly good at it (when was the last time you confused a fruit with a giant tech company?), computers need help.

To provide that help, we are releasing the Wikilinks Corpus: 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages -- over 100 times bigger than the next largest corpus (about 100,000 documents, see the table below for mention and entity counts). The mentions are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If we think of each page on Wikipedia as an entity (an idea we’ve discussed before), then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity.

Dataset	Number of Mentions	Number of Entities
Bentivogli et al. (data) (2008)	43,704	709
Day et al. (2008)	less than 55,000	3,660
Artiles et al. (data) (2010)	57,357	300
Wikilinks Corpus	40,323,863	2,933,659

What might you do with this data? Well, we’ve already written one ACL paper on cross-document co-reference (and received lots of requests for the underlying data, which partly motivates this release). And really, we look forward to seeing what you are going to do with it! But here are a few ideas:

• Look into coreference -- when different mentions mention the same entity -- or entity resolution -- matching a mention to the underlying entity
• Work on the bigger problem of cross-document coreference, which is how to find out if different web pages are talking about the same person or other entity
• Learn things about entities by aggregating information across all the documents they’re mentioned in
• Type tagging tries to assign types (they could be broad, like person, location, or specific, like amusement park ride) to entities. To the extent that the Wikipedia pages contain the type information you’re interested in, it would be easy to construct a training set that annotates the Wikilinks entities with types from Wikipedia.
• Work on any of the above, or more, on subsets of the data. With existing datasets, it wasn’t possible to work on just musicians or chefs or train stations, because the sample sizes would be too small. But with 10 million Web pages, you can find a decent sampling of almost anything.

Gory Details

How do you actually get the data? It’s right here: Google’s Wikilinks Corpus. Tools and data with extra context can be found on our partners’ page: UMass Wiki-links. Understanding the corpus, however, is a little bit involved.

For copyright reasons, we cannot distribute actual annotated web pages. Instead, we’re providing an index of URLs, and the tools to create the dataset, or whichever slice of it you care about, yourself. Specifically, we’re providing:

• The URLs of all the pages that contain labeled mentions, which are links to English Wikipedia
• The anchor text of the link (the mention string), the Wikipedia link target, and the byte offset of the link for every page in the set
• The byte offset of the 10 least frequent words on the page, to act as a signature to ensure that the underlying text hasn’t changed -- think of this as a version, or fingerprint, of the page
• Software tools (on the UMass site) to: download the web pages; extract the mentions, with ways to recover if the byte offsets don’t match; select the text around the mentions as local context; and compute evaluation metrics over predicted entities.

The format looks like this:

URL http://1967mercurycougar.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

MENTION Lincoln Continental Mark IV 40110 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Continental_Mark_IV

MENTION 1975 MGB roadster 41481 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_MGB

MENTION Buick Riviera 43316 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buick_Riviera

MENTION Oldsmobile Toronado 43397 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Toronado

TOKEN seen 58190

TOKEN crush 63118

TOKEN owners 69290

TOKEN desk 59772

TOKEN relocate 70683

TOKEN promote 35016

TOKEN between 70846

TOKEN re 52821

TOKEN getting 68968

TOKEN felt 41508

We’d love to hear what you’re working on, and look forward to what you can do with 40 million mentions across over 10 million web pages!

Thanks to our collaborators at UMass Amherst: Sameer Singh and Andrew McCallum.

Read More

Applauding the White House Memorandum on Open Access

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

Last week the Obama Administration issued a Memorandum that could vastly increase the impact of federally funded research on innovation and the economy. Entrepreneurs, businesses, students, patients, researchers, and the public will soon have digital access to the wealth of research publications and data funded by Federal agencies. We're excited that this important work will be made more broadly accessible.

This memorandum directs federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to open up access to the crucial results of publicly funded research (including both unclassified articles and data). These agencies will need to provide the public with free and unlimited online access to the results of that research after a guideline 12 month embargo period. Before last week only one agency, the National Institutes of Health, had a public research access policy.

The federal government funds tens of billions of dollars in research each year through agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy. These investments are intended to advance science, accelerate innovation, grow our economy, and improve the lives of all Americans and members of the public. Opening this research up to the public will accelerate these goals.

Federal investment in research and development only pays off if it has an impact. Researchers, businesses, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and the public need to be able to access and use the knowledge contained in the articles and data generated by those funds. Making the results of scholarly research accessible and reusable in digital form is one important way to increase the impact of existing taxpayer investments.

Read More

Google Research Awards: Winter, 2013

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations

Another round of the Google Research Awards has just been completed. This is our bi-annual open call for proposals on a variety of computer science-related topics, including systems, machine perception, natural language processing, security and many others. Our grants cover tuition and travel for a graduate student and provides faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google scientists and engineers.

This round, we received almost 600 proposals from 46 different countries. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 102 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were human-computer interaction, machine learning, and mobile. In addition, 22% of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Google’s University Relations funding falls into three categories. The first is the Google Research Award program which funds new faculty and innovative projects, or helps faculty get a new research program off the ground. We fund over 200 projects annually through this program. We feel this is a great way for Google to support a large number of faculty and projects, and it helps us keep a pulse on what’s going on in academic computer science research.

The second category of funding goes toward more focused, longer-term projects, where we collaborate closely on projects of mutual interest. Our PhD Fellowship program is also a part of our focused program strategy. The third category goes toward new programs and initiatives, and to the development of research and education in emerging countries.

Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is April 15), please visit our website for more information.

Read More

Mobile interaction research at Google

Posted by Xiaojun Bi, Ciprian Chelba, Tom Ouyang, Kurt Partridge and Shumin Zhai

Google takes a hybrid approach to research - research happens across the entire company, and affects everything we do. As one example, we have a group that focuses on mobile interaction research. With research backgrounds in human-computer interaction, machine learning, statistical language modeling, and ubicomp, the group has focused on both foundational work and feature innovations for smart touchscreen keyboards. These innovations help us make things like typing messages on your Android device easier for hundreds of millions of people each day.

We work closely with world-class engineers, designers, product managers, and UX researchers across the company, which enables us to rapidly integrate the fruits of our research into the Android platform. The first major integration was the launch of Gesture Typing in Android 4.2.

Rapidly developed from basic concepts up to product code, and built on years of Android platform groundwork on input method editors (IME) and input method framework (IMF), Gesture Typing uses novel algorithms to dynamically infer and display the user’s intended word right at the fingertip. Often the intended word is displayed even before the user has finished gesturing--creating a magical experience for the user. Seamlessly integrated with touch tapping, Gesture Typing also supports two-thumb use.

It is exciting and rewarding to do research inside a product team that enforces engineering and user experience discipline. At the same time, we as researchers also contribute to the broader research community; publication, whether in the form of papers, code, or data, bind a research community together. The following papers are based on our work over the last year, some with bright and hardworking student interns:

Octopus: Evaluating Touchscreen Keyboard Correction and Recognition Algorithms via “Remulation”
by Xiaojun Bi, Shiri Azenkot (U. of Washington), Kurt Partridge, Shumin Zhai
CHI 2013, in press (link to come)

FFitts Law: Modeling Finger Touch with Fitts’ Law
by Xiaojun Bi, Yang Li, Shumin Zhai
CHI 2013, in press (link to come)

Making Touchscreen Keyboards Adaptive to Keys, Hand Postures, and Individuals - A Hierarchical Spatial Backoff Model Approach
by Ying Yin (MIT), Tom Ouyang, Kurt Partridge, Shumin Zhai
CHI 2013, in press (link to come)

Bimanual gesture keyboard.
by Xiaojun Bi, Ciprian Chelba, Tom Ouyang, Kurt Partridge, and Shumin Zhai
UIST 2012

Touch Behavior with Different Postures on Soft Smart Phone Keyboards
by Shiri Azenkot (U. Washington) and Shumin Zhai
MobileHCI 2012

Read More

Research Projects on Google App Engine

By Andrea Held, Program Manager, Google University Relations

Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog

Last spring Google University Relations announced an open call for proposals for Google App Engine Research Awards. We invited academic researchers to use Google App Engine for research experiments and analysis, encouraging them to take advantage of the platform’s ability to manage heavy data loads and run large-scale applications. Submissions included exciting proposals in various subject areas from mathematics, computer vision, bioinformatics, climate and computer science. We have selected seven projects that have the potential to impact people’s lives by making community seismic networks affordable, creating individualized DNA profiles, collecting useful local data through social media, and by understanding global climate trends, just to mention a few.

We have donated $60,000 in Google App Engine credits to each of these projects recognizing the innovation and vision of the Principal Investigator and his collaborators. Congratulations to all of them!

Below is a brief introduction of the award recipients and their research. We look forward to learning about their progress and will share the news right here. Stay tuned!

K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor and Professor of Computer Science, California Institute of Technology
Project title: Cloud-based Event Detection for Sense and Response
Description and research goals: We developed an App Engine-based sense and response platform for the Community Seismic Network (CSN) project. CSN's goals include measuring seismic events with finer spatial resolution than previously possible and developing a low-cost alternative to traditional seismic networks, which have high capital costs for acquisition, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. We are working on generalizing our implementation and experience to provide a system for other members of the community to use in future sense and response applications.

Lawrence Chung, Associate Professor, The University of Texas at Dallas
Project title: Google App Engine: Software Benchmark and Simulation Forecaster
Description and research goals: An important consideration before migrating a company’s application software to Google App Engine is performance and operating cost.
Similarly, the Google App Engine organization would want to estimate Google App Engine’s resource usage and how well the particular resource allocation will meet the performance and cost requirements, as in the service level agreements (SLAs). This research project aims to develop a Google App Engine simulation forecaster - a tool for estimating the performance and cost of software operating on Google App Engine, and produce some important operational benchmark.

Julian Gough, Professor, University of Bristol, UK
Project title: Personalised DNA Analysis
Description and research goals: Personal genomics is still in its infancy and although it is easy, and relatively cheap to obtain personal genotype data, the available analysis is not personalised; it is the same for everybody. In this project we will set up a service powered by App Engine that provides personal DNA analysis specific to each individual. The proposed service does not focus on disease, but on identifying aspects of a healthy person that make them unique. What does your genome tell you about yourself that makes you special?

Ramesh Raskar, PhD, MIT Media Lab; Dr. Erick Baptista Passos, IFPI (Federal Institute of Technology, Brazil)
Project title: Vision Blocks
Description and research goals: Vision Blocks is a research project that aims to make computer vision available to everyone. Its primary goal is to develop tools for delivering computer vision to masses through an extensible visual programming language and an online application building and sharing system. We have a prototype HTML5 client that already performs computer vision tasks locally. Our goals for the next iterations include integration with App Engine for preprocessing of video streaming platforms.

Norman Sadeh, Professor, Director of Mobile Commerce Lab, School of
Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Justin Cranshaw, PhD student, School of Computer Science, Hazim Almuhimedi, PhD student, School of Computer Science
Project title: Mapping the Dynamics of a City & Nudging Twitter Users
Description and research goals: We are working on two research
projects. The first is Livehoods in which we take a computational approach to analyzing large-scale trends in the ways people move through dense urban areas. Our goal is to find algorithmic ways of uncovering local collective knowledge about the city using social media. The second is “Nudging Twitter Users” in which we utilize quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand why people post things on Twitter they wish they had not, and also to understand the nature of these posts. Our objective is to develop tools that help nudge users to reduce the likelihood of those posts.

William Stein, Professor of Mathematics, University of Washington
Project title: Sage: Creating a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Matlab, and Mathematica
Description and research goals: The goal is to create a highly scalable and resilient website through which very large numbers of people can use Sage. This is the next step.

Enrique Vivoni, Associate Professor, Hydrologic Science, Engineering & Sustainability, Arizona State University; Dr. Giuseppe Mascaro, Research Engineer; Jyothi Marupila, Graduate Student; Mario A. Rodriguez, Software Engineer
Project title: Cloud Computing-Based Visualization and Access of Global Climate Data Sets
Description and research goals: Our project uses Google App Engine for analyzing global climate data within the Google Maps API. At this stage, we are able to generate loads from the Global Land Data Assimilation Systems (GLDAS) climate model into the Google App Engine datastore. We select the climate variable to be used and aggregate data at different spatial resolutions. We are using Google App Engine Task Queue API to load large files. For the presentation layer, we are using Django templates to integrate the display of many data points in the Google Maps API. Our objective is to provide scientific data on global climate trends by allowing map-based queries and summaries at the appropriate resolutions. Sample Map

Currently, no further rounds for Google App Engine Research Awards have been planned. We will announce any updates to the program on our website.

Read More