Technical Programs & Events Blog

2012-11-21T13:44:00.000-05:00

Thanks for reading—please follow us on other channels

Posted by Lisa McCracken, on behalf of the Technical Programs Editorial Board

Thanks to everyone who has been a loyal reader of this blog over the last two years. After some consideration, we recognize that we're not generating enough content here to warrant your time, so we won't be posting here any longer. We encourage you to visit the following blogs and Google+ pages for ongoing news, announcements and summaries of Google’s technical outreach programs:

For computer science research, innovation and outreach: follow us on the Research at Google page and Research blog
For industry-wide programs and outreach: follow us on the Life at Google page
For student and on-campus outreach: follow us on the Google Students page and the Students blog

A Virtual Battlefield... with Bugs: Ship Wars @ Google Kirkland

2012-11-09T17:40:00.001-05:00

By Anthony F. Voellm (aka Tony the @p3rfguy / G+) and Emily Bedont

On Wednesday, October 24th, while sitting under the Solar System, 30 software engineers from the Greater Seattle area came together at Google Kirkland to partake in the first ever Test Edition of Ship Wars. Ship Wars was created by two Google Waterloo engineers, Garret Kelly and Aaron Kemp, as a 20% project. Yes, 20% time does exist at Google! The object of the game is to code a spaceship that will outperform all others in a virtual universe - algorithm vs algorithm.

The Kirkland event marked the 7th iteration of the program which was also recently done in NYC. Kirkland however was the first time that the game had been customized to encourage exploratory testing. In the case of "Ship Wars the Test Edition," we planted 4 bugs that the engineering participants were awarded for finding. Well, we ran out of prizes and were quickly reminded that when you put a lot of testing minded people in a room, many bugs will be unveiled! One of the best unveiled bugs was not one of the four planted in the simulator. When turning your ship 90 degrees, the ship actually turned -90 degrees. Oops!

Participants were encouraged to test their spaceship built on their own machine or a Google Chromebook. While the coding was done in the browser, the simulator and web server were run on Google Compute Engine. Throughout the 90 minutes, people challenged other participants to duels. Head-to-head battles took place on Chromebooks at the front of the room. There were many accolades called out but in the end, there could only be one champion who would walk away with a brand spankin’ new Nexus7. Check out our video of the evening’s activities.

Sounds fun, huh? We sure hope our participants, including our first place winner shown receiving the Nexus 7 from Garret, enjoyed the evening! Beyond the battles, our guests were introduced to the revived Google Testing Blog, heard firsthand that GTAC will be back in 2013, learned about testing at Google, and interacted with Googlers in a "Googley" environment. Achievement unlocked.

Cross posted on the Google Testing Blog.

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

2012-10-17T12:36:00.000-04:00

September 15 marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month and the start of our third year celebrating the Hispanic community through events and community outreach initiatives. Googlers from our Corporate Social Responsibility Team, Diversity & Inclusion Team, Engineering Industry Team, the Hispanic Googler Network (HGN), and our Community Partners worked together to host 20+ events focused on this year’s theme of Latinos in Technology.

We kicked things off at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) National Conference, where two members from our Google Accelerate team worked one-on-one with business owners during matchmaking sessions to consult on the best use of Google tools for their enterprises. Googler Eliana Murillo spoke on a panel titled “Beyond Social Media: The Potential of Technology & the Internet in a Global Economy,” where she shared how tools like Google Analytics, YouTube and Google for Nonprofits can be useful for businesses.

In early October, we ran a Hispanic Heritage Month 2012 Hangout on Air on the Life at Google page with the Latino Community Foundation (LCF). Raquel Donoso (CEO of LCF) and Googlers Hector Mujica (HGN member) and myself shared the history of the partnership and what our respective goals are. They also talked about the Family Health Day at Google & Olympic Games event, which we held at our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters that same week. Health is a pressing issue (PDF) in the Hispanic community; at this event, part of the Binational Health Week, we encouraged guests to have healthier lifestyles by teaching them some easy exercises, how to be active and eat healthy. More than 380+ community members and 50+ Googlers attended.

Last week we wrapped up a series of networking events in partnership with the Society of Hispanic Engineers (SHPE), where more than 400+ technical professionals came to our Seattle, Cambridge, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, New York, and Mountain View Offices to network and learn about how Google is supporting the local hispanic technical community.

Finally, today the Hispanic Googler Network is hosting the Bay Area Latino Employee Resource Group (ERG) Networking Reception in Mountain View. The Honorable Aida Alvarez, Chair of the Latino Community Foundation of the Bay Area, will speak to 300+ guests from local Hispanic ERGs in the Bay Area about what LCF is doing to build a better future for Latino children, youth and families in the Hispanic community.

Though the month officially comes to an end today, we’ll continue to support the Hispanic community as a lead sponsor in the LATISM '12 conference, taking place in two weeks. LATISM ‘12 connects Latinos in social media, technology, education, business and health fields to increase their online footprint through the web and Google's tools for small businesses and communities. We’re also participating in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Conference and will soon open up applications for our Hispanic College Fund Google scholarship.

We’ve had a great time celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, and are already looking forward to next year’s events. We invite you to view the recaps, photos and hangouts on our Life at Google page on Google+ and to visit our Diversity & Inclusion site where you can see more of what we do.

Posted by Sylvia Bonilla Zizumbo, Hispanic Googler Network Chair and Strategic Partnerships Lead

(cross posted on the Official Google Blog)

2012-10-02T15:22:00.002-04:00

Michel Benard, University Relations Manager

Last week we held our fifth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty Summit in London, bringing together 94 of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics from 65 universities representing 25 countries, together with more than 60 Googlers.

This year’s jam-packed agenda included a welcome reception at the Science Museum (plus a tour of the special exhibition: “Codebreaker - Alan Turing’s life and legacy”), a keynote on “Research at Google” by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives and a welcome address by Nelson Mattos, Vice President of Engineering and Products in EMEA, covering Google’s engineering activity and recent innovations in the region.

The Faculty Summit is a chance for us to meet with academics in Computer Science and other areas to discuss the latest exciting developments in research and education, and to explore ways in which we can collaborate via our our University Relations programs.

The two and a half day program consisted of tech talks, break out sessions, a panel on online education, and demos. The program covered a variety of computer science topics including Infrastructure, Cloud Computing Applications, Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Audio/Video, Machine Learning, User Interface, e-Commerce, Digital Humanities, Social Media, and Privacy. For example, Ed H. Chi summarized how researchers use data analysis to understand the ways users share content with their audiences using the Circle feature in Google+. Jens Riegelsberger summarized how UI design and user experience research is essential to creating a seamless experience on Google Maps. John Wilkes discussed some of the research challenges - and opportunities - associated with building, managing, and using computer systems at massive scale. Breakout sessions ranged from technical follow-ups on the talk topics to discussing ways to increase the presence of women in computer science.

We also held one-on-one sessions where academics and Googlers could meet privately and discuss topics of personal interest, such as how to develop a compelling research award proposal, how to apply for a sabbatical at Google or how to gain Google support for a conference in a particular research area.

The Summit provides a great opportunity to build and strengthen research and academic collaborations. Our hope is to drive research and education forward by fostering mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities.

Cross-posted with Google's Research Blog

Ship Wars Invades Google San Francisco

2012-09-24T16:31:00.000-04:00

Posted by Aaron Kemp, Software Engineer

Eight months after its inception in the Google Waterloo Office, Ships Wars has reached the Silicon Valley. On Thursday, September 13th, Google San Francisco and the Wallet team welcomed 25 local programmers to show off their skills as they coded their own spacecraft to do battle in a virtual universe.

After a brief explanation of the rules, participants, nourished by a bevy of snacks and beverages, coded for 1-1/2 hours, using test runs and their on-the-fly problem-solving skills to control the direction and speed of their ships before unleashing them for head-to-head battle in final competitions. The evening ended with a tour of the Google office as thousands of battles ensued. After replays of the worthiest battles, results were displayed and prizes, including a Xoom tablet, were given to the top three winners of the most battles. Check out a few more photos from this exciting event.

Participants hard at work gearing up for battle

Since the inaugural event last January, Ship Wars has been taken on the road to four total locations: Waterloo, Pittsburgh, Mountain View and now San Francisco. The game has moved entirely to the cloud and has been played by professional and student audiences alike. Future battles are confirmed, focusing on Front End Engineers in Google’s New York office on October 9th and on Test Engineers in our Kirkland office on October 24th.

Interested in having a Ship War strike near you? Contact the Google Events Team to suggest a battle zone or to learn more about other Google events in your area.

Google Hosts Girls Who Code

2012-09-21T19:15:00.001-04:00

Posted by Kabita Komal and Amy Yeung, University Programs Team

This past July, our Engineering University Programs team had the pleasure of hosting a unique new organization known as Girls Who Code (GWC) in the Google New York office. GWC is an organization working to educate, inspire and equip 13- to 17-year old girls with the skills and resources to pursue opportunities in technology and engineering. With the help of educators, engineers, and entrepreneurs, GWC has developed a new model for computer science (CS) education, pairing learning and mentorship led by the industry’s top female developers and entrepreneurs. GWC’s day at Google was part of an eight-week program for 20 high-school-age girls intended to teach them how to build websites and mobile apps, and even start their own companies.

On the day of the event, GWC attendees joined members of the Google Women in Engineering (GWE) group along with several people from the University Programs team for an office tour, lunch in one of the cafes, a Q&A session with GWE career panelists, networking, and a discussion of the many technical career opportunities at Google. The Q&A session in particular highlighted the possibilities enabled by a career in technology. It also revealed that many of the GWE participants pursued CS or engineering because they enjoyed the experience of building something and seeing tangible results--Amy Schendel (Software Engineer) was influenced by her experience building a robot in her high school robotics club; Adriana Alltari (Systems Administrator, Corporate Engineering) was inspired by building a computer. The career panel was then broken down into smaller networking sessions and the conversations really came alive. Some of the girls inquired about opportunities at Google while in High School and the Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) program was mentioned.

GWC’s visit to Google showed that there are driven young women who aspire to pursue CS and engineering, and how access to a network of mentors can strengthen their interest and align them for success. On August 30, 2012, Girls Who Code wrapped up their inaugural eight-week program with a graduation ceremony and demo presentation that showcased the valuable technical experience the girls gained in addition to their personal growth.

The evening commenced with speeches from key individuals such as Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer of General Electric, and the founder of GWC, Reshma Saujani. These speeches had the common thread of excitement over the program exceeding all expectations and enthusiasm surrounding the program’s growth potential. One of the girls spoke directly to the success of the program explaining that prior to her GWC experience, she had no interest in or knowledge about CS. Upon graduating, she announced her desire to study CS in hopes of being part of the next generation of tech professionals.

Demo presentations were next on the evening’s schedule. GWC participants were broken into groups of 2-3 and created projects that not only exemplified their newly acquired working knowledge of CS, but expressed their creativity. For example, two girls created the app “Mood Food,” in which users can find restaurants around them that satisfy a specific food craving. They explained that though this app is similar to Yelp.com, they believe their version is more user-friendly.

Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Several technology companies, Google included, have joined the movement to close this gender gap, and GWC is testament to what can be accomplished through education, support, and access to the right resources. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for the GWC graduates and hope to see the program expand to encourage and empower more women as they pursue careers in technology.

Power Searching with Google is back

2012-09-11T12:27:00.001-04:00

Posted by Dan Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality & User Happiness

If you missed Power Searching with Google a few months ago or were unable to complete the course the first time around, now’s your chance to sign up again for our free online course that aims to empower our users with the tools and knowledge to find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily.

The community-based course features six 50-minute classes along with interactive activities and the opportunity to hear from search experts and Googlers about how search works. Beginning September 24, you can take the classes over a two-week period, share what you learn with other students in a community forum, and complete the course assessments to earn a certificate of completion.

During the course’s first run in July, people told us how they not only liked learning about new features and more efficient ways to use Google, but they also enjoyed sharing tips and learning from one another through the forums and Hangouts. Ninety-six percent of people who completed the course also said they liked the format and would be interested in taking similar courses, so we plan to offer a suite of upcoming courses in the coming months, including Advanced Power Searching.

Stay tuned for further announcements on those upcoming courses, and don’t forget to register now for Power Searching with Google. You’ll learn about things like how to search by color, image, and time and how to solve harder trivia questions like our A Google a Day questions. We’ll see you when we start up in two weeks!

(cross-posted on the Research Blog)

Faculty Summit 2012: Online Education Panel

2012-08-20T18:35:00.001-04:00

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education. Daphne Koller's presentation on "Education at Scale" describes how a talk about YouTube at the 2009 Google Faculty Summit was an early inspiration for her, as she was formulating her approach that led to the founding of Coursera. Koller started with the goal of allowing Stanford professors to have more time for meaningful interaction with their students, rather than just lecturing, and ended up with a model based on the flipped classroom, where students watch videos out of class, and then come together to discuss what they have learned. She then refined the flipped classroom to work when there is no classroom, when the interactions occur in online discussion forums rather than in person. She described some fascinating experiments that allow for more flexible types of questions (beyond multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank) by using peer grading of exercises.

In my talk, I describe how I arrived at a similar approach but starting with a different motivation: I wanted a textbook that was more interactive and engaging than a static paper-based book, so I too incorporated short videos and frequent interactions for the Intro to AI class I taught with Sebastian Thrun.

Finally, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google+ gave a talk describing the goals of Google+. It is not to build the largest social network; rather it is to understand our users better, so that we can serve them better, while respecting their privacy, and keeping each of their conversations within the appropriate circle of friends. This allows people to have more meaningful conversations, within a limited context, and turns out to be very appropriate to education.

By bringing people together at events like the Faculty Summit, we hope to spark the conversations and ideas that will lead to the next breakthroughs, perhaps in online education, or perhaps in other fields. We'll find out a few years from now what ideas took root at this year's Summit.

cross-posted on the Research Blog

Education in the Cloud

2012-07-27T12:00:00.000-04:00

Posted by Andrea Held, University Relations

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a major transition from stand-alone applications that run on desktop computers to applications running in the cloud. Unfortunately, many computer science students don’t have the opportunity to learn and work in the cloud due to a lack of resources in traditional undergrad programs. Without this access students are limited to the resources their school can provide.

So today, we’re announcing a new award program: the Google App Engine Education Awards. We are excited because Google App Engine can teach students how to build sophisticated large-scale systems in the cloud without needing access to a large physical network.

Google App Engine can be used to build mobile or social applications, traditional browser-based applications, or stand-alone web services that scale to millions of users with ease. The Google App Engine infrastructure and storage tools are useful for collecting and analyzing educational data, building a learning management system to organize courses, or implementing a teacher forum for exchanging ideas and practices. All of these adaptations of the Google App Engine platform will use the same infrastructure that powers Google.

We invite teachers at universities across the United States to submit a proposal describing how to use Google App Engine for their course development, educational research or tools, or for student projects. Selected proposals will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the US, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. The application deadline is midnight PST August 31, 2012.

Cross-posted on the Research Blog

Google at CVPR 2012

2012-07-17T19:38:00.000-04:00

Posted by Rahul Sukthankar, Research Scientist

More than 1800 participants showed up to discuss their research at this year’s International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’12), held in Providence, RI last month. The main conference consisted of three eventful -- and exhausting -- days of talks and poster sessions, supplemented by an additional three days of tutorials and workshops.

This year, I found the CVPR posters to be especially energizing: poster presenters were mobbed by huge crowds that prompted the authors to start early and give encore performances through breaks and into subsequent sessions. Live demos and videos on laptops and tablets were increasingly common and allowed the audience to get a closer look at the research.

Here is a small sampling of papers (both oral and poster) that I particularly enjoyed:

“Accidental pinhole and pinspeck cameras: revealing the scene outside the picture”: A. Torralba and W. Freeman
“Weakly Supervised Structured Output Learning for Semantic Segmentation”: A. Vezhnevets, V. Ferrari, and J. Buhmann
“A Theory of Flat Refractive Geometry”: A. Agrawal, S. Ramalingam, Y.Taguchi, and V. Chari
“Learning Object Class Detectors from Weakly Annotated Video”: A. Prest, C. Leistner, J. Civera, C. Schmid, and V. Ferrari

The best paper prize this year (sponsored by Google) was awarded to Y. Dai, H. Li, and M. He for their paper, “A Simple Prior-free Method for Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion Factorization”; the best student paper award went to M. Hoai and F. De la Torre for their work on “Max-Margin Early Event Detectors”.

Research at Google was very active at CVPR '12:

Sebastian Thrun presented a plenary talk on self-driving cars
Dennis Strelow gave an oral presentation, “General and Nested Wiberg Minimization”
Google researchers co-authored an additional seven papers in the main conference:

“Collection Flow”: I. Kemelmacher, S.Seitz (Google)
“Computer Vision Aided Target Linked Radiation Imaging”: D. Gao, Y. Yao, F. Pan, T. Yu, L. Guan, B. Yu, T.-P. Tian, D. Walter, B. Yanoff, & N. Krahnstoever (Google)
“D-Nets: Beyond Patch-Based Image Descriptors”: F. von Hundelshausen, R. Sukthankar (Google)
“Model Recommendation for Action Recognition”: P. Matikainen, R. Sukthankar (Google), & M. Hebert
“Refractive Height Fields from Single and Multiple Images”: Q. Shan, S. Agarwal (Google), & B. Curless
“Schematic Surface Reconstruction”: C. Wu (Google), S. Agarwal (Google), B. Curless, S. Seitz (Google)
“Visibility Based Preconditioning for Bundle Adjustment”: A. Kushnal, S. Agarwal (Google)

Three invited talks were given in CVPR workshops:

“Monoscopic to Stereoscopic Conversion of YouTube Videos”: D. Mukherjee, C. Wu (both Google)
“Machine Perception for Content Discovery at YouTube”: A. Natsev (Google)
“Algorithmic Frontiers in Computer Vision”: H. Neven (Google)

Two tutorials:

“Deep Learning Methods for Vision”: R. Fergus, H. Lee, M.'A. Ranzato (Google), G. Taylor, R. Salakhutdinov, & K. Yu
“Python for MATLAB Users: Promoting Open Source Computer Vision Research”: M. Leotta, A. Perera, E. Swears, P. Reynolds, Y. Zhao (Google), & V. Ganapathi (Google)

For me, the best part of CVPR was talking with graduate students about their work: at the doctoral consortium, during poster sessions and at the Google booth (where interesting demos and swag drew large crowds).

Since becoming a part of Research at Google last year, I’ve been particularly excited about the idea of training spatiotemporally localized object and action detectors from lots of video, with minimal human supervision -- a goal that seemed both technically and computationally infeasible until recently. It’s great to see that many in the CVPR community share my belief that we’re now ready to learn from large-scale video and we’ve decided to organize a AAAI Spring Symposium on this topic.

Next year’s CVPR will be held in Portland, OR. I look forward to seeing many of you there!

M. Grundmann and V. Kwatra present the YouTube video stabilization demo

Google I/O Extended 2012 Unites 1,000+ Developers Coast to Coast

2012-07-12T13:34:00.001-04:00

Posted by Craig Rubens, People Operations Communications team

Now that Google I/O has concluded, the parachutes have been repacked, hundreds of pounds of snacks have all been eaten and the Moscone Center has fewer robots prowling its hallways.

But Google I/O is much more than just announcements, giveaways and demos. As Vic Gundotra said in the opening keynote: “this conference is really about you-- developers.” I/O is the global gathering of Google developers who build services, products and businesses using Google’s tools, platforms and infrastructure.

For the second year, we helped broadcast the magic of I/O beyond the 6,000+ attendees in San Francisco to some 30,000+ participants at over 350 I/O Extended viewing events around the globe. This included nine events hosted by the Google Industry Programs team at our North American offices.

More than 1,000 developers joined us in our offices in Boston, Boulder, Irvine, Los Angeles, Mountain View, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Waterloo to watch the I/O announcements. Attendees were greeted by site directors, bedecked in Google swag and handed mimosas as they met fellow developers and watched I/O live.
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Each office featured live demos, in addition to those streaming from I/O. In Mountain View, attendees saw the Google Maps team’s Trekker backpack - a pack-mounted Street View camera that can be hiked into almost any location, capturing 360 degree imagery along the trail. The Waterloo event welcomed the Honorable Gary Goodyear, Ontario’s Minister of State for Science and Technology who hosted a fireside chat. And Seattle participants partied with a life-size Android and sipped beers from three local breweries.

In addition to the Extended events around the country, we wanted to connect with I/O attendees directly and hosted the I/O NightCap at San Francisco’s ROE club, right up the street from the Moscone Center. Attendees enjoyed free beer, snacks, games and cool swag like Android Rubik’s cubes (which are super hard to solve!). Even though all the attendees had already gotten lots of cool, high-tech gifts from I/O, they were still excited for the chance to win an App Engine squishable (who doesn’t love squishables?).

If you missed any of the sessions from I/O 2012, you can find all of the keynotes, technical sessions and code labs on the Google I/O website.

Tune in to I/O Live at 9:30 a.m. PDT on June 27

2012-06-25T16:27:00.000-04:00

Google I/O, our annual developer conference, begins in just two days, and this year, we’re bringing you more than 130 technical sessions, 20 code labs and 155 Sandbox partners. If you’re not here in San Francisco, you can still sign up for one of our 350+ I/O Extended events around the world or tune in to I/O Live to watch the live stream from wherever you are. This year’s conference kicks off on June 27 with the first day’s keynote at 9:30 a.m. and the second day’s keynote on June 28 at 10:00 a.m. PDT, so tune in early at developers.google.com/io to avoid missing the action!

Bookmark developers.google.com/io to watch I/O Live from your desktop, or download the Google I/O mobile app to access the live stream from your phone or tablet. For the truly entrepreneurial, check our liveblogging gadget, which lets you add your commentary and the live video feed from the Google I/O keynotes to your blog.

More than 40 sessions on Android, Chrome, Google+ and your favorite APIs will be streamed live, and all remaining session videos will be recorded and available shortly after the conference on Google Developers Live and the conference website. Between sessions, we’ll bring you behind-the-scenes footage featuring interviews with Googlers and attendees, tours of the Sandbox and more. The stream will also continue through our After Hours party (June 27 starting at 7:00 p.m. PDT), where we've teamed up with top entertainers, inventors, artists, educators and visionaries from all over the world for an amazing evening.

Posted by Mike Winton, Director of Developer Relations

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Google Helping Make the Web Faster at Velocity 2012

2012-06-18T16:51:00.000-04:00

Posted by Jim Keller, Software Engineer

Next week, Google will join the Internet speed community at the Velocity 2012 conference in Santa Clara, California. This will be our fifth year at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference. We hope to see you there as we introduce the latest in faster web browsing and exchange and advance ideas to speed up the web.

From the client to the backend, Google is accelerating the web experience. Come hear Google's latest insights for performance metrics, page design, backend design, user prediction, browser tools, networking protocols and how to use them to make the mobile and desktop web experience faster. Studies show that people stay engaged longer and interact more on faster websites, and the talks we’re putting on will help you take advantage of all the benefits speed brings. Googlers will present:

Understanding and Optimizing Web Performance Metrics by Bryan McQuade
Taming the Mobile Beast by Matt Welsh and Patrick Meenan
Stronger and Faster with Steve Souders
Predicting User Activity to Make the Web Fast by Arvind Jain and Dominic Hamon
Lightning Demos with Bryan McQuade, Patrick Meenan, and Steve Souders
SPDYing Up Your Site by Matthew Steele and Roberto Peon
Selecting and Deploying Automated Optimization Solutions by Patrick Meenan
Got Performance Anxiety? Using Website Performance Tools to Test, Optimize and Improve Load by Patrick Meenan
Using Google Sitespeed and PageSpeed products to debug, improve, measure, and iterate by Matt Atterbury and Mustafa Tikir
Lightning Demos by Nat Duca
Browsers with Tony Gentilcore

For a complete list of speakers and details on each presentation, please visit the Velocity schedule online.

We encourage you to stop by our booth (#101) in the exhibit hall on Tuesday, June 26 and Wednesday, June 27. At the booth, Google engineers will give informal tech talks, answer questions, and run demos during conference breaks. We’ll have a mix of general and technical topics for those who stop by, including:

Ilya Grigorik on Measuring user perceived latency with Google Analytics Site Speed reports: hands on demo and insights
Wenbo Zhu on HTTP streaming - discuss the true latency bottleneck with bi-directional HTTP streaming and "full-duplex HTTP"
Patrick Meenan on Async Scripts and why you care, particularly for third-party content
Patrick Meenan on Measuring Web Performance
Pradnya Karbhari on PageSpeed Automatic Optimizations
Mustafa M. Tikir on Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics: Measuring your website's performance
Libo Song on PageSpeed Insights for Chrome with mobile support - Demo
Chris Bentzel with Q&A: Your Chrome Wishlist, Suggestions, and Questions
Ilya Grigorik and Mustafa Tikir with Q&A: Performance monitoring with Google Analytics

If you haven’t registered yet, exhibit passes are available here. We hope to see you in Santa Clara!

Attending the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

2012-06-13T18:01:00.001-04:00

Posted by Mark Lentczner, Software Engineer, Security Research

A number of us from Google attended this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, held May 20-23 (known as the “Oakland” conference, despite being held in San Francisco this year). The three day, single track main conference featured some of the best work in Security and Privacy, and spanned from pure research to state-of-the-industry reports. I enjoyed hearing about security and flash memory, unpatched bug detection, and a much-anticipated report on commercially deployed single-sign-on web services, among other things.

A highlight for me was Session 11: Passwords. Despite all our schemes for replacing passwords (including my own), they show no signs of going away anytime soon. This session included both excellent analysis of real systems, and a presentation of a framework for evaluating web authentication. For me, the authors breathed new life into a topic often avoided.

I was also happy to hear Googler Xin Zhang present a paper on network security he co-authored while at CMU:

Secure and Scalable Fault Localization under Dynamic Trafﬁc Patterns by Xin Zhang, Chang Lan, and Adrian Perrig

This year, Google was a Gold sponsor of the symposium, supporting student travel grants and the Best Student Paper Award—Memento: Learning Secrets from Process Footprints, by Suman Jana and Vitaly Shmatikov from University of Texas at Austin. We presented a demo of some of our security work-in-progress at our table in the lobby.

Attendees watch demo of Belay at our table in the lobby

The project, Belay, explores a method to achieve authorization without authentication in general, specifically for web based accounts. We demoed the system from our live running prototype (here are background slides for the demo). The “demo-in-the-lobby” format led to great discussions each day. We enjoyed being able to share some of Google's security work with the symposium.

Project Belay presentation

It was great to have the opportunity to spend three days with some of the best people in the field, and I go back to my research thinking of the great technical presentations and hallway discussions. I'm glad that as a Googler I was able to be a part of it.

Supporting Accessibility at Big Design

2012-05-25T15:04:00.000-04:00

Posted by Tomer Sharon, User Experience Researcher

Students, professionals, and executives looking to stay on the bleeding edge of accessibility will be heading to Addison, Texas, from May 31 - June 2 for the annual Big Design Conference. Googlers will also be in attendance to present research and share experiences and best practices surrounding accessibility technologies at Google.

This is Google’s first year sponsoring Big Design, though our commitment to accessibility has been long standing. As the Gold Sponsor for this year’s conference, we’re partnering with conference organizers and Knowbility (a non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, that makes sure people with disabilities can access websites) to identify six recipients to receive Google-sponsored travel grants to attend the conference.

While at Big Design, I will be giving a talk on my recently published book, It’s Our Research. The talk will feature tested techniques for engaging stakeholders of UX research. The primary theme is that stakeholder engagement for UX research is attained by making any research activity their own, not the researcher’s. Involving stakeholders throughout the process of planning, execution, analysis, and reporting UX research dramatically increases the chances that they will act upon its results. I’ll suggest 14 tips and tricks for fostering truly great relationships with UX research stakeholders.

At Google, my research is focused on organic search results, voice-activated search, and identifying solutions to people’s search needs. I founded and led UPA Israel and am also the co-founder and organizer of leanUXmachine, a weekend of UX learning, collaboration, and mentorship for Israeli startups. I am proud of Google’s accomplishments in the accessibility space and look forward to seeing what others in the industry are working on at Big Design. To learn more about the work Googlers all over the globe are doing in the world of accessibilty, visit www.google.com/accessibility/.

Google @ CHI2012 -- It’s the experience!

2012-05-18T20:25:00.003-04:00

Posted by Kathy Baxter, Sr. UX Researcher & Infrastructure Manager

More than 60 Googlers descended on Austin, TX May 5-10 for CHI—probably the best CHI I’ve attended in the last 12 years! Each year, it’s exciting to see Google continuing to offer contributions to the CHI community through research and volunteer efforts. In addition to the 10 papers, notes and case studies presented by Googlers, we also participated in panels, contributed to workshops and supported the conference itself as a Platinum-level sponsor.

Google’s Ed Chi, Staff Research Scientist, spent the past year working tirelessly as the 2012 Technical Program Co-Chair. He did an outstanding job! He also made time to present papers and participate in the special interest group (SIG), “RepliCHI SIG – from a panel to a new submission venue for replication,” along with Max Wilson (University of Nottingham, U.K.), Wendy Mackay (INRIA, France), Michael S Bernstein (MIT CSAIL), and Jeffrey Nichols (IBM Research - Almaden). For CHI2013, they proposed a new forum that focuses on replicating, confirming and challenging published HCI findings.
I was honored to be on a panel with illustrious women UX Leaders like Janaki Kumar (Sr. UX Director @SAP), Janice Rohn (VP of UX @Experian), Lisa Anderson (UX Dir. @Microsoft), & Apala Lahiri Chavan (Chief Oracle & Innovator @Human Factors International). We discussed what we have learned over the years as women and managers in the tech industry, and UX specifically.

Googlers Anne Aula, Staff UX Researcher, and Jhilmil Jain, Senior UX Researcher, led an SIG on “Designing for the living room TV experience.”
In addition to leading an invited SIG and presenting a paper, Jhilmil Jain also facilitated a workshop with Evangelos Karapanos (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal) and Marc Hassenzahl (Folkwang University of Arts, Germany) on Theories, Methods and Case Studies of Longitudinal HCI Research.

For the second year in a row, we sponsored the MatriarCHI event, which was a luncheon this year. MatriarCHI is the organizing committee for a set of meetings at CHI related to the challenges women face in HCI. We are excited to report that we had even more attendees this year than last. At the luncheon, we discussed common challenges learned from each other’s experiences, and honored the women that have received awards not only at CHI, but other CS/HCI forums.

Googlers hanging out in the booth before the Expo Hall opened

There was also a lot of fun to be had at the Google booth. Thanks to Dan Russell, UX Researcher at Google, attendees could play “a CHI-A-Day” (it was “A Google a Day” the CHI way, featuring great questions about HCI and research at Google) to win great prizes and learn how to search more effectively! We also put on a Ph.D. Forum event at Moonshine: Ph.D. candidates heard from a panel of Googlers with Ph.D.s, and got to speak with them about research and publishing opportunities at Google—plus get some fun Google swag. We met so many brilliant individuals throughout the conference and I’m hopeful some of them will be joining the ranks of Google.

CHI2013 will be held in Paris, France next April. We’re all already thinking of papers, panels, SIGs and other contributions to submit. We can’t wait to see what's in store for the next CHI!

Google, the World Wide Web and WWW conference: years of progress, prosperity and innovation

2012-05-07T14:26:00.000-04:00

Posted by Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President of Engineering

More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012. A decade ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied their research to an information retrieval problem and their work—presented at WWW in 1998—led to the invention of today’s most popular search engine.

As I've watched the WWW conference series evolve over the years, a couple of larger trends struck me in this year's edition. First, there seems to be more of a Mobile Web presence in the technical program, relative to recent years. The refereed program included several interesting Mobile papers, including the Best Student Paper Awardee from Stanford University researchers: Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption, Narendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal, Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh, Jatinder Singh.

Second, one gets the sense that the WWW community is moving from the a classic "bag of words" view of web pages, to an entity-centric view. There were a number of papers on identifying and using entities in Web pages. While I'm loathe to view this as a vindication of "the Semantic Web" (mainly because this has become an overloaded phrase that people elect to interpret as suits them), the technical capability to get at entities is clearly here. The question is -- what is the killer application? Finally, it’s nice to see that recommendation systems are becoming a major topic of focus at WWW. This paper was a personal favorite: Build Your Own Music Recommender by Modeling Internet Radio Streams, Natalie Aizenberg, Yehuda Koren, Oren Somekh.

In keeping with tradition, Google was a major supporter, sponsoring the conference, the Best Paper Award (Counting beyond a Yottabyte, or how SPARQL 1.1 Property Paths will prevent adoption of the standard, Marcelo Arenas, Sebastián Conca and Jorge Pérez) and four PhD student travel grants. We chatted with hundreds of attendees who hung out with us at the Google booth to chat and see demos about the latest Google product and research developments (see full schedule of booth talks).

Googlers were also active member of the vibrant research community at WWW:

David Assouline delivered the keynote for the Demo Track -- to a standing-room-only crowd -- on the Google Art Project, which uses a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners to create a unique online art experience. Googler Alon Halevy served as a program committee member. Googlers were also co-authors of the following papers:

Risk-Aware Revenue Maximization in Display Advertising by Ana Radovanovic and William Heavlin (Googlers)
SessionJuggler: Secure Web Login From an Untrusted Terminal Using Session Hijacking by Elie Bursztein (Googler), Chinmay Soman, Dan Boneh and John Mitchell
Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews by Arjun Murkherjee, Bing Liu, and Natalie Glance (Googler)
Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother’s by James Cook, Atish Das Sarma (Googler), Alexander Fabrikant and Andrew Tomkins (Googlers)
YouTube Around the World: Geographic Popularity of Videos by Mirjam Wattenhofer (Googler), Anders Brodersen (Googler), and Salvatore Scellato
Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption by Narendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal (Googler), Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh and Jatinder Singh

Googlers co-organized three workshops:

Appification of the Web by Ed Chi (Googler), Brian Davison, and Evgeniy Gabrilovich (Googler)
Extracting Unambiguous Keywords from Microposts Using Web and Query Logs Data, as part of the Making Sense of Microsposts workshop by Davi Reis, Felipe Portavales Goldstein, and Fred Quintao (Googlers)
Human Computation Must Be Reproducible, as part of the CrowdSearch: Crowdsourcing Web search workshop by Praveen Paritosh (Googler)
WebQuality 2012: The Anti-Social Web by Zoltan Gyongyi (Googler), Carlos Castillo, Adam Jatowt, and Katsumi Tanaka

Additionally, a Googler led a tutorial:

The Role of Human-Generated and Automatically-Extracted Lexico-Semantic Resources in Web Search by Marius Pasca (Googler)

Googlers presented a poster:

Google Image Swirl by Yushi Jing, Henry Rowley, Jingbin Wang, David Tsai, Chuck Rosenberg, Michele Covell (Googlers)

At the conference, we also paid homage to the founding of the World Wide Web and the strong community and enterprise it’s created since the 1990s, seen in the Euronews report: Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee on imagining worlds. Through our products and support of WWW in 2013, we look forward to continuing to nurture the world wide web’s open ecosystem of knowledge, innovation and progress.

Add Research at Google to your circles on G+ to learn more about our academic conference involvement, view pictures from events, and hear about upcoming programming and presence at conferences

(Cross-posted from the Research Blog)

It’s that time again: Google’s Heading to CHI

2012-05-03T14:25:00.000-04:00

Researchers at Google have enormous potential to impact the experience of Google users, which means it’s of enormous importance for us to conduct Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Grounded in user behavior understanding and real-use iteration, Google’s HCI researchers invent, design, build and trial real-scale interactive systems in the real world, often exploring areas where products and features may not yet exist. With this in mind, every year we participate in CHI: the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference on HCI research. As far as I know, it is the second largest ACM conference with nearly 3,000 attendees, and one of the top 10 research conferences that Google contributes to, in terms of technical content. I’m proud to be a Technical Program Co-Chair for CHI 2012, which will be held in Austin, TX from May 5 to May 10.

There are now a wide variety of HCI research activities at Google. First, we have a sizable user experience organization that focuses on design, user research and the critical insight needed by many product development organizations within the company. Second, we’ve built up a group of research scientists inside of Research at Google who work on projects involving gesture and touch interaction, activity- and context-aware recommendation, mobile input methods and social computing research.

Between attending talks and presenting papers of my own, I look forward to seeing many other Googlers show off their research in the world of HCI at CHI 2012. More than 15 Googlers are actively contributing to the conversations happening at the event: sitting on panels, walking attendees through submitted papers and case studies, teaching workshops and offering demos. For example:

One paper being presented by Google Researcher Yang Li, along with Hao Lü of the University of Washington, received an honorable mention: “Gesture Coder: A Tool for Programming Multi-Touch Gestures by Demonstration.”
We’re publishing one of the first papers on Google+, focusing on how users make use of circles during the initial rollout of their products: “Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+,” done in collaboration with intern Sanjay Kairam from Stanford, Mike Brzozowski, David Huffaker and myself.
Anne Aula and Jhilmil Jain are leading a SIG (Special Interest Group) on “Designing for the living room TV experience.”

As in previous years, we’ll also have a booth in the Exhibit Hall at CHI, where Googlers from all over the globe will be available to chat about their experiences solving interesting user research and design challenges. Finally, in keeping with Austin’s BBQ culture, we look forward to welcoming CHI attendees to head outdoors and join us in our backyard BBQ-themed booth where Googlers will also be talking about some of the hot-off-the-grill innovations that have influenced our products. Be sure to stop by and say hello!

Posted by Ed Chi, Staff Research Scientist

Women engineers come together at Google Cambridge

2012-03-30T16:08:00.000-04:00

Nearly one hundred guests from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Boston joined Googlers for a fascinating technical talk Wednesday, March 21 at our Cambridge office. Google Cambridge partnered with the local chapter of SWE to showcase some of the incredible work women at Google are accomplishing and showcase the Cambridge office. Women from all areas of engineering joined us: academia, industry professionals and local students.

Guests began the evening with a sit down dinner and drinks with Googlers and had the opportunity to network with each other. After dinner, engineering manager Julie Farago touched on some of the amazing opportunities available for women at Google, and then I , Alice Bonhomme-Biais, Software Engineer, delivered the technical talk, Crisis Response: The Story of How Technology Helped After the Earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.

I walked guests through the work of the crisis response team at Google and how we responded to the Japan and Haiti earthquakes last year. I highlighted some of the other tools our team is building for potential future crisis, which aim to assist responders and partners during emergencies. I also touched on some of Google’s partnerships with NGOs and how Google.org is making an impact in the world.

People in the audience sit back and enjoy the presentation

The audience stayed for nearly an hour afterward, asking questions and expressing an interest in getting involved with Google.org and other efforts around crisis susport. We were thrilled with the engagement from the nearly one hundred women that attended.

For more information about Google’s crisis response team and efforts and tools for responders, visit www.google.org/crisisresponse.

Posted by Alice Bonhomme-Biais - Software Engineer, Crisis Response Team

PyCon 2012

2012-03-19T14:09:00.000-04:00

PyCon 2012 was held in Santa Clara, which was particularly convenient for many of the dozens of participants who work at Google, whose headquarters is a few miles away in Mountain View. The location was obviously convenient for others too; instead of the anticipated 1500 attendees the conference drew well over 2200, and hundreds of them stayed for the development sprints.

In addition to Guido van Rossum, whose entertaining keynote addressed the answers he gives to frequently asked questions, half a dozen Google engineers had the opportunity to present in the conference technical tracks. Augie Fackler and Nathaniel Manista, for example, delivered an introductory talk titled “Stop Mocking Start Testing” that discussed lessons learned about testing python code over the many years since Google Code originally launched. Of course, Google Code itself hosts many projects, among which is “gaeunit,” a project for testing python code.

The Friday evening party sponsored by YouTube, New Relic, Loggly, Rackspace, and Skullcandy at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara had opportunities for lots of thought provoking discussions.

Google was a platinum sponsor, but what seemed to draw the most interest was this year’s edition of the Google at PyCon challenge. Just like past years, the challenges were relevant to the conference’s Python topic. Even before the exhibit floor opened, many attendees had obviously been hard at work on the problems and were already prepared to head straight to the booth and show off their solutions. The next morning, the same rush arrived from people who had worked on the problems overnight.

Between bursts of excited game participants, the booth was a casual place to hang out and chat about interesting Python challenges with whoever else happened to be around. A comfy red couch was certainly a draw, often for those whose competition submission had a bug in it.

A few of the Google attendees who happened to be in the booth at the same time

After three days, the conference drew to a close. One lucky attendee won a dancing robot, and then the PyCon event moved into its next phase, the sprints. While many left, hundreds of people remained to form focused groups to develop key improvements in Python technologies.

Posted by Alex Perry, Site Reliability Engineer

Google Code Jam 2012 registration is open

2012-03-13T16:08:00.000-04:00

Today, we're opening up registration for Google Code Jam 2012. This year thousands of students, professional programmers and freelance code wizards will pit their ingenuity against a new set of algorithmic challenges concocted by our tireless team of red-eyed, LED-illuminated problem writers.

Last year’s champion, Makoto Soejima, was asked to build a house for kittens, serve food to hungry mathematicians, escape from a shady casino and help Goro control his anger. Who knows what our problem writers have on their minds this year?

Code Jam is a world-wide programming competition in which contestants may use any programming language to solve algorithmic problems. The qualification round takes place April 13, followed by three online rounds in the following months. At the end of it all, the top 25 contestants will be invited to Google’s New York office on July 27 for a final match up and a chance to win $10,000. If you are up for the challenge, throw your hat into the ring now.

Posted by Igor Naverniouk, Software Engineer, Google Code Jam

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Celebrating Black History Month

2012-03-12T14:34:00.000-04:00

Last month, in honor of Black History Month, Google offices in five cities in North America hosted events celebrating black professionals in our community. Across the country, we opened our doors to over 400 guests consisting of engineers, entrepreneurs, technologists, students and professors. The inaugural series of celebrations focused on creating opportunities to network, build relationships and discuss the achievements and challenges of blacks in technology with organizations like NewMe, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and the meetup group Blacks In Technology (LA & NYC), among others.

Events ranged from networking to tech talks to poetry readings. Offices in New York, Mountain View and Los Angeles brought together technical leaders from the local area for panel discussions, while in cities like Chicago and Atlanta, the events focused on establishing a relationship between Google and the local chapters of NSBE and NewMe.

Slideshow of photos from last month's festivities

Even though our celebrations for Black History Month have ended, we continue to celebrate Google’s diverse and innovative culture year-round. We look forward to growing our relationship with each of these organizations in the months and years ahead.
Posted by Nilma Rubin, on behalf of Industry Programs and Diversity & Inclusion

Announcing Google-hosted workshop videos from NIPS 2011

2012-02-27T17:20:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog

At the 25th Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Granada, Spain last December, we engaged in dialogue with a diverse population of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, statistical learning theorists, and machine learning researchers. More than twenty Googlers participated in an intensive single-track program of talks, nightly poster sessions and a workshop weekend in the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains. Check out the NIPS 2011 blog post for full information on Google at NIPS.

In conjunction with our technical involvement and gold sponsorship of NIPS, we recorded the five workshops that Googlers helped to organize on various topics from big learning to music. We’re now pleased to provide access to these rich workshop experiences to the wider technical community.

Watch videos of Googler-led workshops on the YouTube Tech Talks Channel:

Big Learning: Algorithms, Systems, and Tools for Learning at Scale by Joseph Gonzalez, Sameer Singh, Graham Taylor, James Bergstra, Alice Zheng, Misha Bilenko, Yucheng Low, Yoshua Bengio, Michael Franklin, Carlos Guestrin, Andrew McCallum, Alexander Smola, Michael Jordan, Sugato Basu (Googler)
Domain Adaptation Workshop: Theory and Application by John Blitzer, Corinna Cortes, Afshin Rostamizadeh (all Googlers)
Learning Semantics by Antoine Bordes, Jason Weston (Googler), Ronan Collobert, Leon Bottou
Sparse Representation and Low-rank Approximation by Ameet Talwalkar, Lester Mackey, Mehryar Mohri (Googler), Michael Mahoney, Francis Bach, Mike Davies, Remi Gribonval, Guillaume Obozinski
International Workshop on Music and Machine Learning: Learning from Musical Structure by Rafael Ramirez, Darrell Conklin, Douglas Eck (Googler), Ryan Rifkin (Googler)

To highlight a few workshops: The Domain Adaptation workshop organized by Google, which fused theoretical and practical domain adaptation, featured invited talks from Shai Ben-David and Googler Mehryar Mohri from the theory side and Dan Roth from the applications side. This was just next door to Googlers Doug Eck and Ryan Rifkin's workshop on Machine Learning and Music, with musical demonstrations loud enough for the next-door neighbors to ask them to “turn it down a bit, please.” In addition to the Googler-run workshops, the Integrating Language and Vision workshop showcased invited talks by Google postdoctoral fellow Percy Liang on the pragmatics of visual scene description and Josh Tenenbaum on physical models as a cognitive plausible mechanism for bridging language and vision. Finally, Google consultant Andrew Ng was one of the organizers of the Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning, which offered an extended tutorial, several inspiring talks, and two panel discussions (one with Googler Samy Bengio as panelist) exploring the question of “How deep is deep?”

As the workshop weekend drew to a close, an airline strike in Spain left NIPS attendees scrambling to get home for the holidays. We hope the skies look clear for 2012 when NIPS lands in Google’s neck of the woods, Lake Tahoe!

Posted by John Blitzer and Douglas Eck, Google Research

IxDA Interaction12 in Dublin

2012-02-14T14:02:00.000-05:00

Google was a proud sponsor of the IxDA’s Interaction12 conference that took place in Dublin, Ireland’s beautiful capital, from February 1-4. IxDA is a global network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design. Interaction12 was the first IxDA conference to be held outside of the US.

Above: Conference attendees kick back between sessions at the Google booth

Several Googlers participated in the conference, representing Google at the company booth or making notable technical contributions. I was lucky enough to attend and enjoyed the work of fellow Googlers by taking in several workshops and talks recapped below:

Eva-Lotta Lamm, Interaction Designer (London) kicked off the conference by teaching a workshop on Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes, which guided my thinking throughout the duration of Interaction 12.

Considering this was a conference on interaction design and taking what I learned from Eva-Lotta’s workshop, I thought it would be a fun idea to take notes in sketches instead of words as the program progressed. While I didn’t achieve any form of mastery, I found sketching to be a great way to keep my attention focused and remain engaged with the content. As an added benefit, it was entertaining to compare my drawings with those of my neighbors in the talks.

Michal Levin, User Experience Designer (Tel-Aviv) asked Does Size Matter? and spoke about designing for multiple devices in a product ecosystem comprised of a variety of users, interaction models, behaviors, use cases, contexts, needs, goals, environments, etc.

Abi Jones, Interaction Designer (Mountain View) gave a talk titled Your Users are Hobbits - comparing user navigation of websites to the legendary quest of Tolkien’s hobbits, and explaining how you can help users fulfill their calling by providing them with mentors and helpers to overcome ordeals and return a changed person.

Miles Rochford, User Experience Manager (London) presented the winners of the 2012 Interaction Awards, which were sponsored by Google this year. Winning projects, ranging from applications and games to instrument panels and installations, were selected from a competitive pool of over 300 entries from 33 countries for their excellence in interaction design.

A personal highlight for me was attending a talk presented by one of this year’s IxDA Interaction Award winners. In Bananas, Technology and Magic, Vitamins Design’s Adrian Westaway talked about the importance of letting go of preconceptions and spending more time understanding users and their requirements. He explained how this approach allowed his company to create a truly beautiful (and useful) “out of the box” experience for customers, instead of a dumbed-down (and ultimately useless) product based on stereotypical assumptions.

Sketch Notes from Adrian Westaway's Talk, "Bananas, Technology, and Magic"

All in all, the conference made for a fascinating couple of days packed with informative and interesting sessions, and providing a great opportunity for Google to connect with professionals from the industry. I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference set to take place in Toronto.

Posted by Nina Weber, UX Researcher, Zurich Office

Ship Wars@ Google Waterloo: a virtual battle of intergalactic spacecraft

2012-02-10T15:13:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, January 24, Google Waterloo opened its doors to engineers from the Kitchener-Waterloo area to participate in the first ever Ship Wars Programming Competition. The brainchild of myself and another Waterloo engineer, Garret Kelly, Ship Wars is a competition in which participants code their own intergalactic crafts in the programming language of their choice, and then battle against each other in a virtual environment. The inaugural competition proved quite popular, drawing nearly 40 participants, ready for battle. The game itself went through a lengthy series of internal tests and refinements at the Google Waterloo office in the weeks leading up to the tournament. On the day of the event, participants quickly learned how to play and were able to code, test and enter their virtual ships into competition in under three hours. Not an easy feat! The engineers brought their own machines (mostly laptops, but a few brought in huge desktops) to build and run their ships. After a brief overview of the rules, they were able to get started coding their ships in the language of their choice—some even switched languages mid-way through the event, changing their plan of attack. They were able to control the way the ships moved (direction and speed) and the strength of their weapons, but were only given clues as to how their ship and weapon systems would behave inside the simulation— the rest had to be deduced by playing test matches against example ships. This type of on-the-fly problem solving proved to be a unique and exciting challenge. To test their ships in battle against other engineers’ creations, head-to-head battle stations were set up around the room. At these stations, participants could see how their ships were shaping up, watch them in action and ultimately decide what changes they could make before the final competition.

Local engineers design their virtual battleships

At the end of the evening, guests were given a tour of the Google Waterloo office while their ships “went to battle.” Thousands of simulated head-to-head battles and 15 minutes later, to the sound of much laughter and raucous cheering, the ship captains saw their results and watched replays of some of the most dramatic battles. Prizes (a Motorola Xoom Tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet and a Google messenger bag) were awarded to the designers of the three ships with the most wins. For more photos, here’s a link to our album. This wildly successful event will be expanding out to a few other Google offices in the near future. Be on the lookout, Pittsburgh and Cambridge: Ship Wars is coming to you next!

Posted by Aaron Kemp, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)