Drink from the firehose with University Research Programs

Posted by Michael Lancaster and Josh Estelle, Software Engineers

Whenever we talk to university researchers, we hear a consistent message: they wish they had Google infrastructure. In pursuit of our company mission, we have built an elaborate set of systems for collecting, organizing, and analyzing information about the web. Operating and maintaining such an infrastructure is a high barrier to entry for many researchers. We recognize this and want to share some of the fruits of our labor with the research community. Today, in conjunction with the Google Faculty Summit we're making two services available under the new University Research Programs, namely access to web search, and machine translation.

University Research Program for Google Search

Google is focused on the success of the web, which is essentially an organism in and of itself with extremely complex contents and an ever-evolving structure. The primary goal of the University Research Program for Google Search is to promote research that creates a greater understanding of the web. We want to make it easy for researchers to analyze millions of queries in a reasonably short amount of time. We feel that such research can benefit everyone. As such, we've added a proviso that all research produced through this program must be published in a freely accessible manner.

University Research Program for Google Translate

The web is a global information medium with content from many cultures and languages. In order to break the language barrier, many researchers are hard at work building high quality, automatic, machine translation systems. We've been successful with our own statistical machine translation system, and are now happy to provide researchers greater access to it. The University Research Program for Google Translate provides researchers access to translations, including detailed word alignment information and lists of the n-best translations with detailed scoring information. We hope this program will be a terrific resource to help further the state of the art in automatic machine translation.

The web holds a wealth of untapped research potential and we look forward to seeing great new publications enabled by these new programs. Go ahead - surprise us!

By the way, since many researchers lead a double life as educators, we want to let you know about a site that recently launched: Google Code for Educators, designed to make it easy for CS faculty to integrate cutting-edge computer science topics into their courses. Check it out.

New Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

Posted by Ziv Bar-Yossef and Kevin McCurley, Research Team

The pace of innovation on the World Wide Web continues unabated more than fifteen years after the first servers went live. The web was initially used by only a small community of scientists, but there are now over a billion people on the planet who use the web in their lives. The World Wide Web grows and changes as a young organism might, reflecting the social forces of the users and information producers. Each year seems to bring a radical new change, including the movement of commerce to the web, the availability of realtime news on the web, mobile users being able to access the web from anywhere, new forms of media such as video, and the emergence of blogs changing politics and publishing.

This rapid pace of innovation and scale presents many interesting research questions. At Google our goal is to organize information in ways that are useful to users, and we regularly find ourselves solving problems that seemed like ridiculous thought experiments just a few years ago. We therefore welcome the arrival of a new conference on Web Search and Data Mining, prosaically named with the acronym WSDM (pronounced as wisdom). WSDM is intended to be complementary to the World Wide Web Conference tracks in search and data mining. The soaring volume of submissions to these two tracks over the past few years justifies the foundation of a new top-tier conference on web search and mining. WSDM is a joint effort of researchers from the three large search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) as well as top-notch scientists from the Academia (such as Jon Kleinberg from Cornell, Rajeev Motwani from Stanford, and Monika Henzinger from Google and EPFL). The first WSDM conference will take place at Stanford University (the place where both Google and Yahoo! were conceived by their founders). The conference will be held in February of 2008, and the deadline for submissions is July 30, 2007. For further information see the WSDM web site. If you have good papers on search or data mining in the pipeline, please consider sending them to WSDM.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Videos of talks

Posted by Kevin McCurley, Research Team

We've recently launched a Google Research web site that we'll be updating to provide information about research activities at Google. Among other things, one thing you'll find there is the ability to search and view videos of talks at Google.

One of the best features of working at Google is the rich variety of talks that we can attend, both technical and general interest. Most of these are videotaped for later viewing. This has multiple benefits:

• In case of a scheduling conflict, Google employees may view talks at a later time (yes, some of us do have other things to do in the day).


• Talks are available for viewing by Google employees at other sites. This provides us with a much more cohesive intellectual culture than most global companies.


• When appropriate, speakers may opt to have their talks available on the World Wide Web. This provides a benefit to both viewers and speakers, since it allows speakers to reach a much broader audience, and it allows viewers to hear interesting talks without the need to be
  physically present.
  

The World Wide Web started out as a means for scientists to communicate among themselves. In the early days it provided a less formal and timely means of distributing information than archival refereed publications, and it's now routine for a scientist to have a home page from which they distribute their writings and thoughts. Moreover, it's also now commonplace to find a large fraction of current scientific literature through the web, both refereed and unrefereed. In fact, the situation has evolved to the point where scientists often consult the web for publications before going to a library.

Archival publications are but one means of communication that has typically been used by scientists. Another mode of communication that has a long history of use is the presentation of talks at meetings and during visits to other institutions. Oral presentations have historically been less formal, and allow the speaker to be more speculative and interactive.

In the last few years, several technological developments have made it possible to distribute high quality video of talks on the web in addition to written publications. This distribution of videos from talks holds the promise of changing the way that scientists think about communication. Imagine what lessons would be available to us if we had the ability to view lectures by Kepler, Einstein, Turing, Shannon, or von Neumann! Imagine also what it would be like to be able to watch and listen to selected talks from conferences that are across the world, without having to suffer the burden of traveling to the remote location. Such media are unlikely to ever completely supplant the richness of communication that arises from personal interaction in physical proximity, but it will probably still change scientific communication as much as email and the web have already.

Seattle conference on scalability

Posted by Amanda Camp, Software Engineer

We care a lot about scalability at Google. An algorithm that works only on a small scale doesn't cut it when we are talking global access, millions of people, millions of search queries. We think big and love to talk about big ideas, so we're planning our first ever conference on scalable systems. It will take place on June 23 at our Seattle office. Our goal: to create a collegial atmosphere for participants to brainstorm different ways to build the robust systems that can handle, literally, a world of information.

If you have a great new idea for handling a growing system or an innovative approach to scalability, we want to hear from you. Send a short note about who you are and a description of your 45-minute talk in 500 words or less to scalabilityconf@google.com by Friday, April 20.

With your help, we can create an exciting event that brings together great people and ideas. (And by the way, we'll bring the food.) If you'd like to attend but not speak, we'll post registration details later.

Hear, here. A Sample of Audio Processing at Google.

Posted by Shumeet Baluja, Michele Covell, Pedro Moreno & Eugene Weinstein

Text isn't the only source of information on the web! We've been working on a variety of projects related to audio and visual recognition. One of the fundamental constraints that we have in designing systems at Google is the huge amounts of data that we need to process rapdily. A few of the research papers that have come out of this work are shown here.

In the first pair of papers, to be presented at the 2007 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Waveprint Overview, Waveprint-for-Known-Audio), we show how computer vision processing techniques, combined with large-scale data stream processing, can create an efficient system for recognizing audio that has been degraded by various means such as cell phone playback, lossy compression, echoes, time-dilation (as found on the radio), competing noise, etc.

It is also fun and surprising to see how often in research the same problem can be approached from a completely different perspective. In the third paper to be presented at ICASSP-2007 (Music Identification with WFST) we explore how acoustic modeling techniques commonly used in speech recognition, and finite state transducers used to represent and search large graphs, can be used in the problem of music identification. Our approach learns a common alphabet of music sounds (which we call music-phones) and represents large song collections as a big graph where efficient search is possible.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of audio recognition goes beyond the matching of degraded signals, and instead attempts to capture meaningful notions of similarity. In our paper presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Music Similarity), we describe a system that learns relevant similarities in music signals, while maintaining efficiency by using these learned models to create customized hashing functions.

We're extending these pieces of work in a variety of ways, not only in the learning algorithms used, but also the application areas. If you're interested in joining google research and working on these projects, be sure to drop us a line.

Google Research Picks for Videos of the Year

Posted by Peter Norvig

Everyone else is giving you year-end top ten lists of their favorite movies, so we thought we'd give you ours, but we're skipping Cars and The Da Vinci Code and giving you autonomous cars and open source code. Our top twenty (we couldn't stop at ten):

1. Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge: Sebastian Thrun stars in the heartwarming drama of a little car that could.
   
2. The Graphing Calculator Story: A thriller starring Ron Avitzur as the engineer who snuck into the Apple campus to write code.
   
3. Should Google Go Nuclear?: Robert Bussard (former Asst. Director of the AEC) talks about inertial electrostatic fusion.
   
4. A New Way to Look at Networking: Van Jacobson as the old pro discovering that the old problems have not gone away.
   
5. Python 3000: Guido van Rossum always looks on the bright side of life in this epic look at the future of Python.
   
6. How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Daniel Wilson stars in this sci-fi horror story.
   
7. The New "Bill of Rights of Information Society": Raj Reddy talks about how to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
   
8. Practical Common Lisp: In this foreign film, Peter Seibel introduces the audience to a new language. Subtitles in parentheses.
   
9. Debugging Backwards in Time: Starring Bil Lewis in this sequel to Back to the Future.
   
10. Building Large Systems at Google: Narayanan Shivakumar takes us behind the scenes to see how Google builds large distributed systems. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but without the Oompa-Loompas.
    
11. The Science and Art of User Experience at Google: Jen Fitzpatrick continues the behind-the-scenes look.
    
12. Universally Accessible Demands Accessibility for All of Humanity: McArthur "Genius Award" Fellow Jim Fruchterman talks about accessibility for the blind and others.
    
13. DNA and the Brain: Nobel Laureate James Watson explains how the key to understanding the brain is in our genes.
    
14. Steve Wozniak: This one-man show is playing to boffo reviews.
    
15. Jane Goodall: The celebrated primatologist discusses her mission to empower individuals to improve the environment.
    
16. Computers Versus Common Sense: Doug Lenat reprises his role as the teacher trying to get computers to understand.
    
17. The Google Story: David Vise talks about his book on Google.
    
18. The Search: John Battelle talks about his book on Google.
    
19. The Archimedes Palimpsest: Like Da Vinci Code, only true.
    
20. The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less: With Barry Schwartz. Hmm, maybe I should have made this a top three list?
    

CSCW 2006: Collaborative editing 20 years later

Posted by Lilly Irani & Jens Riegelsberger, User Experience team

9am Mountain View, California. 6pm Zurich, Switzerland. The two of us sit separated by thousands miles, telephones tucked under our ears, talking about this blog post and typing words and edits into Google Docs. As we talk about the title, we start typing into the same paragraph -- and Lilly gets a warning: "You've edited a paragraph that Jens has been editing!" Lilly stops typing so she doesn't lose her thoughts and coordinates with Jens over the phone. Then we realize "We just talked about this problem at the conference we're writing about!"

Two weeks ago four Googlers ventured north to attend ACM CSCW in Banff, Alberta, Canada. CSCW is ACM's conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and brings together computer scientists, social scientists, and designers interested in how people live their lives -- at work, at play, and in between -- with and around technology, with a focus on undestanding the design of technological systems. Topics like issues and implementation of collaborative editing are staples at CSCW.

As this year was the conference's 20th anniversary, we had a chance to hear from many of the founders of CSCW: Irene Greif, Jonathan Grudin, Tom Malone, Judy Olson, Lucy Suchman, among others. Not surprisingly, the mood was introspective, with many speakers tracing the impact of the community over time and looking critically and constructively at the future paths the research community might take. Many sessions focused on less traditional areas of research, such as how Facebook figures into college students' school transitions and how tagging vocabularies evolve and are shaped by technology in a movie community. Jens also gave a talk on his pre-Google research on how photos and voice profiles affect people's choice of gaming partners. And he participated in a workshop exploring how people trust -- and learn to trust -- in online environments.

Apart from actively taking part in the debates and Q&As, we also demo-ed Google's tools for getting things done, collaboratively or solo: Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Notebook. These were met with much interest, as these publicly available Google tools build on insights gained in the CSCW field over the last 20 years.

If you're interested in these issues, you'd be a great addition to our team. Learn about available positions in user experience research and design.