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Congratulations to three Googlers elected ACM Fellows
8 грудня 2011 р.
It gives me great pleasure to share that the
Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM) has
announced
that three Googlers have been elected ACM Fellows in 2011. The ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and the Fellows Program celebrates the exceptional contributions of leaders in the computing field. This year the society has selected
Amit Singhal
,
Peter S. Magnusson
and
Amin Vahdat
for their outstanding work, which has provided fundamental knowledge to the field.
The recently-named Fellows join 14
prior Googler ACM Fellows
and other professional society honorees in exemplifying our extraordinarily talented people. On behalf of Google, I congratulate our colleagues. They embody Google’s commitment to innovation with impact, and I hope that they’ll serve as inspiration to students as well as the broader community of computer scientists.
You can read more detailed summaries of their achievements below, including the official citations from the ACM.
Dr. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow
For contributions to search and information retrieval
Since 2000, Dr. Amit Singhal has been pioneering search as the technical lead for Google's core search algorithms. He is credited with most of the information retrieval design decisions in Google Search – a massive system that has responded to hundreds of billions of queries. More than anyone, Amit has a deep understanding of Google’s entire algorithmic system. He is responsible for prioritization and has overseen the development of numerous algorithmic signals and their progression over time. He is the clear thought and managerial leader who has led critically important initiatives at the company. Among many other things, Amit catalyzed Universal Search, which returns multi-modal results from all available corpora; he was the force behind Realtime Search, which returns results from dynamic corpora with low latency; and he championed Google Instant, which returns search results as the user types.
Prior to joining Google, Amit boasted a prolific publication record averaging 5 publications/year from 1996-9 while at AT&T Labs. Since that time, you could say Google Search has been one long, sustained publication demonstrating a constant advancement in the state of the art of information retrieval.
Peter S. Magnusson, Engineering Director
For contributions to full-system simulation
Peter has made a tremendous impact by driving full-system simulation. His approach was so advanced, it can be used in real world production of commercial CPUs and prototyping of system software. Starting in 1991, Peter began to challenge the notion that simulators could not be made fast enough to run large workloads, nor accurate enough to run commercial operating systems. His innovations in simulator design culminated in Simics, the first academic simulator that could boot and run commercial multiprocessor workloads. Simics saw huge academic success and has been used to run simulations for research presented in several hundred subsequent publications.
Peter founded Virtutech in 1998 to commercially develop Simics, and he ultimately forged and became the leader in a new market segment for software tools. With Peter at the helm, Virtutech pushed Simics beyond several performance barriers to make it the first simulator to exceed 1 billion instructions per second and the first simulator to model over 1,000 processors. Peter joined Google in 2010 to work with cloud computing.
Dr. Amin Vahdat, Principal Engineer
For contributions to data center scalability and management
Amin’s work made an impact at Google long before he arrived here. Amin is known for conducting research through bold, visionary projects that combine creativity with careful consideration of the engineering constraints needed to make them applicable in real world applications. Amin’s infrastructure ideas have underpinned the shift in the computing field from the pure client-server paradigm to a landscape in which major web services are hosted “in the cloud” across multiple data centers. In addition to pioneering “third-party cloud computing” through his work on WebOS and Rent-A-Server in the mid-90s, Amin has made important advancements in managing wide-area consistency between data centers, scalable modeling of data center applications, and building scalable data center networks.
Amin’s innovations have penetrated and broadly influenced the networking community within academia and industry, including Google, and his research has been recapitulated and expanded upon in a number of publications. Conferences that formerly did not even cover data centers now have multiple sessions covering variants of what Amin and his team have proposed. At Google, Amin continues to drive next-generation data center infrastructure focusing on Software Defined Networking and new opportunities from optical technologies. This is emblematic of Amin’s ability to build real systems, and perhaps more significantly, convince people of their value.
Posted by Alfred Spector, Google Research
Atmosphere 2011: A view from the cloud
7 грудня 2011 р.
Last month 350 CIOs and thousands of live stream viewers joined us for
Atmosphere 2011
, our annual cloud event. Leading companies from around the world came to explore how businesses are using the web to drive collaboration, innovation and growth in their organizations. In case you missed them, the keynotes are now available on our
YouTube channel
. You can watch the entire conference in order on the
Atmosphere playlist
.
This year’s speakers included a best-selling author, award-winning computer scientists, Google executives and product managers, and several
Google Apps
customers including Flint Waters, CIO of the state of
Wyoming
, Bryson Koehler, SVP of Global Revenue and Guest Technology at IHG, Michael O’Brien, CIO of
Journal Communications
and Christine Atkins, VP of Group IT at Ahold.
One of the highlights was listening to Christine Atkins talk about Ahold’s experience moving 55,000 users to Google Apps and how, in her words, “Google Apps is helping us deliver on the promise that we've all been seeking: that of strong collaboration platforms that help our company come together and work together.” You can watch Christine’s presentation here:
Posted by Chris Farinacci, Global Marketing Director, Google Enterprise
Saluting Europe’s eTowns
7 грудня 2011 р.
It’s often assumed that big cities benefit the most from the Internet, but we believe the net offers giant opportunities to everyone from urbanites to small town residents, farmers and nature lovers in the far-flung countryside. We recently tested this thesis in our first-ever European
Google eTown awards
, which recognize those areas that had most embraced the web’s potential over the last year.
The results were fascinating—and surprising. Smaller, quirky and plucky towns came out ahead.
Scunthorpe
, a steel town in the north of England, topped the U.K.’s list.
Caen
, a town in rural Normandy not far from the D-Day beaches and famed as the home of camembert cheese, came first in France.
Salerno
, nestled between the Amalfi and the Cilento Coast led the way in Italy and
Elbląg
, a remote northern town located in the region of 1,000 lakes won in Poland. In all four participating countries, eTown lists included towns of all sizes.
How did we determine our eTown awards? We broke down the U.K., France, Italy and Poland into all of their thousands of towns and then ranked local areas according to the growth in small businesses using AdWords over the last year. The top towns in each country won Google eTown awards.
The results back up recent research identifying the Internet as a main force driving growth throughout Europe. For example, a recent McKinsey report
Internet Matters
states that 2.6 Internet jobs are created globally for every job destroyed. Separately, the Boston Consulting Group estimates that by 2015 the web will account for 7.3 percent of Denmark’s GDP, 10 percent of the U.K.’s GDP and 5.5 percent of France’s GDP. The net drives growth of both big and small businesses—indeed another BCG report called “
Turning Local
” (PDF) makes clear that small businesses with a website grow faster than businesses without a web presence.
We’ve seen this ourselves, in the businesses of all shapes and sizes that we encountered as part of our eTown awards. An entrepreneur in
Hartlepool
in the U.K. sells golf balls online. A Polish programmer runs a data recovery business from
Piaseczno
. An plumber directs a
heating systems
company from Vicenza, Italy and a French retailer has reached new scooter customers online in
Reims
. Online advertising has helped them grow and reach more customers than ever before. When it comes to the Internet, our eTown awards show that anybody, almost anywhere, can boost a business by going online.
Posted by Ben Novick, European Communications Manager
Show your love for charities on Google+ this holiday season
7 грудня 2011 р.
We’ve been thrilled to see the ways nonprofit organizations use Google+ to raise awareness about their work, as well as the ways people connect with causes on Google+. In the past couple days, several entertainers have helped start a movement for this holiday season, drawing attention to their favorite charities on Google+ using the phrase
#CauseILoveEm
and creatively showing their followers what they love about these nonprofit organizations.
+Russell Brand
is asking fans to volunteer for two hours of charity work at
+Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles
,
+Los Angeles Animal Alliance
or one of four other local L.A. charities. In exchange, he and Sarah Silverman will give fans two hours of live comedy.
+Usher
and student participants in his New Look Leadership Academy asked people to do an international act of kindness and post descriptions of their acts including photos and videos as comments on
+Usher's New Look Foundation
. The acts with the most "+1"s will be re-posted by Usher and highlighted on the
New Look Foundation website
.
+Linkin Park
posted a new video asking people to spread about the word about
+Music For Relief
and their new
Power the World Give Light
campaign, which encourages people to donate to provide solar-powered light bulbs for families in Haiti without electricity. People who share
their website
online and drive the most clicks will be eligible to win prizes.
+Dolly Parton
and
+Dolly Parton's Imagination Library
, her early child literacy program that provides 700,000+ free books every month, are sharing
Champion Spotlight
stories about their community leaders and posting the 20 most inspiring
Imagination Moments
submitted by families who have benefited from this gift of reading.
Co-founder
+Hugh Jackman
and
+Laughing Man
Coffee & Tea asked people to share photos of themselves with Laughing Man's fair trade products (the profits of which go to charity) and to sound off on living their motto, "All Be Happy," using #CauseILoveEm to be included in a thank you photo album.
+Find Your Light Foundation
and
+Josh Groban
announced the
Fulfill-a-Wish
campaign, spotlighting the needs of nonprofit arts organizations from across North America in videos and posts, and asking for your help fulfilling these holiday wishes.
We hope you’ll join these folks and lots of others in the Google+ community who have already started sharing their favorite nonprofits this holiday season. Say which nonprofit you like and what you like about them in a public post using the phrase
#CauseILoveEm
and mentioning the nonprofit’s Google+ page by typing “+” and the nonprofit’s name. Be creative and post videos, images and stories that will convince others to love them too. Through the end of December on our
+Google for Nonprofits
page, we’ll re-share great examples of the ways people are recognizing their favorite nonprofits and highlight some nonprofits with which you might want to connect.
If the nonprofit you care about most isn’t yet on Google+, be sure to let them know about our
Google+ for Nonprofit community page
that they can use to get started and learn more. Thanks in advance for caring about these organizations and doing something small to help them grow and achieve their goals during the holiday season.
Posted by Mimi Kravetz, Google.org, Senior Product Marketing Manager
10 Billion Android Market downloads and counting
6 грудня 2011 р.
One billion is a pretty big number by any measurement. However, when it’s describing the
speed
at which something is growing, it’s simply amazing. This past weekend, thanks to Android users around the world,
Android Market
exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads
per month
. We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012.
To celebrate this milestone, we partnered with some of the Android developers who contributed to this milestone to make a bunch of great Android apps available at an amazing price. Starting today for the next 10 days, we’ll have a new set of awesome apps available each day for only
10 cents each
. Today, we are starting with
Asphalt 6 HD
,
Color & Draw for Kids
,
Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro
,
Fieldrunners HD
,
Great Little War Game
,
Minecraft
,
Paper Camera
,
Sketchbook Mobile
,
Soundhound Infinity
and
SwiftKey X
.
Of course, none of these apps would have existed if it weren’t for the developers who created them. Every day, these developers continue to push the limits on what’s possible and delight us in the process. For that, we thank them.
Please join us in this 10-day celebration and check in every day to see what new apps our developer partners are making available on
Android Market
—for only a dime.
Posted by Eric Chu, Director, Android Developer Ecosystem
(Cross-posted on the
Mobile blog
and the
Android Developers blog
)
Inaugurating our new French headquarters
6 грудня 2011 р.
Last year, our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt promised to open a research and development and culture centre in France. Today, Eric returned to Paris to inaugurate our new 10,000-square meter office in a refurbished
19th century Second Empire building
near the St. Lazare Train Station.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy honored us with his presence. “Why as President, do I make this symbolic move and come to Google?" he asked rhetorically to a packed courtyard auditorium. “I love the United States, and its motto that everything is possible whatever your origins.” President Sarkozy also officially launched the
Elysee Palace’s YouTube channel
and his visit was shown on
YouTube Live
, the section of the site where we list all live streamed events.
The President participated in a Google+ Hangout, taking questions from French-speaking Googlers around the world. (“What time is it there?” he asked someone dialing in from California.) On a serious note, he expressed his gratification for how Google has moved to dig deep roots in France. “When I first met Eric, we had a frank conversation,” he recalled, saying his message was clear. “I asked him how long Google was preparing to make money in France without investing here. I told him that Google must have its feet in France.”
Our new Paris office is emblematic of our commitment to one of Europe’s fastest-growing Internet economies. According to a recent McKinsey study that we helped sponsor, the web contributed to 3.2 percent of the French GDP in 2009 and created more than 700,000 jobs during the past 15 years. Between now and 2015, McKinsey estimates that the digital contribution will grow to 5.5 percent of GDP, and 450,000 additional jobs will be created. In order to help accelerate the French digital engine, we’ve launched a
Startup Café
, an online platform offering information and tools.
Our investment plan for France is ambitious, and extends far beyond buildings. We’re expanding our engineering presence to take advantage of France’s strong engineering talent pool and are making significant academic investments, including a partnership with the French national research center
CNRS
.
France is a global cultural leader and we’re working hard to partner with French writers, filmmakers and musicians. Over the past year, we've reached an agreement with the biggest French publisher Hachette to scan and sell digital versions of out-of-print books and are providing payment systems for French news publishers from Hachette. YouTube has signed royalty-collection agreements with music copyright societies and our new Cultural Institute will be located in the Paris headquarters. It will aim at driving innovation in cultural preservation, creation and access, not just in France, but across the world.
Just before the President left, he asked to say a few final words. He praised our “dynamism” and wished well our expanded operations, before making a parting promise. “I hope this inauguration is one of a long series,” he said. “If you invite me to another building opening, I will come.”
Posted by Anne-Gabrielle Dauba Pantanacce, Head of Communications, France
(Cross-posted from the
European Public Policy Blog
)
Gravity Games highlight future scientists and engineers
5 грудня 2011 р.
The Google data center in
Caldwell County, NC
lies close to the birthplace of
NASCAR
and any visitor can tell—even our data center is decked out in NASCAR paraphernalia and pretty much everyone is a NASCAR fan. When we learned that many competitive drivers got their first start behind the wheel in
soapbox cars
, we put two and two together and thought there would be no better way to get local students excited about science and engineering than by giving them a chance to build and race a soapbox car in the first ever Western North Carolina Gravity Games Soapbox Races.
We teamed up with
Appalachian State University
(ASU) to co-host a soapbox race, hoping that young people would bring the same excitement they had for NASCAR to this hands-on engineering activity and gain some technological ingenuity along the way. The race was divided into three divisions: middle school, high school and an open group for university, corporate or private teams. Each car would compete for both speed and creativity honors. During the months leading up to the event, ASU’s physics, technology and design graduate students and Googlers from the data center in Caldwell County served as mentors for the teams and provided the students with technical assistance and advice.
On November 19, I joined a team of Googlers from the data center and several hundred parents, kids and their derby cars in downtown Lenoir for the race. While most families were still in their PJs, we were busy transforming Church Street into a race track—complete with hay bales, a custom-built starting gate, finish line, a race timer designed by the team at the data center, an event emcee and 34 colorful soapbox cars. Some even had sponsor logos, just like real race cars.
Teams from Alleghany, Avery, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba and Watauga counties competed to be the fastest car on the hill and the kids had an “in-it-to-win-it” swagger. Some had designed their own custom T-shirts, while one driver dressed up in a Super Mario costume. One team created a box-turtle car made from metal and wood and there were several cars with custom paint jobs that included bright red flames and a few bug eyes.
The vehicles had to run solely on potential energy. No electrical, chemical or animal-powered sources were allowed. (Because you never know what kids are capable of, we forbade nuclear power in the rules, too, just in case.) The only thing cars could run on was gravity and—for the upper age divisions—potential mechanical energy, such as springs, weights, elastic or
flywheels
. Most of the teams stuck with gravity as the primary accelerator and focused on reducing friction, optimizing vehicle weight and selecting the fastest path down the race course.
The Church Street race track was 650 feet long, and the average speed over the course of the track was 17 miles per hour. Top speeds at the finish line topped 30 miles per hour, and our
winners
clocked in with total times around 26 seconds.
With a time of 26.213 seconds, Hudson Middle School won the speed category in the middle school division, beating 22 other teams. Caldwell Career Middle College won the speed category in the high school division, defeating seven other high school teams with a time of 26.962. Hudson Middle School also won the People’s Choice Award, given to the car the attendees voted as their overall favorite. Each team entered a car that was either custom-built or was created from an approved kit.
In the creativity category, Jacobs Fork Middle School and St. Stephens High School took home top honors. In the open division, ASU’s North Carolina Center for Engineering Technologies won for its two-bicycle design.
The Gravity Games was one of my proudest moments as a Googler. Beyond being a great time, it gave young people a way to get excited about science, technology and engineering. The students who participated in the soapbox races are future engineers and scientists (and possibly Googlers), and I hope they’ll have more opportunities to inspire their peers and this community with the incredible abilities we saw that morning.
Naturally, we’re already planning to host another Western North Carolina Gravity Games in the spring of 2012 and we’ll be including more North Carolina communities. You can view the complete results and event photos at
www.ncgravitygames.com
.
Posted by Enoch Moeller, Hardware Operations Manager
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