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Google Opens Voting on Ideas to Change the World

sparky3887 — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:00:45 +0000

Google’s Project 10 to the 100th–a contest celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary–asked participants in September 2008 to submit ideas that could help change the world. Google is giving the five winners a collective $10 million to fund their projects. However, because there were more than 150,000 submissions, Google is still deliberating between 16 newly-released finalists. Google says there were many similar ideas, so the 16 finalists are idea themes rather than specific submissions. Google has posted the finalists and is asking users to vote on their favorites over the next two weeks. Their input will be considered when the five winners are selected two weeks from now. Once the winners are picked, Google will ask the individuals and teams to put together project proposals. Ideas include new public transportation technology, a news service updated by regular computer users, a genocide tracking system, and a natural crisis monitoring system. “We hoped to capture the imagination of people around the world and offer a way to bring their best ideas to fruition,” the Google Project 10^100 Team wrote in a blog post. “We were overwhelmed by the response. It took more than 3,000 Googlers in offices around the world to review the submissions.”

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Google PageRank-Like Algorithm Dates Back to 1941

sparky3887 — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:37:45 +0000

Iterative ranking methods predate Google’s PageRank algorithm for ranking the importance of Web pages by nearly 60 years, according to “PageRank: Stand on the shoulders of giants,” a new study by University of Udine computer scientist Massimo Franceschet. He says economist Wassily W. Leontief discussed an iterative method for ranking industries in a 1941 paper, and Leontief would receive the Nobel Prize for economics for his research in this area in 1973. In 1965, sociologist Charles Hubbell published an iterative method for ranking people, and scientists Gabriel Pinski and Francis Narin used a circular approach for ranking journals in 1976. In their own paper, Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page referenced Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg, who developed the Hypertext Induced Topic Search algorithm for optimizing Web information retrieval. Google’s search engine brings a “popularity contest” style to determining the quality of an item, which has created a debate in academic circles about the evaluation of research papers. “Expert evaluation, the judgment given by peer experts, is intrinsic, subjective, deep, slow and expensive,” Franceschet writes. “By contract, network evaluation, the assessment gauged [by] exploiting network topology, is extrinsic, democratic, superficial, fast and low-cost.”

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Hillary Clinton Calls for Web Freedom, Demands China Investigate Google Attack

sparky3887 — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:42:28 +0000

In a sweeping Internet freedom speech, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a global Internet free of censorship in response to claims that hackers targeted Chinese human rights activists’ Google accounts. The U.S. State Department has sent a formal request to the Chinese government asking for a review of the claims. Clinton also called for all nations to work together to punish cyberattacks aimed at silencing citizens and disrupting businesses. “Countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation,” Clinton says. The rise in social networking has led some countries such as Iran, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Tunisia, to try to block online traffic. The United States will push to preserve the ability of everyone to communicate freely over the Web, Clinton says. The State Department also plans to work with non-government organizations and technology companies on solutions to the problem of Internet censorship abroad.

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Google Threatens to Leave China After Attacks on Activists’ E-mail

sparky3887 — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:48:42 +0000

Google has threatened to withdraw from China following a computer network attack targeting its email service and corporate infrastructure. Google claimed to have proof suggesting that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” while noting that at least 20 other large firms have been targeted by similar attacks. U.S. officials have avoided leveling a public charge against China for the attacks because it is difficult to determine the assault’s origins with certainty. Google chief legal officer David Drummond says the hacks drove the company to “review the feasibility” of its Chinese operations, while realizing that this could entail the shutdown of Google.cn and Google’s China offices. He also says that Google has elected to halt its censoring of search results on Chinese Google sites, and over the next few weeks the company will engage in discussions with China on the possibility of running “an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.” Center for Democracy and Technology president Leslie Harris lauds Google’s move, saying the company “has taken a bold and difficult step for Internet freedom in support of fundamental human rights.”

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Google Invites Users to Join Wave

sparky3887 — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:24:06 +0000

Google developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen have released a limited preview of an open source messenger called Wave. Users must be invited to test the application, but can then send five more invitations to friends. Wave conversations can be edited like Wikipedia Web pages, with a log tracking who has made what alterations and when. Google Wave also allows real-time typing, meaning that users can watch friends’ on-screen messages appear letter by letter. One can answer a question before it is finished, says Lars Rasmussen. The Google team is designing an option to turn this feature off for users who do not want it. Other options include easy image-sharing, game applications, and the ability to read conversations even after signing off. All Google developers now use Wave to create design documents. Internet Explorer does not support Wave on its own, but users can download the add-on Chrome Frame to run the program, which is written in HTML 5 code. One million people have asked to be invited to use the program, and Wave will be open to everyone at the beginning of 2010. “I have been accused of being pathologically optimistic about it, but I can’t see why people wouldn’t want it,” says Rasmussen.

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Google Releases News-Reading Service

sparky3887 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:35:59 +0000

Google Fast Flip is a new service designed to make it easier for users to read newspaper and magazine articles by facilitating the viewing of articles from dozens of major publishers. Readers can flip through the articles as rapidly as they would the pages of a magazine. “Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” notes Google researcher Krishna Bharat. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.” Fast Flip first manifests itself as a cluster of images of articles Google has compiled from the sites of its partners, displayed side by side and ranked by popularity. The article images are stripped down for fast loading, and readers can zoom into a particular section, publication, or article, as well as go directly to the publisher’s Web site by clicking on the article. Bharat says Fast Flip will use many Web features, and rank articles based on a combination of Google algorithms and user behavior. Google plans to place display ads alongside the stories and split the resulting revenue with publishers.

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Google Explores ‘Eyes-Free’ Phones

sparky3887 — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:41:48 +0000

Google engineers are experimenting with interfaces for Android mobile phones that can be operated without any visual attention. At the Google I/O annual developer’s conference, research scientist T.V. Raman demonstrated an adaptive, circular interface for phones that provides audio and tactile feedback. Raman says Google is building a user interface that goes beyond the screen. Eyes-free interfaces are often used for blind users, but Raman says these interfaces could have far greater applications. Some mobile phones already support vibrational feedback, but most devices require significant visual attention. The Android platform already supports vibrational and audio feedback, and at the conference Raman and a colleague demonstrated that an eyes-free alternative could be added to almost any Android application using only a few lines of code. Raman says a problem with most graphical user interfaces is that the buttons are in a fixed location, which is inconvenient if the user cannot feel them. To solve this problem, Raman’s interface appears wherever the user’s finger touches the screen, centering the keypad on that location. The phone vibrates as the finger moves from number to number, and when the finger is lifted a computerized voice repeats the number. Raman says consumer feedback is needed to make eyes-free interfaces more useful, and says software that anticipates the user’s intent would be one improvement.

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Tongue in Check

sparky3887 — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:15:41 +0000

The growth of the Web has facilitated a revolution in translation technologies that are primarily based not on language rules but on vast volumes of text translated by humans into different languages. For example, Google’s Translate project can instantaneously translate text among 41 languages. Google research director Peter Norvig’s vision for Google Translate is to make billions of routine pages more accessible to ordinary people. Norvig says that running a newspaper article through Translate allows the readers to get the gist of the article, although he adds that “it will be very rare that you think a native speaker did the translation.” He foresees the inevitable advent of cell phones that translate conversation, and in November Google unveiled an application to search on any topic by talking into an iPhone. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is testing a universal translator that converts spoken English words into native tongues, and vice versa. It is the agency’s goal to equip each U.S. soldier with an affordable iPod-size interpreter via its Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) project. TRANSTAC program manager Mari Maeda wants the devices to be networked so that if one soldier spots an error in translation, all the devices will learn. Carnegie Mellon University’s Alex Waibel says that translation by machines–even highly accurate translation–is complicated by the fact that most people speak broken English, while speaker/listener bias can add to the difficulty of understanding the machine’s translation.

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Web Tool ‘as Important as Google

sparky3887 — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:45:58 +0000

Physicist Stephen Wolfram says the goal of his free Wolfram Alpha program, which will be available to the public starting in the middle of May, is to “make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.” Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine was recently demonstrated at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It is designed to answer questions directly instead of retrieving Web pages in response to queries. Wolfram Alpha employs natural language processing to enable the use of normal, spoken language queries by users, and Wolfram says the program has addressed many of the challenges of interpreting people’s questions. The program computes many answers on the fly by capturing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds. Wolfram says that trillions of pieces of data were selected and managed by a team of experts at Wolfram Research, and that these experts also tweak the information to ensure that it can be read and displayed by the system. He says the system has become proficient at eliminating “linguistic fluff,” or words that are unnecessary for the location and computation of relevant data. This statement disappointed Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is head of the Start natural language processing project. “I believe [Wolfram] is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organizes concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing,” Katz says.

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Researchers: Databases Still Beat Google’s MapReduce

sparky3887 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:34:02 +0000

Parallel SQL databases perform up to 6.5 times faster than Google’s MapReduce data-crunching technology, concludes a new research paper by Microsoft technical fellow David DeWitt and Vertica Systems chief technology officer Michael Stonebraker. The paper, “A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis,” will be published by ACM in the June 29-July 2 issue of the SIGMOD Record. Google developed MapReduce to index the World Wide Web on its network of low-end PC servers, and as of January 2008 had used MapReduce to process 20 petabytes of data a day. Recent in-house tests, published in November, show that Google used MapReduce running on 1,000 servers to process 1TB of data in only 68 seconds. MapReduce and Hadoop, an open source version of the technology, have gained wide industry support. However, DeWitt and Stonebraker have argued that MapReduce lacks may important features available in databases, and was generally a “major step backward.” Their paper is expected to create controversy over the technical merits of each system. DeWitt and Stonebraker tested two 100-node parallel, “shared-nothing” database clusters against a similarly configured MapReduce cluster of the same size. The researchers found that databases were significantly faster and required less code to implement each task, though databases did take longer to tune and load the data. The researchers also note that MapReduce requires developers to write features or perform tasks manually that can be done automatically by most SQL databases.

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