1. Cross-posted from the Official Open-Source at Google Blog.


    Today marks the start of the 2011 Google Summer of Code student application period.

    Google Summer of Code is a global program where university students are given a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

    Google Summer of Code is a highly competitive program with a limited number of students being accepted. We are pleased to announce that this year we have enlarged the program so that we can accept as many as 150 additional students. We hope all interested students will apply!

    Now it is time for the students to submit their proposals to the accepted mentoring organizations via the Google Summer of Code program website from today through Friday, April 8th 19:00 UTCFor the past 10 days students have had the opportunity to review the Ideas pages for this year’s 175 accepted projects and to research which projects they would like to contribute to for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

    Every year we have thousands of students who apply for the Google Summer of Code program but due to the limited number of slots many students are not able to be a part of the program. The quality of your proposal is what will make you stand out from your peers. Students should consult the Google Summer of Code student manual for suggestions on how to write a proposal that will grab the attention of the mentoring organizations. Multiple proposals are allowed but we highly recommend focusing on quality over quantity. The mentoring organizations have many proposals to review, so it is important to follow each organization’s specific guidelines or templates and we advise you to submit your proposal early so you can receive timely feedback.

    For more tips, see a list of some helpful dos and don’ts for successful student participation written by a group of experienced Google Summer of Code administrators, our user’s guide for the program site, Frequently Asked Questions and timeline. You can also stay up-to-date on all things Google Summer of Code on our Google Open Source blogmailing lists or on IRC at #gsoc on Freenode.

    Good luck students and remember to submit your proposals early–you only have until April 8!

    By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs Office

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  2. Hello WWW 2011 attendees

    Global members of our technical team, from New York to Tel Aviv, are in Hyderabad this week for the World Wide Web 2011 conference to demonstrate our commitment to advancing the state of the web.

    You can follow what Google is doing during WWW week on Twitter via messages with hashtag: #googlewww11. Googlers are engaged across all areas of the WWW technical program, covering topics like Milgram-routing within social networks and a context-sensitive query auto completion algorithm. Follow along as we chirp about the big challenges we’re tackling.
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  3. (Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)

    Like the rest of the world, we’ve been transfixed by the images and news coming out of the northeastern part of Japan over the past six days. Our hearts go out to those who have been affected by this devastation and we’re deeply grateful to those who are working to keep us safe. In the meantime, Googlers in Japan and elsewhere around the world have been working around the clock to try and help improve the flow of information. Here are some of the recent developments we’ve been working on:

    Centralized information
    Our Crisis Response page—now in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean—organizes all of Google’s efforts, with links to valuable resources such as emergency hotlines, Person Finder, blackout schedules, maps and links to relief organizations receiving donations.Ninety-three percent of mobile users in Japan don’t have top-of-the-line smartphones, so we’ve recently optimized this Crisis Response page to make it more readable for a wider range of devices. You can also access that version by scanning this QR code:

    Person Finder
    Within the first two hours of the earthquake, we launched Person Finder so people can enter the names of those they’re looking for or have found. You can now also search byentering mobile phone numbers to see if they match any listings. And as with the Crisis Response page, Person Finder has also been optimized for those without smartphones. There are currently more than 250,000 records in the database (including names shared with us by NHK, the national broadcaster in Japan) and we’ve heard several reports of people who have found their loved ones safe.

    To help the many people in shelters get word of their whereabouts to loved ones, we’re also asking people in shelters to take photos of the handwritten lists of names of current residents and email them to us. Those photos are automatically uploaded to a publicPicasa Web Album. We use scanning technology to help us manually add these names to Person Finder; but it’s a big job that can’t be done automatically by computers alone, so we welcome volunteers with Japanese language skills who want to help out.

    Satellite images
    We’re also working with our satellite partners GeoEye and DigitalGlobe to provide frequent updates to our imagery of the hardest-hit areas to first responders as well as the general public. You can view this imagery in this Google Earth KML, browse it online through Google Maps or look through our Picasa album of before-and-after images of such places as Minamisanriku and Kesennuma.

    Mapping
    You can follow developments on the ground by looking at several maps that track changing developments. We’ve mapped rolling blackouts for areas that are affected by power outages. With data given to us by Honda, you can now see which roads have been recently passable on this map or this user-made Google Earth mashup with new satellite imagery. We’re also constantly updating a master map (in Japanese and English) with other data such as epicenter locations and evacuation shelters. And with information from the newspaper Mainichi, we’ve published a partial list of shelters.

    Translation
    Use Google Translate for Japanese and 56 other languages. You can paste in any text, or enter the address of any web page for automatic translation. We also just released an early experimental version of Google Translate for Android to help non-Japanese speakers in affected areas.

    Donations
    Visit our Crisis Response resource page to find opportunities to donate. When you donate to Japan relief efforts through Google Checkout, we absorb processing fees—so 100% of your money goes to the organizations. Google has also donated $250,000 to help the people of Japan recover.

    To keep up with the latest developments on our efforts in Japan, follow @googlejapan(tweets are mostly in Japanese) or @earthoutreach (for our mapping and imagery efforts) on Twitter.

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  4. As many of you may know, Python is one of the official languages here at Google. Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, is a Googler too—so naturally we’re thrilled to be supporting PyCon 2011 USA, the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. The PyCon conference days will be March 11th to the 13th, preceded by two tutorial days, March 9th and 10th. For those of you with coding in mind, the Sprints run afterwards from March 14th-17th. All-in-all that’s nine days of Python nirvana!!

    In addition to having many Googlers in attendance, some of us will be presenting as well.
    • On Wednesday, March 9th at 2 PM, I will be leading a Google App Engine tutorial with fellow teammate Ikai Lan. Tutorials have gotten so popular at PyCon, they’ve now been expanded into a two-day affair!

    • On Friday the 11th, the very first day of sessions, App Engine engineer Brett Slatkinwill kick things off with his talk, “Creating Complex Data Pipelines in the Cloud” using the new App Engine Pipeline API at 10:25 AM.

    • After lunch on Friday, I’ll take my Google hat off momentarily to discuss Python 3 in my talk subtitled “The Next Generation is Here Already” at 1:35 PM. It is mostly a repeat of the well-received talk I gave last year but with updates. The main point is to introduce folks to the next version of the language and discuss how its backwards-incompatibility will affect users, when users should port their apps to Python 3, what the differences from Python 2 are, etc. My job is to calm and soothe, dispelling any FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about Python 3.

    • On Saturday morning at 9:25 AM, Python creator, BDFL, and App Engine engineer Guido van Rossum will do his annual Q&A session for all conference attendees in a fireside chat session.

    • Later Saturday morning at 11:05 AM, I’m looking forward to speaking about “Running Django Apps on Google App Engine.” This is exciting for me, not only because it’s a relatively new topic, but it represents a major change for Django developers: being able to write Django apps that run on NoSQL or non-relational databases -- it’s been only RDBMSs all this time. Furthermore, with Django-nonrel, you can move Django projects/apps between traditional hosting and App Engine, helping to break that “vendor lock-in” issue that many have had concerns about when hosting apps in the cloud. A good part of my talk does focus on porting apps from App Engine to Django however.

    • Right after my talk, at 11:45 AM comes another famous Googler, author of Python in a Nutshell, co-editor of the Python Cookbook, and a long-time member of the Python community, Alex Martelli. Alex’s invited talk on “API Design anti-patterns” will be insightful and cerebral, sure to cause many future hallway discussions.

    • Late Saturday afternoon at 4:15 PM, Google engineer Augie Fackler will deliver his talk entitled, “HTTP in Python: which library for what task?” There are many libraries that do HTTP. Which ones should you use and when? What are the benefits and tradeoffs?

    • Finally, several members of the Google App Engine team, App Engine forum gurus, and experienced App Engine users are attending PyCon this year. I’m hoping to establish an OpenSpace session one of the conference evenings where we can meet other users, chat about best practices, and do some informal Q&A letting people ask anything they want (except “When will you support newer versions of Python?”). :-)
    You can find the entire PyCon schedule online. It’s interactive if you log-in, allowing you to bookmark sessions you’re interested in attending. This will be PyCon’s biggest year yet, so hopefully you can join us in Atlanta next week! Keep an eye out on the PyCon blog to get the latest news, and be sure to follow the Twitter hashtag (#pycon).

    We invite you to join Google team members at all our talks, plus stop by our booth to meet our technical staff as they demo select developer tools and APIs. We’ll have handouts there and also encourage you to try a short coding puzzle for a prize! 

    By Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Google Developer Relations team

    Cross-posted with the Open Source at Google Blog

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  5. For those of you who were quick to register for Google I/O, we thank you for continuing to support our developer initiatives--this year's I/O is slated to be one of our best yet. For the rest of our developers, we weren’t kidding when we told you we <3 our developers.

    Starting Wednesday, March 16, we will be launching Last Call for Google I/O: A contest that spans 10 days, 10 developer challenges and 100 chances to win tickets to attend the now-sold-out Google I/O 2011.

    Here’s how it works. We will announce a new challenge on the contest site on select dates at either 9am or 4pm PDT, that will last for 24 hours each. There will be 10 days of challenges with 10 winners on each day, spanning the following developer products:

    March 16 - Android, 9:00 am
    March 17 - Chrome, 9:00 am
    March 18 - App Engine, 9:00 am
    March 21 -  YouTube APIs, 9:00 am
    March 22 - Game Developers, 9:00 am
    March 23 - Google Maps / Geo, 4:00 pm
    March 24 - Commerce, 9:00 am
    March 25 - Developer Tools / GWT, 9:00 am
    March 28 - Accessibility, 4:00 pm
    March 29 - Google Apps / Enterprise, 4:00 pm

    Each of the challenges will focus on one of our developer products and has two rounds. Plan to be in front of your computers for the first half-hour that the challenge starts to complete a series of questions for Round I, which will qualify you for the main coding challenge in Round II. You will have a little over 20hrs to complete Round II.

    We want to make sure that we provide the opportunity to attend Google I/O to as many developers as possible and hope you’re feeling up to the task. The contest is valid in the 50 United States and the District of Columbia with winners being announced on April 4. And don’t forget that we will be livestreaming the keynotes and taping sessions during Google I/O. Stay tuned!

    For more information and contest rules, visit  https://sites.google.com/site/lastcallforio2011/Home



    Posted by Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering
    Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog
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  6. Due to the earthquake in Japan's Tohoku and Kanto regions, both qualifying and final rounds of Code Jam Japan have been postponed.  We will announce the contest dates at a later date, possibly May 2011 but to be decided. Our prayers are with those who have been affected by this tragedy. 

    Sincerely,

    Code Jam Japan Team

    Resources:

    Person Finder: 2011 Japan Earthquake

    今週末から予定されておりました Google Code Jam Japan 2011 ですが、東北地方太平洋沖地震の発生を受け、予選・決勝ともに日程を延期させて頂くことになりましたのでお知らせさせていただきます。

    改めた開催日時は追ってアナウンスいたしますが、5 月の開催を視野に入れています。
    被災された皆さまには心からお見舞い申し上げるとともに被災地の一日も早い復旧をお祈り申し上げます。

    Google Code Jam Japan 事務局

    Person Finder (消息情報): 2011 日本地震
    http://goo.gl/sagas

    災害に関する情報: 東北地方太平洋沖地震

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  7. Google invites people interested in Cloud Computing and Site Reliability Engineering to a Tech Talk at the Dublin office on March 24th. This will be followed by office tours in the new building and “unconferece” slots, where the invitees can give short spur-of-the-moment interactive talks. The space is limited and registration is required. 

    The Talk will be held in our brand new office in Grand Canal Plaza. In this office each floor has a different theme including a Library floor, a Music floor, a Relaxation floor, an Irish Pub and the Craggy Island Cafe; check out the pictures on the left.
    The key note speaker is John Looney. John runs Google's graduate programme for training Site Reliability Engineers. Previous to that, he spent five years looking after Google's Storage and Computer clusters, worked in web-hosting, SMS services, hardware design, and loves ancient tech like amigas and fighting with axes. We hope to see you there!

    Posted by Daniela Brica, People Operations, Zurich
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  8. Google Code Jam Japan is now open for registration! Code Jam is an annual programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time, using the programming language of their choice. This year, Googlers in the Tokyo office came up with a unique set of problems and prepared a fully internationalized contest UI, all in Japanese. Mark you calendars for the dates below!

    March 19th 1:00 pm JST* - Qualifying Round (6 hr)
    March 26th 1:00 pm JST* - Final Round (3 hr)

    *All times are Japan Standard Time (UTC+9).
    Note: One must be over 13 years of age and have a valid address in Japan to participate. Both the Qualifying Round and Final Round will take place online.

    For more details, check out the Google Japan official Blog post or follow us on Twitter at @GoogleCodeJamJp. 皆さまのご参加お待ちしております!

    Posted by Yuko Chitani, Talent & Outreach Programs, Japan


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  9. We’ve endorsed seven standout women in research to attend the World Wide Web Conference 2011, hosted in the vibrant and historic city of Hyderabad, India, March 28 - April 1. We’re recognizing this global group of PhD students, named below, with conference travel awards for their unique work in web-related technology. Their intriguing research ranges from using natural language processing technology to prevent cyberbullying to harnessing the knowledge of crowds in order to learn facial attributes and profile human behavior. They all expressed similar desires to attend WWW in order to keep pace with the latest developments in their field, receive valuable feedback on their research and gain exposure to international perspectives. One of the winners will present her first ever paper accepted at a premier conference. We congratulate our winners and wish them happy travels to Hyderabad!

    WWW 2011 Travel Award Winners
    Sandra Garcia Blasco, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia - Valencia, Spain
    Yan‐Ying Chen, National Taiwan University - Taipei, Taiwan
    Lydia Chilton, University of Washington - Seattle, Washington, United States
    Aparna Lalingkar, International Institute of Information Technology - Bangalore, India
    Dongyuan Lu, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences - Beijing, China
    Nikita Mishra, Indian Institute of Kharagpur - West Bengal, India
    Edelweis Rohrer, Universidad de la República, Uruguay - Montevideo, Uruguay

    Posted by Vivian Fontillas, Research Programs team
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