1. Courtesy of El Colombiano
    A few months ago, Google SVP Alan Eustace announced that 2011 was going to be Google's biggest hiring year to date. This expansion, as well as Google’s commitment to diversity, has taken us to new places and across borders as we search for new talent to join the company.

    I was lucky enough to join four other Googlers on the first engineering university recruiting tour to Colombia. I was overjoyed to be able to return to my native country to offer the kind of outstanding internships and full-time opportunities that I dreamt of when I was an undergrad walking the same halls.

    During our short stay in Colombia, we visited four universities, including EAFIT, Javeriana, U. Nacional and the Universidad de los Andes. We met with dozens of faculty and staff and gave five separate talks to packed audiences of students that totalled nearly 1,000 attendees. We were very happy to receive such positive response from students, faculty and staff—thank you to all those who made our visit so successful.

    Over a thousand tweets about our visit were posted, so many that our university recruiting colleagues back in the U.S. took notice! A special tip of the hat to the Universidad de los Andes students, who tweeted the most out of all the universities we visited. Here are a few memorable ones:

    Quiero las 15 libras de #google @paezaurio
    I want the #Google 15   [a reference to one of our running gags]

    Que pasa en el baño de #google?
    What happens in #Google’s restrooms? [Testing on the Toilet!]

    Quien es markov?! no se pero esta en mi tesis! @danielfrg
    Who is Markov?! I do not know, but he is in my thesis now!  [regarding Googlers using Markov chains to test distributed systems]

    We were impressed by the advancements these universities have made in the last decade. Progress is visible in several dimensions: from world-class education campuses and research labs; to strides in academic collaboration and CS curriculum evaluation; to research projects that tackle very significant challenges.  A few of the projects I found particularly interesting were a landmine sweeping robot, a histopathology image search prototype. A haptic system that allows museum visitors to manipulate pre-Columbian jewelry and an enterprise architecture lab. Keep up the great work, Colombia!

    No matter if you speak Spanish or Swahili, we’d be just as excited to meet you as we were our engineering colleagues in Colombia. If you would like to apply for internships or full-time jobs at Google for early and mid-2011, it’s not too late. Submit your resumes through our Student Jobs site. Some of the engineering offices that are actively recruiting include Belo Horizonte - Brazil, New York, Zürich and our headquarters in Mountain View.

    I think I speak for the whole team when I say that we are very excited to head back down to Colombia next year. ¡Hasta la próxima!

    Luis D. Maya, Engineer, Google Apps for Business
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  2. The first ever HotPlanet Mobility Data Contest is about to kick off! 


    If you are at MobiSys '11 or are planning on attending HotPlanet '11 we hope you'll consider participating. The contest starts on the 28th of June, tomorrow, but it's not too late to get your mobility experiment ready. If you'd like further details please check our earlier announcement on this blog or visit the contest's website. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow!


    Posted by Dr. Michał Piórkowski, USI, Switzerland
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  3. The computer vision community will get together in Colorado Springs the week of June 20th for the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2011). This year will see a record number of people attending the conference and 27 co-located workshops and tutorials. The registration was closed at 1500 attendees even before the conference started.

    Computer Vision is at the core of many Google products, such as Image SearchYouTubeStreet ViewPicasa, and Goggles, and as always, Google is involved in several ways with CVPR. Andrew Senior is serving as an area chair of CVPR 2011 and many Googlers are reviewers. Googlers also co-authored these papers:


    If you are attending the conference, stop by Google’s exhibition booth. In addition to talking with Google researchers, you will get to see examples of exciting computer vision research that has made it into Google products including, among others, the following:


    • Google Earth Facade Shadow Removal by Mei Han, Vivek Kwatra, and Shengyang Dai
      We will demonstrate our technique for removing shadows and other lighting/texture artifacts from building facades in Google Earth. We obtain cleaner, clearer, and more uniform textures which provide users with an improved visual experience.
    • Video Stabilization on YouTube Editor by Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, and Irfan Essa
      Casually shot videos captured by handheld or mobile cameras suffer from significant amount of shake. In contrast, professionally shot video usually employs stabilization equipment such as tripods or camera dollies, and employ ease-in and ease-out for transitions. Our technique mimics these cinematographic principles, by optimally dividing the original, shaky camera path into a set of segments and approximating each with either constant, linear or parabolic motion using a computationally efficient and stable algorithm. We will showcase a live version of our algorithm, featuring real-time performance and interactive control, which is publicly available at youtube.com/editor.
    • Tag Suggest for YouTube by George Toderici and Mehmet Emre Sargin
      YouTube offers millions of users the opportunity to upload videos and share them with their friends. Many users would love to have their videos discoverable but don't annotate them properly. One new feature on YouTube that seeks to address this problem is tag prediction based on video content and independently based on text metadata.
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  4. This week, we’ll be sponsoring the Velocity 2011 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. This is our fourth year at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, which we attend to introduce the latest in faster web browsing, and exchange and advance ideas to make the web faster.

    We’ll have some Googlers speaking at the conference about the latest performance ideas, improvements you can make to your websites, browsers, backend servers and the networks that connect it all. While it seems obvious that people prefer fast websites, the research backs it up: studies show that people stay engaged longer and interact more on faster websites, and the talks we’re putting on are designed to help you take advantage of all the benefits speed brings. We hope you’ll join us for talks on:
    For a complete list of speakers and details on each presentation, please visit the Velocity schedule online.

    We also encourage you to stop by our booth, #401, in the exhibit hall on Wednesday, June 15 and Thursday, June 16. We’ll be putting on informal “tech talks” with Google engineers during conference breaks. Last year, these proved to be a huge hit with conference goers—in fact, our booth had a bigger mob than the adjacent dessert and refreshment tables. We’ll have a mix of general and technical topics for those who stop by, including:
    • Wenbo Zhu on HTTP streaming
    • Yuchung Cheng and Nandita Dukkipati on TCP fast open and loss recovery
    • Ben Lisbakken on Perfect Resource Caching OR Multiple iFrames, One Request
    • Steve Lamm on Web Page Replay
    • Igor Minar on Efficient DOM manipulation
    • Andrew Oates on Google's Page Speed Online API
    • Patrick Meenan and Sadeesh Duraisamy on WebPageTest to optimize performance
    • Jan-Willem Maessen on How to configure mod_pagespeed
    In addition to the informal tech talks, you can participate in a variety of booth games and quizzes for a chance to win some Google swag.

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

    Posted by Jim Keller, Software Engineer
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  5. This year’s International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO) took place last month in picturesque Chamonix, France, located at the bottom of Mont Blanc, Europe's highest peak. The conference covered a wide range of topics from purely static to fully dynamic approaches to optimization and tuning, including techniques ranging from pure software based methods to architectural features and support. It was an excellent opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners working at the interface of hardware and software on a wide range of optimization and code generation techniques, and I was pleased to see a significant twenty-five percent increase in submissions this year (who doesn’t like the French Alps?).

    I delivered a presentation on my project, MAO, a micro-architectural optimizer. The key lesson was that modern out-of-order micro-architectures are so complicated, and contain so many mysterious performance cliffs, that for performance work of any kind, the experimental methodology must be sharpened to ensure that a given performance effect is really caused by a given transformation, and not by some 2nd order micro-architectural effect, e.g., by improved branch prediction behavior.


    My colleague, Silvius Rus, also presented his work on “Automated Locality Optimization based on the Reuse Distance of String Operations.” The core idea here is that we can estimate memory reuse via sampling and using a simple apparatus exploiting the OS’s page protection mechanism. Once it has been determined that, e.g., a memcpy() operation touches memory that will not be referenced in the near future, a non-temporal flavor of this routine can be used.


    I believe these are exciting times for this conference, with computing moving into the cloud and software development increasingly targeting data centers and mobile platforms. Both of these represent new and exciting challenges for compilers and performance methodology. Combine this with multi- and many-core platforms, increasingly heterogeneous platforms and the future combination of CPUs and GPUs on a die, then add the rise of domain specific languages to address programmability and productivity, and it is evident that CGO will only become more important over the coming years.


    Posted by Robert Hundt, Senior Staff Software Engineer
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