1. Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog


    At the 25th Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Granada, Spain last December, we engaged in dialogue with a diverse population of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, statistical learning theorists, and machine learning researchers. More than twenty Googlers participated in an intensive single-track program of talks, nightly poster sessions and a workshop weekend in the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains. Check out the NIPS 2011 blog post for full information on Google at NIPS.

    In conjunction with our technical involvement and gold sponsorship of NIPS, we recorded the five workshops that Googlers helped to organize on various topics from big learning to music. We’re now pleased to provide access to these rich workshop experiences to the wider technical community.

    Watch videos of Googler-led workshops on the YouTube Tech Talks Channel


    To highlight a few workshops: The Domain Adaptation workshop organized by Google, which fused theoretical and practical domain adaptation, featured invited talks from Shai Ben-David and Googler Mehryar Mohri from the theory side and Dan Roth from the applications side. This was just next door to Googlers Doug Eck and Ryan Rifkin's workshop on Machine Learning and Music, with musical demonstrations loud enough for the next-door neighbors to ask them to “turn it down a bit, please.” In addition to the Googler-run workshops, the Integrating Language and Vision workshop showcased invited talks by Google postdoctoral fellow Percy Liang on the pragmatics of visual scene description and Josh Tenenbaum on physical models as a cognitive plausible mechanism for bridging language and vision. Finally, Google consultant Andrew Ng was one of the organizers of the Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning, which offered an extended tutorial, several inspiring talks, and two panel discussions (one with Googler Samy Bengio as panelist) exploring the question of “How deep is deep?”

    As the workshop weekend drew to a close, an airline strike in Spain left NIPS attendees scrambling to get home for the holidays. We hope the skies look clear for 2012 when NIPS lands in Google’s neck of the woods, Lake Tahoe!
     

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  2. Google was a proud sponsor of the IxDA’s Interaction12 conference that took place in Dublin, Ireland’s beautiful capital, from February 1-4. IxDA is a global network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design. Interaction12 was the first IxDA conference to be held outside of the US.


    Above: Conference attendees kick back between sessions at the Google booth


    Several Googlers participated in the conference, representing Google at the company booth or making notable technical contributions. I was lucky enough to attend and enjoyed the work of fellow Googlers by taking in several workshops and talks recapped below:

    Eva-Lotta Lamm, Interaction Designer (London) kicked off the conference by teaching a workshop on Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes, which guided my thinking throughout the duration of Interaction 12.

    Considering this was a conference on interaction design and taking what I learned from Eva-Lotta’s workshop, I thought it would be a fun idea to take notes in sketches instead of words as the program progressed. While I didn’t achieve any form of mastery, I found sketching to be a great way to keep my attention focused and remain engaged with the content. As an added benefit, it was entertaining to compare my drawings with those of my neighbors in the talks.  

    Michal Levin, User Experience Designer (Tel-Aviv) asked Does Size Matter? and spoke about designing for multiple devices in a product ecosystem comprised of a variety of users, interaction models, behaviors, use cases, contexts, needs, goals, environments, etc.

    Abi Jones, Interaction Designer (Mountain View) gave a talk titled Your Users are Hobbits - comparing user navigation of websites to the legendary quest of Tolkien’s hobbits, and explaining how you can help users fulfill their calling by providing them with mentors and helpers to overcome ordeals and return a changed person.

    Miles Rochford, User Experience Manager (London) presented the winners of the 2012 Interaction Awards, which were sponsored by Google this year. Winning projects, ranging from applications and games to instrument panels and installations, were selected from a competitive pool of over 300 entries from 33 countries for their excellence in interaction design.

    A personal highlight for me was attending a talk presented by one of this year’s IxDA Interaction Award winners. In Bananas, Technology and Magic, Vitamins Design’s Adrian Westaway talked about the importance of letting go of preconceptions and spending more time understanding users and their requirements. He explained how this approach allowed his company to create a truly beautiful (and useful) “out of the box” experience for customers, instead of a dumbed-down (and ultimately useless) product based on stereotypical assumptions.



    Sketch Notes from Adrian Westaway's Talk, "Bananas, Technology, and Magic"


    All in all, the conference made for a fascinating couple of days packed with informative and interesting sessions, and providing a great opportunity for Google to connect with professionals from the industry. I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference set to take place in Toronto.

    Posted by Nina Weber, UX Researcher, Zurich Office
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  3. On Tuesday, January 24, Google Waterloo opened its doors to engineers from the Kitchener-Waterloo area to participate in the first ever Ship Wars Programming Competition. The brainchild of myself and another Waterloo engineer, Garret Kelly, Ship Wars is a competition in which participants code their own intergalactic crafts in the programming language of their choice, and then battle against each other in a virtual environment. The inaugural competition proved quite popular, drawing nearly 40 participants, ready for battle. The game itself went through a lengthy series of internal tests and refinements at the Google Waterloo office in the weeks leading up to the tournament. On the day of the event, participants quickly learned how to play and were able to code, test and enter their virtual ships into competition in under three hours. Not an easy feat! The engineers brought their own machines (mostly laptops, but a few brought in huge desktops) to build and run their ships. After a brief overview of the rules, they were able to get started coding their ships in the language of their choice—some even switched languages mid-way through the event, changing their plan of attack. They were able to control the way the ships moved (direction and speed) and the strength of their weapons, but were only given clues as to how their ship and weapon systems would behave inside the simulation— the rest had to be deduced by playing test matches against example ships. This type of on-the-fly problem solving proved to be a unique and exciting challenge. To test their ships in battle against other engineers’ creations, head-to-head battle stations were set up around the room. At these stations, participants could see how their ships were shaping up, watch them in action and ultimately decide what changes they could make before the final competition.
    Local engineers design their virtual battleships

    At the end of the evening, guests were given a tour of the Google Waterloo office while their ships “went to battle.” Thousands of simulated head-to-head battles and 15 minutes later, to the sound of much laughter and raucous cheering, the ship captains saw their results and watched replays of some of the most dramatic battles. Prizes (a Motorola Xoom Tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet and a Google messenger bag) were awarded to the designers of the three ships with the most wins. For more photos, here’s a link to our album. This wildly successful event will be expanding out to a few other Google offices in the near future. Be on the lookout, Pittsburgh and Cambridge: Ship Wars is coming to you next!



    (Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)
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