1. Posted by Tomer Sharon, User Experience Researcher


    Students, professionals, and executives looking to stay on the bleeding edge of accessibility will be heading to Addison, Texas, from May 31 - June 2 for the annual Big Design Conference. Googlers will also be in attendance to present research and share experiences and best practices surrounding accessibility technologies at Google.  

    This is Google’s first year sponsoring Big Design, though our commitment to accessibility has been long standing. As the Gold Sponsor for this year’s conference, we’re partnering with conference organizers and Knowbility (a non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, that makes sure people with disabilities can access websites) to identify six recipients to receive Google-sponsored travel grants to attend the conference.

    While at Big Design, I will be giving a talk on my recently published book, It’s Our Research. The talk will feature tested techniques for engaging stakeholders of UX research. The primary theme is that stakeholder engagement for UX research is attained by making any research activity their own, not the researcher’s.  Involving stakeholders throughout the process of planning, execution, analysis, and reporting UX research dramatically increases the chances that they will act upon its results. I’ll suggest 14 tips and tricks for fostering truly great relationships with UX research stakeholders.

    At Google, my research is focused on organic search results, voice-activated search, and identifying solutions to people’s search needs. I founded and led UPA Israel and am also the co-founder and organizer of leanUXmachine, a weekend of UX learning, collaboration, and mentorship for Israeli startups. I am proud of Google’s accomplishments in the accessibility space and look forward to seeing what others in the industry are working on at Big Design. To learn more about the work Googlers all over the globe are doing in the world of accessibilty, visit www.google.com/accessibility/.
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  2. Posted by Kathy Baxter, Sr. UX Researcher & Infrastructure Manager

    More than 60 Googlers descended on Austin, TX May 5-10 for CHI—probably the best CHI I’ve attended in the last 12 years! Each year, it’s exciting to see Google continuing to offer contributions to the CHI community through research and volunteer efforts. In addition to the 10 papers, notes and case studies presented by Googlers, we also participated in panels, contributed to workshops and supported the conference itself as a Platinum-level sponsor.

    • Google’s Ed Chi, Staff Research Scientist, spent the past year working tirelessly as the 2012 Technical Program Co-Chair. He did an outstanding job! He also made time to present papers and participate in the special interest group (SIG), “RepliCHI SIG – from a panel to a new submission venue for replication,” along with Max Wilson (University of Nottingham, U.K.), Wendy Mackay (INRIA, France), Michael S Bernstein (MIT CSAIL), and Jeffrey Nichols (IBM Research - Almaden). For CHI2013, they proposed a new forum that focuses on replicating, confirming and challenging published HCI findings.
    • I was honored to be on a panel with illustrious women UX Leaders like Janaki Kumar (Sr. UX Director @SAP), Janice Rohn (VP of UX @Experian), Lisa Anderson (UX Dir. @Microsoft), & Apala Lahiri Chavan (Chief Oracle & Innovator @Human Factors International). We discussed what we have learned over the years as women and managers in the tech industry, and UX specifically.

    For the second year in a row, we sponsored the MatriarCHI event, which was a luncheon this year. MatriarCHI is the organizing committee for a set of meetings at CHI related to the challenges women face in HCI. We are excited to report that we had even more attendees this year than last. At the luncheon, we discussed common challenges learned from each other’s experiences, and honored the women that have received awards not only at CHI, but other CS/HCI forums. 

    Googlers hanging out in the booth before the Expo Hall opened

    There was also a lot of fun to be had at the Google booth. Thanks to Dan Russell, UX Researcher at Google, attendees could play “a CHI-A-Day” (it was “A Google a Day” the CHI way, featuring great questions about HCI and research at Google) to win great prizes and learn how to search more effectively! We also put on a Ph.D. Forum event at Moonshine: Ph.D. candidates heard from a panel of Googlers with Ph.D.s, and got to speak with them about research and publishing opportunities at Google—plus get some fun Google swag. We met so many brilliant individuals throughout the conference and I’m hopeful some of them will be joining the ranks of Google.

    CHI2013 will be held in Paris, France next April. We’re all already thinking of papers, panels, SIGs and other contributions to submit. We can’t wait to see what's in store for the next CHI!
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  3.  

    More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012. A decade ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied their research to an information retrieval problem and their work—presented at WWW in 1998—led to the invention of today’s most popular search engine. 

    As I've watched the WWW conference series evolve over the years, a couple of larger trends struck me in this year's edition. First, there seems to be more of a Mobile Web presence in the technical program, relative to recent years. The refereed program included several interesting Mobile papers, including the Best Student Paper Awardee from Stanford University researchers: Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy ConsumptionNarendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal, Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh, Jatinder Singh. 

    Second, one gets the sense that the WWW community is moving from the a classic "bag of words" view of web pages, to an entity-centric view. There were a number of papers on identifying and using entities in Web pages. While I'm loathe to view this as a vindication of "the Semantic Web" (mainly because this has become an overloaded phrase that people elect to interpret as suits them), the technical capability to get at entities is clearly here. The question is -- what is the killer application? Finally, it’s nice to see that recommendation systems are becoming a major topic of focus at WWW. This paper was a personal favorite: Build Your Own Music Recommender by Modeling Internet Radio StreamsNatalie Aizenberg, Yehuda Koren, Oren Somekh. 

    In keeping with tradition, Google was a major supporter, sponsoring the conference, the Best Paper Award (Counting beyond a Yottabyte, or how SPARQL 1.1 Property Paths will prevent adoption of the standardMarcelo Arenas, Sebastián Conca and Jorge Pérez) and four PhD student travel grants. We chatted with hundreds of attendees who hung out with us at the Google booth to chat and see demos about the latest Google product and research developments (see full schedule of booth talks).


    Googlers were also active member of the vibrant research community at WWW:

    David Assouline delivered the keynote for the Demo Track -- to a standing-room-only crowd -- on the Google Art Project, which uses a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners to create a unique online art experience. Googler Alon Halevy served as a program committee member. Googlers were also co-authors of the following papers:


    Googlers co-organized three workshops:


    Additionally, a Googler led a tutorial: 


    Googlers presented a poster: 

    • Google Image Swirl by Yushi Jing, Henry Rowley, Jingbin Wang, David Tsai, Chuck Rosenberg, Michele Covell (Googlers)

    At the conference, we also paid homage to the founding of the World Wide Web and the strong community and enterprise it’s created since the 1990s, seen in the Euronews report: Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee on imagining worlds. Through our products and support of WWW in 2013, we look forward to continuing to nurture the world wide web’s open ecosystem of knowledge, innovation and progress.

    Add Research at Google to your circles on G+ to learn more about our academic conference involvement, view pictures from events, and hear about upcoming programming and presence at conferences

    (Cross-posted from the Research Blog)
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  4. Researchers at Google have enormous potential to impact the experience of Google users, which means it’s of enormous importance for us to conduct Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Grounded in user behavior understanding and real-use iteration, Google’s HCI researchers invent, design, build and trial real-scale interactive systems in the real world, often exploring areas where products and features may not yet exist. With this in mind, every year we participate in CHI: the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference on HCI research. As far as I know, it is the second largest ACM conference with nearly 3,000 attendees, and one of the top 10 research conferences that Google contributes to, in terms of technical content. I’m proud to be a Technical Program Co-Chair for CHI 2012, which will be held in Austin, TX from May 5 to May 10.

    There are now a wide variety of HCI research activities at Google. First, we have a sizable user experience organization that focuses on design, user research and the critical insight needed by many product development organizations within the company. Second, we’ve built up a group of research scientists inside of Research at Google who work on projects involving gesture and touch interaction, activity- and context-aware recommendation, mobile input methods and social computing research.

    Between attending talks and presenting papers of my own, I look forward to seeing many other Googlers show off their research in the world of HCI at CHI 2012. More than 15 Googlers are actively contributing to the conversations happening at the event: sitting on panels, walking attendees through submitted papers and case studies, teaching workshops and offering demos. For example:


    As in previous years, we’ll also have a booth in the Exhibit Hall at CHI, where Googlers from all over the globe will be available to chat about their experiences solving interesting user research and design challenges. Finally, in keeping with Austin’s BBQ culture, we look forward to welcoming CHI attendees to head outdoors and join us in our backyard BBQ-themed booth where Googlers will also be talking about some of the hot-off-the-grill innovations that have influenced our products. Be sure to stop by and say hello!

    Posted by Ed Chi, Staff Research Scientist

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