1. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a major transition from stand-alone applications that run on desktop computers to applications running in the cloud. Unfortunately, many computer science students don’t have the opportunity to learn and work in the cloud due to a lack of resources in traditional undergrad programs. Without this access students are limited to the resources their school can provide.

    So today, we’re announcing a new award program: the Google App Engine Education Awards. We are excited because Google App Engine can teach students how to build sophisticated large-scale systems in the cloud without needing access to a large physical network.

    Google App Engine can be used to build mobile or social applications, traditional browser-based applications, or stand-alone web services that scale to millions of users with ease. The Google App Engine infrastructure and storage tools are useful for collecting and analyzing educational data, building a learning management system to organize courses, or implementing a teacher forum for exchanging ideas and practices. All of these adaptations of the Google App Engine platform will use the same infrastructure that powers Google.

    We invite teachers at universities across the United States to submit a proposal describing how to use Google App Engine for their course development, educational research or tools, or for student projects. Selected proposals will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits.

    If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the US, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. The application deadline is midnight PST August 31, 2012.

    Cross-posted on the Research Blog

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  2. Posted by Rahul Sukthankar, Research Scientist


    More than 1800 participants showed up to discuss their research at this year’s International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’12), held in Providence, RI last month. The main conference consisted of three eventful -- and exhausting -- days of talks and poster sessions, supplemented by an additional three days of tutorials and workshops.

    This year, I found the CVPR posters to be especially energizing: poster presenters were mobbed by huge crowds that prompted the authors to start early and give encore performances through breaks and into subsequent sessions. Live demos and videos on laptops and tablets were increasingly common and allowed the audience to get a closer look at the research.

    Here is a small sampling of papers (both oral and poster) that I particularly enjoyed:

    The best paper prize this year (sponsored by Google) was awarded to Y. Dai, H. Li, and M. He for their paper, “A Simple Prior-free Method for Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion Factorization”; the best student paper award went to M. Hoai and F. De la Torre for their work on “Max-Margin Early Event Detectors”

    Research at Google was very active at CVPR '12: 


    For me, the best part of CVPR was talking with graduate students about their work: at the doctoral consortium, during poster sessions and at the Google booth (where interesting demos and swag drew large crowds).

    Since becoming a part of Research at Google last year, I’ve been particularly excited about the idea of training spatiotemporally localized object and action detectors from lots of video, with minimal human supervision -- a goal that seemed both technically and computationally infeasible until recently. It’s great to see that many in the CVPR community share my belief that we’re now ready to learn from large-scale video and we’ve decided to organize a AAAI Spring Symposium on this topic. 

    Next year’s CVPR will be held in Portland, OR. I look forward to seeing many of you there!

    M. Grundmann and V. Kwatra present the YouTube video stabilization demo

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  3. Posted by Craig Rubens, People Operations Communications team


    Now that Google I/O has concluded, the parachutes have been repacked, hundreds of pounds of snacks have all been eaten and the Moscone Center has fewer robots prowling its hallways.

    But Google I/O is much more than just announcements, giveaways and demos. As Vic Gundotra said in the opening keynote: “this conference is really about you-- developers.” I/O is the global gathering of Google developers who build services, products and businesses using Google’s tools, platforms and infrastructure.

    For the second year, we helped broadcast the magic of I/O beyond the 6,000+ attendees in San Francisco to some 30,000+ participants at over 350 I/O Extended viewing events around the globe. This included nine events hosted by the Google Industry Programs team at our North American offices.

    More than 1,000 developers joined us in our offices in Boston, Boulder, Irvine, Los Angeles, Mountain View, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Waterloo to watch the I/O announcements. Attendees were greeted by site directors, bedecked in Google swag and handed mimosas as they met fellow developers and watched I/O live.

    .
    Each office featured live demos, in addition to those streaming from I/O. In Mountain View, attendees saw the Google Maps team’s Trekker backpack - a pack-mounted Street View camera that can be hiked into almost any location, capturing 360 degree imagery along the trail. The Waterloo event welcomed the Honorable Gary Goodyear, Ontario’s Minister of State for Science and Technology who hosted a fireside chat. And Seattle participants partied with a life-size Android and sipped beers from three local breweries.

    In addition to the Extended events around the country, we wanted to connect with I/O attendees directly and hosted the I/O NightCap at San Francisco’s ROE club, right up the street from the Moscone Center. Attendees enjoyed free beer, snacks, games and cool swag like Android Rubik’s cubes (which are super hard to solve!). Even though all the attendees had already gotten lots of cool, high-tech gifts from I/O, they were still excited for the chance to win an App Engine squishable (who doesn’t love squishables?).

    If you missed any of the sessions from I/O 2012, you can find all of the keynotes, technical sessions and code labs on the Google I/O website.
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