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Posted by Lisa McCracken, on behalf of the Technical Programs Editorial Board

Thanks to everyone who has been a loyal reader of this blog over the last two years.
September 15 marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month and the start of our third year celebrating the Hispanic community through events and community outreach initiatives.
Michel Benard, University Relations Manager

Last week we held our fifth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty Summit in London, bringing together 94 of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics from 65 universities representing 25 countries, together with more than 60 Googlers.

Posted by Aaron Kemp, Software Engineer

Eight months after its inception in the Google Waterloo Office, Ships Wars has reached the Silicon Valley.  On Thursday, September 13th, Google San Francisco and the Wallet team welcomed 25 local programmers to show off their skills as they coded their own spacecraft to do battle in a virtual universe.

After a brief explanation of the rules, participants, nourished by a bevy of snacks and beverages, coded for 1-1/2 hours, using test runs and their on-the-fly problem-solving skills to control the direction and speed of their ships before unleashing them for head-to-head battle in final competitions.  The evening ended with a tour of the Google office as thousands of battles ensued.  After replays of the worthiest battles, results were displayed and prizes, including a Xoom tablet, were given to the top three winners of the most battles.  Check out a few more photos from this exciting event.

Participants hard at work gearing up for battle

Since the inaugural event last January, Ship Wars has been taken on the road to four total locations: Waterloo, Pittsburgh, Mountain View and now San Francisco.  The game has moved entirely to the cloud and has been played by professional and student audiences alike.  Future battles are confirmed, focusing on Front End Engineers in Google’s New York office on October 9th and on Test Engineers in our Kirkland office on October 24th.

Interested in having a Ship War strike near you?  Contact the Google Events Team to suggest a battle zone or to learn more about other Google events in your area.

Posted by Anonymous
Labels: Technical Programs & Events Blog
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Posted by Dan Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality & User Happiness

If you missed Power Searching with Google a few months ago or were unable to complete the course the first time around, now’s your chance to sign up again for our free online course that aims to empower our users with the tools
Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education.
Posted by Andrea Held, University Relations

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.
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.
Google I/O, our annual developer conference, begins in just two days, and this year, we’re bringing you more than 130 technical sessions, 20 code labs and 155 Sandbox partners.
Posted by Jim Keller, Software Engineer

Next week, Google will join the Internet speed community at the Velocity 2012 conference in Santa Clara, California. This will be our fifth year at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference.
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.
Today, we're opening up registration for Google Code Jam 2012. This year thousands of students, professional programmers and freelance code wizards will pit their ingenuity against a new set of algorithmic challenges concocted by our tireless team of red-eyed, LED-illuminated problem writers.
Last month, in honor of Black History Month, Google offices in five cities in North America hosted events celebrating black professionals in our community. Across the country, we opened our doors to over 400 guests consisting of engineers, entrepreneurs, technologists, students and professors.
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.
As we mentioned in a previous post, Googlers traveled to Boston this month to participate in the Usenix LISA '11 conference. Nearly 1,300 IT professionals attended this year’s conference to discuss cutting edge system administration techniques and technologies.
We participate in the sysadmin community in many ways. Many Googlers are involved in their local Unix users’ groups and give presentations at conferences. One conference we participate heavily in is the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference.
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