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As a little girl, my biggest wish was for a dollhouse. But as the daughter of a single mom, we just couldn’t afford things like that. Forty-something years later, that wish came true. I bought my first dollhouse. What I didn’t know at the time was that a childhood dream would soon become my passion for telling stories through dioramas. My love for miniatures gained a new meaning upon the devastating incarceration of my son. It was in the midst of that pain and anguish that I came up with the African American Miniature Museum . This mobile exhibit tells stories of Black history through a collection of dioramas placed in shadow boxes, created by myself and my husband Eddie Lewis. For me, the museum was a way to turn the negativity into something positive and share the stories of our ancestors’ strength and perseverance through hardship. I want young people to learn about those that came before them who sacrificed to help make the lives they live today possible. Most importantly, I wa...

Chromebooks help teachers stay organized, jazz up their lesson plans, and collaborate with students. But did you know they can improve the way schools administer assessments? With a secure platform, Chromebooks are ideal for formative assessments, like state exams, or pop quizzes throughout the year. While testing is key in tracking students’ progress, it often only happens at the end of the year, semester, or unit. That's too late to fix a concept that students don’t understand, but educators can use Chromebooks to check in along the way. Many testing solutions, one device Let’s check out three ways instructors and schools can use Chromebooks for better assessments - and how you can now use accessibility apps and extensions to support all learners while test taking. 1. Helping to cut distractions during test time  Many instructors use Google Forms Quizzes for formative assessments and understanding student progress. But we've heard instructors worry it's too easy for...

Each year, the Unicode Consortium reviews a seemingly infinite number of proposals that result in a list of emoji to be added to smartphones. Then companies like Google design the emoji for their operating systems like Android.  This week, Unicode announced their 62 new emoji, along with skin tone and gender variants, for 2020. The list has us feeling 🤗, because five of the approved designs were proposed by the Android team. They’re also part of our ongoing effort to create an emoji keyboard that’s more inclusive. Here’s a look at all five: More representation for a variety of families Until this year, the only emoji that depicts childcare is the “breastfeeding” emoji. Since an inability to breastfeed doesn't preclude you from nurturing your child, we proposed First, “ person feeding baby with a bottle ”—an emoji that everyone can use. (Though in my opinion, as a mother of twins, parenthood is already representable with🌪️💩.) Emoji design for "person fee...

Stars are magical. Van Gogh painted them. Shakespeare wrote about them. We make wishes on them.  On the Google Earth team, we understand people’s desire to see stars just as much as they want to see Planet Earth. The Google Earth mobile app now offers wide views of our starry universe, just as Earth for the web and Earth Pro have done for some time. As smartphones and tablets have become more powerful, we’ve been able to bring the quality of Earth’s web and Pro versions to most smartphones. You can now see a view of the stars as you zoom out from Earth on your phone. Rotate the globe and you’ll see images of the beautiful Milky Way, collected from the European Southern Observatory, depicting the stars as they’d appear to a space explorer at a point some 30,000 miles above the planet.  Before we added the star imagery, the sky around the “big blue marble” view in Google Earth was simply black, which wasn’t very realistic. Realism is important to us—we want peopl...

Huddle up, football fans! It’s almost game time. This Sunday, people around the country will gather to watch Kansas City and San Francisco face off in the biggest football game of the year. We took a look at Google Trends data to see the top questions, recipes and topics people are searching for. Fun fact: Search interest in Roman numerals spikes every year at this time (and this year roman numeral LIV is no exception) . While the teams get ready to go head to head, Search and the Google Assistant can provide  information about Sunday’s showdown, help you prep your game day appetizers, give you fun ideas for your watch party, and keep you updated with the latest plays during the game. Score! Football fan face-off Our two conference champions are causing chatter across the U.S. Search interest in both San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs have reached an all-time high. What team will you cheer for this Sunday? And football isn’t the only thing we’re exc...

Stars are magical. Van Gogh painted them. Shakespeare wrote about them. We make wishes on them.  On the Google Earth team, we understand people’s desire to see stars just as much as they want to see Planet Earth. The Google Earth mobile app now offers wide views of our starry universe, just as Earth for the web and Earth Pro have done for some time. As smartphones and tablets have become more powerful, we’ve been able to bring the quality of Earth’s web and Pro versions to most smartphones. You can now see a view of the stars as you zoom out from Earth on your phone. Rotate the globe and you’ll see images of the beautiful Milky Way, collected from the European Southern Observatory, depicting the stars as they’d appear to a space explorer at a point some 30,000 miles above the planet.  Before we added the star imagery, the sky around the “big blue marble” view in Google Earth was simply black, which wasn’t very realistic. Realism is important to us—we want peop...

As a lifelong thermostat-turner-upper, I distinctly remember a day in high school when I made a beeline to crank the heat in my family home. Instead of the quiet rumble of the heater turning on, it was silent. I bundled myself in blankets and waited to tell my parents the news: We were going to freeze. Clearly I was being dramatic, but I remember my parents' frustration nonetheless with the broken furnace.  Not to date myself, but this was before smart thermostats existed. Our thermostat wasn’t tracking any minor issues that could become big ones, and it certainly couldn’t alert us about them. Fortunately, homes are getting smarter: Starting today we are testing a new Nest thermostat feature that can help alert you to some heating and cooling system (HVAC) issues. With this new feature, Nest is learning how to identify unusual patterns related to your HVAC system, and can alert you to a variety of potential issues. Most of us don’t have an HVAC pro on speed dial, so we're a...

Editor’s note: Guest author Dr. Toshiyuki Kono is President of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. Distinguished Professor Kono also teaches private international law and heritage law at Japan's Kyushu University. Preserving and protecting the past is essential for our future. This belief is at the core of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a global non-government organization dedicated to the conservation of architectural and archaeological heritage. Our 10,000 members across the globe—including architects, archeologists, geographers, planners and anthropologists—share the same vision: to protect and promote the world’s cultural heritage. The recent youth climate demonstrations shed a spotlight on the urgency of the climate crisis, which is having a devastating effect on our cultural monuments too. It is important to take action, and we must act now to save this part of our human legacy. That’s why, in collaboration with CyArk and Goo...

Last time I went home to see my parents in Shanghai, I found them watching lots of how-to videos on painting and photography on their phone—even though I had considered them to be “smartphone challenged.” My mom has always had a creative side, and I was surprised to learn that she’s now an amateur oil painter thanks to these niche communities with quick how-to videos. Coco’s mom trying out new watercolor techniques and the painting up close. I too joined some of these vibrant creative communities that make videos about cooking and fashion. I noticed something magical in these videos: They could quickly get a point across—something that used to take a long time to learn with just text and images.  Last year, our small team within Area 120 , Google’s lab for experimental projects, started building Tangi . It’s an experimental social video sharing app with quick DIY videos that help people learn new things every day. Tangi is where creative people can get new idea...

Indian journalist Bharat Nayak knows misinformation can have dangerous consequences. He’s witnessed it too often in his home state of Jharkhand, India.  According to Bharat, “Indian society has been gravely affected by ‘fake news’, which has  contributed to a rise in hatred and violence, and horrific incidences of lynching.” Concern about misinformation was especially pronounced around last year’s Indian general election—where more than 600 million people voted in the biggest democratic exercise in history.   The spread of misinformation is something the Google News Initiative (GNI) India Training Network —a group of 240 senior Indian reporters and journalism educators—has been working to counteract, in their newsrooms and beyond.  In partnership with DataLeads and Internews , the Network has provided in-depth verification training for more than 15,000 journalists and students from more than 875 news organizations, in 10 Indian languages. Using a “trai...

The Salish Sea, which extends from British Columbia to Washington State in the U.S., was once home to hundreds of killer whales, also known as orcas. Now, the population of Southern Resident Killer Whales, a subgroup of orcas, is struggling to survive—there are only 73 of them left . Building on our work using AI for Social Good , we’re partnering with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to apply machine learning to protect killer whales in the Salish Sea. According to DFO, which monitors and protects this endangered population of orcas, the greatest threats to the animals are scarcity of prey (particularly Chinook salmon, their favorite meal), contaminants, and disturbance caused by human activity and passing vessels. Teaming up with DFO and Rainforest Connection , we used deep neural networks to track, monitor and observe the orcas’ behavior in the Salish Sea, and send alerts to Canadian authorities. With this information, marine mammal managers can monitor and treat whales that ar...

Beyond helping us navigate the world, the human eye can reveal signs of underlying disease, which care providers can now uncover during a simple, non-invasive screening (a photograph taken of the back of the eye). We’ve previously shown that deep learning applied to these photos can help identify diabetic eye disease as well as cardiovascular risk factors . Today, we’re sharing how we’re continuing to use deep learning to detect anemia . Anemia is a major public health problem that affects 1.6 billion people globally, and can cause tiredness, weakness, dizziness and drowsiness. The diagnosis of anemia typically involves a blood test to measure the amount of hemoglobin (a critical protein in your red blood cells that carries oxygen). If your hemoglobin is lower than normal, that indicates anemia. Women during pregnancy are at particularly high risk of anemia with more than 2 in 5 affected, and anemia can also be an early sign of colon cancer in otherwise healthy individuals.  ...

As people use Data Studio throughout their organizations , IT administrators have asked to manage how Data Studio can be used. Today, we’re launching three free enterprise features providing IT administrators new visibility and control over Data Studio in their organization. Organization management through Cloud Identity integration Data Studio now integrates with Google Cloud Identity to provide organization-wide administrative capabilities. With this integration, Cloud Identity admins can manage who can use Data Studio and how they can use it. Existing G Suite and Cloud Identity customers get Data Studio integration out of the box, and can start using the new Data Studio administration features today. Customers using other identity providers, such as Active Directory, can synchronize their users with Google Cloud Identity , so that creating, suspending, and deleting users happens in one place.  Enterprise audit logging Data Studio now offers audit logging, providing...

After a nice holiday break we’re back with the latest in our Stadia Savepoint series, keeping you up to date on what’s new on the Stadia platform.  We recently shared on our Community Blog that we’re tracking more than 120 games coming to Stadia in 2020. We’re also looking at more than ten games in the first half of this year that will be only available on Stadia when they launch. Plus, support for wireless gaming on the web, more Assistant functionality and additional Android phones are right around the corner. As for the latest updates, read on for what we were up to in January. Achievements You’ll receive notifications of your achievements when playing on desktop, laptop and TV, and you’ll get credit for those achievements. You can view your full list on the web, including all the hard-won achievements  you've earned since you began playing Stadia.  Achievements on Stadia Strategic Collaboration with BT We announced a strategic collaboratio...

Editor's note: Today's guest post comes from Amanda Raines, Head of B2B Marketing at ClassPass. As any small business owner in the fitness industry would tell you, there’s nothing like the energy of a room full of people clipping into their spin bikes, a packed class of yogis ready to flow, or the collective peace of a group meditation session. But with so many gyms and fitness studios out there, one of the biggest challenges these entrepreneurs face is just getting people through the door. Small business owners can get so caught up trying to build their business that they miss out on doing what they love—empowering and inspiring their customers to live their healthiest lives.  90 percent of the fitness industry is comprised of small businesses that offer classes to keep people healthy and foster strong communities. Many of them don’t have a big marketing budget, so they struggle to promote their classes to the right people. Plus, they lose money if they don’t fill all th...

Long before Meg Mitchell founded the Ethical AI team at Google in 2017, she loved Boggle, the classic game where players come up with words from random letters in three minutes or less. Looking back at her childhood Boggle-playing days, Meg sees the game as her early inspiration to pursue studying computational linguistics. “I always loved identifying patterns, solving puzzles, language games, and creating new things,”  Meg says. “And Boggle had it all. It was a puzzle, and it was creative.” The creative puzzles she tackles today as a Senior Research Scientist at Google are developing tools and techniques to help artificial intelligence (AI) evolve ethically over time, reflecting Google’s AI Principles . We caught up with Meg to talk about what took her from playing Boggle to working at Google.  How do you describe your job at a dinner party to people who don’t work in tech? When I used to work in language generation, my partner would say, “she makes robots talk.” Now tha...

The global telecommunications industry, which is comprised of traditional cable operators, satellite, wireless, and internet service providers, is in the midst of a digital transformation. Consumers’ expectations for integrated and on-demand experiences are driving demand for superior internet connectivity and digital TV and video content, creating more competition in TV and video than ever before. The market is changing rapidly with the proliferation of mobile and connected TV devices, more direct-to-consumer (DTC) and skinny bundle offerings, and new ways to monetize these experiences. To gain a deeper perspective on emerging strategies and solutions across the telco market, we worked with international research and strategy consultancy MTM to conduct 25 long-form interviews with senior executives from leading telcos around the world. The findings which are summarized in our new report—called The Next-Generation Telco Bundle —explores industry perspectives on these changes as le...

Keeping you safe online is a top priority at Google, especially for the thousands of Googlers who work on privacy and security around the world. Today on Data Privacy Day, we’re sharing some of the many ways we keep you safe online and across our products—from built-in protections to easy tools that keep you in control of your privacy. 1. Keep your passwords safe Password Manager in your Google Account helps you remember and securely store strong passwords for all your online accounts. With Password Checkup , one click will tell you if any of your passwords are weak—whether you’ve reused them across multiple sites, or if we've discovered they’ve been compromised in a third-party data breach—and we’ll give you the link to change them. 2. Let Google automatically delete your data With auto-delete for Location History , Web & App Activity and YouTube History , you can choose to have Google automatically delete your activity and location history every 3 or 18 months. You ca...

Ten years ago Google aired its first-ever commercial , during the 2010 Super Bowl. We’ve run several more Super Bowl ads in the years since. And on Sunday, viewers of this year’s game will see “Loretta,” which tells the story of a man who uses the Google Assistant to keep the memory of his love alive.  The ad reflects our goal to build products that help people in their daily lives, in both big and small ways. Sometimes that’s finding a location, sometimes it’s playing a favorite movie, and sometimes it’s using the Google Assistant to remember meaningful details.  “Loretta” has a few other things in common with our “Parisian Love” commercial from 10 years ago. Both are simple love stories told through the lens of our products. Both were inspired by real people—in fact, the voice you hear throughout “Loretta” is the grandfather of a Googler, whose story we drew from to create the ad. At 85, to an audience of millions, he’ll be making his film debut. We couldn’t be happier f...

We’re excited to see you at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) from March 16-20 in San Francisco. If you can’t make it in person, sign up to keep up to date with our announcements and view the livestream. You’ll learn about new products and solutions from Google that will help developers for all platforms take their game to the next level.  Everything kicks off with the Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote on Monday, March 16th where product leaders from across Google will share the biggest announcements for game developers. After the keynote, join in on two days of developer sessions to learn how to use Google solutions to create great games, connect with more players, and scale your business. Check out the agenda today. Starting Wednesday, March 18th, visit our booth in the GDC Expo to experience demos and meet one-on-one with Google product experts.  If you can’t attend GDC in-person, you can still watch the Keynote and other Developer Summit sessions...

When I was in the 11th grade, I had the opportunity to write my first screenplay through NAACP’s Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics ( ACT-SO ) program. The program provides a platform for Black high school students—more than 300,000 to date—to bring their ideas to life and kickstart their journeys to becoming leaders in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), humanities, business, and the arts.  ACT-SO gave me the confidence to pursue my dream of working in the entertainment and tech industry. After competing in NAACP’s local and national competitions, I wrote and directed my first short film, which I used in my portfolio to attend New York University. That eventually led me to my job as a Google Account Manager handling sales in the Media and Entertainment industry.  Looking back, the greatest gift was that the program instilled values of community, excellence, and discipline in the participants. I’ve carried those values throughout...