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Caroline Rothwell is a Sydney-based visual artist whose work tackles important conversations about human interactions with nature throughout history — and their lasting effects. In her latest body of work, she hopes to bring attention to the plants around us we so often take for granted. She wanted to see if technology could help her use botanical data from historical archives to educate people about the natural world. So with the help of Google Creative Lab Sydney, she began exploring how machine learning could interpret archives and datasets to create new art. Together, we built Infinite Herbarium , a web application as well as a participatory art installation, in which users can explore an infinite number of machine-learning-generated plants, creating their own artwork while learning more about the plants in their own backyard. The installation invites participants to photograph two plants from the world around them. Then, using machine learning, the application class...

I live in the Pacific Northwest, a part of North America known for cooler weather and notoriously gray skies. So imagine my surprise when temperatures hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit over the past few days. And did I mention that, like many other PNWers, I don’t have air conditioning? Every morning lately, my Google Assistant delivers the slightly worrying news that the temperature is ticking up. The heat wave is all anyone here — and in other affected areas — can talk about. U.S. searches about heat waves and sunscreen reached all time record highs this month, and “air conditioner installation service” spiked more than 2,150% over the same period of time. (To little surprise, search interest in air conditioning peaks every summer — but you can see that they’ve been rising every year.)  Since many of us are searching for this kind of information, I decided to take a trip down Ngrams lane to see how exactly we’ve talked about (er, I suppose “written about”) extreme summe...

Over the past year, responsibly developed AI has transformed health screenings, supported fact-checking to battle misinformation and save lives, predicted Covid-19 cases to support public health, and protected wildlife after bushfires. Developing AI in a way that gets it right for everyone requires openness, transparency, and a clear focus on understanding the societal implications. That is why we were among the first companies to develop and publish AI Principles  and why, each year, we share updates on our progress. Building on previous AI Principles updates in 2018 ,  2019 , and 2020 , today we’re providing our latest overview of what we’ve learned, and how we’re applying these learnings. Internal Education In the last year, to ensure our teams have clarity from day one, we’ve added an introduction to our AI Principles for engineers and incoming hires in technical roles. The course presents each of the Principles as well as the applications we will not ...

San Francisco-based Googler Ernest Holmes first started coding when he was in high school. “From then on, I was hooked and knew I wanted to become an engineer,” he says. By the time he was a freshman at Morehouse College, Ernest was participating in the Google in Residence program (GIR). That program introduced him to the Google internship program which he took part in for three consecutive summers before joining us as a full-time engineer. Early exposure to coding helped set Ernest up for success, but some of his classmates weren’t as lucky. During his first computer science course in college, he realized many of the students were only then getting their first coding experience. “There were some students who, like me, had their interest piqued early on, while others had never coded before in their lives, and they just wanted to take a computer science class to figure it out,” Ernest says. “For that second group, it was like they were starting at a disadvantage because they’d neve...

Nakisha Wynn was working at a financial services firm when life took an unexpected turn. She thought about starting a blog aimed at other moms, particularly single mothers. “I didn’t see anybody who looked like me doing the blogging thing,” Nakisha notes. “It was either these fabulous girls showing off their fashions or huge bloggers I couldn’t relate to, so I birthed my blog from that.” In 2016, Nakisha launched nakishawynn.com , where she blogs about single parenting, personal finance, working at home, family travel, frugal living and self-care. Today, her following extends to social media, including YouTube , Instagram and Facebook . She has developed brand partnerships, participates in affiliate programs and offers her professional services as a content creator, coach and speaker.  Nakisha describes how “hard work, persistence and dedication” led to her entrepreneurial success as a web creator, blogger and YouTuber.  How would you start a blog from sc...

In October 2020, Women Techmakers, in collaboration with Google for Startups, launched Founded, a podcast highlighting women entrepreneurs from all over the world. This week, the series returns with six new episodes, sharing advice and experiences from women who’ve lived the entrepreneurial journey. Ahead of the new season, we took time to chat with one of our podcast interviewees, Lateesha Thomas. Lateesha Thomas, Founder of Onramp What were you doing before launching Onramp? I spent several years working in the coding bootcamp industry, where I saw thousands of graduates complete intensive programs with the promise of a new career at the end of that journey. But I learned that even if candidates managed to acquire a baseline set of technical skills that should give them a competitive edge in the job market, they still faced significant bias due to hiring practices in the industry. Companies have spent years scaling traditional hiring methods like industry and unive...

Ignoring vowels, removing connecting letters and recording up to 150 words a minute. It’s not the latest algorithmic advance, but instead something many U.K. journalists will recognise as Teeline: a shorthand transcribing skill which forms part of a formal journalism qualification. Two decades ago, as a journalism student in London, I was taught the importance of law, ethics and editorial values, as well as the technical skills required to be a journalist. While the fundamentals of journalism may not have altered since, it’s clear technology has radically changed how journalists work, not to mention the changing habits of their audiences. Alongside the shifting landscape, we’re announcing our support for the   Journalism Skills Academy  (JSA): an e-learning platform from the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ). This will help digitally transform the way they provide assessments, qualifications and workshops, while also helping how they overhaul t...

On June 4th 2021, a piece of LGBTQIA+ history that we thought was long lost resurfaced: the original rainbow pride flag that was first raised on June 25, 1978 in San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza. The Gilbert Baker Foundation uncovered this priceless artifact in 2019 and donated it to the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco to make it accessible to all.  Today, 43 years after the flag was first raised, we are partnering with Google Arts & Culture - along with 12 other cultural institutions - to make stories about this iconic rainbow flag available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  As part of the “ Beyond the Rainbow'' hub, everyone can dive back into the history of the LGBTQIA+ movement through the colors of the iconic Pride flag whose design and many iterations led it to become a symbol that would represent the full spectrum of the LGBTQIA+ community and carry the memory of the fights for LGBTQIA+ rights and a better representation of all the LGBTQIA+ ident...

The outlook for American news journalism has significantly shifted over the years. To shed light on what caused this shift, my team at Accenture recently completed an analysis of newspaper revenues over two decades. And while some suggest that tech companies like Google have taken the ad revenue from news publishers, our analysis reveals a more complex story.  Smartphones and high-speed broadband brought the wonders of the internet to our fingertips. With technological advances have come tremendous volumes of content from around the world — academic sources, specialist and topic-specific news and other content — offering consumers choice about how, where and in what format they access content.  This availability of digital news and other content has fragmented audiences and, in turn, advertiser revenue and balance sheets shrunk. Thousands of American journalists have been laid off, and the industry has consolidated as publishers cut costs.  Now, with a growing de...

As part of ongoing cross-industry efforts to help tackle the issue of financial fraud, we recently announced that we were the first major technology firm to join Stop Scams UK . We also pledged $5 million in advertising credits to support public awareness campaigns in the UK, helping to ensure that consumers are better informed about how to spot the tactics of scammers both online and offline. Today, we are announcing a significant additional measure to protect users and legitimate advertisers, and help prevent scammers exploiting our platforms. The Google Ads Financial Products and Services policy will be updated from 30th August to introduce new certification requirements for financial services advertisers targeting the UK. Financial services advertisers will be required to demonstrate that they are authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority or qualify for one of the limited exemptions described in the UK Financial Services verification page . This new update builds...

Two years ago Nest shared our commitments to privacy to give you a better understanding of how our products work in your home. Today, we’re publishing new security commitments and putting it all in one place: Nest’s new Safety Center . The Safety Center is meant to give you a clear picture of the work we do each day to build trustworthy products and create a safer and more helpful home. Our new security commitments include standards Google has long held as well as updates that are specific to Nest’s connected home devices and services . Finally, we want to acknowledge the way this technology is evolving — for example, our recent announcements on Matter and our work on Project Connected Home over IP ). That’s why we’ve updated a small section in our privacy commitments to better reflect our focus on openness. Here are the details: We will validate our Google Nest devices using an independent security standard. Google Nest connected smart home devices introduced in 2019 or...

What is the future of retail media? Earlier this month, Google hosted more than 100 leaders from nearly 50 global retailers to discuss how e-commerce platforms are transforming digital advertising. The two-day session featured inspiring talks from Google’s retail partners as well as industry experts from Forrester, Tinuiti, Merkle and eMarketer/Insider Intelligence. Here are nine of the most important lessons from the event: 1. Retail media has gone mainstream Ad spend on e-commerce properties is expected to double over the next four years. Retail ad spend grew nearly 50% in 2020 and will reach more than $40 billion by 2024 , per Nicole Perrin at eMarketer. It’s the fastest growing sector of the digital ad market, exceeding even connected TV. 2. Retail media benefits brands, merchants and consumers Merchants can monetize their traffic and generate incremental income with minimal investment. Brands can sell more by reaching shoppers as they’re making purchase decisions. Consumer...

Soda, pop; sweater, jumper; soccer, football. So many things go by different names. Sometimes it’s a function of language, but sometimes it’s a matter of cultural trends or nuance, or simply where you are in the world.  One very relevant example is COVID-19. As people everywhere searched for information, we had to learn to identify all the different phrases people used to refer to the novel coronavirus to make sure we surfaced high quality and timely information from trusted health authorities like the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A year later, we’re encountering a similar challenge with vaccine names, only this time, we have a new tool to help: Multitask Unified Model (MUM) .   Understanding searches for vaccine information  AstraZeneca, CoronaVac, Moderna, Pfizer, Sputnik and other broadly distributed vaccines all have many different names all over the world — over 800, based on our analysis. People sear...

When the Google for Education team designs products, we put the safety, security and privacy needs of our users first. This means keeping schools’ data safer with built-in security features that provide automated protection, compliance visibility and control, to ensure a private, safe and secure learning environment. We aim to support and protect the entire education community, and particularly teachers and students, so they can focus on what matters most: teaching and learning. Everything we build is guided by three important principles: Secure by default: Protecting your privacy starts with the world’s most advanced security. Even before you set up security controls for your school’s digital environment specific to your needs, our built-in security is automatically protecting you from threats, like ransomware.  Private by design: We uphold responsible data practices designed to respect your privacy. Our products can be used in compliance with the most rigorous data p...

Have you ever noticed that the word art is embedded in the phrase artificial intelligence? Neither did we, but when the opportunity presented itself to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) inspires artistic expression — with the help of internationally renowned Canadian artist Douglas Coupland — the Google Research team jumped on it. This collaboration, with the support of Google Arts & Culture, culminated in a project called Slogans for the Class of 2030 , which spotlights the experiences of the first generation of young people whose lives are fully intertwined with the existence of AI.  This collaboration was brought to life by first introducing Coupland’s written work to a machine learning language model. Machine learning is a form of AI that provides computer systems the ability to automatically learn from data. In this case, Google research scientists tuned a machine learning algorithm with Coupland’s 30-year body of written work — more than a million words — so i...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis that followed exacerbated hunger for millions of people. Feeding America estimates that the number of those without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable food grew to 45 million people in 2020, including 15 million children. That equates to one in seven Americans and is a nearly 30% increase from 2019.  Connecting people to community food services We know people are looking for ways to get help, including on Google Search. Over the past year, searches for "food bank near me" , "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)" , "food stamps application" and "school lunch pick up" reached record highs.  Starting today, you can find free food support all in one place on our new Find Food Support site. The site features a Google Maps locator tool to help you find the nearest food bank, food pantry or school lunch program pickup site in your community. We worked with No Kid Hun...