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Imagine living your truth, but not being able to tell anyone. That was my experience as a young queer person in small-town Alabama. Twenty years ago, nobody, including LGBTQ+ people, had the language we have today to talk about queerness or gender outside the binary. Coded language made it even more difficult to learn about the LGBTQ+ community, much less learn about myself. Even when I felt safe (mostly in anonymous chat rooms), I found it nearly impossible to talk about what I was going through. It wasn’t until my college professor, Cliff Simon, shared his story that I first heard someone use terms like “gay” and “lesbian” without shame or judgement. Cliff’s story proved to me that I could be happy, and it’s the reason I came out — and ultimately, my inspiration to start VideoOut , an LGBTQ+ education and advocacy nonprofit. As the population of openly LGBTQ+ people increases around the world , VideoOut aims to shepherd people from a place of limited exposure to a place of expa...

Editor’s Note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation : The GNI Innovation Challenge program is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Amos Gelb, publisher of D.C. Witness and Baltimore Witness, is part of an innovator series sharing inspiring stories and learnings from funded projects. Violent crime is surging across America while cities scramble to reform their criminal justice systems. This is especially difficult because there is no single American criminal justice system. Every jurisdiction has its own practices, methods and even laws. What they all have in common, however, is a lack of reliable, up-to-date information that could drive local change by providing transparency and accountability. Starting in 2015, D.C. Witness developed a new approach to criminal justice journalism to try to address this issue. Traditional crime reporting can give an incomplete and warped view of what’s really going on, of...

EngageRocket co-founder Dorothy Yiu and her husband were eagerly expecting the arrival of their first baby. But as Dorothy was preparing to start her maternity leave, she found herself battling feelings of guilt. She was hesitant to step away from her work responsibilities, her team and the company that she had been pouring her heart into. EngageRocket — a Singaporean company that helps companies improve their employees’ experiences at work — recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Dorothy, now pregnant with her second child, says those years have been a time of growth and self discovery for her. Not only has she learned to focus on important things and get rid of her self-inflicted feelings of inadequacy, she has also come to realize how important it is to initiate open conversations about the stigma, insecurity and imposter syndrome so many working women are struggling to overcome. Today, on Women’s Entrepreneurship Day , stories like Dorothy’s are important reminders that the...

One of the best parts of my role is seeing the great examples of news publishers embracing technology to grow new audiences and build sustainable business models in the Asia-Pacific region. This week, we heard from news partners at the Google News Initiative (GNI) Global Summit, along with local events in Australia, India, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, on the impactful work they are doing. Supporting a more sustainable, diverse and innovative news ecosystem Our GNI Impact Report (released during the Summit) features stories from publishers in the Asia-Pacific, including one of our partners DataLEADS, who we worked with to provide verification training for thousands of reporters across India . We also heard from Indonesia’s Warta Ekonomi on how they improved their website and user experience, and developed their monetization strategy after taking part in the GNI Local News Foundry . Highlighting APAC leaders in innovation The GNI Innovation Challenge program launc...

Twenty years ago, Google started using machine learning, and 10 years ago, it helped spur rapid progress in AI using deep learning. Jeff Dean and Marian Croak of Google Research take a look at how we’ve innovated on these techniques and applied them in helpful ways, and look ahead to a responsible and inclusive path forward. Jeff Dean From research demos to AI that really works I was first introduced to neural networks — computer systems that roughly imitate how biological brains accomplish tasks — as an undergrad in 1990. I did my senior thesis on using parallel computation to train neural networks. In those early days, I thought if we could 32X more compute power (using 32 processors at the time!), we could get neural networks to do impressive things. I was way off. It turns out we would need about 1 million times as much computational power before neural networks could scale to real-world problems. A decade later, as an early employee at Google, I became reacq...

In Google’s early days, around this time every year, a group of us would run to Costco and buy supplies to take to Bay Area food banks and pantries. It was a grassroots effort that was scrappy and meaningful — and it introduced a lot of Googlers to how rewarding giving back can be. It made me want to learn what more we could do to have an even bigger impact. Inspired by our small and mighty food donation operation, I became a passionate supporter of Second Harvest Food Bank in Silicon Valley. And with guidance from food assistance experts, we established a dedicated team at Google in 2020 to work on tackling issues of food waste and food insecurity. Too many families are having to make difficult decisions no one should be forced to make: paying rent, bills, healthcare costs — or keeping food on their table. These challenges have only been compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, which has left more than 54 million working Americans struggling to find a meal. That’s nearly 16% of the coun...

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