Monthly Archives: October 2018

Announcing some security treats to protect you from attackers’ tricks

Posted by Jonathan Skelker, Product Manager

It’s Halloween ? and the last day of Cybersecurity Awareness Month ?, so we’re celebrating these occasions with security improvements across your account journey: before you sign in, as soon as you’ve entered your account, when you share information with other apps and sites, and the rare event in which your account is compromised.

We’re constantly protecting your information from attackers’ tricks, and with these new protections and tools, we hope you can spend your Halloween worrying about zombies, witches, and your candy loot—not the security of your account.

Protecting you before you even sign in
Everyone does their best to keep their username and password safe, but sometimes bad actors may still get them through phishing or other tricks. Even when this happens, we will still protect you with safeguards that kick-in before you are signed into your account.

When your username and password are entered on Google’s sign-in page, we’ll run a risk assessment and only allow the sign-in if nothing looks suspicious. We’re always working to improve this analysis, and we’ll now require that JavaScript is enabled on the Google sign-in page, without which we can’t run this assessment.

Chances are, JavaScript is already enabled in your browser; it helps power lots of the websites people use everyday. But, because it may save bandwidth or help pages load more quickly, a tiny minority of our users (0.1%) choose to keep it off. This might make sense if you are reading static content, but we recommend that you keep Javascript on while signing into your Google Account so we can better protect you. You can read more about how to enable JavaScript here.

Keeping your Google Account secure while you’re signed in

Last year, we launched a major update to the Security Checkup that upgraded it from the same checklist for everyone, to a smarter tool that automatically provides personalized guidance for improving the security of your Google Account.

We’re adding to this advice all the time. Most recently, we introduced better protection against harmful apps based on recommendations from Google Play Protect, as well as the ability to remove your account from any devices you no longer use.

More notifications when you share your account data with apps and sites

It’s really important that you understand the information that has been shared with apps or sites so that we can keep you safe. We already notify you when you’ve granted access to sensitive information — like Gmail data or your Google Contacts — to third-party sites or apps, and in the next few weeks, we’ll expand this to notify you whenever you share any data from your Google Account. You can always see which apps have access to your data in the Security Checkup.

Helping you get back to the beginning if you run into trouble

In the rare event that your account is compromised, our priority is to help get you back to safety as quickly as possible. We’ve introduced a new, step-by-step process within your Google Account that we will automatically trigger if we detect potential unauthorized activity.

We'll help you:
  • Verify critical security settings to help ensure your account isn’t vulnerable to additional attacks and that someone can’t access it via other means, like a recovery phone number or email address.
  • Secure your other accounts because your Google Account might be a gateway to accounts on other services and a hijacking can leave those vulnerable as well.
  • Check financial activity to see if any payment methods connected to your account, like a credit card or Google Pay, were abused.
  • Review content and files to see if any of your Gmail or Drive data was accessed or mis-used.
Online security can sometimes feel like walking through a haunted house—scary, and you aren't quite sure what may pop up. We are constantly working to strengthen our automatic protections to stop attackers and keep you safe you from the many tricks you may encounter. During Cybersecurity Month, and beyond, we've got your back.

Delegate contact management in the new Google Contacts preview

We’re adding the ability to delegate contact management to someone else in new Google Contacts (aka Contacts preview). When you delegate contact management, you give someone else the ability to edit or delete information in your personal contacts folder on your behalf. Any changes they make to those contacts will update in your Contacts. Customers will often use delegated contacts so administrative assistants can manage contacts for executives.

This feature was previously available in old Contacts, but not in new Contacts (see below for more). If you use delegation in old Contacts, the delegation will still be active if you move to new Contacts. Contacts and contact delegation are no longer available through Gmail.

Delegate access to your contacts 

You can invite someone else within your organization to manage your contacts through the new Contacts website at contacts.google.com. Once you’ve delegated access, the person you delegated to will be notified by email and will be able to add, edit, and delete contacts on your behalf.

To see and change delegate access to your contacts, click on the Delegate access button in the product’s main navigation menu. See our Help Center to learn more about how to delegate your contacts.



Accept delegation invitation and manage someone else’s contacts

When someone delegates their contacts to you, you’ll get an email asking if you want to accept the request. If you accept, the contacts will appear in a new “Delegated contacts” section of the Contacts menu. You can add, edit, and delete someone else’s contacts the same way you can with your other contacts. If you want to stop managing these contacts, click Remove delegated contacts at the top of the page.

See our Help Center to learn more about managing delegated contacts.

Delegated contacts appear in a separate section of Contacts 


Use the new Google Contacts 

If you haven’t already, you can launch new Contacts for your users. New Contacts (aka Contacts preview) was launched in 2015 and has many comparable features from old Contacts, with an updated interface and additional features that increase efficiency. If you’ve previously enabled new Contacts and a user has opted out, they can opt back in by looking for the link to “Try Contacts preview” in the left hand menu at contacts.google.com.

A comparison of the old and new Google Contacts interface


Launch Details 
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release 

Editions: 
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace: 
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact: 
All end users

Action: 
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information 
Help Center: Delegate contacts to an assistant 


Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
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The Android Dev Summit app is live! Get ready for November 7-8

Posted by Matt Pearring, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Developer Marketing

In just a week, we'll be kicking off Android Dev Summit 2018, broadcasting live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on November 7 and 8. We'll have two days of deep technical sessions from the Android engineering team, with over 30 sessions livestreamed. The app just went live; download it on Google Play and start planning.

With the app you can explore the conference schedule with details on keynotes, sessions, and lightning talks. You can also plan your summit experience by saving events to your personalized schedule. This year's app is also an Instant app, so you can try it out first before installing it!

Android Dev Summit app screenshots

If you can't join in person, you can always join us online — we'll be livestreaming all of the sessions on the Android Dev Summit website or app and making them available on YouTube throughout the conference so you can watch at your own pace. Plus, we will share updates directly from the Computer History Museum to our social channels, so be sure to follow along!

Announcing v0_5 of the Google Ads API

Today we’re announcing the beta release of Google Ads API v0_5. With this version, you’ll continue pointing to v0 as your endpoint, however, you'll need to update your client libraries. Here are the highlights:
  • Billing. Multiple services are available for managing billing.
    • BillingSetupService
      • Create a new billing setup
      • Cancel an approved billing setup that is scheduled to start in the future
      • Cancel a pending billing setup that is not yet approved
    • AccountBudgetService
      • View all approved account-level budgets, including budget adjustments
      • View currently pending account-level budget proposals (if any)
    • AccountBudgetProposalService
      • Create account-level budget proposal to update a budget or create a new budget
      • View all account-level budget proposals. All approved values and proposed budget values are visible. Approved values will be exposed as fields prefixed with approved_.
  • Conversion tracking. Conversion tracking lets you measure the performance of your advertising against your business goals.
    • Conversion actions - Set up and edit the settings associated with your conversion actions, including website tracking and call-conversion tracking
  • Shopping. The ProductGroupView resource provides Shopping campaign statistics aggregated at the product group level (also called listing group in the Google Ads API). Results always reflect the current set of product groups. An impression for a product will be attributed to all product groups that contain the product. ProductGroupView provides features equivalent to the Product Partition Report of AdWords API.
  • Location and Demographics. You can now create criteria with CriterionType AGE_RANGE, GENDER, INCOME_RANGE, PARENTAL_STATUS, PLACEMENT, PROXIMITY, TOPIC, YOUTUBE_CHANNEL, and YOUTUBE_VIDEO. The GeoTargetConstantService lets you input locations and receive suggested geos.
  • Account Management. CustomerService.ListAccessibleCustomers provides the capability to manage Google Ads accounts.
To get started with the API, review these helpful resources:
The updated client libraries and code examples will be published within the next 48 hours. If you have any questions or need help, please contact us via the forum.
Nadine Sundquist, on behalf of the Google Ads API Team

Beta Channel Update for Desktop

The beta channel has been updated to 71.0.3578.30 for Windows, Mac, and, Linux.


A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels?  Find out how here. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.


Krishna Govind
Google Chrome

Google at EMNLP 2018

Posted by Manaal Faruqui, Senior Research Scientist and Emily Pitler, Staff Research Scientist, Google AI Language

This week, the annual conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2018) will be held in Brussels, Belgium. Google will have a strong presence at EMNLP with several of our researchers presenting their research on a diverse set of topics, including language identification, segmentation, semantic parsing and question answering, additionally serving in various levels of organization in the conference. Googlers will also be presenting their papers and participating in the co-located Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2018) shared task on multilingual parsing.

In addition to this involvement, we are sharing several new datasets with the academic community that are released with papers published at EMNLP, with the goal of accelerating progress in empirical natural language processing (NLP). These releases are designed to help account for mismatches between the datasets a machine learning model is trained and tested on, and the inputs an NLP system would be asked to handle “in the wild”. All of the datasets we are releasing include realistic, naturally occurring text, and fall into two main categories: 1) challenge sets for well-studied core NLP tasks (part-of-speech tagging, coreference) and 2) datasets to encourage new directions of research on meaning preservation under rephrasings/edits (query well-formedness, split-and-rephrase, atomic edits):
  • Noun-Verb Ambiguity in POS Tagging Dataset: English part-of-speech taggers regularly make egregious errors related to noun-verb ambiguity, despite high accuracies on standard datasets. For example: in “Mark which area you want to distress” several state-of-the-art taggers annotate “Mark” as a noun instead of a verb. We release a new dataset of over 30,000 naturally occurring non-trivial annotated examples of noun-verb ambiguity. Taggers previously indistinguishable from each other have accuracies ranging from 57% to 75% accuracy on this challenge set.
  • Query Wellformedness Dataset: Web search queries are usually “word-salad” style queries with little resemblance to natural language questions (“barack obama height” as opposed to “What is the height of Barack Obama?”). Differentiating a natural language question from a query is of importance to several applications include dialogue. We annotate and release 25,100 queries from the open-source Paralex corpus with ratings on how close they are to well-formed natural language questions.
  • WikiSplit: Split and Rephrase Dataset Extracted from Wikipedia Edits: We extract examples of sentence splits from Wikipedia edits where one sentence gets split into two sentences that together preserve the original meaning of the sentence (E.g. “Street Rod is the first in a series of two games released for the PC and Commodore 64 in 1989.” is split into “Street Rod is the first in a series of two games.” and “It was released for the PC and Commodore 64 in 1989.”) The released corpus contains one million sentence splits with a vocabulary of more than 600,000 words. 
  • WikiAtomicEdits: A Multilingual Corpus of Atomic Wikipedia Edits: Information about how people edit language in Wikipedia can be used to understand the structure of language itself. We pay particular attention to two atomic edits: insertions and deletions that consist of a single contiguous span of text. We extract around 43 million such edits in 8 languages and show that they provide valuable information about entailment and discourse. For example, insertion of “in 1949” adds a prepositional phrase to the sentence “She died there after a long illness” resulting in “She died there in 1949 after a long illness”.
These datasets join the others that Google has recently released, such as Conceptual Captions and GAP Coreference Resolution in addition to our past contributions.

Below is a full list of Google’s involvement and publications being presented at EMNLP and CoNLL (Googlers highlighted in blue). We are particularly happy to announce that the paper “Linguistically-Informed Self-Attention for Semantic Role Labeling” was awarded one of the two Best Long Paper awards. This work was done by our 2017 intern Emma Strubell, Googlers Daniel Andor, David Weiss and Google Faculty Advisor Andrew McCallum. We congratulate these authors, and all other researchers who are presenting their work at the conference.

Area Chairs Include:
Ming-Wei Chang, Marius Pasca, Slav Petrov, Emily Pitler, Meg Mitchell, Taro Watanabe

EMNLP Publications
A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun-Verb Ambiguity
Ali Elkahky, Kellie Webster, Daniel Andor, Emily Pitler

A Fast, Compact, Accurate Model for Language Identification of Codemixed Text
Yuan Zhang, Jason Riesa, Daniel Gillick, Anton Bakalov, Jason Baldridge, David Weiss

AirDialogue: An Environment for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Research
Wei Wei, Quoc Le, Andrew Dai, Jia Li

Content Explorer: Recommending Novel Entities for a Document Writer
Michal Lukasik, Richard Zens

Deep Relevance Ranking using Enhanced Document-Query Interactions
Ryan McDonald, George Brokos, Ion Androutsopoulos

HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering
Zhilin Yang, Peng Qi, Saizheng Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, William Cohen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Christopher D. Manning

Identifying Well-formed Natural Language Questions
Manaal Faruqui, Dipanjan Das

Learning To Split and Rephrase From Wikipedia Edit History
Jan A. Botha, Manaal Faruqui, John Alex, Jason Baldridge, Dipanjan Das

Linguistically-Informed Self-Attention for Semantic Role Labeling
Emma Strubell, Patrick Verga, Daniel Andor, David Weiss, Andrew McCallum

Open Domain Question Answering Using Early Fusion of Knowledge Bases and Text
Haitian Sun, Bhuwan Dhingra, Manzil Zaheer, Kathryn Mazaitis, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, William Cohen

Noise Contrastive Estimation for Conditional Models: Consistency and Statistical Efficiency
Zhuang Ma, Michael Collins

Part-of-Speech Tagging for Code-Switched, Transliterated Texts without Explicit Language Identification
Kelsey Ball, Dan Garrette

Phrase-Indexed Question Answering: A New Challenge for Scalable Document Comprehension
Minjoon Seo, Tom Kwiatkowski, Ankur P. Parikh, Ali Farhadi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Policy Shaping and Generalized Update Equations for Semantic Parsing from Denotations
Dipendra Misra, Ming-Wei Chang, Xiaodong He, Wen-tau Yih

Revisiting Character-Based Neural Machine Translation with Capacity and Compression
Colin Cherry, George Foster, Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat, Wolfgang Macherey

Self-governing neural networks for on-device short text classification
Sujith Ravi, Zornitsa Kozareva

Semi-Supervised Sequence Modeling with Cross-View Training
Kevin Clark, Minh-Thang Luong, Christopher D. Manning, Quoc Le

State-of-the-art Chinese Word Segmentation with Bi-LSTMs
Ji Ma, Kuzman Ganchev, David Weiss

Subgoal Discovery for Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning
Da Tang, Xiujun Li, Jianfeng Gao, Chong Wang, Lihong Li, Tony Jebara

SwitchOut: an Efficient Data Augmentation Algorithm for Neural Machine Translation
Xinyi Wang, Hieu Pham, Zihang Dai, Graham Neubig

The Importance of Generation Order in Language Modeling
Nicolas Ford, Daniel Duckworth, Mohammad Norouzi, George Dahl

Training Deeper Neural Machine Translation Models with Transparent Attention
Ankur Bapna, Mia Chen, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao, Yonghui Wu

Understanding Back-Translation at Scale
Sergey Edunov, Myle Ott, Michael Auli, David Grangier

Unsupervised Natural Language Generation with Denoising Autoencoders
Markus Freitag, Scott Roy

WikiAtomicEdits: A Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Edits for Modeling Language and Discourse
Manaal Faruqui, Ellie Pavlick, Ian Tenney, Dipanjan Das

WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community
Yiqing Hua, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dario Taraborelli, Nithum Thain, Jeffery Sorensen, Lucas Dixon

EMNLP Demos
SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing
Taku Kudo, John Richardson

Universal Sentence Encoder for English
Daniel Cer, Yinfei Yang, Sheng-yi Kong, Nan Hua, Nicole Limtiaco, Rhomni St. John, Noah Constant, Mario Guajardo-Cespedes, Steve Yuan, Chris Tar, Brian Strope, Ray Kurzweil

CoNLL Shared Task
Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies
Slav Petrov, co-organizer

Universal Dependency Parsing with Multi-Treebank Models
Aaron Smith, Bernd Bohnet, Miryam de Lhoneux, Joakim Nivre, Yan Shao, Sara Stymne
(Winner of the Universal POS Tagging and Morphological Tagging subtasks, using the open-sourced Meta-BiLSTM tagger)

CoNLL Publication
Sentence-Level Fluency Evaluation: References Help, But Can Be Spared!
Katharina Kann, Sascha Rothe, Katja Filippova

Source: Google AI Blog


Sean Medlin: A ‘Grow with Google Developer Scholarship’ Success Story

Originally published on the Udacity blog by Stuart Frye, VP for Business Development

This deserving scholarship recipient overcame incredible odds to earn this opportunity, and he's now on the path to achieving a career dream he's harbored since childhood!

Sean Medlin is a young man, but he's already experienced a great deal of hardship in his life. He's had to overcome the kinds of obstacles that too often stop people's dreams in their tracks, but he's never given up. Sustained by a lifelong love for computers, an unshakeable vision for his future, and a fierce commitment to learning, Sean has steadfastly pursued his life and career goals. He's done so against the odds, often without knowing whether anything would pan out.

Today, Sean Medlin is a Grow with Google Developer Scholarship recipient, on active duty in the US Air Force, with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree. He's married to a woman he says is "the best in the world" and he's just become a father for the second time. It's been a long journey for a boy who lost his sister to cancer before he'd reached adulthood, and whose official education record listed him as having never made it past the eighth grade.

But Sean keeps finding a way forward.

The experience of getting to know people like Sean is almost too powerful to describe, but experiences like these are at the heart of why the Grow with Google Developer Scholarship is such an impactful initiative for us. It's one thing to read the numbers at a high level, and feel joy and amazement that literally thousands of deserving learners have been able to advance their lives and careers through the scholarship opportunities they've earned. However, it's an entirely different experience to witness the transformative power of opportunity at the individual, human level. One person. Their life. Their dreams. Their challenges, and their successes.

It's our pleasure and our honor to introduce you to Sean Medlin, and to share his story.

You've spoken about your love for computers; when did that begin?

When I was around eight or nine, I inherited a computer from my parents and just started picking it apart and putting it back together. I fell in love with it and knew it was something I wanted to pursue as a career. By the time I reached the seventh grade I decided on a computer science degree, and knew I was already on the path to it—I was top of math and science in my class at that point.

And then things changed for your family. What happened?

My sister, who was just a year old at the time, was diagnosed with cancer; stage four. For the next several years, she fought it, and at one point beat it; but unfortunately, it came back. When she relapsed, she started receiving treatments at a research hospital about eight hours from where we lived. Because of this, our family was constantly separated. My brothers and I usually stayed at family and friend's houses. Eventually, my parents pulled us out of school so we could travel with them. We stayed at hotels or the Ronald McDonald house, really wherever we could find a place to stay. We eventually moved to Memphis, where the hospital is located. During all of this, I was homeschooled, but I really didn't learn a whole lot, given the circumstances. When my sister passed away, our family went through a terrible time. I personally took it hard and became lackadaisical. Eventually, I decided that regardless of what wrenches life was throwing me, I would not give up on my dream.

So you were still determined to further your education; what did you do?

Well, in what was my senior year, I decided to start thinking about college. I started googling, and the first thing I discovered is that I needed a high school diploma. So I found my way to the education boards in Oklahoma. I learned that I was never properly registered as a homeschool student. So my record shows that I dropped out of school my eighth grade year. I was pretty devastated. My only option was to go and get my GED*, so that's what I did.

Computer science was still your passion; were you able to start pursuing it after earning your GED?

Well, I had to take a lot of prerequisites before I could even start a computer science degree. I mean, a lot! Which was frustrating, because it took more money than I had. I tried applying for financial aid, but I wasn't able to get very much. I looked like an eighth grade dropout with a GED. That's all anyone saw.

So you found another way to pay for your schooling; what was that?

I decided to join the United States Air Force. I couldn't pay for my own education anymore, and the Air Force was offering tuition assistance. That was the best option I had. I have no military history in my family, and at first my friends and family were against the idea, worried I'd be overseas too much. But I was determined I was going to finish school and get my computer science degree and work in this field.

It sounds like the work you started doing in the Air Force wasn't really related to your desired career path, but you were still able to continue your education?

That's right. The career path I joined was supposedly tech-related, but it wasn't. I enlisted as a munition systems technology troop, or in other words, an ammo troop. It wasn't really in line with my goals, but the tuition assistance made it possible for me to keep studying computer science online. There was a tuition assistance cap though, and between that, and how much my supervisors were willing to approve, I was only able to take two classes per semester. But I kept plugging away, even using my own money to pay for some of it. It took me eight years while working in the Air Force, but I completed my computer science degree last March. I finished with a 3.98 GPA and Summa Cum Laude, the highest distinction!

That's an outstanding accomplishment, congratulations! Did you feel ready to enter the field and start working at that point?

Not at all! I definitely learned that I wasn't prepared for the programming world based just off my bachelor's degree. It taught me all the fundamentals, which was great. I learned the theory, and how to program, but I didn't really learn how to apply what I'd learned to real-world situations.

You'd had a great deal of experience with online learning by that point; is that where you went looking to determine your next steps?

Yes! I tried everything. I did some free web development boot camps. I discovered Udemy, and tried a bunch of their courses, trying to learn different languages. Then I found Udacity. I started off with free courses. I really fell in love with Java, and that's what initially brought me to Udacity's Android courses. The satisfaction of making an app, it just pulled me in. It was something I could show my wife, and my friends. I knew it was what I wanted to pursue.

And then you heard about the Google Scholarship?

Well, I was actually working out how I was going to pay for a Nanodegree program myself when the scholarship opportunity emerged. I applied, and was selected for the challenge course. I knew when I got selected, that I only had three months, and that they were going to pick the top 10 percent of the students, after those three months were up, to get the full scholarship. My son was only about a year old then, and my wife became pregnant again right when I found out about the scholarship. I told her, "I'm going to knock this course out as fast as possible. But I need you to help me buckle down." She took care of my son as much as possible, and I finished the challenge course in about two weeks. I was determined. I wanted to show I could do it. Afterwards, I became one of the student mentors and leaders, and constantly stayed active in the channels and forums. I just did as much as I could to prove my worth.

Those efforts paid off, and you landed a full Google Scholarship for the Android Basics Nanodegree program. And now you have some good news to share, is that right? Yes, I successfully completed the Android Basics Nanodegree program on July 29th!

How are you approaching your career goals differently now?

Well, completing the projects in my Nanodegree program really improved my confidence and performance in technical interviews. When I first graduated with my bachelor's degree, I applied for a few jobs and went through a couple technical interviews. I felt completely lost, and became nervous about doing them going forward. Once I completed the Nanodegree program, I went through another technical interview and felt so prepared. I knew every answer, and I knew exactly what I was talking about.

As it turns out, you've actually earned new opportunities ​within​ the Air Force. Can you
tell us about that?

The base I'm at is considered an IT hub for the Air Force, and the Air Force recently decided to start building mobile apps organically, utilizing our service members. Soon after this was decided, senior leadership began searching for the best and brightest programmers to fill this team. I was not only recommended, but they looked over my projects from the Nanodegree program, and deemed I was one of the most qualified! Normally, opportunities like this are strictly prohibited to anyone outside the requested Air Force specialty code, so I wasn't getting my hopes up. That restriction didn't stop senior leadership. As of right now, I'm part of the mobile app team, and the only ammo troop developing mobile apps for the Air Force, in the entire world!

So what does the future hold for you next?

I feel like the last 15 years of my life have been leading up to where I'm at now. I want to pursue a job as a software developer—an Android developer, in Silicon Valley! Ever since I was a kid, I've had the dream of being a developer at Blizzard. I was a huge World of Warcraft nerd during my homeschooled years. However, I'm okay if I fall a little short of that. I really just want to be surrounded by other programmers. I want to learn from them. It's what I've always wanted. To become a programmer. The idea of leaving the military is really scary though. The thought of not being able to get a job … it's scary, it's a lot of different emotions. But my aspiration is to become a full-time software developer for a big tech company, in a nice big city.

How does your wife feel about all of this?

My wife is the best woman in the world. She wants to follow me wherever the wind takes us. She's very proud of me, and I'm very proud of her too. She does a lot. I wouldn't be able to do what I do without her. That's for sure.

I think I speak for everyone at Udacity when I say that no one here has any doubt you'll achieve whatever you set out to achieve!

It's often said that hindsight is 20/20, and in hindsight, it's tempting to say we helped create the Grow with Google Developer Scholarship just for people like Sean. To say that, however, would be doing a disservice to him. His journey, and his accomplishments, are unique. The truth is, we didn't know who we'd meet when we launched this initiative. Yet here we are today, celebrating all that Sean has accomplished!

To have played a role in his story is an honor we couldn't have predicted, but it's one we'll treasure always.

Sean, congratulations on your success in the scholarship program, and for everything you've achieved. Whether you elect to stay in the military, or make your way to California with your family, we know you'll continue to do great things!

Growing Careers and Skills Across the US

Grow with Google is a new initiative to help people get the skills they need to find a job. Udacity is excited to partner with Google on this powerful effort, and to offer the Developer Scholarship program.

Grow with Google Developer scholars come from different backgrounds, live in different cities, and are pursuing different goals in the midst of different circumstances, but they are united by their efforts to advance their lives and careers through hard work, and a commitment to self-empowerment through learning. We're honored to support their efforts, and to share the stories of scholars like Sean.

Beta Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Beta channel has been updated to 71.0.3578.27 (Platform version: 11151.17.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes, security updates and feature enhancements.   A list of changes can be found here.

If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using ‘Report an issue...’ in the Chrome menu (3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the browser).

Kevin Bleicher
Google Chrome

A new way to browse hotels on Google

Earlier this year, we redesigned our hotel search experience so you can more easily explore and filter for hotels on your mobile device. We see that travelers love interacting with the new mobile features—so beginning today, we’re bringing the same modern look and feel to Hotel Search on desktop, too.

Now, when you search for hotels in Honolulu for example, you can browse hotel results easily with:

  • Photos from the hotel or fellow travelers
  • Hotel information, such as neighborhood and location
  • Hotel reviews from around the web that can be searched by keywords like “air conditioning”

  • Hotel results on Google

    Browse hotel results on Google

  • Hotel details

    Get an overview of hotel information and details

  • Hotel details - prices

    Compare hotel room prices

  • Hotel details - reviews

    Read hotel reviews from around the web

  • Hotel details - about

    See a description of the hotel 

  • Hotel details - photos

    View photos from the hotel or fellow travelers

We hope this makes planning your holidays and 2019 travels just a little bit easier.

Green hair, don’t care: create emoji that look exactly like you on Gboard

There might be thousands of emoji, but for a lot of people, it’s hard to find one that looks and feels like *you*. Today, we’re introducing emoji style Mini stickers for Gboard, designed for those who may have stared into the eyes of emoji and not seen yourself staring back. These sticker versions of the emoji you use every day are customizable so you can make them look just like you. Have a beard and long gray curly hair? No problem. Nose piercing and baseball cap? We gotcha.

Mini sticker styles

Three Mini flavors: Bold, Sweet, and Emoji

Minis use a combination of machine learning and artistry to create illustrated stickers based on your selfie. Mini stickers also come in two other styles: “bold,” for when you might be feeling a little extra, and “sweet,” for when you want a softer touch.

After you take a selfie, emoji Minis use Google’s machine learning algorithms, known as neural networks, to suggest a skin tone, hair style and accessories that you can fine tune. Then, you choose a color for your hair, facial hair or different types of head coverings and eyewear. Add freckles or wrinkles—a little or a lot—if you'd like. Design your Minis so they resemble what you look like in your eyes—or in your mind. ?

Emoji stickers

Customizable emoji Minis

With Mini emojis, redheads (and other hair types) won’t just get a single redheaded emoji, but instead a selection of redheaded options, including redheaded zombies ?, redheaded mages ? and redheaded shruggies ?.


Start stickerising with your new, more YOU emojis! Emoji Minis start rolling out today in all Gboard languages and countries, on both iOS and Android.
Mini UX flow