Coronavirus: Cómo estamos ayudando

Blog en inglés aquí.

Tenga en cuenta que la siguiente información se basa en una nota enviada a todos los empleados hoy de parte de Sundar. 

A medida que COVID-19 se abre paso en todo el mundo, está afectando a nuestras comunidades de diferentes maneras. Muchos en Europa y América están hasta ahora experimentando lo que las personas en Asia han estado enfrentando durante semanas.

Hemos establecido un equipo de respuesta a incidentes las 24 horas del día para estar alineados con la Organización Mundial de la Salud, y los líderes de Google se están reuniendo diariamente para tomar decisiones críticas sobre nuestras oficinas a nivel mundial. 

Al hacerlo, sopesamos una serie de factores basados ​​en la ciencia, incluida la orientación de los departamentos de salud locales, las evaluaciones de transmisión comunitaria y nuestra capacidad para continuar el trabajo esencial y proveer los productos y servicios en los que las personas confían. También estamos creando resiliencia en nuestras operaciones, y en nuestros productos, probando nuestra propia capacidad para trabajar de forma remota. Y también es importante pensar en cómo podemos ayudar a nuestras comunidades locales en la medida en que hacemos estos cambios.

En algunas de nuestras oficinas, nuestros empleados están trabajando desde sus hogares para garantizar la continuidad del negocio, mientras que en otras siguen funcionando normalmente. A medida que hacemos estos cambios, nos hemos asegurado de que los proveedores de servicios que forman parte de nuestra fuerza laboral extendida que se ven afectados por horarios de trabajo reducidos sean compensados ​​por el tiempo que habrían trabajado.

Este es un momento sin precedentes. Es importante que lo abordemos con un sentido de calma y responsabilidad, pues tenemos muchas personas que cuentan con nosotros.

Todos los días, las personas recurren a los productos de Google para obtener ayuda: para acceder a información importante; mantenerse productivo mientras trabajan y aprenden de forma remota; mantenerse conectado con las personas cercanas en todas las geografías; o simplemente relajarse con un excelente video o música al final de un día largo.

A continuación, quiero compartir algunos ejemplos de lo que estamos haciendo para ayudar. En la medida en que la situación del coronavirus continúe evolucionando, estaremos pensando en más formas en que podemos ser útiles para todos nuestros usuarios, socios, clientes y comunidades.

Mientras tanto, continúen cuidándose a sí mismos y a los demás.

Ayudando a las personas a encontrar información útil

Las personas continúan acudiendo a Google para buscar información sobre vacunas, avisos de viajes y consejos de prevención (por ejemplo, las consultas de búsqueda para "consejos de limpieza de coronavirus" aumentaron más del 1,700 por ciento durante la última semana en los Estados Unidos). Nuestra Alerta SOS en la Búsqueda conecta a las personas con las últimas noticias, además de ofrecer consejos de seguridad y enlaces a información autorizada de la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS).

Para las personas que buscan específicamente información sobre los síntomas, la prevención o los tratamientos, estamos trabajando para expandir nuestros paneles de conocimiento sobre condiciones de salud para incluir un panel COVID-19.

En YouTube, usaremos la página de inicio para dirigir a los usuarios a la OMS u otras organizaciones autorizadas localmente relevantes y donaremos inventarios de anuncios a gobiernos y ONG en las regiones afectadas para uso de educación e información. Google Maps continúa mostrando información local útil y confiable.

Proteger a las personas de la desinformación

Nuestro equipo de Trust & Safety (Confianza y Seguridad) ha estado trabajando durante todo el día y en todo el mundo para proteger a nuestros usuarios de phishing, teorías de conspiración, malware y desinformación, y estamos constantemente en búsqueda de nuevas amenazas. En YouTube, estamos trabajando para eliminar rápidamente cualquier contenido que pretenda prevenir el coronavirus en lugar de buscar tratamiento médico. En Google Ads, estamos bloqueando todos los anuncios que se aprovechan del coronavirus, y hemos bloqueado decenas de miles de anuncios en las últimas seis semanas. También estamos ayudando a la OMS y las organizaciones gubernamentales a publicar anuncios de PSA. Google Play también prohíbe a los desarrolladores capitalizar eventos confidenciales, y nuestras pólizas de contenido prohíben estrictamente las aplicaciones que presentan contenido o funcionalidades médicas o relacionadas con la salud que son engañosas o potencialmente dañinas.

Haciendo posible la productividad para trabajadores remotos y estudiantes

Empleados, educadores y estudiantes están utilizando productos como Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Classroom, Hangouts Meet y Hangouts Chat, así como G Suite for Education, para ser productivos mientras trabajan y aprenden de forma remota, incluidos cientos de miles de estudiantes en Hong Kong y Vietnam, donde las escuelas han sido cerradas. A partir de esta semana, implementamos acceso gratuito a nuestras capacidades avanzadas de videoconferencia de Hangouts Meet para todos los clientes de G Suite y G Suite for Education a nivel mundial hasta el 1 de julio de 2020. También estamos agregando recursos para poder apoyar una mayor demanda de transmisión pública en vivo en YouTube. Hemos visto un mayor interés en las regiones afectadas a medida que las personas buscan conectarse virtualmente con sus comunidades cuando no pueden hacerlo en persona.

Apoyando los esfuerzos de ayuda y las organizaciones gubernamentales

Estamos proporcionando $25 millones de dólares en créditos publicitarios donados a la OMS y agencias gubernamentales, y proporcionaremos más si es necesario durante todo el año. Google.org y Googlers han donado más de $1 millón de dólares para apoyar los esfuerzos de ayuda, que se destinarán a organizaciones que trabajan para comprar suministros médicos, proporcionar alimentos y alojamiento a los trabajadores de primera línea, apoyar la construcción de hospitales temporales y ayudar con los esfuerzos de recuperación a largo plazo. Google Cloud continúa trabajando con los gobiernos federales, estatales y locales para ayudarlos a conectarse con los ciudadanos y los viajeros que regresan de las regiones afectadas. Por ejemplo, en Singapur, Google Cloud trabajó con el gobierno para implementar un bot de chat en su sitio web que ayuda a responder las preguntas más comunes de los ciudadanos. También estamos trabajando con gobiernos de todo el mundo para ayudarlos a promover información pública autorizada sobre COVID-19 a través de nuestro programa de ayuda en caso de crisis de Google Ad Grants.

Avanzando en la investigación y la ciencia de la salud

DeepMind utilizó la última versión de su sistema AlphaFold (basándose en el trabajo de plegamiento de proteínas que apareció en Nature en enero) para publicar predicciones de la estructura de varias proteínas asociadas con el SARS-CoV-2, el virus que causa COVID-19. Estas predicciones de estructura aún no se han verificado experimentalmente, pero la esperanza es que al acelerar su liberación puedan contribuir a la comprensión de la comunidad científica de cómo funciona el virus y al trabajo experimental en el desarrollo de futuros tratamientos. Verily está desarrollando un pequeño parche de temperatura en el cuerpo que transmite datos a una aplicación de teléfono para proporcionar una notificación oportuna de fiebre y respaldar el diagnóstico y el tratamiento tempranos de una infección viral como la gripe o el coronavirus. Esto podría ser especialmente útil en poblaciones de edad avanzada, donde las infecciones virales tienen tasas más altas de morbilidad y mortalidad.


Women at Google: Meet Sara Sabour


For Women's History Month, we're profiling some of the powerful, dynamic and creative Canadian women at Google.

Sara Sabour wants to make an impact in the world. She’s focused on increasing the ability of machine learning, specifically unsupervised. An ambitious goal for some, but as an Artificial Intelligence Research Scientist at Google, she knows how to push the boundaries and think big.

Personally inspired by the late mathematician and Field Medal Winner, Maryam Mirzakhani (Sara and Maryam went to the same high school in Iran), Sara touts Maryam as someone who has inspired her career. And although Sara blushes when I refer to her as a ‘superwoman’, she’s doing the same. Her work and accomplishments are inspiring girls and showing them the magnitude and impact that computer science can have.

How would you describe your job at a dinner party to people who don't work in tech?
I work on fundamental science behind artificial intelligence (AI). My work focuses on the ability for computers to observe the world and find the solutions by themselves. My specific research currently focuses more on image data and to increase the ability for computers to process and identify different viewpoints of the same objects.

What is the most challenging part of your job?
As a research scientist, I work at the cutting edge of technology, focused on solving open problems. While this can undoubtedly be exciting, it also presents a challenge. The path forward is not clear at all, there is a high level of uncertainty about what you should try next.

You mentioned uncertainty as the biggest challenge, how do you approach this?
Depending on the situation, there’s a couple of things I do. Sometimes it’s really as simple as talking it out. I’ll consult with my colleagues (oftentimes Geoffrey Hinton), share my thinking and get their perspective. In other situations, I’ll go down the path of exploring the various ideas. This lets me see pretty early on whether some ideas would not work and some might be more promising. What’s really important with this approach is being flexible, fluid and willing to pivot if an idea isn’t coming to fruition the way you envisioned it.

So I can’t help but ask, since you mentioned him. What’s it like to work with Geoffrey Hinton?
He’s definitely someone I look up to, he’s brilliant. He’s also really passionate about his work. His passion extends to those around him and it helps energize me and makes me want to jump in and solve problems. He’s fun to work with, he’s funny and compassionate and I’ve become better at my job by working with him.

What is the most rewarding part/your favourite part of the job?
Because of the field I’m in, I get to see the fruit of my labour and how it impacts others in real world situations. I enjoy watching how a simple programming idea suddenly improves the performance of a task by a huge margin. I also get excited when I see boosts in the general frontier of artificial intelligence by any group. I feel proud of being a member of this scientific community.

What is your secret power/habit that makes you successful?
The ability to focus 100% for several hours straight. Whenever I dive deep into a problem, I get a tremendous performance boost.

That's definitely a superpower! So what’s the secret?
Growing up I was always a bookworm, but while I’d be trying to read, my sister would want to play with me. It was never quiet! That’s how I learned to really block everything out and simply focus. Even today, sometimes I find myself so focused that I don’t notice when someone’s talking to me.

Was there something specific that pushed you toward your career in tech?
My interest in computer science began at a young age, but I didn’t cross paths with machine learning until high school. I was really fortunate that at my high school in Iran, we had the opportunity to be exposed to different courses. During the summer one year, I took two courses - mechanical robotics and software coding. This was when I fell in love with coding.

As a competitive coder and member of the robotics team, I taught my robot to walk and stand with the aid of a machine learning program that used several simulations as input data. I saw the potential machine learning had to advance other fields dramatically—from health and medicine to physics and astronomy. The opportunities were endless. From that moment, I knew I needed to be a part of those advancements.

What inspires you in your career?
The opportunity of AI, and making artificial intelligence solutions that can help us be more efficient with our time and tasks.

What advice would you give to women pursuing a career in technology?
Believe in yourself! Don’t let others determine your confidence. Your gender, race and differences are your strength, own them.

How do you hope to inspire the next generation of girls?
I’d encourage them to be open to exploring new things. I love to think of it as the ‘room of doors’ in Alice in Wonderland. The possibilities with Computer Science are endless. Computer Science gives you the opportunity to help across a variety of fields and teaches you critical thinking skills such as problem solving.

Tell us about a project that you're proud of.
Working on Capsule Networks with Geoffrey Hinton is definitely up there for me! There have been several adaptations of it for medical imaging which makes me excited and proud. We have four published research articles regarding Capsule Networks and were featured in a New York Times article highlighting one of the first iterations of the work.

Your work has been featured in the New York Times, that must be surreal!
It was a big deal. It is a big deal. It’s still really crazy to me! It’s opened a lot of other opportunities for me, it’s helped with my confidence and reminded me that the work I’m doing is really valuable and making an impact. It pushes me to want to do more and continue to achieve great things.

Coronavirus: How we’re helping

Note: The following is based on an email to employees that Sundar sent earlier today.

As COVID-19 makes its way across the globe, it’s affecting our communities in different ways. Many in Europe and the Americas are just now beginning to experience what people in Asia have been confronting for weeks. 

We have set up a 24-hour incident response team to stay in sync with the World Health Organization, and Google’s leaders are meeting daily to make critical decisions about our offices globally. 

In doing so, we weigh a number of factors grounded in science, including guidance from local health departments, community transmission assessments, and our ability to continue essential work and deliver the products and services people rely on. We’re also trying to build resilience into our operations—and our products—by testing our own capacity to work remotely. And it is also important to think about how we can help our local communities as we make these changes.

Some of our offices have shifted to a work-from-home status ensuring business continuity, while others are still operating as normal. As we make these changes, we have been making sure that our hourly service vendor workers in our extended workforce who are affected by reduced work schedules are compensated for the time they would have worked. 

This is an unprecedented moment. It’s important that we approach it with a sense of calm and responsibility—because we have many people counting on us.

Every day people turn to Google products for help: to access important information; to stay productive while working and learning remotely; to stay connected to people you care about across geographies; or to simply relax with a great video or some music at the end of a long day.  

I’ve shared some early examples of what we are doing to help below. As the coronavirus situation continues to evolve, we will be thinking of even more ways we can be helpful to all of our users, partners, customers and communities. 

In the meantime, please continue to take care of yourselves and each other.

Helping people find useful information

People continue to come to Google to search for vaccine information, travel advisories and prevention tips (for example, search queries for "coronavirus cleaning advice" spiked over 1,700 percent over the last week in the U.S.). Our SOS Alert in Search connects people with the latest news plus safety tips and links to more authoritative information from the World Health Organization (WHO). 

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For people specifically looking for information about symptoms, prevention or treatments, we’re working to expand our Knowledge Panels for health conditions to include a COVID-19 panel.

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On YouTube, we’ll be using the homepage to direct users to the WHO or other locally relevant authoritative organizations and will donate ad inventory to governments and NGOs in impacted regions to use for education and information. Google Maps continues to surface helpful and reliable local information.

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Protecting people from misinformation

Our Trust and Safety team has been working around the clock and across the globe to safeguard our users from phishing, conspiracy theories, malware and misinformation, and we are constantly on the lookout for new threats. On YouTube, we are working to quickly remove any content that claims to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment. On Google Ads we are blocking all ads capitalizing on the coronavirus, and we’ve blocked tens of thousands of ads over the last six weeks. We are also helping WHO and government organizations run PSA ads. Google Play also prohibits developers from capitalizing on sensitive events, and our long-standing content policies strictly prohibit apps that feature medical or health-related content or functionalities that are misleading or potentially harmful.

Enabling productivity for remote workers and students

Employees, educators and students are using products like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Classroom, Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, as well as G Suite for Education, to be productive while working and learning remotely, including hundreds of thousands of students in Hong Kong and Vietnam, where schools have been closed. Starting this week we rolled out free access to our advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally until July 1, 2020. We’re also adding resources to be able to support increased demand for public livestreaming on YouTube. We’ve seen increased interest in affected regions as people look to be able to connect virtually with their communities when they are unable to do so in person.

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Supporting relief efforts and government organizations

We're providing $25 million in donated ad credit to the WHO and government agencies, and will provide more if there is a need throughout the year. Google.org and Googlers have donated over $1 million to support relief efforts, which will go towards organizations working to purchase medical supplies, provide frontline workers with food and lodging, support the construction of temporary hospitals, and help with long-term recovery efforts. Google Cloud continues to work with federal, state and local governments to help them connect with citizens and returning travelers from impacted regions. For example, in Singapore, Google Cloud worked with the government to implement a chat bot on their website that helps answer citizens’ most common questions. We’re also working with governments around the globe to help them promote authoritative public information about COVID-19 through our Google Ad Grants crisis relief program.

Advancing health research and science

DeepMind used the latest version of its AlphaFold system (building on the protein folding work that appeared in Nature in January) to release structure predictions of several proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These structure predictions have not yet been experimentally verified, but the hope is that by accelerating their release they may contribute to the scientific community’s understanding of how the virus functions and experimental work in developing future treatments. Verily is developing a small, body-worn temperature patch that transmits data to a phone application to provide timely notification of fever and support earlier diagnosis and treatment of a viral infection like the flu or coronavirus. This could be especially useful in elderly populations, where viral infections have higher rates of morbidity and mortality.

Measuring Compositional Generalization

Posted by Marc van Zee, Software Engineer, Google Research

People are capable of learning the meaning of a new word and then applying it to other language contexts. As Lake and Baroni put it, “Once a person learns the meaning of a new verb ‘dax’, he or she can immediately understand the meaning of ‘dax twice’ and ‘sing and dax’.” Similarly, one can learn a new object shape and then recognize it with different compositions of previously learned colors or materials (e.g., in the CLEVR dataset). This is because people exhibit the capacity to understand and produce a potentially infinite number of novel combinations of known components, or as Chomsky said, to make “infinite use of finite means.” In the context of a machine learning model learning from a set of training examples, this skill is called compositional generalization.

A common approach for measuring compositional generalization in machine learning (ML) systems is to split the training and testing data based on properties that intuitively correlate with compositional structure. For instance, one approach is to split the data based on sequence length — the training set consists of short examples, while the test set consists of longer examples. Another approach uses sequence patterns, meaning the split is based on randomly assigning clusters of examples sharing the same pattern to either train or test sets. For instance, the questions "Who directed Movie1" and "Who directed Movie2" both fall into the pattern "Who directed <MOVIE>" so they would be grouped together. Yet another method uses held out primitives — some linguistic primitives are shown very rarely during training (e.g., the verb “jump”), but are very prominent in testing. While each of these experiments are useful, it is not immediately clear which experiment is a "better" measure for compositionality. Is it possible to systematically design an “optimal” compositional generalization experiment?

In “Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data”, we attempt to address this question by introducing the largest and most comprehensive benchmark for compositional generalization using realistic natural language understanding tasks, specifically, semantic parsing and question answering. In this work, we propose a metric — compound divergence — that allows one to quantitatively assess how much a train-test split measures the compositional generalization ability of an ML system. We analyze the compositional generalization ability of three sequence to sequence ML architectures, and find that they fail to generalize compositionally. We also are releasing the Compositional Freebase Questions dataset used in the work as a resource for researchers wishing to improve upon these results.

Measuring Compositionality
In order to measure the compositional generalization ability of a system, we start with the assumption that we understand the underlying principles of how examples are generated. For instance, we begin with the grammar rules to which we must adhere when generating questions and answers. We then draw a distinction between atoms and compounds. Atoms are the building blocks that are used to generate examples and compounds are concrete (potentially partial) compositions of these atoms. For example, in the figure below, every box is an atom (e.g., Shane Steel, brother, <entity>'s <entity>, produce, etc.), which fits together to form compounds, such as produce and <verb>, Shane Steel’s brother, Did Shane Steel’s brother produce and direct Revenge of the Spy?, etc.
Building compositional sentences (compounds) from building blocks (atoms).
An ideal compositionality experiment then should have a similar atom distribution, i.e., the distribution of words and sub-phrases in the training set is as similar as possible to their distribution in the test set, but with a different compound distribution. To measure compositional generalization on a question answering task about a movie domain, one might, for instance, have the following questions in train and test:
While atoms such as “directed”, “Inception”, and “who <predicate> <entity>” appear in both the train and test sets, the compounds are different.

The Compositional Freebase Questions dataset
In order to conduct an accurate compositionality experiment, we created the Compositional Freebase Questions (CFQ) dataset, a simple, yet realistic, large dataset of natural language questions and answers generated from the public Freebase knowledge base. The CFQ can be used for text-in / text-out tasks, as well as semantic parsing. In our experiments, we focus on semantic parsing, where the input is a natural language question and the output is a query, which when executed against Freebase, produces the correct outcome. CFQ contains around 240k examples and almost 35k query patterns, making it significantly larger and more complex than comparable datasets — about 4 times that of WikiSQL with about 17x more query patterns than Complex Web Questions. Special care has been taken to ensure that the questions and answers are natural. We also quantify the complexity of the syntax in each example using the “complexity level” metric (L), which corresponds roughly to the depth of the parse tree, examples of which are shown below.
Compositional Generalization Experiments on CFQ
For a given train-test split, if the compound distributions of the train and test sets are very similar, then their compound divergence would be close to 0, indicating that they are not difficult tests for compositional generalization. A compound divergence close to 1 means that the train-test sets have many different compounds, which makes it a good test for compositional generalization. Compound divergence thus captures the notion of "different compound distribution", as desired.

We algorithmically generate train-test splits using the CFQ dataset that have a compound divergence ranging from 0 to 0.7 (the maximum that we were able to achieve). We fix the atom divergence to be very small. Then, for each split we measure the performance of three standard ML architectures — LSTM+attention, Transformer, and Universal Transformer. The results are shown in the graph below.
Compound divergence vs accuracy for three ML architectures. There is a surprisingly strong negative correlation between compound divergence and accuracy.
We measure the performance of a model by comparing the correct answers with the output string given by the model. All models achieve an accuracy greater than 95% when the compound divergence is very low. The mean accuracy on the split with highest compound divergence is below 20% for all architectures, which means that even a large training set with a similar atom distribution between train and test is not sufficient for the architectures to generalize well. For all architectures, there is a strong negative correlation between the compound divergence and the accuracy. This seems to indicate that compound divergence successfully captures the core difficulty for these ML architectures to generalize compositionally.

Potentially promising directions for future work might be to apply unsupervised pre-training on input language or output queries, or to use more diverse or more targeted learning architectures, such as syntactic attention. It would also be interesting to apply this approach to other domains such as visual reasoning, e.g. based on CLEVR, or to extend our approach to broader subsets of language understanding, including the use of ambiguous constructs, negations, quantification, comparatives, additional languages, and other vertical domains. We hope that this work will inspire others to use this benchmark to advance the compositional generalization capabilities of learning systems.

Source: Google AI Blog


Enroll security keys on more devices

What’s changing

We’re making it easier to enroll security keys on Android and MacOS devices by making it possible to use additional web browsers to initially register the security keys to your account.

Now, you can register security keys on:

  • Android devices running Android 7.0 “N” and up using the Google Chrome web browser (version 70 and up)
  • MacOS devices using Safari (v. 13.0.4 and up)

This will work for security keys registered independently, as well as those registered when a user signs up for the Advanced Protection Program for the enterprise.

Who’s impacted

End users

Why it’s important

Security keys provide the strongest form of 2-Step Verification (also known as two-factor authentication or 2FA) to help protect your account against phishing. By making it easier to register security keys, we hope more users will be able to take advantage of the protection they offer.

This builds on other recent announcements around security keys for G Suite and Cloud Identity, including using an iPhone as a security key for 2-Step Verification, and enabling phones as security keys in the Advanced Protection Program.

Getting started



Registering a security key on an Android mobile device with the Chrome browser

Rollout pace

  • This feature is available now for all users.


Availability

  • Available to all G Suite and Cloud Identity customers


Resources

Math gave Lilian Rincon a voice, and led to her passion

When Lilian Rincon was 9-years-old, her family moved from Venezuela to Vancouver, Canada. Lilian, who’s half Chinese and half Spanish, didn’t speak any English, and found herself as the only Spanish-speaking student in her ESL (English as a second language) class. “It was a very lonely time since I couldn’t speak with many people at school.” That struggle steered her toward a more welcoming environment: math. “Math is kind of a universal language, so it was the only subject I could keep progressing in without having to start from scratch because I couldn’t understand what people were saying,” Lilian explains. Her love of math led to a career in computer science, and today she works as a senior director of Google Assistant, where she runs the team that creates new features and functions for the product. 

We recently had the chance to talk to Lilian about her personal time management tips, how her team cultivates creativity within a productivity tool and even heard about some of her favorite Assistant Easter Eggs—right in time for International Women’s Day. 

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Google Assistant is so complex; it’s the hardest product I’ve ever worked on, many people on the team feel the same way—but we are excited by that, too. For me, the thing that’s most challenging is prioritizing what I need to work on and how I need to be available to support my team on the projects they are working on—I'm proud that I can lean on them. And I’ve also realized that for me to be the best I can be it’s about making time for myself, whether that’s reserving 30 minutes in the morning for a workout or taking a quick walk in the afternoon. I can recharge, get a fresh perspective and set the example that we all need to have breaks and focus on ourselves. 

What’s the most rewarding part? 

Seeing how many people Assistant is helping and how much impact we're having is so rewarding. 500 million people worldwide use Assistant each month; in some places, it’s even available to people without internet access. It’s also been incredible to see how Assistant is helping the world become more accessible to everyone. 

What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?

I started playing volleyball when we moved to Canada when I was nine. Although I could barely speak the language, I was able to figure out what to do. It became a lifeline in helping me make friends. I played through high school, earned a college scholarship and became the captain of my university’s team. 

Was it difficult to manage your time as a college athlete?

When you play on a varsity team, you’re getting up early to train in the morning, you go to class, then after class there’s more training. I didn’t have a lot of time to do homework or go to the library. I'm proud I kept my academic scholarship the whole time. When I switched majors from biochemistry to computer science, I ended up taking a year longer to graduate. During my fifth year when I was finishing up my major, I wasn't playing volleyball, and it was actually the most challenging year! More time wasn’t necessarily the thing I needed, it was focused time. 

Do you have any advice for women entering the technology field?

Look inward, figure out what you’re passionate about and what you want. You need to identify these things, and then tell your colleagues and your managers. If you don’t tell them, it’s hard for them to help you. When you communicate your goals and passions, people will step in to help you. 

How has productivity changed for you as your career has progressed?

Earlier in my career, I focused on execution and the day-to-day management of making sure the right tasks were being done and the right opportunities were identified. As I’ve become more senior, it’s more about being thoughtful about my time and making sure I’m focused on the important things that matter to my team and for the product. It’s really easy to get into a mode where you’re spending the entire day in meetings reacting to things, but it becomes much more important to be more proactive and less reactive. 

Do you have any favorite Google Assistant Easter Eggs?

Yes! Too many of them, to be honest. I love the simple ones like “Hey Google, can you beat box?” or “Hey Google, can you rap?” But then we have some really cool temporal ones, too. For International Women’s Day, we have some amazing stories from Google Assistant if you say,  “Hey Google, Happy International Women’s Day” or “Hey Google, tell me about an inspiring woman.” 

Has there been a feature that people were more excited about than you thought they would be?

Yes, interpreter mode, our real-time language translation feature. This was something we announced at CES 2019, and rolled out on phones at the end of last year. I was in New York showing press, and we were overwhelmed—in a good way—at their reactions. People were like, “wow this is incredible!” 

For me, it was important to bring translation features to Assistant because I went through a point in my life where I really couldn’t communicate, where I couldn’t be heard.  I couldn’t be understood by others and I also couldn’t understand what they were saying—which felt crippling. For me, it’s a personal thing. 


Cloud Covered: What was new with Google Cloud in February

In Google Cloud last month, we felt the love with new cloud classes, an addition to our cloud family, and a brand-new cloud region. Read on for those and other top stories from February.

Meet us in the cloud.

We are transforming our annual gathering of cloud professionals to Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect, a free, global, digital-first, multi-day event connecting our attendees to Next ’20 content and each other through streamed keynotes, breakout sessions, interactive learning and digital “ask an expert” sessions with Google teams. Stay tuned to the Next ‘20 site for more details on sessions and registration info.

A new cloud data center opens in Utah.

We announced the opening of a Google Cloud Platform region in Salt Lake City last month, making it our third western U.S. region, sixth nationally, and 22nd globally. Though cloud may seem like an ephemeral concept, it’s actually made up of many physical computers, stacked together and run very efficiently in these large data centers, called regions. For a company based in Utah, this new region can speed up access to their data and services run with Google Cloud.

Cloud school is in session.

We added more content to our online set of courses for people looking for deeper training and skills in an evolving discipline of cloud computing. The Data Engineering on Google Cloud learning path is newly updated, and includes introductions to relevant Google Cloud products, plus hands-on labs for experimenting. The courses all combine to cover the primary responsibilities of a data engineer.

Work smarter and more efficiently.

Check out these essential tips from our G Suite team on combating the information overload many of us experience at work every day. Those emails and chat messages will keep coming, but you can find some ways to use your time wisely and get more done. For example, you can try the snooze and mute features in Gmail or Hangouts Chat to avoid interruptions when you want to focus on finishing a task or meeting a deadline.

Computers of the past join the present.

The computers of olden days, called mainframes, were the huge systems that powered the first businesses using technology. Plenty of mainframe systems are still running these days, but they can hold developers back from using new technologies. Google Cloud acquired Cornerstone Technology last month to better help customers migrate the software that’s running on mainframes. Cornerstone’s experience and capabilities can make the mainframe-to-Google Cloud move easier.

That’s a wrap for February. Keep up to date on our blog anytime.

Hey Google, tell me about an inspiring woman

Honoring the bold, brave and brilliant women who have influenced our lives is not limited to a single month—it’s a daily endeavor. But for Women’s History Month, Google Assistant and Google Arts & Culture are doing something special. 


When you wish your Assistant "Happy International Women's Day," you’ll learn about one of twelve extraordinary women like Dolores Huerta (an American labor rights activist), Savitribai Phule (often called the mother of Indian feminism), Rachel Carson (an American marine biologist, conservationist and author) and Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya (an activist empowering girls to access education in Kenya). For additional stories about female trailblazers, visit g.co/womeninculture.


Celebrate with your Google Assistant all month long by asking your smart speaker, Smart Display (like Nest Hub Max) or phone (Android and iOS):

  • “Hey Google, Happy International Women’s Day”

  • “Hey Google, tell me about an inspiring woman” 

  • “Hey Google, tell me quotes from inspiring women”

Google Assistant_IWD Phone.png

And if you’re looking for ways to connect with the women in your life (or treat yourself!), get a little help by asking your Assistant:

  • “Hey Google, play a podcast about inspirational women”

  • "Hey Google, talk like Issa" to get Issa Rae’s cameo voice.

  • “Hey Google, call Mom”

  • “Hey Google, text Lisa ‘Happy International Women’s Day’”

  • “Hey Google, who runs the world?”

  • “Hey Google, compliment me”

Reboot your career with DigiPivot – Introducing a skilling program for women to build their careers in digital marketing

We are excited to introduce DigiPivot, a skilling program designed for women who are looking to  return to their corporate careers after a break or simply planning to make mid career shifts to digital marketing.
Developed jointly in association with Avtar and the prestigious Indian School of Business, the program aims to influence the overall gender mix in the digital marketing landscape in India and will provide an opportunity for 200 Women Professionals to re-skill themselves and become India’s next set of Digital Marketing Leaders. 
Selected participants will go through a curated 18 week learning program and engagement (both offline and online) that aims to empower the participants with digital marketing knowledge and tools as well as mentorship on strategic leadership skills. The program will culminate in a day long Graduation event at the Google Hyderabad Campus on 28th August 2020. 
The program is open to both women professionals who are currently working and those who are keen to return to the workforce with 4-10 years of experience in consulting, analytics, branding and sales and support with passion for digital marketing. The program is completely sponsored by Google and does not require participants to contribute to any registration, participation, travel or accommodation fees.
Applications are open from today. If you are interested or know someone who is looking for a career switch to digital marketing, share the link with them and ask them to register and apply today. Last date for registration is 21st March 2020.
You can read more about the program and apply here.


Posted by Arijit Sarker, VP, gTech Professional Services