Meet eight Canadian small businesses from the ShopHERE powered by Google program

As we celebrate International Small Business Week, we’re taking a moment to reflect on our one year partnership helping get small businesses across Canada online with the Digital Main Street ShopHERE powered by Google program. Read below to learn about eight small businesses who participated in the program and are now reaping the benefits of being online. And if you're a Canadian small business interested in building out your online presence - you can still register. 


As part of the festivities, we’ll be highlighting inspirational small business stories, including a new video spot featuring Rugs by Roo, a Vancouver-based sustainable rug business. And, on Thursday June 24th, we’ll also be hosting the first ever YouTube Small Biz Day, where you can shop from 20 unique small businesses across Canada and the U.S. live on YouTube, including ChopValue, Malleable Jewellers, Rugs by Roo, and more. 


Read on for the inspiring stories of small business owners supported by the ShopHERE powered by Google program 


Beads Bangles & Bows - Windsor, ON 
Five years ago, Alyssa Trumic started Beads, Bangles & Bows, where she brought her love for painting, creating and jewelry making to life. She would sell her handcrafted products as a ‘side job’ at local markets and art shows in the Windsor area. But when the pandemic hit, and she lost her job in the restaurant industry, Alyssa decided to make her side job a full time business. She didn’t have a website or online presence at that point, but came across the program at just the right time. Alyssa credits the program for not just building her website, but coaching her along the way, advising her on the layout and style, and providing ongoing workshops that added rigor, concrete goals and business objectives to follow. 


Cultivate - Toronto, ON 
Francesca Serwaa started her business as a counselling service in 2019, serving the Black community with mental health and addiction challenges. When the pandemic hit, she figured people needed something beyond therapy - and set out on a mission to create a business with a variety of self care products. CultiVate is a wellness lifestyle brand with products essential to your self care. It was inspired by Black millennials looking to connect within themselves, and it also aims to modernize Afrocentric healing practices. Francesca has been selling online since October. 


Doodle Lovely - Halifax, NS 
Melissa Lloyd started Doodle Lovely in 2016, following 20+ years in the corporate industry. After working nonstop, she was burnt out and stressed, so began using doodling as a tool for calm and mindfulness. When she realized the power of doodling, she knew she wanted to bring this to the rest of the world. With Doodle Lovely, Melissa sells stationery, pens and products for the home, but also provides guided doodling practices, called ‘Doodle Breaks.’ Once COVID hit, Melissa knew she needed to elevate her online presence - so she signed up for the program, and with her new website, her sales have grown 200%. 


Dumpling’s Treats - Toronto, ON 
For the past three years, Susan Lee-Macdonald has been making homemade treats for her dog Dumpling out of her kitchen in Toronto. When the pandemic hit and she began spending more time around the house, she started sharing Dumpling’s treats with other furry friends in the neighborhood. Soon enough, the dogs were starting to drag their owners back to Susan’s house for their daily snack. As popularity for the canine treats grew in her community, Susan decided to take a leap, joined the program and created Dumpling’s Treats, an online business where she sells one ingredient, human-grade dog treats. 


Momma Bears Boutique - Dartmouth, NS 
Erin Dawe always had a dream to open up a boutique. After losing her job during the pandemic - she accelerated the timeline, and set out to make this a reality in 2020. However, she knew that in order to succeed during the pandemic, she’d have to build out her digital presence as much as her in-store. Erin got her business online and says she could not have done it without the program. Prior to joining, she tried a number of different e-commerce platforms, but could not bring her vision to life. She credits the program for not just setting up the backend of the website, but also taught her how to use both the back and front end herself. So now, she’s been able to make changes, add a gift registry and add subscriptions all by herself. 


Play.Full.Goods - Hamilton, ON 
Denise Mayer worked as a kids fashion designer for many years, but unfortunately lost her job at the beginning of the pandemic. This reset period gave her an opportunity to live out a longtime dream - to start her own children’s boutique. She started slowly, selling children’s quilts through social media and word of mouth. As her business started gaining momentum, Denise knew she needed a website so her brand could have it’s own home. Denise was appreciative of the one-to-one training and support the program provided -- she wasn’t just handed a website and left to figure it out on her own. Rather, the program taught her how to make the website work for her business, and built her confidence and ability to manage the site on her own. Within two weeks of launching the site, Denise had over 3,000 people visit her website. 


Rezn Artstudio - Windsor, ON 
Prior to the pandemic, Rezwana Islam spent a lot of time day dreaming of starting a handmade business. When the pandemic hit, she started to source materials, price her products and build out her business values. Initially, she wanted to sell her items in boutique shops and local art fairs, but with the pandemic putting that to a halt, she joined the ShopHERE powered by Google program to build a website. Rezwana particularly appreciated how helpful her student coordinator was - he went above and beyond to answer her questions, move the website along at a quick pace, and suggest ideas for her website, all while staying true to Rezwana’s vision. 


Stagg & Paper Interiors - Hamilton, ON 
Margaret Stagg is a registered interior designer with over 15 years of experience in the industry. When the pandemic hit and she was faced with a slow-down in the workplace and changing family needs, she knew that the natural next step was to take the leap and start her own interior design practice. Her firm is rooted in the fundamental principle that home is where we start. Over the past year the COVID pandemic has created a deeper connection for many to their home and resulted in a boom in residential renovations. Margaret knew she needed a visual presence (website), to bring her vision to life, but she did not have the expertise to get started with building a website. She joined the program, and credits the program for not just helping her build a website, but helping to create clarity for her business and a clear plan of what she wanted to achieve moving forward. 


Posted by Sabrina Geremia, VP and Country Manager, Google Canada and Darryl Julott, Managing Lead, Digital Main Street

Google Play Points: a rewards program for the ways you Play

Since 2012, Google Play has been your place to find and enjoy apps, games, movies, TV shows, and books. More than 2 billion people in 190 countries use Google Play to discover blockbuster movies, apps that help you be more productive, and books that inspire imagination.


To show our appreciation, we created a rewards program called Google Play Points that lets you earn points and rewards for the ways you already use Google Play. Over the past two years, millions of people in Japan, South Korea, the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia have joined the program. Starting this week, Google Play Points is launching in New Zealand. 


It’s free to join, and you can earn Play Points to use for special items and discounts in top games or for Google Play Credit to use on movies, books, games, and apps.



Play your way and earn points


With Google Play Points, you’ll earn points on everything you buy with Google Play, including in-app items, movies, books, subscriptions and more. Weekly points events can boost your earning rate on movies, books, and select games. 


Google Play Points has four levels, from Bronze to Platinum. Your level depends on how many points you’ve collected, and higher levels have perks like weekly prizes.



Redeem your Play Points how you’d like


We’re partnering with developers of some of the top apps and games on Google Play so that you can redeem points for special in-app items like characters, gems and more. You can also use Play Points for Google Play Credit and rent an award-winning movie or buy a best-selling audiobook. 



Join for free


Google Play Points will be available over the next week. It’s free to join, there is no recurring or monthly fee, and you’ll earn three times the Play Points on everything you buy your first week. To get started, visit Google Play. Tap menu, then Play Points. Learn more about Play Points--and get ready to earn points and rewards.



Post content Posted by Elena Chen, Product Manager.

Google at CVPR 2021

Posted by Emily Knapp and Tim Herrmann, Program Managers

This week marks the start of the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021), the premier annual computer vision event consisting of the main conference, workshops and tutorials. As a leader in computer vision research and a Champion Level Sponsor, Google will have a strong presence at CVPR 2021, with over 70 publications accepted, along with the organization of and participation in multiple workshops and tutorials.

If you are participating in CVPR this year, please visit our virtual booth to learn about Google research into the next generation of intelligent systems that utilize the latest machine learning techniques applied to various areas of machine perception.

You can also learn more about our research being presented at CVPR 2021 in the list below (Google affiliations in bold).

Organizing Committee Members

General Chair: Rahul Sukthankar
Finance Chair: Ramin Zabih
Workshop Chair: Caroline Pantofaru
Area Chairs: Chen Sun, Golnaz Ghiasi, Jonathan Barron, Kostas Rematas, Negar Rostamzadeh, Noah Snavely, Sanmi Koyejo, Tsung-Yi Lin

Publications

Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation (see the blog post)
Han Zhang, Jing Yu Koh, Jason Baldridge, Honglak Lee*, Yinfei Yang

Learning Graph Embeddings for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Yongqin Xian, Federico Tombari, Zeynep Akata

SPSG: Self-Supervised Photometric Scene Generation From RGB-D Scans
Angela Dai, Yawar Siddiqui, Justus Thies, Julien Valentin, Matthias Nießner

3D-MAN: 3D Multi-Frame Attention Network for Object Detection
Zetong Yang*, Yin Zhou, Zhifeng Chen, Jiquan Ngiam

MIST: Multiple Instance Spatial Transformer
Baptiste Angles, Yuhe Jin, Simon Kornblith, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Kwang Moo Yi

OCONet: Image Extrapolation by Object Completion
Richard Strong Bowen*, Huiwen Chang, Charles Herrmann*, Piotr Teterwak*, Ce Liu, Ramin Zabih

Ranking Neural Checkpoints
Yandong Li, Xuhui Jia, Ruoxin Sang, Yukun Zhu, Bradley Green, Liqiang Wang, Boqing Gong

LipSync3D: Data-Efficient Learning of Personalized 3D Talking Faces From Video Using Pose and Lighting Normalization
Avisek Lahiri, Vivek Kwatra, Christian Frueh, John Lewis, Chris Bregler

Differentiable Patch Selection for Image Recognition
Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier*, Aravindh Mahendran, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Dirk Weissenborn, Jakob Uszkoreit, Thomas Unterthiner

HumanGPS: Geodesic PreServing Feature for Dense Human Correspondences
Feitong Tan, Danhang Tang, Mingsong Dou, Kaiwen Guo, Rohit Pandey, Cem Keskin, Ruofei Du, Deqing Sun, Sofien Bouaziz, Sean Fanello, Ping Tan, Yinda Zhang

VIP-DeepLab: Learning Visual Perception With Depth-Aware Video Panoptic Segmentation (see the blog post)
Siyuan Qiao*, Yukun Zhu, Hartwig Adam, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen

DeFMO: Deblurring and Shape Recovery of Fast Moving Objects
Denys Rozumnyi, Martin R. Oswald, Vittorio Ferrari, Jiri Matas, Marc Pollefeys

HDMapGen: A Hierarchical Graph Generative Model of High Definition Maps
Lu Mi, Hang Zhao, Charlie Nash, Xiaohan Jin, Jiyang Gao, Chen Sun, Cordelia Schmid, Nir Shavit, Yuning Chai, Dragomir Anguelov

Wide-Baseline Relative Camera Pose Estimation With Directional Learning
Kefan Chen, Noah Snavely, Ameesh Makadia

MobileDets: Searching for Object Detection Architectures for Mobile Accelerators
Yunyang Xiong, Hanxiao Liu, Suyog Gupta, Berkin Akin, Gabriel Bender, Yongzhe Wang, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Mingxing Tan, Vikas Singh, Bo Chen

SMURF: Self-Teaching Multi-Frame Unsupervised RAFT With Full-Image Warping
Austin Stone, Daniel Maurer, Alper Ayvaci, Anelia Angelova, Rico Jonschkowski

Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts
Soravit Changpinyo, Piyush Sharma, Nan Ding, Radu Soricut

Uncalibrated Neural Inverse Rendering for Photometric Stereo of General Surfaces
Berk Kaya, Suryansh Kumar, Carlos Oliveira, Vittorio Ferrari, Luc Van Gool

MeanShift++: Extremely Fast Mode-Seeking With Applications to Segmentation and Object Tracking
Jennifer Jang, Heinrich Jiang

Repopulating Street Scenes
Yifan Wang*, Andrew Liu, Richard Tucker, Jiajun Wu, Brian L. Curless, Steven M. Seitz, Noah Snavely

MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation With Mask Transformers (see the blog post)
Huiyu Wang*, Yukun Zhu, Hartwig Adam, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen

IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering
Qianqian Wang, Zhicheng Wang, Kyle Genova, Pratul Srinivasan, Howard Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Noah Snavely, Thomas Funkhouser

From Points to Multi-Object 3D Reconstruction
Francis Engelmann*, Konstantinos Rematas, Bastian Leibe, Vittorio Ferrari

Learning Compositional Representation for 4D Captures With Neural ODE
Boyan Jiang, Yinda Zhang, Xingkui Wei, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu

Guided Integrated Gradients: An Adaptive Path Method for Removing Noise
Andrei Kapishnikov, Subhashini Venugopalan, Besim Avci, Ben Wedin, Michael Terry, Tolga Bolukbasi

De-Rendering the World’s Revolutionary Artefacts
Shangzhe Wu*, Ameesh Makadia, Jiajun Wu, Noah Snavely, Richard Tucker, Angjoo Kanazawa

Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning
Rui Qian, Tianjian Meng, Boqing Gong, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Huisheng Wang, Serge Belongie, Yin Cui

Decoupled Dynamic Filter Networks
Jingkai Zhou, Varun Jampani, Zhixiong Pi, Qiong Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang

NeuralHumanFVV: Real-Time Neural Volumetric Human Performance Rendering Using RGB Cameras
Xin Suo, Yuheng Jiang, Pei Lin, Yingliang Zhang, Kaiwen Guo, Minye Wu, Lan Xu

Regularizing Generative Adversarial Networks Under Limited Data
Hung-Yu Tseng*, Lu Jiang, Ce Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Weilong Yang

SceneGraphFusion: Incremental 3D Scene Graph Prediction From RGB-D Sequences
Shun-Cheng Wu, Johanna Wald, Keisuke Tateno, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari

NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis
Pratul P. Srinivasan, Boyang Deng, Xiuming Zhang, Matthew Tancik, Ben Mildenhall, Jonathan T. Barron

Adversarially Adaptive Normalization for Single Domain Generalization
Xinjie Fan*, Qifei Wang, Junjie Ke, Feng Yang, Boqing Gong, Mingyuan Zhou

Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation
Gen Li, Varun Jampani, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Deqing Sun, Jonghyun Kim, Joongkyu Kim

Adversarial Robustness Across Representation Spaces
Pranjal Awasthi, George Yu, Chun-Sung Ferng, Andrew Tomkins, Da-Cheng Juan

Background Splitting: Finding Rare Classes in a Sea of Background
Ravi Teja Mullapudi, Fait Poms, William R. Mark, Deva Ramanan, Kayvon Fatahalian

Searching for Fast Model Families on Datacenter Accelerators
Sheng Li, Mingxing Tan, Ruoming Pang, Andrew Li, Liqun Cheng, Quoc Le, Norman P. Jouppi

Objectron: A Large Scale Dataset of Object-Centric Videos in the Wild With Pose Annotations (see the blog post)
Adel Ahmadyan, Liangkai Zhang, Jianing Wei, Artsiom Ablavatski, Matthias Grundmann

CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization
Chun-Liang Li, Kihyuk Sohn, Jinsung Yoon, Tomas Pfister

Nutrition5k: Towards Automatic Nutritional Understanding of Generic Food
Quin Thames, Arjun Karpur, Wade Norris, Fangting Xia, Liviu Panait, Tobias Weyand, Jack Sim

CReST: A Class-Rebalancing Self-Training Framework for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning
Chen Wei*, Kihyuk Sohn, Clayton Mellina, Alan Yuille, Fan Yang

DetectoRS: Detecting Objects With Recursive Feature Pyramid and Switchable Atrous Convolution
Siyuan Qiao, Liang-Chieh Chen, Alan Yuille

DeRF: Decomposed Radiance Fields
Daniel Rebain, Wei Jiang, Soroosh Yazdani, Ke Li, Kwang Moo Yi, Andrea Tagliasacchi

Variational Transformer Networks for Layout Generation (see the blog post)
Diego Martin Arroyo, Janis Postels, Federico Tombari

Rich Features for Perceptual Quality Assessment of UGC Videos
Yilin Wang, Junjie Ke, Hossein Talebi, Joong Gon Yim, Neil Birkbeck, Balu Adsumilli, Peyman Milanfar, Feng Yang

Complete & Label: A Domain Adaptation Approach to Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds
Li Yi, Boqing Gong, Thomas Funkhouser

Neural Descent for Visual 3D Human Pose and Shape
Andrei Zanfir, Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, Mihai Zanfir, William T. Freeman, Rahul Sukthankar, Cristian Sminchisescu

GDR-Net: Geometry-Guided Direct Regression Network for Monocular 6D Object Pose Estimation
Gu Wang, Fabian Manhardt, Federico Tombari, Xiangyang Ji

Look Before You Speak: Visually Contextualized Utterances
Paul Hongsuck Seo, Arsha Nagrani, Cordelia Schmid

LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction From a Monocular Video
Gengshan Yang*, Deqing Sun, Varun Jampani, Daniel Vlasic, Forrester Cole, Huiwen Chang, Deva Ramanan, William T. Freeman, Ce Liu

MoViNets: Mobile Video Networks for Efficient Video Recognition
Dan Kondratyuk, Liangzhe Yuan, Yandong Li, Li Zhang, Mingxing Tan, Matthew Brown, Boqing Gong

No Shadow Left Behind: Removing Objects and Their Shadows Using Approximate Lighting and Geometry
Edward Zhang, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Janne Kontkanen, Brian Curless

On Robustness and Transferability of Convolutional Neural Networks
Josip Djolonga, Jessica Yung, Michael Tschannen, Rob Romijnders, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Joan Puigcerver, Matthias Minderer, Alexander D'Amour, Dan Moldovan, Sylvain Gelly, Neil Houlsby, Xiaohua Zhai, Mario Lucic

Robust and Accurate Object Detection via Adversarial Learning
Xiangning Chen, Cihang Xie, Mingxing Tan, Li Zhang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Boqing Gong

To the Point: Efficient 3D Object Detection in the Range Image With Graph Convolution Kernels
Yuning Chai, Pei Sun, Jiquan Ngiam, Weiyue Wang, Benjamin Caine, Vijay Vasudevan, Xiao Zhang, Dragomir Anguelov

Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition
Aravind Srinivas, Tsung-Yi Lin, Niki Parmar, Jonathon Shlens, Pieter Abbeel, Ashish Vaswani

Faster Meta Update Strategy for Noise-Robust Deep Learning
Youjiang Xu, Linchao Zhu, Lu Jiang, Yi Yang

Correlated Input-Dependent Label Noise in Large-Scale Image Classification
Mark Collier, Basil Mustafa, Efi Kokiopoulou, Rodolphe Jenatton, Jesse Berent

Learned Initializations for Optimizing Coordinate-Based Neural Representations
Matthew Tancik, Ben Mildenhall, Terrance Wang, Divi Schmidt, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Jonathan T. Barron, Ren Ng

Simple Copy-Paste Is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation
Golnaz Ghiasi, Yin Cui, Aravind Srinivas*, Rui Qian, Tsung-Yi Lin, Ekin D. Cubuk, Quoc V. Le, Barret Zoph

Function4D: Real-Time Human Volumetric Capture From Very Sparse Consumer RGBD Sensors
Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, Kaiwen Guo, Pengpeng Liu, Qionghai Dai, Yebin Liu

RSN: Range Sparse Net for Efficient, Accurate LiDAR 3D Object Detection
Pei Sun, Weiyue Wang, Yuning Chai, Gamaleldin Elsayed, Alex Bewley, Xiao Zhang, Cristian Sminchisescu, Dragomir Anguelov

NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections
Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Noha Radwan, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Jonathan T. Barron, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Daniel Duckworth

Robust Neural Routing Through Space Partitions for Camera Relocalization in Dynamic Indoor Environments
Siyan Dong, Qingnan Fan, He Wang, Ji Shi, Li Yi, Thomas Funkhouser, Baoquan Chen, Leonidas Guibas

Taskology: Utilizing Task Relations at Scale
Yao Lu, Sören Pirk, Jan Dlabal, Anthony Brohan, Ankita Pasad*, Zhao Chen, Vincent Casser, Anelia Angelova, Ariel Gordon

Omnimatte: Associating Objects and Their Effects in Video
Erika Lu, Forrester Cole, Tali Dekel, Andrew Zisserman, William T. Freeman, Michael Rubinstein

AutoFlow: Learning a Better Training Set for Optical Flow
Deqing Sun, Daniel Vlasic, Charles Herrmann, Varun Jampani, Michael Krainin, Huiwen Chang, Ramin Zabih, William T. Freeman, and Ce Liu

Unsupervised Multi-Source Domain Adaptation Without Access to Source Data
Sk Miraj Ahmed, Dripta S. Raychaudhuri, Sujoy Paul, Samet Oymak, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

Meta Pseudo Labels
Hieu Pham, Zihang Dai, Qizhe Xie, Minh-Thang Luong, Quoc V. Le

Spatially-Varying Outdoor Lighting Estimation From Intrinsics
Yongjie Zhu, Yinda Zhang, Si Li, Boxin Shi

Learning View-Disentangled Human Pose Representation by Contrastive Cross-View Mutual Information Maximization
Long Zhao*, Yuxiao Wang, Jiaping Zhao, Liangzhe Yuan, Jennifer J. Sun, Florian Schroff, Hartwig Adam, Xi Peng, Dimitris Metaxas, Ting Liu

Benchmarking Representation Learning for Natural World Image Collections
Grant Van Horn, Elijah Cole, Sara Beery, Kimberly Wilber, Serge Belongie, Oisin Mac Aodha

Scaling Local Self-Attention for Parameter Efficient Visual Backbones
Ashish Vaswani, Prajit Ramachandran, Aravind Srinivas, Niki Parmar, Blake Hechtman, Jonathon Shlens

KeypointDeformer: Unsupervised 3D Keypoint Discovery for Shape Control
Tomas Jakab*, Richard Tucker, Ameesh Makadia, Jiajun Wu, Noah Snavely, Angjoo Kanazawa

HITNet: Hierarchical Iterative Tile Refinement Network for Real-time Stereo Matching
Vladimir Tankovich, Christian Häne, Yinda Zhang, Adarsh Kowdle, Sean Fanello, Sofien Bouaziz

POSEFusion: Pose-Guided Selective Fusion for Single-View Human Volumetric Capture
Zhe Li, Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, Kaiwen Guo, Yebin Liu

Workshops (only Google affiliations are noted)

Media Forensics
Organizers: Christoph Bregler

Safe Artificial Intelligence for Automated Driving
Invited Speakers: Been Kim

VizWiz Grand Challenge
Organizers: Meredith Morris

3D Vision and Robotics
Invited Speaker: Andy Zeng

New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop and Challenges on Image and Video Processing
Organizers: Ming-Hsuan Yang Program Committee: George Toderici, Ming-Hsuan Yang

2nd Workshop on Extreme Vision Modeling
Invited Speakers: Quoc Le, Chen Sun

First International Workshop on Affective Understanding in Video
Organizers: Gautam Prasad, Ting Liu

Adversarial Machine Learning in Real-World Computer Vision Systems and Online Challenges
Program Committee: Nicholas Carlini, Nicolas Papernot

Ethical Considerations in Creative Applications of Computer Vision
Invited Speaker: Alex Hanna Organizers: Negar Rostamzadeh, Emily Denton, Linda Petrini

Visual Question Answering Workshop
Invited Speaker: Vittorio Ferrari

Sixth International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) Workshop on Skin Image Analysis
Invited Speakers: Sandra Avila Organizers: Yuan Liu Steering Committee: Yuan Liu, Dale Webster

The 4th Workshop and Prize Challenge: Bridging the Gap between Computational Photography and Visual Recognition (UG2+) in Conjunction with IEEE CVPR 2021
Invited Speakers: Peyman Milanfar, Chelsea Finn

The 3rd CVPR Workshop on 3D Scene Understanding for Vision, Graphics, and Robotics
Invited Speaker: Andrea Tagliasacchi

Robust Video Scene Understanding: Tracking and Video Segmentation
Organizers: Jordi Pont-Tuset, Sergi Caelles, Jack Valmadre, Alex Bewley

4th Workshop and Challenge on Learned Image Compression
Invited Speaker: Rianne van den Berg Organizers: George Toderici, Lucas Theis, Johannes Ballé, Eirikur Agustsson, Nick Johnston, Fabian Mentzer

The Third Workshop on Precognition: Seeing Through the Future
Invited Speaker: Anelia Angelova
Organizers: Utsav Prabhu Program Committee: Chen Sun, David Ross

Computational Cameras and Displays
Organizers: Tali Dekel Keynote Talks: Paul Debevec Program Committee: Ayan Chakrabarti, Tali Dekel

2nd Embodied AI Workshop
Organizing Committee: Anthony Francis Challenge Organizers: Peter Anderson, Anthony Francis, Alex Ku, Alexander Toshev Scientific Advisory Board: Alexander Toshev

Responsible Computer Vision
Program Committee: Caroline Pantofaru, Utsav Prabhu, Susanna Ricco, Negar Rostamzadeh, Candice Schumann

Dynamic Neural Networks Meets Computer Vision
Invited Speaker: Azalia Mirhoseini

Interactive Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Subjective and Computational Measurements of Machine Creativity
Invited Speaker: David Bau

GAZE 2021: The 3rd International Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild
Organizer: Thabo Beeler Program Committee: Thabo Beeler

Sight and Sound
Organizers: William Freeman

Future of Computer Vision Datasets
Invited Speaker: Emily Denton, Caroline Pantofaru

Open World Vision
Invited Speakers: Rahul Sukthankar

The 3rd Workshop on Learning from Unlabeled Videos
Organizers: Anelia Angelova, Honglak Lee Program Committee: AJ Piergiovanni

4th International Workshop on Visual Odometry and Computer Vision Applications Based on Location Clues — With a Focus on Mobile Platform Applications
Organizers: Anelia Angelova

4th Workshop on Efficient Deep Learning for Computer Vision
Invited Speaker: Andrew Howard
Organizers: Pete Warden, Andrew Howard

Second International Workshop on Large Scale Holistic Video Understanding
Invited Speaker: Cordelia Schmid Program Committee: AJ Piergiovanni Organizers: David Ross

Neural Architecture Search 1st Lightweight NAS Challenge and Moving Beyond
Invited Speakers: Sara Sabour

The Second Workshop on Fair, Data-Efficient, and Trusted Computer Vision
Invited Speakers: Gaurav Aggarwal

The 17th Embedded Vision Workshop
General Chair: Anelia Angelova

8th Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Organizers: Christine Kaeser-Chen, Kimberly Wilber

AI for Content Creation
Invited Speaker: Tali Dekel, Jon Barron, Emily Denton Organizers: Deqing Sun

Frontiers of Monocular 3D Perception
Invited Speakers: Anelia Angelova, Cordelia Schmid, Noah Snavely

Beyond Fairness: Towards a Just, Equitable, and Accountable Computer Vision
Organizers: Emily Denton

The 1st Workshop on Future Video Conferencing
Invited Speakers: Chuo-Ling Chang, Sergi Caelles

Tutorials (only Google affiliations are noted)

Tutorial on Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in Computer Vision
Organizer: Emily Denton

Data-Efficient Learning in An Imperfect World
Organizers: Boqing Gong, Ting Chen

Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds: a Deep Learning Framework for Cultural Heritage
Invited Speaker: Manzil Zaheer

From VQA to VLN: Recent Advances in Vision-and-Language Research
Organizer: Peter Anderson * Indicates work done while at Google

Source: Google AI Blog


Use the Classic Sites Manager to download archived backups and control editing of sites in bulk

Quick launch summary 

In 2017, we announced that we would replace classic Sites with new Sites, and in 2019 we announced that domains will have until the end of 2021 to complete the transition. 

To help Admins and end users manage the transition to new Sites, we introduced the Classic Sites Manager in 2020. In May 2021, we added the ability to bulk delete, restore, and update ownership of sites. Today, we’re adding additional new features to the Classic Sites Manager for Admins: 
  • Bulk download an archive of a selection of sites via Takeout, 
  • Bulk disable and/or re-enable the ability for users to edit a selection of sites. 



We hope the ability to take these actions in bulk will help our customers migrate from classic Sites to new Sites more easily. 

Getting started 


Rollout pace 


Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers 

Resources 

Improved search in Google Chat

Quick Summary 

You can now search Google Chat content faster by quickly editing down your search results using interactive filters on mobile. These filters help you find artifacts like files and links more easily. 

You can try searching for a keyword that you remember from a message or use a filter to look at all the files within a specific chat. Additionally, we have also refreshed our visual interface to provide a more balanced view of search results and results will now also include the content of the messages, making it even easier to find the exact content you’re looking for. 

Filter using different search chips in Chat

Filters will be visible below chat search bar

 Use the ‘Said in’ filter to narrow down to the conversations that matter






These features are available now on Android. They will be available on iOS and Web by the end of July 2021. 

Getting started 

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. When searching in Google Chat on mobile, you can further refine your search results using the search filter chips below the search box. 

Rollout pace 


Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers.

In the Triangle, Google Fiber is working all the angles.

The Triangle isn’t just a Google Fiber city — it’s our East Coast hub, and we’ve got a lot going on across the region. Right now, customers can sign up for 1 Gig and 2 Gig in Morrisville and Carrboro, and parts of Cary, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. And we’re continuing to expand our network across the region. Construction is underway in all of the cities we’re still working to complete our network build, including Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary. 

With all that activity, our team is also growing. Just before the pandemic, we’d expanded our downtown Durham offices on Chapel Hill Street to make room for our expanding team, but we haven’t yet gotten the chance to properly move in. We’re looking forward to doing that later this year. Plans for the new space include a lobby featuring the work of our incredible non-profit partners’ digital equity work across the Triangle. Once we’re back in the office, we hope you’ll come and get to know these organizations, whose work has only become even more critical.





And if you’re looking for your next opportunity, we’d love to have you join the Google Fiber team and help us connect more customers in our area and across the country to great internet. We have both local and central roles open in the Triangle, and, just like Google, we’re growing here and need your help! 

Serving our community

Despite the weirdness of the last year — or maybe because of its challenges — our community impact work continued to grow over the last year. Google Fiber is a lead sponsor of “Building a New Digital Economy” (BAND-NC), created by the Institute for Emerging Issues at NC State  and the Broadband Infrastructure Office at the NC Department of Information Technology. This initiative provides mini-grants to communities to implement digital inclusion plans, begin a digital inclusion planning process, or meet immediate digital needs, with the ultimate goal of making North Carolina the first state with a digital inclusion plan for each county.

Earlier this spring, Google Fiber partner RIoT, along with Facebook Reality Labs and US Ignite launched an augmented reality challenge called RIoT Your Reality. Google Fiber teamed up with  The City of Raleigh and the Town of Cary to sponsor an opportunity challenge, "Improving Inclusivity and Accessibility for City Programs & Services," focusing on using augmented reality to make our cities more inclusive and accessible. The applications are in and candidates are currently going through the pitch process — winners will be announced in July, so stay tuned! 

2020 challenged many of our local institutions to find new ways to connect and engage our communities, and Google Fiber was proud to be able to support these efforts. The Museum of Life & Science brought STEM programming to life during quarantine by creating Field Trip Fridays, behind the scenes visits to see science at work at local businesses throughout Durham and the Triangle. You can take the journey yourself by watching the 2020 recap video or any of the Field Trip Friday Episodes.

We continue to focus on our traditional areas of digital inclusion and STEM education, but also added a new focus this year, racial justice and equity. Google Fiber sponsored the United Way of the Greater Triangle’s Anti-Racism Fund, with a clear vision that our work on digital equity is a piece of a much larger puzzle. Creating anti-racist capacity across our community will provide the opportunities for our entire region to grow and thrive.

Faster and farther

The Triangle is growing in leaps and bounds, and Google Fiber is so excited to keep working towards connecting the region to the fastest internet in town. 

Posted by Spencer Walston, Head of Sales; Jason Smith, Head of Metro Technical Operations, & Jess George, Government & Community Affairs Manager









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author: Spencer Walston, Jason Smith, Jess George
title: Head of Sales, Head of Metro Technical Operations, Government & Community Affairs Manager
category: city_news



Seeking journalists who want to start something new

Megan Raposa felt torn.

She enjoyed the routine of her reporting beat at the local paper. But she wanted to build something new -- a news startup that would better serve her neighbors in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Raposa was ready to become a journalism founder. She just wasn't sure how to start.

Megan applied and was accepted to the Google News Initiative’s Startups Boot Camp, which provided her with the training, support and funding she needed to launch her email-focused digital startup, Sioux Falls Simplified. Five months later, Sioux Falls Simplified has continually grown its audience, earned local advertising revenue and even converted new members who support its mission.

Applications are officially openfor the 2021 GNI Startups Boot Camp. We're looking for our next group of aspiring journalism entrepreneurs to mentor every step of the way as they turn their ideas into real businesses.

During Megan's eight-week stint in the 2020 GNI Boot Camp, my team and I supported her journey as a founder through a real-world practical curriculum, relevant case studies, weekly one-on-one coaching, and support from peers working toward similar goals. 

“[Through the Bootcamp,] I learned that there is an appetite for another news option in my community, and I can be the person to provide that,” Megan says. “I don’t have to sit and ride out the sinking ship of the local newspaper, watching desks empty year after year.”

Megan isn’t the only success story among the 24 teams in the program, of course. Bria Felicien’s newsletter, The Black Sportswomen, has grown the newsletter’s subscriber base to a size that results in a steady stream of people choosing to support the project financially. Annelise Pierce’s project, Shasta Scout, has brokenimportant local stories and recently incorporated as a non-profit newsroom. Luke Baumgarten launched RANGE to cover local issues and has already grown past 1,000 email newsletter subscribers, 100 of which are paying. And Camille Padilla Dalmau’s publication, 9 Millones, recently raised a five-figure sum in less than 48 hours from readers. The list goes on.

If you’re a journalist who’s ready to start a new project, we’re here to help. Your launch team includes experienced coaches, the entire LION Publishers staff and LION News Entrepreneurs community, as well as the team at the Google News Initiative. When you join the Bootcamp, you benefit from the collective experience and wisdom of founders who have very likely faced the challenges you’re about to face yourself. You’ll also benefit from a curriculum based on the GNI Startups Playbook, published in partnership with some of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the entrepreneurial news space, as well as an official LION Publishers membership.

The first step, however, is to apply.

Applications are now open to U.S. residents for the fall 2021 Boot Camp. The U.S. program will run from September 7 to November 5, 2021 (with a one week break) and aims to accept 24 projects. The application window opens today and closes Sunday, August 1 at 11 p.m. PT. To get a better idea of the types of projects we think are a good fit,read our detailed FAQs and join one of our upcoming live Q&A sessions.

Later this year, we’ll also open applications for our first Startups boot camp dedicated exclusively to Canadian founders. The Canadian boot camp will be custom-designed to address the realities of starting a business or non-profit journalism project in Canada, addressing country-specific questions like tax status, business registration, legal preparedness, and the Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization Designation. We will also look at ways to strengthen Canada's media ecosystem by tackling issues like diversity and how to increase support for Canadian communities currently under-served by news.

As someone born in Toronto General Hospital, who spent childhood summers with family in Quebec and Nova Scotia, and later working for a startup newsroom in Vancouver, the opportunity to bring the Boot Camp to Canada is a real honour.


Here to help more small businesses succeed

Sashee Chandran, founder of tea company Tea Drops, noticed in 2020 that there were spikes on Google Search for terms like “boba” and “boba shop.” So she created a boba kit, and grew her revenue by 350%. Fat Witch Bakery, founded in 1991 with only one brownie recipe, relied on their storefront for 50% of their revenue. After their store closed due to the pandemic, they doubled down on Google Ads to sell more than 30 types of brownies, and over the last few months their online orders have doubled. They aren’t only surviving — they’re thriving. 


As more businesses and communities reopen and recover, I’m inspired by the countless number of stories like these. We know using digital tools makes a meaningful difference — during the pandemic, revenue performance was 50% better for digitally advanced small businesses versus those that are less savvy. We also know that consumers want to support small businesses — Google searches for “support local businesses” grew by over 20,000% since last year.


Ahead of the United Nations’ Micro-, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprises Day, Google is dedicating a full week to celebrating and supporting small businesses during our second annual International Small Business Week. As part of the week’s celebrations, consumers who shop at a small business through July 4 will receive $10 cashback when they pay with Google Pay on their Pixel phones. We’re also looking forward to sharing our very first YouTube Small Biz Day on Thursday, June 24: Tune in for Grow with Google workshops, panels and a live shopping event. All across Google we’ve been working on a variety of new initiatives to make it even simpler for small businesses to use digital tools to succeed. Here are some recent updates that can help as you transition your business to a post pandemic world.  


Show customers what you offer

You’ve asked for easier ways to manage your business presence on Google. Over the past year, we’ve been rolling out new ways for businesses to edit details on their Business Profile directly from Google Search and Maps — including how to update basic business information, message customers and see detailed performance insights. Now, we’re adding more features to Search and Maps that enable retailers, food and local services businesses, like personal care, to adjust how they show up and connect with customers on Google — from adding specific  services, such as beard trimming, to sharing menu and accepting food orders. 


Get discovered across Google 

We’re also making it easier for e-commerce businesses to be discovered and connect directly with customers. Businesses on Shopify, WooCommerce, GoDaddy and Squarewill now be able to show their products across Google for free. This means businesses will have even more ways to get discovered across Google, and shoppers will have more choices.  


Add products to your Business Profile 

Shoppers are increasingly looking for products online before they head to the store. In fact, Google Searches for “who has” + “in stock” have grown by more than 8,000% year over year. If you’re a retailer, manually adding your product information can be a hassle. Pointy from Google creates a connection between your physical store and your Business Profile on Search and Maps so you can drive more traffic to your store. As you scan barcodes on the items to be sold, Pointy automatically adds the product to your profile so that customers can see what’s in stock. Eligible retailers can now get Pointy for free through September 30, 2021. Pointy box supplies are limited and shipping may be delayed; the offer excludes ads.
An image of a Google search for “drills near me” and search results of a local business showing its current inventory.

Create video ads in minutes

We're committed to making it easier for small businesses to use video to reach their customers. Last year we introduced Video Builder, a free tool that allows small businesses to quickly set up a video ad using just two images and a logo. Today we’re introducing a faster, easier way to create video ad campaigns on YouTube. Just add the video ad, the audiences you want to reach and your budget to launch a campaign in minutes. And with the new mobile experience, you can now more easily measure campaign performance. Access the new experience today at youtube.com/ads.


Find resources tailored to your business type and digital experience 

Two years ago we launched Google for Small Business, our one-stop-shop for small businesses to find the Google tools that can help them reach their business goals. We’re now expanding to include recommendations by business type: Restaurant, Retail or Services. The new Digital Essentials Guide is focused on the basics of being found and transacting with customers on Google and across the web. When you’re ready to explore more advanced recommendations, we have you covered with in-depth guides to introduce you to additional tools.
An overview of the experience of a service business receiving digital tool recommendations via the Google Small Business Digital Essentials Guide.

If you’re a small business owner looking for free, interactive training to brush up on your digital skills or learn more about new features, Grow with Google has live and recorded workshops, primers and quick help videos for entrepreneurs of all skill levels. 


Throughout International Small Business Week, we’ll continue sharing resources to help you celebrate, whether you’re just getting started, turning to digital tools to help grow your business, or simply looking for additional ways to support your favorite small businesses. Stay updated by following Google Small Business on Twitter.


#YouTubeBlack Voices Fund Now Open to Canadian Creators



#YouTubeBlack Voices Fund Now Open to Canadian Creators Canadian YouTube creators who identify as Black can apply for the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund here.

Last year, we announced the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund, as part of our commitment to supporting racial equity. The multi-year global initiative is dedicated to amplifying the stories and experiences of Black creators and artists on YouTube. Today we are thrilled to announce that the fund is now open to Black Canadian creators on YouTube. 

The beauty of YouTube is its ability to connect creators and users from around the world, helping people share their stories and experiences with others. It not only provides a platform for connection but opportunities to listen and learn from diverse voices. 

The #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund was created to support the Black creator community and amplify their voices. Grantees receive dedicated support from a Youtube Partner Manager, and seed funding for content creation. They attend workshops and masterclasses on cultivating new content ideas, video production skills, wellbeing, and more. They also get exclusive access to social and community programmes. 

Its inaugural year, more than 130 grantees from countries including the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Kenya participated. It included creators from across categories like music, lifestyle, education, activism and more. Aysha Harun, a Black, Muslim, beauty and lifestyle creator from Canada, now living in the U.S., was part of the class of 2021. 

“My experience has been great so far,” Aysha said. “The grant has allowed me to reinvest in my channel by hiring an editor, and bringing on an assistant to my team. The incubators have given me early access to features that keep me ahead of the game in terms of optimization. I’ve had more opportunities with partners to participate in panels and speaking engagements. And I’ve had complete autonomy with the grant, which makes my life as a creator a lot less stressful.” 

 Over the next few years, the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund will support 500+ creators and artists from around the world. We are thrilled to extend the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund to Canadian creators this year. 

Applications are now open for the Class of 2022. Canadian creators who identify as Black are encouraged to apply here by July 11.


#YouTubeBlack Voices Fund Now Open to Canadian Creators



#YouTubeBlack Voices Fund Now Open to Canadian Creators Canadian YouTube creators who identify as Black can apply for the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund here.

Last year, we announced the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund, as part of our commitment to supporting racial equity. The multi-year global initiative is dedicated to amplifying the stories and experiences of Black creators and artists on YouTube. Today we are thrilled to announce that the fund is now open to Black Canadian creators on YouTube. 

The beauty of YouTube is its ability to connect creators and users from around the world, helping people share their stories and experiences with others. It not only provides a platform for connection but opportunities to listen and learn from diverse voices. 

The #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund was created to support the Black creator community and amplify their voices. Grantees receive dedicated support from a Youtube Partner Manager, and seed funding for content creation. They attend workshops and masterclasses on cultivating new content ideas, video production skills, wellbeing, and more. They also get exclusive access to social and community programmes. 

Its inaugural year, more than 130 grantees from countries including the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Kenya participated. It included creators from across categories like music, lifestyle, education, activism and more. Aysha Harun, a Black, Muslim, beauty and lifestyle creator from Canada, now living in the U.S., was part of the class of 2021. 

“My experience has been great so far,” Aysha said. “The grant has allowed me to reinvest in my channel by hiring an editor, and bringing on an assistant to my team. The incubators have given me early access to features that keep me ahead of the game in terms of optimization. I’ve had more opportunities with partners to participate in panels and speaking engagements. And I’ve had complete autonomy with the grant, which makes my life as a creator a lot less stressful.” 

 Over the next few years, the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund will support 500+ creators and artists from around the world. We are thrilled to extend the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund to Canadian creators this year. 

Applications are now open for the Class of 2022. Canadian creators who identify as Black are encouraged to apply here by July 11.