Creating a STEM culture on campus in Uganda

Posted by Muhammad (Auwal) Samu, Developer Communities Regional Lead, Sub-Saharan Africa

Halimah Bukirwa says she felt like she knew nothing about computers or coding when she started university but threw herself into learning about STEM as much as possible.

“I committed to being the best at it, since I was given this awesome opportunity to actually study it.” Originally thinking she’d pursue a career in the field of aviation, Halimah joined several developer communities to learn more about engineering. That’s when she found the Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) at her university.

Creating a culture of participation on campus

She joined the local GDSC chapter as a core team member first, helping out with general logistics and planning, then the next year she applied to become the chapter Lead. Now, with all her community learnings, this fourth-year software engineering student at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, sees herself as a community leader and has her sights set on helping other software developers grow.

Learnings and proud moments for the community

The campus club achieved many milestones during Halimah’s tenure as the GDSC Lead. The chapter hosted over 40 events and reached over two thousand developers at her university. She also helped her chapter find inspiration to submit 11 projects to the annual GDSC Solution Challenge. These efforts were the result of intentionally creating a culture of support and helping other students find their footing as developers.


“When we were starting GDSC, our objective was to help students learn, connect, and grow into developers, and identify problems in our community and address them using technology. GDSC has given students hands-on skills to apply what they study and create solutions for the problems in their communities.”

 

Creating technical solutions for local problems

The GDSC Makarere chapter submitted 11 projects to the annual GSDC Solution Challenge to come up with technical ways to solve community challenges, and one notable team from the club, MpaMpe, proudly finished in the Top 50 global projects with its crowdfunding hybrid app intended to reduce the financial and digital divide via crowdsourcing and donations.

Halimah also answered the call to change the world through coding by also participating in the global GDSC Solution Challenge. “I discovered that technology is a tool we can use to drive change and transformation–to address the problems in our communities and create solutions.”

Noting that Uganda has small women-owned enterprises that face high charges on bulk transactions. She and her team built a payment solutions app called Alfasente to help businesses digitize their payments at a lower cost. The project used Firebase to build the application backend and hosted it on the Google Cloud Platform. The team submitted to the Solution Challenge with the goal of addressing the UN Sustainable Goal #8, Decent Work and Economic Growth.

Improving local farming conditions using Google Cloud Platform

Beyond these Google tools and technologies, exposure to GDSC (along with her engineering curriculum) has allowed Halimah to quickly learn new technologies and concepts.


“Organizing these events has been so fulfilling because I have witnessed so many students' lives transform. My university has received recognition from other entities, and I have been consulted by other people and organizations on tech-related issues.”


No matter the tool or its application she shares that the GDSC program can help speed up the learning process. “We wanted to make sure that students find their place in the tech ecosystem, learn as much as they can, and connect and grow with other people,” she says. “We have seen that come to life. So many students are interested that now we need more room for students.”

Halimah says she’s used the Google Cloud Platform for several university projects and internship work and is keen on using technology to address issues affecting the cultivation of a root vegetable called cassava that grows in her region.

What’s next for Halimah and the GDSC chapter

Halimah says she is honored to be considered as a potential recipient of the EMEA Generational Google Scholarship program for women studying computer science in Europe, the Middle East or Africa. She’s planning to better learn TensorFlow and is helping friends get started with Flutter projects, learning Flutter from codelabs, tutorials, videos, and documentation.


“I am passionate about AI, ML, Data Science, and Cloud Computing, and I am confident that I can address the problems in the industries that I am passionate about, too. My goal is to graduate, go into a master's program, and possibly do an internship at a technology company.”


Halimah is excited about her career journey and pleased by how much her GDSC club is growing with the new students starting their school term.

Join a Google Developer Student Club near you

Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) are community groups for college and university students like Halimah who are interested in Google developer technologies.

With over 1800+ chapters in 112 countries, GDSC aims to empower developers like Halimah to help their communities by building technical solutions. If you’re a student and would like to join a Google Developer Student Club community, look for a chapter near you here, or visit the program page to learn more about starting one in your area.

Announcing KataOS and Sparrow


As we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by smart devices that collect and process information from their environment, it's more important now than ever that we have a simple solution to build verifiably secure systems for embedded hardware. If the devices around us can't be mathematically proven to keep data secure, then the personally-identifiable data they collect—such as images of people and recordings of their voices—could be accessible to malicious software.

Unfortunately, system security is often treated as a software feature that can be added to existing systems or solved with an extra piece of ASIC hardware— this generally is not good enough. Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications. This is an ongoing project with plenty left to do, but we're excited to share some early details and invite others to collaborate on the platform so we can all build intelligent ambient systems that have security built-in by default.

To begin collaborating with others, we've open sourced several components for our secure operating system, called KataOS, on GitHub, as well as partnered with Antmicro on their Renode simulator and related frameworks. As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Through the seL4 CAmkES framework, we're also able to provide statically-defined and analyzable system components. KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user's privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel's hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. KataOS is also implemented almost entirely in Rust, which provides a strong starting point for software security, since it eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows.

The current GitHub release includes most of the KataOS core pieces, including the frameworks we use for Rust (such as the sel4-sys crate, which provides seL4 syscall APIs), an alternate rootserver written in Rust (needed for dynamic system-wide memory management), and the kernel modifications to seL4 that can reclaim the memory used by the rootserver. And we've collaborated with Antmicro to enable GDB debugging and simulation for our target hardware with Renode.

Internally, KataOS also is able to dynamically load and run third-party applications built outside of the CAmkES framework. At the moment, the code on Github does not include the required components to run these applications, but we hope to publish these features in the near future.

To prove-out a secure ambient system in its entirety, we're also building a reference implementation for KataOS called Sparrow, which combines KataOS with a secured hardware platform. So in addition to the logically-secure operating system kernel, Sparrow includes a logically-secure root of trust built with OpenTitan on a RISC-V architecture. However, for our initial release, we're targeting a more standard 64-bit ARM platform running in simulation with QEMU.

Our goal is to open source all of Sparrow, including all hardware and software designs. For now, we're just getting started with an early release of KataOS on GitHub. So this is just the beginning, and we hope you will join us in building a future where intelligent ambient ML systems are always trustworthy.

By Sam, Scott, and June – AmbiML Developers

Ask a techspert: How does Lens turn images to text?

When I was on holiday recently, I wanted to take notes from an ebook I was reading. But instead of taking audio notes or scribbling things down in a notebook, I used Lens to select a section of the book, copy it and paste it into a document. That got me curious: How did all that just happen on my phone? How does a camera recognize words in all their fonts and languages?

I decided to get to the root of the question and speak to Ana Manasovska, a Zurich-based software engineer who is one of the Googlers on the front line of converting an image into text.

Ana, tell us about your work in Lens

I’m involved with the text aspect, so making sure that the app can discern text and copy it for a search or translate it — with no typing needed. For example, if you point your phone’s camera at a poster in a foreign language, the app can translate the text on it. And for people who are blind or have low vision, it can read the text out loud. It’s pretty impressive.

So part of what my team does is get Lens to recognize not just the text, but also the structure of the text. We humans automatically understand writing that is separated into sentences and paragraphs, or blocks and columns, and know what goes together. It’s very difficult for a machine to distinguish that, though.

Is this machine learning then?

Yes. In other words, it uses systems (we call them models) that we’ve trained to discern characters and structure in images. A traditional computing system would have only a limited ability to do this. But our machine learning model has been built to “teach itself” on enormous datasets and is learning to distinguish text structures the same way a human would.

Can the system work with different languages?

Yes, it can recognize 30 scripts, including Cyrillic, Devanagari, Chinese and Arabic. It’s most accurate in Latin-alphabet languages at the moment, but even there, the many different types of fonts present challenges. Japanese and Chinese are tricky because they have lots of nuances in the characters. What seems like a small variation to the untrained eye can completely change the meaning.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

There’s lots of complexity and ambiguity, which are challenging, so I’ve had to learn to navigate that. And it’s very fast paced; things are moving constantly and you have to ask a lot of questions and talk to a lot of people to get the answers you need.

When it comes to actual coding, what does that involve?

Mostly I use a programming language called C++, which enables you to run processing steps needed to take you from an image to a representation of words and structure.

Hmmm, I sort of understand. What does it look like?

A screenshot of some C++ code against a white background.

This is what C++ looks like.

The code above shows the processing for extracting only the German from a section of text. So say the image showed German, French and Italian — only the German would be extracted for translation. Does that make sense?

Kind of! Tell me what you love about your job

It boils down to my lifelong love of solving problems. But I also really like that I’m building something I can use in my everyday life. I’m based in Zurich but don’t speak German well, so I use Lens for translation into English daily.

Dev Channel Update for Desktop

 The dev channel has been updated to 108.0.5355.0 for Windows,Mac and Linux.


A partial list of changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. 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.

Srinivas Sista
Google Chrome

Helping you easily identify information sources in Search

People come to Google to find information from a wide range of sources and formats, from big brands to individual creators, across text, images and video. As we’ve introduced features and design elements to help you explore information in new ways, we’ve also continued to bring greater context to the search results page, helping you make sense of the information you see. Today, we’re making a few new updates to the search page that build on this work, providing even more information about the sites that you see so you can feel confident about the websites you visit.

We’re adding site names to search results on mobile, so you can easily identify the website that’s associated with each result at a glance. We’re also updating the size and shape of the favicon (a website’s logo or icon) that appears in Search, to make it easier to see on the page. We’ll extend these changes to Search ads to increase clarity and advertiser transparency at a glance.

A scrolling GIF of mobile search results featuring site names and favicons on search results and ads, including the word Sponsored.

Part of helping you make sense of the information you see is ensuring that ads are clearly labeled, which is why our label will now be featured on its own line in the top-left corner of Search ads. We also want the label to be prominent and clear across different types of paid content. That’s why when ads show on mobile search results, they will now be labeled with the word “Sponsored” in bold black text. This new label and its prominent position continues to meet our high standards for being distinguishable from search results and builds on our existing efforts to make information about paid content clear.

This search page update is starting to gradually roll out on mobile and we’ll soon begin testing a similar experience on desktop, helping people more easily find what they’re looking for, no matter where they’re searching.

How seeking inclusion in tech led Lara to Google

Welcome to the latest edition of “My Path to Google,” where we talk to Googlers, interns and alumni about how they got to Google, what their roles are like and even some tips on how to prepare for interviews.

Today’s post is all about Lara Suzuki, a technical director in Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, who’s based in London.

What’s your role at Google?

I work at the forefront of many technologies, including machine learning, responsible AI, cloud robotics and AI applied to medicine. I collaborate with Googlers across product, engineering and sales.

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got interested in technology.

I grew up in Sao Paulo in a Brazilian-Italian-Japanese family. I’m autistic and have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with things that move or change state, like machines, cars and electronic equipment. I always wanted to understand how things worked — what made them behave the way they did, and how I could make them do something else.

I started a music degree when I was 15, but a year later, I decided to follow my passion for engineering. I went on to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer science.

Lara, wearing a space-themed sweater, sits smiling with a golden retriever.

Why did you decide to apply to Google?

Besides its technological impact, I was drawn to Google’s commitment to inclusion and belonging — including the programs they invest in to help people of all walks of life join the technology sector. The best thing about Google is the people and the value the organization puts on Googlers.

I will never be able to express my appreciation for the way Google has impacted my own life and helped me grow in this field. Even before I joined, Google awarded me an academic scholarship to pursue my PhD and provided mentorship, leadership and technical training.

Lara presents at an event. She wears a gray jacket and a lime green event badge. Behind her are pictures of women technologists with their names and talk names listed.

What was your interview experience like?

Even though I was nervous, all my interview experiences at Google were fantastic (I applied for one role and received referrals for two). Every interviewer was enthusiastic about the technologies they were developing, and my potential role in them. Even in the early stages of the interview process, I could grasp the company’s culture of belonging and belief in everyone’s capabilities.

What resources did you use to prepare?

I used a lot of online resources to polish my coding skills, read books and took coding challenges. I also did mock interviews with my friends and husband. That helped me prepare for questions and keep my anxiety at bay. At the actual interview, it felt like I was having a chat with a friend.

What advice do you have for aspiring Googlers?

Applying to Google can sometimes feel like you’re taking a long shot. I was very motivated to make it to Google, but also a bit afraid I wouldn’t be good enough. Don’t hesitate to apply because of a fear of failure. In the end, you’ll find the right opportunity at the right time in your career.

Chrome for Android Update

Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 106 (106.0.5249.126) for Android: it'll become available on Google Play over the next few days.

This release includes stability and performance improvements. You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Android releases contain the same security fixes as their corresponding Desktop release, unless otherwise noted.



Krishna Govind
Google Chrome

Refreshed guidelines for site owners

In 2002 we launched a page with a set of guidelines for site owners that gave an overview of best practices when it came to building a site. We called this page "Webmaster Guidelines" and it's been with us ever since. Since then we added a lot of information to these guidelines to help site owners build the site that's right for their users who visit through Google Search. Today we're launching a refreshed, simplified version of the Webmaster Guidelines, and we're changing its name as well.

Chrome Dev for Android Update

Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Dev 108 (108.0.5354.5) for Android. It's now available on Google Play.

You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.

If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Krishna Govind
Google Chrome