Tag Archives: cloud

Announcing Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science

Posted by Bram Bout, Director, Google for Education

While university students are on their summer holidays, internships or jobs, their professors are already hard at work planning for fall courses. These course maps will be at the center of student learning, research and academic growth. Google was founded on the basis of the work that Larry and Sergey did as computer science students at Stanford, and we understand the critical role that teachers play in fostering and inspiring the innovation we see today and will see in the years to come. That’s why we’re excited to offer Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science.

Starting today, university faculty in the United States who teach courses in computer science or related subjects can apply for free credits for their students to use across the full suite of Google Cloud Platform tools, like App Engine and the Cloud Machine Learning Platform. These credits can be used any time during the 2016-17 academic year and give students access to the same tools and infrastructure used by Google engineers.
Students like Duke University undergrad Brittany Wenger are already taking advantage of cloud computing. After watching several women in her family suffer from breast cancer, Brittany used her knowledge of artificial intelligence to create Cloud4Cancer, an artificial neural network built on top of Google App Engine. By analyzing uploaded scans of benign and malignant breast cancer tumors, Cloud4Cancer has learned to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue. It’s providing health care professionals with a powerful diagnostic tool in the fight against cancer.

Google Cloud Platform offers a range of tools and services that are unique among cloud providers. The tool that Brittany used -- Google App Engine -- lets you simply build and run an application without having to configure custom infrastructure. Our Machine Learning platform allows you to build models for any type of data, at any size, and TensorFlow provides access to an open-source public software library (tinker with that extensive data here). Students will also be able to get their hands on one of Cloud Platform’s most popular new innovations: the Cloud Vision API, which allows you to incorporate Google’s state-of-the-art image recognition capabilities into the most basic web or mobile app.

We look forward to seeing the creative ways that computer science students will use their Google Cloud Platform Education Grants, and will share stories along the way on this blog.

Computer science faculty in the United States can apply here for Education Grants. Students and others interested in Cloud Platform for Higher Education, should complete this form to register and stay up to date with the latest from Cloud Platform. For more information on Cloud Platform and its uses for higher education, visit our Google Cloud Platform for Higher Education site.

Google Cloud Messaging: State of the Union

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is an infrastructure that allows you to do simple and reliable messaging to distribute your messages to and across many devices.

Every day, GCM delivers over 150 Billion messages to devices on various platforms including Android Devices, iOS Devices and Web Browsers. It has a number of different techniques for sending messages:

Single devices. Each device has a unique registration token. If you want to reach that device -- for example using GCM to build a 1:1 chat application, you can do so, addressing it via that token.

Device Groups allow you to bundle devices together into a group. For example, one of your users might have multiple devices -- including the very common scenario of having both a phone and a tablet. Using Device Groups in GCM, you can send a message to all of her devices, and if you desire, you can implement your app so that dismissing on one dismisses on all.

Topics allow you to create interest groups for your users. Once they subscribe to a topic, you can send messages to that topic, and your users will receive them. There’s no subscription limit to these, so you don’t have to worry about how many users subscribe to your topics! Some great scenarios of topics being used to improve user experience can be found in this blog post.

When it comes to reliability of messages, an internal study at Google found that the majority of notification messages (95th percentile) are delivered within 250ms to connected devices. Connectivity is impacted by many factors -- including carriers, routers and local connectivity. Indeed, in some locales it is common for people to disable mobile data for large parts of the day in order to save on bandwidth costs. In this scenario, users will still receive their notifications once they re-activate their data connection.

We’ve provided a number of resources to help you to build apps using GCM. Check out this talk where you are taken step by step through building an Android app and an associated server in PHP. There’s also an open source ‘GCM Playground’ on GitHub here, which provides a sample server implementation that runs on the Google Cloud Platform!

If you want to reach iOS users, today we’re adding an API that will help you to migrate your existing infrastructure to send notifications to iOS device, with no client code changes required. With the new batch Import API you can import the APNs device tokens that you collected from your iOS audience into GCM, and immediately start sending notifications through GCM. After you import the APNs device tokens, you can also use the InstanceID API to transparently subscribe users to GCM topics, achieving efficient fan-out of notifications based on interest groups, once again with no changes required on client code.

We’re continuing to build and innovate on this platform -- stay tuned for lots of cool new features coming soon!

You can learn more about Google Cloud Messaging on the Developers site here, including quickstarts for Android and iOS!

Google Cloud Messaging – We’ve Come a Long Way

Posted by Laurence Moroney Developer Advocate

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a technology that provides simple and reliable messaging to devices. In the last six months, the number of messages that GCM handles has more than doubled -- to 150 billion messages per day, and the number of applications has grown 25% to 750,000. With this growth in mind, we’re continuing to improve the service with some helpful updates for developers.

Google Cloud Messaging supports topic messaging - an easy way to segment your users’ devices into groups and send a message to the entire segment at once. We’re now happy to announce that we’re allowing unlimited free topics for your app. This means app developers can place an unlimited number of devices within each topic and create an unlimited number of topics.

Moovit uses topics to efficiently scale

Moovit, a community of 30 million+ users, helps improve transit routes in cities worldwide. Using GCM, Moovit has been able to create over 60,000 topics to help users in individual cities navigate the headache of daily transit.

"We started using GCM to power our push infrastructure in a more seamless, efficient way. Not only does GCM help us to send real-time updates to a high volume of tens of millions of users, keeping them informed of any transit information they need for a stress-free commute, but we don't have to spend extra time or energy developing an infrastructure for delivery on the backend. GCM Topics allows us to message users in hundreds of cities around the world with multi-platform support for both iOS and Android."

For example: Users of London’s Underground Service were impacted by recent strikes that disrupted the regular service. While Moovit has a global audience, only those impacted were notified, as Moovit used GCM topic messaging to send the message to only those that needed it.

National Public Radio (NPR) uses Topics for news personalization

NPR is a mission-driven multimedia news organization and radio program producer in the United States. To reach their users efficiently, NPR sends and schedules personalized notifications to their listeners

via their NPR One App. For example, if you listened to the Aziz Ansari interview on the show All Things Considered, and wanted to hear more, you could subscribe to the topic ‘Aziz Ansari’ and receive a notification of his appearance on the Hidden Brain podcast. Similarly, you could subscribe to other topics such as Election 2016, Women in Combat or Pop Culture Happy Hour.

Tejas Mistrly, Mobile Product Manager for NPR, described their use of topics: “With GCM topic messaging, NPR is able to send and schedule personalized notifications to our listeners on NPR One. Whether to catch them up on the latest news or to tell them a story from a recommended podcast across public radio, GCM topic messaging gives us the tool set to send the most effective notifications that ties into our personalized radio app.”

New APIs for GCM topic management

Complementing unlimited free topics and the existing client-side API, we’re launching a new suite of server APIs that allow you to manage message subscriptions. The new APIs allow you to subscribe/unsubscribe devices individually or in batches, as well as allow retrieval of info on current subscriptions per device. We think the server-side API is a great tool to help you reduce roll-out friction, and allow for easy management and migration of subscriptions as your app grows.

To learn more about Google Cloud Messaging, visit the Google Developers Site, where you can learn more about how to build for this technology, and download sample implementations. There’s also a full reference implementation available on GitHub and the GCM Diagnostics tool for when you need help to troubleshoot.