Tag Archives: community

Machine Learning Communities: Q3 ‘21 highlights and achievements

Posted by HyeJung Lee, DevRel Community Manager and Soonson Kwon, DevRel Program Manager

Let’s explore highlights and achievements of vast Google Machine Learning communities by region for the last quarter. Activities of experts (GDE, professional individuals), communities (TFUG, TensorFlow user groups), students (GDSC, student clubs), and developers groups (GDG) are presented here.

Key highlights

Image shows a banner for 30 days of ML with Kaggle

30 days of ML with Kaggle is designed to help beginners study ML using Kaggle Learn courses as well as a competition specifically for the participants of this program. Collaborated with the Kaggle team so that +30 the ML GDEs and TFUG organizers participated as volunteers as online mentors as well as speakers for this initiative.

Total 16 of the GDE/GDSC/TFUGs run community organized programs by referring to the shared community organize guide. Houston TensorFlow & Applied AI/ML placed 6th out of 7573 teams — the only Americans in the Top 10 in the competition. And TFUG Santiago (Chile) organizers participated as well and they are number 17 on the public leaderboard.

Asia Pacific

Image shows Google Cloud and Coca-Cola logos

GDE Minori MATSUDA (Japan)’s project on Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan was published on Google Cloud Japan Blog covering creating an ML pipeline to deploy into real business within 2 months by using Vertex AI. This is also published on GCP blog in English.

GDE Chansung Park (Korea) and Sayak Paul (India) published many articles on GCP Blog. First, “Image search with natural language queries” explained how to build a simple image parser from natural language inputs using OpenAI's CLIP model. From this second “Model training as a CI/CD system: (Part I, Part II)” post, you can learn more about why having a resilient CI/CD system for your ML application is crucial for success. Last, “Dual deployments on Vertex AI” talks about end-to-end workflow using Vertex AI, TFX and Kubeflow.

In China, GDE Junpeng Ye used TensorFlow 2.x to significantly reduce the codebase (15k → 2k) on WeChat Finder which is a TikTok alternative in WeChat. GDE Dan lee wrote an article on Understanding TensorFlow Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3-1, Part 3-2, Part 4

GDE Ngoc Ba from Vietnam has contributed AI Papers Reading and Coding series implementing ML/DL papers in TensorFlow and creates slides/videos every two weeks. (videos: Vit Transformer, MLP-Mixer and Transformer)

A beginner friendly codelabs (Get started with audio classification ,Go further with audio classification) by GDSC Sookmyung (Korea) learning to customize pre-trained audio classification models to your needs and deploy them to your apps, using TFlite Model Maker.

Cover image for Mat Kelcey's talk on JAX at the PyConAU event

GDE Matthew Kelcey from Australia gave a talk on JAX at PyConAU event. Mat gave an overview to fundamentals of JAX and an intro to some of the libraries being developed on top.

Image shows overview for the released PerceiverIO code

In Singapore, TFUG Singapore dived back into some of the latest papers, techniques, and fields of research that are delivering state-of-the-art results in a number of fields. GDE Martin Andrews included a brief code walkthrough for the released PerceiverIO code at perceiver- highlighting what JAX looks like, how Haiku relates to Sonnet, but also the data loading stuff which is done via tf.data.

Machine Learning Experimentation with TensorBoard book cover

GDE Imran us Salam Mian from Pakistan published a book "Machine Learning Experimentation with TensorBoard".

India

GDE Aakash Nain has published the TF-JAX tutorial series from Part 4 to Part 8. Part 4 gives a brief introduction about JAX (What/Why), and DeviceArray. Part 5 covers why pure functions are good and why JAX prefers them. Part 6 focuses on Pseudo Random Number Generation (PRNG) in Numpy and JAX. Part 7 focuses on Just In Time Compilation (JIT) in JAX. And Part 8 covers vmap and pmap.

Image of Bhavesh's Google Cloud certificate

GDE Bhavesh Bhatt published a video about his experience on the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer certification exam.

Image shows phase 1 and 2 of the Climate Change project using Vertex AI

Climate Change project using Vertex AI by ML GDE Sayak Paul and Siddha Ganju (NVIDIA). They published a paper (Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery with Semi-Supervised Learning) and open-sourced the project with regard to NASA Impact's ETCI competition. This project made four NeurIPS workshops AI for Science: Mind the Gaps, Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, Women in ML, and Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences. And they finished as the first runners-up (see Test Phase 2).

Image shows example of handwriting recognition tutorial

Tutorial on handwriting recognition was contributed to Keras example by GDE Sayak Paul and Aakash Kumar Nain.

Graph regularization for image classification using synthesized graphs by GDE Sayak Pau was added to the official examples in the Neural Structured Learning in TensorFlow.

GDE Sayak Paul and Soumik Rakshit shared a new NLP dataset for multi-label text classification. The dataset consists of paper titles, abstracts, and term categories scraped from arXiv.

North America

Banner image shows students participating in Google Summer of Code

During the GSoC (Google Summer of Code), some GDEs mentored or co-mentored students. GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid (USA) mentored TF-GAN, Model Garden, TF Hub and TFLite products. You can get some of her experience and tips from the GDE Blog. And you can find GDE Sayak Paul (India) and Googler Morgan Roff’s GSoC experience in (co-)mentoring TensorFlow and TF Hub as well.

A beginner friendly workshop on TensorFlow with ML GDE Henry Ruiz (USA) was hosted by GDSC Texas A&M University (USA) for the students.

Screenshot from Youtube video on how transformers work

Youtube video Self-Attention Explained: How do Transformers work? by GDE Tanmay Bakshi from Canada explained how you can build a Transformer encoder-based neural network to classify code into 8 different programming languages using TPU, Colab with Keras.

Europe

GDG / GDSC Turkey hosted AI Summer Camp in cooperation with Global AI Hub. 7100 participants learned about ML, TensorFlow, CV and NLP.

Screenshot from slide presentation titled Why Jax?

TechTalk Speech Processing with Deep Learning and JAX/Trax by GDE Sergii Khomenko (Germany) and M. Yusuf Sarıgöz (Turkey). They reviewed technologies such as Jax, TensorFlow, Trax, and others that can help boost our research in speech processing.

South/Central America

Image shows Custom object detection in the browser using TensorFlow.js

On the other side of the world, in Brazil, GDE Hugo Zanini Gomes wrote an article about “Custom object detection in the browser using TensorFlow.js” using the TensorFlow 2 Object Detection API and Colab was posted on the TensorFlow blog.

Screenshot from a talk about Real-time semantic segmentation in the browser - Made with TensorFlow.js

And Hugo gave a talk about Real-time semantic segmentation in the browser - Made with TensorFlow.js covered using SavedModels in an efficient way in JavaScript directly enabling you to get the reach and scale of the web for your new research.

Data Pipelines for ML was talked about by GDE Nathaly Alarcon Torrico from Bolivia explained all the phases involved in the creation of ML and Data Science products, starting with the data collection, transformation, storage and Product creation of ML models.

Screensho from TechTalk “Machine Learning Competitivo: Top 1% en Kaggle (Video)

TechTalk “Machine Learning Competitivo: Top 1% en Kaggle (Video)“ was hosted by TFUG Santiago (Chile). In this talk the speaker gave a tour of the steps to follow to generate a model capable of being in the top 1% of the Kaggle Leaderboard. The focus was on showing the libraries and“ tricks ”that are used to be able to test many ideas quickly both in implementation and in execution and how to use them in productive environments.

MENA

Screenshot from workshop about Recurrent Neural Networks

GDE Ruqiya Bin Safi (Saudi Arabia) had a workshop about Recurrent Neural Networks : part 1 (Github / Slide) at the GDG Mena. And Ruqiya gave a talk about Recurrent Neural Networks: part 2 at the GDG Cloud Saudi (Saudi Arabia).

AI Training with Kaggle by GDSC Islamic University of Gaza from Palestine. It is a two month training covering Data Processing, Image Processing and NLP with Kaggle.

Sub-Saharan Africa

TFUG Ibadan had two TensorFlow events : Basic Sentiment analysis with Tensorflow and Introduction to Recommenders Systems with TensorFlow”.

Image of Yannick Serge Obam Akou's TensorFlow Certificate

Article covered some tips to study, prepare and pass the TensorFlow developer exam in French by ML GDE Yannick Serge Obam Akou (Cameroon).

Expanding Fuchsia’s open source model

Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system, and today we are expanding Fuchsia’s open source model to welcome contributions from the public.

Fuchsia is designed to prioritize security, updatability, and performance, and is currently under active development by the Fuchsia team. We have been developing Fuchsia in the open, in our git repository for the last four years. You can browse the repository history at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com to see how Fuchsia has evolved over time. We are laying this foundation from the kernel up to make it easier to create long-lasting, secure products and experiences.

Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia's open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project. We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.

In addition, we are also publishing a technical roadmap for Fuchsia to provide better insights for project direction and priorities. Some of the highlights of the roadmap are working on a driver framework for updating the kernel independently of the drivers, improving file systems for performance, and expanding the input pipeline for accessibility.

Fuchsia is an open source project that is inclusive by design, from the architecture of the platform itself, to the open source community that we’re building. The project is still evolving rapidly, but the underlying principles and values of the system have remained relatively constant throughout the project. More information about the core architectural principles are available in the documentation: secure, updatable, inclusive, and pragmatic.

Fuchsia is not ready for general product development or as a development target, but you can clone, compile, and contribute to it. It has support for a limited set of x64-based hardware, and you can also test it with Fuchsia’s emulator. You can download and build the source code by following the getting started guide.

Fuchsia emulator startup with fx emu
If you would like to learn more about Fuchsia, join our mailing lists and browse the documentation at fuchsia.dev. You can now be part of the project and help build the future of this operating system. We are looking forward to receiving contributions from the community as we grow Fuchsia together.

By Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate for Fuchsia

Find A Way Together, #WithMe on YouTube

This year has demanded a lot of each of us. And we’ve all been finding our own ways to cope. 
But despite the uncertainty, something profound has been happening on YouTube. People are coming together to support each other, and creators are doing what they do best: showing up for their communities. Whether it’s pausing to check in, find a moment of joy, reflect or simply express vulnerability, creators are sharing their expertise, stories, passions, and a little bit more of themselves. And these simple acts are making a difference. 
For World Mental Health Day, Mental Health Week Australia and National Mental Health Month—we want to shine a light on our YouTube community, and creators who are sharing their stories, and helping others find ways to speak out, take care, and cope. 
Thank you to the registered mental health organisations like Black Dog Institute, Project Rockit and headspace Australia on the platform for sharing your expert knowledge and resources with us. And thank you to the many other creators—from yoga instructors to musicians, from gardeners to gamers—for providing emotional support and a sense of connection just by opening up and talking about what you’re going through. You are all helping us take better care of ourselves and each other. 


Turning to YouTube for Support and Comfort 
Videos related to many practices associated with coping with anxiety and stress, including many hobbies, yoga and exercise, have seen increases in viewership this year. 
Aussie creator Chloe Ting, was one channel offering locals in lockdown an outlet. Videos with ‘Chloe Ting’ or ‘Chloe Ting Challenge’ or ‘#chloetingchallenge’ in the title generated more than 140 million views globally since March 15, 2020.1 
Videos with prayer in the title are also among those seeing an increase in views—up 70 percent in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the prior year.2 Prayer plays an important role in the lives of many, especially in handling stressful situations, and these videos may offer a feeling of solace. They also offer a way to continue participating in religious practices, and to maintain a routine during a time that is anything but routine. 

Mental health exists on a spectrum from illness to wellness and, as such, impacts every single one of us. If you’re looking for ways to take care or you’re interested to hear how others are coping with different experiences, below are a few videos to explore. For more, check out our Mental Health Awareness Playlist. 


Meet Sarah Chrisp 
Kiwi entrepreneur Sarah aka Wholesale Ted usually shares advice on ecommerce with her 620k fans. This week saw a break in tradition though, when she posted this video on her struggle with anxiety, depression and burnout, and how she restored her sense of wellbeing, and balance. 


Meet Maaz 
He’s a trained medical doctor turned animator extraordinaire. This video breaks away from Maaz’s renowned comedic take on life events and stories, as he talks about the discrimination he faced growing up as Muslim Pakastani in Australia, and how he has learned to be comfortable in his own skin. 


Meet Jason Stephenson 
Average daily views of videos related to insomnia more than doubled after April 1 compared to the first quarter of the year,3 and in turn, average daily views of videos related to guided meditation with “sleep” in the title increased 25 percent in April, compared to March.4  
So find a comfy seat, close down your eyes and take a moment. Jason has attracted almost two million fans to his channel, sharing weekly guided meditations, inspirational talks and affirmations to help you de-stress, find calm and get better sleep. 


Meet Erin May Henry 
Based in Melbourne, Erin has become a go-to for videos on positive self-talk. Tune in for videos like this one on self-care routines, healthy habits and life lessons that’ll help you feel motivated, and supported.


Meet Jamie Perkins 
He shares honest stories about the ins and outs of being a dad to two young daughters. Jamie created his YouTube channel to provide fun, inspirational videos on his approach to life and raising little ones. In this video created for World Mental Health Day, he talks gratitude, and what helps him get through. 


What creators are doing on YouTube is no small thing. Talking openly about coping matters. When creators promote healthy ways of coping and share adaptive skills and tips, they not only inspire us to try new strategies, but they also begin to chip away at the stigma associated with talking about and taking care of our mental health. And when stigma is reduced, we’re more likely to reach out and ask for the additional help we may need. 

If you're looking for support or want to talk, help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere in Australia and New Zealand: 
Lifeline Australia | 13 11 14 
Kids Helpline | 1800 55 1800 
Beyond Blue | 1300 22 4636 

Lifeline New Zealand | 0800 54 33 54 
Youthline New Zealand | 0800 376 633 

For research-informed mental health resources and free support tools, check out Black Dog Institute.



1 YouTube data, Global, 15 March 2020 - 5 July 2020
2 YouTube data, Global, jan - Mar 2019, Jan - Mar 2020 
3 YouTube data, Global, January - April 2020 
4 YouTube data, Global, March - April 2020 



Posted by YouTube Australia

Find A Way Together, #WithMe on YouTube

This year has demanded a lot of each of us. And we’ve all been finding our own ways to cope. 
But despite the uncertainty, something profound has been happening on YouTube. People are coming together to support each other, and creators are doing what they do best: showing up for their communities. Whether it’s pausing to check in, find a moment of joy, reflect or simply express vulnerability, creators are sharing their expertise, stories, passions, and a little bit more of themselves. And these simple acts are making a difference. 
For World Mental Health Day, Mental Health Week Australia and National Mental Health Month—we want to shine a light on our YouTube community, and creators who are sharing their stories, and helping others find ways to speak out, take care, and cope. 
Thank you to the registered mental health organisations like Black Dog Institute, Project Rockit and headspace Australia on the platform for sharing your expert knowledge and resources with us. And thank you to the many other creators—from yoga instructors to musicians, from gardeners to gamers—for providing emotional support and a sense of connection just by opening up and talking about what you’re going through. You are all helping us take better care of ourselves and each other. 


Turning to YouTube for Support and Comfort 
Videos related to many practices associated with coping with anxiety and stress, including many hobbies, yoga and exercise, have seen increases in viewership this year. 
Aussie creator Chloe Ting, was one channel offering locals in lockdown an outlet. Videos with ‘Chloe Ting’ or ‘Chloe Ting Challenge’ or ‘#chloetingchallenge’ in the title generated more than 140 million views globally since March 15, 2020.1 
Videos with prayer in the title are also among those seeing an increase in views—up 70 percent in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the prior year.2 Prayer plays an important role in the lives of many, especially in handling stressful situations, and these videos may offer a feeling of solace. They also offer a way to continue participating in religious practices, and to maintain a routine during a time that is anything but routine. 

Mental health exists on a spectrum from illness to wellness and, as such, impacts every single one of us. If you’re looking for ways to take care or you’re interested to hear how others are coping with different experiences, below are a few videos to explore. For more, check out our Mental Health Awareness Playlist. 


Meet Sarah Chrisp 
Kiwi entrepreneur Sarah aka Wholesale Ted usually shares advice on ecommerce with her 620k fans. This week saw a break in tradition though, when she posted this video on her struggle with anxiety, depression and burnout, and how she restored her sense of wellbeing, and balance. 


Meet Maaz 
He’s a trained medical doctor turned animator extraordinaire. This video breaks away from Maaz’s renowned comedic take on life events and stories, as he talks about the discrimination he faced growing up as Muslim Pakastani in Australia, and how he has learned to be comfortable in his own skin. 


Meet Jason Stephenson 
Average daily views of videos related to insomnia more than doubled after April 1 compared to the first quarter of the year,3 and in turn, average daily views of videos related to guided meditation with “sleep” in the title increased 25 percent in April, compared to March.4  
So find a comfy seat, close down your eyes and take a moment. Jason has attracted almost two million fans to his channel, sharing weekly guided meditations, inspirational talks and affirmations to help you de-stress, find calm and get better sleep. 


Meet Erin May Henry 
Based in Melbourne, Erin has become a go-to for videos on positive self-talk. Tune in for videos like this one on self-care routines, healthy habits and life lessons that’ll help you feel motivated, and supported.


Meet Jamie Perkins 
He shares honest stories about the ins and outs of being a dad to two young daughters. Jamie created his YouTube channel to provide fun, inspirational videos on his approach to life and raising little ones. In this video created for World Mental Health Day, he talks gratitude, and what helps him get through. 


What creators are doing on YouTube is no small thing. Talking openly about coping matters. When creators promote healthy ways of coping and share adaptive skills and tips, they not only inspire us to try new strategies, but they also begin to chip away at the stigma associated with talking about and taking care of our mental health. And when stigma is reduced, we’re more likely to reach out and ask for the additional help we may need. 

If you're looking for support or want to talk, help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere in Australia and New Zealand: 
Lifeline Australia | 13 11 14 
Kids Helpline | 1800 55 1800 
Beyond Blue | 1300 22 4636 

Lifeline New Zealand | 0800 54 33 54 
Youthline New Zealand | 0800 376 633 

For research-informed mental health resources and free support tools, check out Black Dog Institute.



1 YouTube data, Global, 15 March 2020 - 5 July 2020
2 YouTube data, Global, jan - Mar 2019, Jan - Mar 2020 
3 YouTube data, Global, January - April 2020 
4 YouTube data, Global, March - April 2020 



Posted by YouTube Australia

Google Open Source Live: A monthly connection for open source communities

Starting in September, open source experts at Google will have a new place to meet with you online: Google Open Source Live, a virtual event series to connect with open source communities with a focus on different technologies and areas of expertise. Google Open Source Live launches on September 3, 2020, and will provide monthly content for open source developers at all levels, contributors, and community members. 
The inaugural event of this series will be: The new open source: Leadership, contributions and sustainability, in which the Google Open Source Programs Office, together with Developer Relations specialists, will share an overview of the best ways to get involved and succeed in the open source ecosystem with four exciting sessions.

Given how the 2020 pandemic has affected the communities’s ability to stay engaged and connect, it is important to us to stay present in the ecosystem. Therefore, we made a conscious decision to build an event series for developers to have the opportunity to hear directly from the Google Open Source Programs Office, developer advocates and experts. Each day will provide impactful information in a 2-hour time frame.

Attendee Experience

After attending several virtual events throughout the Summer, we designed our platform with one idea in mind: to create an alternative platform for developers to gather, learn, and interact with experts, and have fun.

Attendees can interact with the experts and speakers with Live Q&A chat during the sessions, and join an after party following the event! It’ll provide a great interactive opportunity for activities and to connect with others.

Sept. 3 Agenda

“The New Open Source: Leadership, contributions and sustainability”
9 AM - 11 AM PST

Session

Topic 

Speaker

Hosted by Stephen Fluin, DevRel Lead and Dustin Ingram, Developer Advocate.  

1

"Be the leader you want in OSS"

Megan Byrd-Sanicki

Manager, Operations & Research

2

"5 simple things you can do to improve OSS docs"

Erin McKean, Docs Advocacy Program Manager, OSPO

3

Fireside Chat: "Business models and contributor engagement in OS"

Seth Vargo, Developer Advocate

Kaslin Fields, Developer Advocate

4

"Sustainability in OS"

Megan Byrd-Sanicki, Manager

 Operations & Research

Google Open Source Live Event Calendar

Each month will focus on one open source project or concept and feature several speakers who are subject matter experts in their fields. Events take place monthly on the first Thursday.

 

2020

Sep 3

Oct 1

Nov 5

Dec 3

The new open source:

Leadership, contributions and sustainability

Knative day

On Google Open Source Live

Go day

On Google Open Source Live


Kubernetes day

On Google Open Source Live



2021

Feb 4

Mar 4

Apr 1

May 6

Istio day

On Google Open Source Live

Bazel day

On Google Open Source Live

Beam day

On Google Open Source Live

Spark day

On Google Open Source Live

Jun 3

Jul 1

Aug 5

Sep 2

CDAP day

On Google Open Source Live

Airflow day

On Google Open Source Live

OSS Security day

On Google Open Source Live

TBD



Find out more 

Sign up to receive more details and alerts, and follow GoogleOSS@ and #GoogleOSlive for updates on Twitter.


By Jamie Rachel, Event Program Manager for Google Open Source

Supporting Wikipedia with more tools for editors

Google has a commitment to making information more accessible to people around the world, while ensuring that the information on the web is accurate and reflects the diversity of its users. Just like Google supports open source software development, WikiLoop is one of the explorations on better contributing to the open knowledge movement. To this day, Wikipedia, a Wikimedia movement project, remains a reliable information source that is also available with an open license, which makes it possible for Knowledge Engine of Google—as well as knowledge graph systems operated by others —to draw excerpts from it for Search features and other apps. With the project’s sustainability in mind, Google has contributed back to the Wikimedia movement in a number of ways since 2018. Building on this commitment, Google created the umbrella program WikiLoop in 2019, which hosts several tools for editors that focus on content quality, like WikiLoop DoubleCheck. 
WikiLoop is led by Zainan Zhou—a Googler for the last 7 years, and a Wikipedian for the last 5—who works as a software engineer in the Knowledge Engine team at Google. When he joined the free encyclopedia as an editor, he always wondered how his company could contribute to this open source project. Zainan involved the Wikipedia communities in every step of the development of WikiLoop, connecting with editors from different parts of the world at Wikimedia events, like WikidataCon, Wikimania, Wiki Conference North America, and WikiDevSummit, throughout 2019. The most recent involvement with the community of Wikipedia editors included a consultation and vote to change the name of the most popular WikiLoop artifact, a tool for peer-review of Wikipedia articles, DoubleCheck.

In the past few months, we focused on raising awareness of WikiLoop DoubleCheck. This tool allows registered and unregistered users to mark new edits with tags “looks good”, “not sure”, and “should revert”, a peer review system which editors could use to approve or revert new content on Wikipedia. Since its launch, the tool has witnessed a 309% quarter over quarter growth in tags added, and over 1,000 editors have used it to review Wikipedia content. With the help of volunteer translators and machine translation, WikiLoop DoubleCheck is now made available in 25 languages, and we hope to continue serving more Wikipedia editors in the months to come. In order for Google’s Knowledge Engine to organize the world's information, the knowledge source needs to be healthy. While peer-review on Wikipedia is an established process that has been going on for years, tools like WikiLoop DoubleCheck support the thousands of volunteers who dedicate their time to this task on Wikipedia by making information verification more accessible.


The WikiLoop program was originally conceived as a virtuous circle: providing data and tools to enhance human editor's productivity, and making the Wikipedia editorial input more machine-readable for open knowledge institutions, academia and researchers interested in advancing machine learning technology.

WikiLoop leverages Google’s talents at software development to contribute to global Wikipedia content accuracy by enhancing the existing suite of Wikimedia and community tools for content validation at scale. While WikiLoop is a contribution of Google to the Wikipedia communities, Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have partnered in other areas as well. Learn more about Google’s partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation on the partnership’s page on Meta-Wikimedia. 

While probably the most popular in the set, DoubleCheck is not the only tool under the WikiLoop umbrella. We are also building data sets and tools and continue to explore other opportunities to contribute to the open knowledge movement. Learn more about tools and other initiatives, like the Coalition call, on the program’s page on Meta-Wikimedia.

By María Cruz – Program Manager, Google Open Source Programs Office

Supporting Wikipedia with more tools for editors

Google has a commitment to making information more accessible to people around the world, while ensuring that the information on the web is accurate and reflects the diversity of its users. Just like Google supports open source software development, WikiLoop is one of the explorations on better contributing to the open knowledge movement. To this day, Wikipedia, a Wikimedia movement project, remains a reliable information source that is also available with an open license, which makes it possible for Knowledge Engine of Google—as well as knowledge graph systems operated by others —to draw excerpts from it for Search features and other apps. With the project’s sustainability in mind, Google has contributed back to the Wikimedia movement in a number of ways since 2018. Building on this commitment, Google created the umbrella program WikiLoop in 2019, which hosts several tools for editors that focus on content quality, like WikiLoop DoubleCheck. 
WikiLoop is led by Zainan Zhou—a Googler for the last 7 years, and a Wikipedian for the last 5—who works as a software engineer in the Knowledge Engine team at Google. When he joined the free encyclopedia as an editor, he always wondered how his company could contribute to this open source project. Zainan involved the Wikipedia communities in every step of the development of WikiLoop, connecting with editors from different parts of the world at Wikimedia events, like WikidataCon, Wikimania, Wiki Conference North America, and WikiDevSummit, throughout 2019. The most recent involvement with the community of Wikipedia editors included a consultation and vote to change the name of the most popular WikiLoop artifact, a tool for peer-review of Wikipedia articles, DoubleCheck.

In the past few months, we focused on raising awareness of WikiLoop DoubleCheck. This tool allows registered and unregistered users to mark new edits with tags “looks good”, “not sure”, and “should revert”, a peer review system which editors could use to approve or revert new content on Wikipedia. Since its launch, the tool has witnessed a 309% quarter over quarter growth in tags added, and over 1,000 editors have used it to review Wikipedia content. With the help of volunteer translators and machine translation, WikiLoop DoubleCheck is now made available in 25 languages, and we hope to continue serving more Wikipedia editors in the months to come. In order for Google’s Knowledge Engine to organize the world's information, the knowledge source needs to be healthy. While peer-review on Wikipedia is an established process that has been going on for years, tools like WikiLoop DoubleCheck support the thousands of volunteers who dedicate their time to this task on Wikipedia by making information verification more accessible.


The WikiLoop program was originally conceived as a virtuous circle: providing data and tools to enhance human editor's productivity, and making the Wikipedia editorial input more machine-readable for open knowledge institutions, academia and researchers interested in advancing machine learning technology.

WikiLoop leverages Google’s talents at software development to contribute to global Wikipedia content accuracy by enhancing the existing suite of Wikimedia and community tools for content validation at scale. While WikiLoop is a contribution of Google to the Wikipedia communities, Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have partnered in other areas as well. Learn more about Google’s partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation on the partnership’s page on Meta-Wikimedia. 

While probably the most popular in the set, DoubleCheck is not the only tool under the WikiLoop umbrella. We are also building data sets and tools and continue to explore other opportunities to contribute to the open knowledge movement. Learn more about tools and other initiatives, like the Coalition call, on the program’s page on Meta-Wikimedia.

By María Cruz – Program Manager, Google Open Source Programs Office

Three opportunities to connect with Google Open Source in June

One of our biggest challenges this year has been finding opportunities to stay connected with the many open source communities that we collaborate with across projects. As we continue to develop new ways of creating convenings with our different stakeholders, here are three opportunities to connect with Google Open Source later this month.

24 hours of Google Cloud Talks by DevRel

When: June 23, 2020
What: This is a free, digital series, organized by Google Developer Relations team, offering practitioners an opportunity to connect with our technical experts and deepen their awareness and knowledge of a variety of Google Cloud solutions including ML/AI, Serverless, DevOps, and many more.

Talks by Google Open Source:

June 23

OpenJS World

When: June 23-24, 2020
What: Organized by The Linux Foundation, and sponsored by Google, this annual event brings together the JavaScript and web ecosystem including Node.js, Electron, AMP and more. In 2020, we’re going virtual to learn and engage with leaders deploying innovative applications at massive scale.

Talks by Google Open Source:

June 23
June 24

Open Source Summit North America

When: June 29 – July 2, 2020
What: Organized by The Linux Foundation, and sponsored by Google, this event connects the open source ecosystem under one roof, summoning over 2,000 participants across 15 conference rooms. It’s a unique environment for cross-collaboration between developers, sysadmins, devops, architects, program and product managers and others who are driving technology forward.

Talks by Google Open Source:

June 29
June 30
If you attend any of these talks, and plan to share, you can tag @GoogleOSS on Twitter. We hope to see and connect with many of you at these virtual events!

By María Cruz, Google Open Source

Knative elects new Technical Oversight Committee members

Towards the end of 2019, Knative project initiated a series of changes to its governance to ensure sustainability in the long term. Over the last week, the project reached a new milestone by successfully wrapping up its first Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) elections, bringing more vendor diversity to the technical stewardship of Knative.

Google has grown thousands of open source projects throughout the years, and it is this collective knowledge that informed the changes proposed to Knative governance. Over the last six months, we worked together with the other members of the Knative Steering Committee, and with the project’s contributors to create a clear set of rules for technical leadership and governance, describing the many ways in which contributors could engage with the project. This process was key to developing trust with Knative’s community, the project’s most valued stakeholder. In the exercise of this vote, the community was able to test the new election process, which proved to be solid: it will be repeated annually for this project, and can serve as a model for other projects as well.

The TOC election, which had a turnout of 70% of active contributors to the project, yielded a new technical stewardship for Knative, with members representing RedHat, VMWare and Google, as follows:

Nghia Tran (Google) - new member
Markus Thömmes (Red Hat) - new member
Grant Rodgers (Google) - new member
Matt Moore (VMWare) - existing member
Evan Anderson (VMWare) - existing member

Members of Knative TOC not only have the technical stewardship of the project in their hands for the next two years, they also model the community’s values: they have strong technical skills, they contribute to the project, and they are collegial, mentoring other contributors and helping the project to grow in a sustainable and healthy way.

We celebrated this important milestone for Knative at the last community meetup. Watch the video to meet the new TOC members, and check out the contribution guidelines to join the project.

By María Cruz, Google Open Source

Apache Beam presents its mascot to the world

Four years after it graduated from The Apache Software Foundation’s incubator, Apache Beam welcomes a new addition to the family: its mascot, the Beam firefly! Apache Beam is an open source data streaming programming model that runs on the back end of some of your favorite apps. It is the technology behind many popular apps that need to process big data in real time. And the reason it has come this far is the community of developers that contribute to this open source project every week. In the last few months, we worked with Apache Beam contributors to collaboratively design a mascot for the project—a creative asset that can represent the values of the project and attract new users and contributors—to keep growing the project and expanding its reach.

In these four years, the Apache Beam project has been a busy… firefly. According to the Apache Software Foundation’s 2019 Annual Report, Beam ranks fourth in the top five most active projects by commits, and it ranks first in the top five most active dev@ mailing list, showing a strong and transparent communication exchange within the community of developers. On top of that, 53 Meetup groups across the globe are directly or indirectly connected to sharing knowledge about Apache Beam use cases, applications and functionalities.

With this much momentum and enthusiasm for this project, it was a good opportunity to cement some of Apache Beam’s most valued characteristics, to help raise awareness of this rapidly growing project, and convert more users to contributors. “Projects with a mascot are more relatable. They signal that there is more to the project than its technical vision. It signals that there is more to the project than its code,” said project contributor Maximilian Michel. In November of last year, the community discussed adopting a mascot and as a result, 11 animal ideas emerged for a possible mascot: beaver, hedgehog, lemur, owl, salmon, trout, robot dinosaur, firefly, cuttlefish, dumbo octopus, and angler fish. After 48 contributors expressed their vote, the collective decision was a firefly. In January of this year, artist Julián Bruno set out to bring the mascot to life. There were four rounds of feedback on different iterations of the mascot, plus a final vote, where 18 people participated; Engagement increased with every new round. In the end, this process produced an original mascot, a model sheet (so that anyone may reproduce it), and two adaptations of the Beam firefly: one where it is learning, and one where it is doing what it does best… stream data! You can read more about this process on the Apache Software Foundation’s blog.

In a year that has presented a lot of challenges to bring people together, working on the mascot project with the Apache Beam community was refreshing, and felt like a medium for contributors to connect beyond code and technical questions. It is our wish that Apache Beam continues to grow as a project, and we hope to continue to support its community to: support newcomers, share what works, and collaborate with others to build great solutions.

By María Cruz, Google Open Source