Tag Archives: google cloud

Champion Innovator Elyes Manai, based in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

Posted by Max Saltonstall, Developer Relations Engineer

In this ongoing interview series we sit down with Google Cloud Champion Innovators across the world to learn more about their journeys, their technology focus, and what excites them. Today we're talking to Elyes Manai. Elyes is a Machine Learning Consultant, Educator and Mentor. He helps companies tap into the power of data science to reduce costs and increase revenue as well as build relationships with relevant target audiences through educational content and community building.


What is a Champion Innovator?

Champion Innovators are a global network of more than 500 non-Google professionals, who are technical experts in Google Cloud products and services. Each Champion specializes in one of nine different technical categories which are cloud AI/ML, data analytics, hybrid multi-cloud, modern architecture, security and networking, serverless app development, storage, Workspace and databases.


What tech area has you most fascinated right now, and why?

Machine Learning: There are so many new insights we can gain from applying ML and AI to problems right now. Especially in security. I'm currently pursuing my PhD in AI applied to Cybersecurity, and am eager to teach the next generation about computer science, AI and security.

I fell into ML by accident, after trying to pursue something else in university. I had hoped to study architecture, but did not do nearly well enough in high school (in Tunisia, where I'm from). I ended up at my last choice of universities, in an IT program. And then I tried to transfer to an architecture school, but my paperwork got messed up so it didn't work out.

There I was, in a field I had not chosen, and yet I liked it. It felt pretty easy to do, I got good grades, and I realized I could make a career out of it. I liked solving problems with code, and progressed to doing web development and managing a team. From there I started thinking about what I wanted to do next.

I really love teaching, so I began looking into how to become a professor. That led me to the computer science? 50 class at Harvard, where I saw many signs pointing to a big AI trend, and so I decided to pursue a masters in computer science.


How do you like to learn new services, tools, and applications?

I dive right in; learn by doing. I frequently bounce around between subjects. I keep a list of ideas that come to me, and then when I'm ready for something new, I just scan through the list and pick one. This helps me stay fresh and excited.

Whenever I'm learning new skills I remind myself to go with the flow. I start small, learn just enough to start using the technology or tool. I'll ask myself:

  • What key concepts or pillars do I need to understand this more deeply?
  • How do I branch out from there?
  • Who should I talk to?
  • What can I make?

Since I'm in the middle of a doctoral program right now, I always challenge myself to make that idea somehow connect to my research, so I can bring it back to a common theme that's pervasive through all my work.


What are some exciting projects you have in flight right now?

Explainable AI, especially applied to less frequently used spoken languages in the world. We have a wealth of research on English language AI models, but what about applying BERT (and other technologies) on some lesser used languages, to expand the benefit to a wider population?

I'm also very excited about how we (as researchers) can optimize AI models to be more secure, be more private in terms of protecting our data, and be more useful to a wide variety of use cases.


What engages you outside of the technology world?

I love biking, and whenever it's warm enough in Québec I will go bike outside.

I like to read, especially science fiction. I recently started reading autobiographies to know more about the world from different perspectives. I'm currently reading autobiographies of Scott Kelley and Sohaila Abdulali.

I also keep a big list of ideas outside of tech for me to pursue: people to meet, foods to try, places to go. I'm always working on new experiences and adventures from that list, to broaden my world and learn more about what's all around me.


What brought you into the Innovators program?

I've been a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for two years and then got an invitation to join the Innovators program, after I attended a GDE event. It's helped me gain some respect and credibility, as I have a little bit of Google's reputation behind my voice now when I share my perspective or opinion. Also they have helped me get some great swag!


What's one thing our readers should do next?

Very few things stand the test of time, as our industry is shifting so quickly. I think CS50 on YouTube still has relevance for folks new to computer science.

I also want to encourage people to create social connections, and go meet the people behind the systems you are using. There are humans out there who can help you find the next project or position, and getting to know them is so important.


Each Champion Innovator is not affiliated with Google nor do they offer services on behalf of Google.

Register for Google Cloud Next ‘23 and get some sweet perks

Posted by Brian Hall, Vice President, Product and Industry Marketing, Google Cloud & Max Saltonstall, Developer Relations Engineer Google Cloud Next is coming to San Francisco, August 29-31, 2023

Developers - it’s finally here . . . the Google Cloud Next ‘23 session library is live!

So many awesome sessions to choose from, it's tough!

Of course we start with the big story of the year, the thing on everyone's (everything's?) mind: AI!

Machine learning and AI

Check out "5 practical considerations for adopting AI" to get started or "Build your organization’s future on Google AI and machine learning infrastructure" for teams that are looking to expand into cross-functional AI-powered innovation.

Building modern apps

Sometimes you've got an awesome idea, and you are looking for a way to speed up getting it to market. We can help. Attend "Building fast, scalable and reliable apps with Firebase and Cloud Run" to learn about serverless, accessible and language-agnostic tools to enable higher cloud velocity. Or come to "Build your first event driven app in less than 5 minutes" and walk away with a reference app for your own event-driven architecture use later on.

Lots of folks take a measured approach to public cloud adoption, especially with how rapidly technology is changing. This is especially true in corporate IT, where change can be tough. Check out "The future of modern enterprise applications with GKE" to learn more about moving your company's apps and workflows to the cloud.

Data insights and analytics

We're all drowning in data these days, and cloud offers many (MANY!) tools to help. Learn where you can get a handle on your data, analytics and insights with "What's next for Data and AI?" and then point your data engineering teams to "What's new with BigQuery" for the latest advances.

Cloud migrations

If you are looking at how you secure your own migration to cloud-based apps and services, make sure you attend "What’s new in cloud-first CI/CD" to get up to speed on Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Deploy and more. These interconnected tools can accelerate development, help with segmentation of roles and responsibilities, and allow for zero to worldwide scale with very little operational overhead.

Industry Solutions

For developers building apps for specific industries, we've got a wide variety of sessions from Retail to Games to Public Sector to Manufacturing. Come learn from customers about AI applications in automation and personalization in "From vision to practice: AI applications in financial services" and take advantage of the latest tools. Or you could dive into the latest craze with "Media’s AI frontier: Navigating the future of entertainment” and start to answer the question we've all been asking: was this blog written by a person or an AI?

Amazing experts

There are sessions for every flavor of developer, architect, designer and operator, and so many opportunities to engage with experts from industry. So join us at Google Cloud Next to learn about key topics from speakers like Gerrit Kazmaier, Dave Nettleton, Keelin McDonnell, Donna Schit, and more.

And that's not all! You can find a series of training workshops available for all skill levels, and a dedicated learning and certification booth to help you on your way to your new cloudy career and skilling journey. Plus we've got a set of lightning talks to give you bite-sized chunks of knowledge across every cloud topic.

Oh no, I'm out of time and I haven't even gotten to the return of Drone Racing League at Next. Guess you'll just have to come and find out. See you there!

Register for Google Cloud Next ‘23 now: August 29-31 in San Francisco.

Welcoming our inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud North America cohort

Posted by Ashley Francisco Head of Startup Ecosystem, North America, Google & Darren Mowry, Managing Director, Corporate Sales, Google

We’re kicking off a summer of accelerators by welcoming the inaugural 2023 North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud cohort, our new class of cloud-native startups in the United States and Canada.

This 10-week virtual accelerator brings the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’re excited to offer these startups cloud mentorship and technical project support, along with deep dives and workshops on product design, customer acquisition and leadership development for technology startup founders and leaders.

We heard from some of the founders from this year’s cohort - including New York City-based Harmonic Discovery, Toronto-based Oncoustics, and Vancouver-based OneCup AI - demonstrating how they are using Google Cloud data, analytics, AI, and other technologies across healthcare, agriculture and farming, and more. Read more on their aspirations for the program below:


"The team at Harmonic Discovery is excited to scale our deep learning infrastructure for drug discovery using Google Cloud. We also want to learn best practices from the Google team on training and developing machine learning models in a cost effective way.” – Rayees Rahman CEO, Harmonic Discovery


"We're very excited to grow our presence in the healthcare space by bringing our ultrasound based "virtual biopsy" solutions to clinics and serve over 2B people with liver diseases globally. Specifically in the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud program, we're looking to develop and hone our ability to efficiently scale our ML environments and processes to support the development of multiple new diagnostic products in parallel. We're also very excited about creating an edge-cloud hybrid solution with effective distribution of AI processing across GCP and Pixel 7 Pro.” – Beth Rogozinski CEO, Oncoustics


"Our primary objective is to leverage Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) cutting-edge technologies to enhance BETSY, our computer vision AI for animal care. Our milestones include developing advanced image recognition models and achieving real-time processing speeds for large-scale datasets. The accelerator will play a vital role in helping us refine our algorithms and optimize our infrastructure on GCP.” – Mokah Shmigelsly, Co-Founder & CEO and Geoffrey Shmigelsky, Co-Founder & CTO, OneCup AI


We received so many great applications for this program and we're excited to welcome the 12 startups that make up the the inaugural North American Cloud cohort:

  • Aiden Automotive (San Ramon, CA): Aiden is one of the first software solutions to provide streaming two-way communication directly with the vehicle and across vehicle brands. Aiden provides simple and intuitive 100% GDPR and CCPA compliant consent management, enabling car owners to choose which digital services they desire.
  • Binarly (Santa Monica, CA): Binarly’s agentless, enterprise-class AI-powered firmware security platform helps protect from advanced threats below the operating system. The company’s technology solves firmware supply chain security problems by identifying vulnerabilities, malicious firmware modifications and providing firmware SBOM visibility without access to the source code. Binarly’s cloud-agnostic solutions give enterprise security teams actionable insights, and reduce the cost and time to respond to security incidents.
  • Duality.ai (San Mateo, CA): Duality AI is an augmented digital twin platform that provides end-to-end workflows for predictive simulation and high fidelity visualization. The platform helps close data gaps for machine learning teams working on perception problems and helps robotics teams speed up design and validation of their autonomy software.
  • HalloAI (Provo, UT): Hallo is an AI-powered language learning platform for speaking. Press a button and start speaking any language with an AI teacher in 3 seconds.
  • Harmonic Discovery (New York, NY): Harmonic Discovery uses machine learning to design multi-targeted kinase drugs for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
  • MLtwist (Santa Clara, CA): MLtwist helps companies bring AI to the world faster. It gives data scientists and ML engineers access to the easiest and best way to get out of the weeds of data pipelines and back to what they enjoy and do best – design, build, and deploy AI.
  • Oncoustics (Toronto, ON): Oncoustics is creating advanced solutions for low-cost and non-invasive surveillance, diagnostics, and treatment monitoring of diseases with high unmet clinical need through the use of patented AI-based solutions running on ultrasound scans. Using a handheld point of care ultrasound, Oncoustics’ first solution allows clinicians to obtain a liver health assessment within 5 minutes.
  • OneCup AI (Vancouver, BC): OneCup uses Computer vision for Animal Care. Our AI, BETSY, is the eyes of the rancher when the rancher is away.
  • Passio AI (Menlo Park, CA): Passio AI is a mobile AI platform that helps developers and companies build mobile applications powered by expert-level AI and computer vision.
  • RealKey (San Francisco, CA): RealKey is one of the first collaboration platforms built specifically for finance (starting with mortgages), automating documentation collection/review, tasks, and communication for all parties (not just borrowers) involved in transactions to reduce time, effort, and costs to close.
  • Sevco Security Inc. (Austin, TX): Sevco Security a leading IT asset visibility and cybersecurity company, that provides the industry’s first unified asset intelligence platform designed to address the new extended attack surface and create a trusted data repository of all devices, users and applications an organization uses.
  • VESSL AI (San Jose, CA): VESSL is an end-to-end MLOps platform aiming to be the next Snowflake for AI. The platform enables MLEs to run ML workloads at any scale on any cloud, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, and on-premises.

As tech advancements continue at lightning speed, it’s an exciting opportunity to work with these founders and startup teams to help grow and scale their business. Programming for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud begins mid-July and we can’t wait to see how far these startups go!

A Look Back at LA #TechWeek OneGoogle Panel: Building a Startup Using Generative AI

Posted by Alexandra Dumas, Head of VC & Startup Partnerships, West Coast, Google

Earlier this month, LA TechWeek hosted an array of thought leaders and innovative minds in the tech industry. As the Head of VC & Startup Partnerships West Coast at Google, I had the privilege of curating and facilitating an insightful panel event, supported by Google Cloud for Startups, on the topic of "Building with Generative AI" with representatives from:

Google Venice Tech Week Panel

Our conversation was as rich in depth as it was in diversity; heightening the LA community's collective excitement for the future of generative AI, and underscoring Google's vision of harnessing the power of collaboration to ignite innovation in the tech startup space. The collaborative event was a unique platform that bridged the gap between startups, venture capitalists, and major players in the tech industry. It was the embodiment of Google's commitment to driving transformative change by fostering robust partnerships with VC firms and startups: We understand that the success of startups is crucial to our communities, economies, and indeed, to Google itself.

Josh Gwyther, Generative AI Global Lead for Google Cloud, kicked things off by tracing Google's impressive journey in AI, shedding light on how we've pioneered in creating transformative AI models, a journey that started back in 2017 with the landmark Transformer whitepaper.

From X, Clarence Wooten elevated our perception of AI's potential, painting an exciting picture of AI as a startup's virtual "co-founder." He powerfully encapsulated AI's role in amplifying, not replacing, human potential, a testament to Google's commitment to AI and its impact.

Venturing into the world of gaming, Andreessen Horowitz's Andrew Chen predicted a revolution in game development driven by generative AI. He saw a future where indie game developers thrived, game types evolved, and the entire gaming landscape shifted, all propelled by generative AI's transformative power.

On the investment side of things, Darian Shirazi from Gradient Ventures shared insights on what makes an excellent AI founder, emphasizing trustworthiness, self-learning, and resilience as critical traits.

Google Venice Tech Week Panel

The panel discussion concluded with a deep dive into the intricacies of integrating AI and scalability, the challenges of GPUs/TPUs, and the delicate balance between innovation and proprietary data concerns.

Founders were also left with actionable information around the Google for Cloud Startups Program, which provides startup experts, cloud credits, and technical training to begin their journey on Google Cloud cost-free, with their focus squarely on innovation and growth. We invite all eligible startups to apply as we continue this journey together.

As the curtains fell on LA TechWeek, we were left with more than just a feeling of optimism about the future of generative AI. We walked away with new connections, fresh perspectives, and a renewed conviction that Google, along with startups, investors, and partners, can lead the transformative change that the future beckons. The main takeaway: The AI revolution isn't coming; it's here. And Google, with its deep expertise and unwavering dedication to innovation, is committed to moving forward boldly, responsibly, and in partnership with others.

Google Venice Tech Week Audience

As we navigate this thrilling journey, I look forward to continuing to collaborate with startups, investors, and partners, leveraging the vast potential of AI to unlock a future where technology serves us all in unimaginable ways.

Machine Learning Communities: Q1 ‘23 highlights and achievements

Posted by Nari Yoon, Bitnoori Keum, Hee Jung, DevRel Community Manager / Soonson Kwon, DevRel Program Manager

Let’s explore highlights and accomplishments of vast Google Machine Learning communities over the first quarter of 2023. We are enthusiastic and grateful about all the activities by the global network of ML communities. Here are the highlights!



ML Campaigns



ML Community Sprint

ML Community Sprint is a campaign, a collaborative attempt bridging ML GDEs with Googlers to produce relevant content for the broader ML community. Throughout Feb and Mar, MediaPipe/TF Recommendation Sprint was carried out and 5 projects were completed.


ML Olympiad 2023

I'm hosting a competiton ML Olympiad 2023 #MLOlympiad

ML Olympiad is an associated Kaggle Community Competitions hosted by ML GDE, TFUG, 3rd-party ML communities, supported by Google Developers. The second, ML Olympiad 2023 has wrapped up successfully with 17 competitions and 300+ participants addressing important issues of our time - diversity, environments, etc. Competition highlights include Breast Cancer Diagnosis, Water Quality Prediction, Detect ChatGpt answers, Ensure healthy lives, etc. Thank you all for participating in ML Olympiad 2023!

Also, “ML Paper Reading Clubs” (GalsenAI and TFUG Dhaka), “ML Math Clubs” (TFUG Hajipur and TFUG Dhaka) and “ML Study Jams” (TFUG Bauchi) were hosted by ML communities around the world.


Community Highlights



Keras


Screen shot of Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion using Keras

Various ways of serving Stable Diffusion by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) and ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) shares how to deploy Stable Diffusion with TF Serving, Hugging Face Endpoint, and FastAPI. Their other project Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion using Keras provides how to fine-tune the image encoder of Stable Diffusion on a custom dataset consisting of image-caption pairs.

Serving TensorFlow models with TFServing by ML GDE Dimitre Oliveira (Brazil) is a tutorial explaining how to create a simple MobileNet using the Keras API and how to serve it with TF Serving.

Fine-tuning the multilingual T5 model from Huggingface with Keras by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) shows a minimalistic approach for training text generation architectures from Hugging Face with TensorFlow and Keras as the backend.


Image showing a range of low-lit pictures enhanced incljuding inference time and ther metrics

Lighting up Images in the Deep Learning Era by ML GDE Soumik Rakshit (India), ML GDE Saurav Maheshkar (UK), ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India), and Samarendra Dash explores deep learning techniques for low-light image enhancement. The article also talks about a library, Restorers, providing TensorFlow and Keras implementations of SoTA image and video restoration models for tasks such as low-light enhancement, denoising, deblurring, super-resolution, etc.

How to Use Cosine Decay Learning Rate Scheduler in Keras? by ML GDE Ayush Thakur (India) introduces how to correctly use the cosine-decay learning rate scheduler using Keras API.


Screen shot of Implementation of DreamBooth using KerasCV and TensorFlow

Implementation of DreamBooth using KerasCV and TensorFlow (Keras.io tutorial) by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) and ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) demonstrates DreamBooth technique to fine-tune Stable Diffusion in KerasCV and TensorFlow. Training code, inference notebooks, a Keras.io tutorial, and more are in the repository. Sayak also shared his story, [ML Story] DreamBoothing Your Way into Greatness on the GDE blog.

Focal Modulation: A replacement for Self-Attention by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) shares a Keras implementation of the paper. Usha Rengaraju (India) shared Keras Implementation of NeurIPS 2021 paper, Augmented Shortcuts for Vision Transformers.

Images classification with TensorFlow & Keras (video) by TFUG Abidjan explained how to define an ML model that can classify images according to the category using a CNN.

Hands-on Workshop on KerasNLP by GDG NYC, GDG Hoboken, and Stevens Institute of Technology shared how to use pre-trained Transformers (including BERT) to classify text, fine-tune it on custom data, and build a Transformer from scratch.


On-device ML

Stable diffusion example in an android application — Part 1 & Part 2 by ML GDE George Soloupis (Greece) demonstrates how to deploy a Stable Diffusion pipeline inside an Android app.

AI for Art and Design by ML GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid (United States) delivered a brief overview of how AI can be used to assist and inspire artists & designers in their creative space. She also shared a few use cases of on-device ML for creating artistic Android apps.


ML Engineering (MLOps)


Overall system architecture of End-to-End Pipeline for Segmentation with TFX, Google Cloud, and Hugging Face

End-to-End Pipeline for Segmentation with TFX, Google Cloud, and Hugging Face by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) and ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) discussed the crucial details of building an end-to-end ML pipeline for Semantic Segmentation tasks with TFX and various Google Cloud services such as Dataflow, Vertex Pipelines, Vertex Training, and Vertex Endpoint. The pipeline uses a custom TFX component that is integrated with Hugging Face Hub - HFPusher.

Extend your TFX pipeline with TFX-Addons by ML GDE Hannes Hapke (United States) explains how you can use the TFX-Addons components or examples.



Textual Inversion Pipeline architecture

Textual Inversion Pipeline for Stable Diffusion by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) demonstrates how to manage multiple models and their prototype applications of fine-tuned Stable Diffusion on new concepts by Textual Inversion.

Running a Stable Diffusion Cluster on GCP with tensorflow-serving (Part 1 | Part 2) by ML GDE Thushan Ganegedara (Australia) explains how to set up a GKE cluster, how to use Terraform to set up and manage infrastructure on GCP, and how to deploy a model on GKE using TF Serving.


Photo of Googler Joinal Ahmed giving a talk at TFUG Bangalore

Scalability of ML Applications by TFUG Bangalore focused on the challenges and solutions related to building and deploying ML applications at scale. Googler Joinal Ahmed gave a talk entitled Scaling Large Language Model training and deployments.

Discovering and Building Applications with Stable Diffusion by TFUG São Paulo was for people who are interested in Stable Diffusion. They shared how Stable Diffusion works and showed a complete version created using Google Colab and Vertex AI in production.


Responsible AI


Thumbnail image for Between the Brackets Fairness & Ethics in AI: Perspectives from Journalism, Medicine and Translation

In Fairness & Ethics In AI: From Journalism, Medicine and Translation, ML GDE Samuel Marks (United States) discussed responsible AI.

In The new age of AI: A Convo with Google Brain, ML GDE Vikram Tiwari (United States) discussed responsible AI, open-source vs. closed-source, and the future of LLMs.

Responsible IA Toolkit (video) by ML GDE Lesly Zerna (Bolivia) and Google DSC UNI was a meetup to discuss ethical and sustainable approaches to AI development. Lesly shared about the “ethic” side of building AI products as well as learning about “Responsible AI from Google”, PAIR guidebook, and other experiences to build AI.

Women in AI/ML at Google NYC by GDG NYC discussed hot topics, including LLMs and generative AI. Googler Priya Chakraborty gave a talk entitled Privacy Protections for ML Models.


ML Research

Efficient Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Response Selection as an Auxiliary Task by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) showcases how, in a task-oriented setting, the T5-small language model can perform on par with existing systems relying on T5-base or even bigger models.

Learning JAX in 2023: Part 1 / Part 2 / Livestream video by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) and ML GDE Ritwik Raha (India) covered the power tools of JAX, namely grad, jit, vmap, pmap, and also discussed the nitty-gritty of randomness in JAX.


Screen grab from JAX Streams: Parallelism with Flax | Ep4 with David Cardozo and Cristian Garcia

In Deep Learning Mentoring MILA Quebec, ML GDE David Cardozo (Canada) did mentoring for M.Sc and Ph.D. students who have interests in JAX and MLOps. JAX Streams: Parallelism with Flax | EP4 by David and ML GDE Cristian Garcia (Columbia) explored Flax’s new APIs to support parallelism.

March Machine Learning Meetup hosted by TFUG Kolkata. Two sessions were delivered: 1) You don't know TensorFlow by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) presented some under-appreciated and under-used features of TensorFlow. 2) A Guide to ML Workflows with JAX by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India), ML GDE Soumik Rakshit (India), and ML GDE Ritwik Raha (India) delivered on how one could think of using JAX functional transformations for their ML workflows.

A paper review of PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model by ML GDE Grigory Sapunov (UK) explained the details of the model. He also shared his slide deck about NLP in 2022.

An annotated paper of On the importance of noise scheduling in Diffusion Models by ML GDE Aakash Nain (India) outlined the effects of noise schedule on the performance of diffusion models and strategies to get a better schedule for optimal performance.


TensorFlow

Three projects were awarded as TF Community Spotlight winners: 1) Semantic Segmentation model within ML pipeline by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea), ML GDE Sayak Paul (India), and ML GDE Merve Noyan (France), 2) GatedTabTransformer in TensorFlow + TPU / in Flax by Usha Rengaraju, and 3) Real-time Object Detection in the browser with YOLOv7 and TF.JS by ML GDE Hugo Zanini (Brazil).

Building ranking models powered by multi-task learning with Merlin and TensorFlow by ML GDE Gabriel Moreira (Brazil) describes how to build TensorFlow models with Merlin for recommender systems using multi-task learning.


Transform your Web Apps with Machine Learning: Unleashing the Power of Open-Source Python Libraries like TensorFlow Hub & Gradio Bhjavesh Bhatt @_bhaveshbhatt

Building ML Powered Web Applications using TensorFlow Hub & Gradio (slide) by ML GDE Bhavesh Bhatt (India) demonstrated how to use TF Hub & Gradio to create a fully functional ML-powered web application. The presentation was held as part of an event called AI Evolution with TensorFlow, covering the fundamentals of ML & TF, hosted by TFUG Nashik.

create-tf-app (repository) by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) shows how to set up and maintain an ML project in Tensorflow with a single script.


Cloud

Creating scalable ML solutions to support big techs evolution (slide) by ML GDE Mikaeri Ohana (Brazil) shared how Google can help big techs to generate impact through ML with scalable solutions.

Search of Brazilian Laws using Dialogflow CX and Matching Engine by ML GDE Rubens Zimbres (Brazil) shows how to build a chatbot with Dialogflow CX and query a database of Brazilian laws by calling an endpoint in Cloud Run.


4x4 grid of sample results from Vintedois Diffusion model

Stable Diffusion Finetuning by ML GDE Pedro Gengo (Brazil) and ML GDE Piero Esposito (Brazil) is a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion 1.5 with more aesthetic images. They used Vertex AI with multiple GPUs to fine-tune it. It reached Hugging Face top 3 and more than 150K people downloaded and tested it.

Google launches inaugural North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud

Posted by Ashley Francisco, Head of Startup Developer Ecosystem, North America, & Darren Mowry, Managing Director, Corporate Sales

Startups are solving the world’s most important challenges with agility, innovative technology, and determination, and Google is proud to support them.

TL;DR: Applications are now open for the inaugural North American Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud cohort. Designed to help connect founders who are building with Cloud to the people, products, and best practices they need to grow, this 10-week virtual accelerator will help 8-12 startups prepare for the next phase of their growth journey.

Around the world, the cloud is helping businesses and governments accelerate their digital transformations, scale their operations, and innovate in new areas. At Google Cloud, we’re helping businesses solve some of their toughest challenges. For instance, we’ve partnered with innovative digital native companies like cart.com to democratize ecommerce by giving brands of all sizes the full capabilities needed to take on the world’s largest online retailers, and with dynamic startups like kimo.ai which leverages our AI tools to transform traditional approaches to online learning.

The adoption and acceleration of Google Cloud unlocks massive potential for startups as the global cloud market is set to grow to more than $470 billion over the next five years. With the artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) landscape evolving rapidly, this moment presents an exciting and unique opportunity for startups. The Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud program helps cloud-native startups using AI/ML to seize the opportunities ahead.

Starting today, U.S.- and Canada-based startups can apply for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud program. This equity-free, 10-week virtual accelerator will offer cloud mentorship and technical project support, as well as deep dives and workshops on product design, customer acquisition and leadership development for cloud startup founders and leaders.

The Accelerator program is designed to bring the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing impactful work in the cloud.

Here’s what our recent North American Accelerator alumni had to say:

“Thanks to truly amazing mentorship and direct access to Googlers, we have been able to reach new levels of specialized knowledge and deployment capability in our GCP architecture and artificial intelligence projects. From a technical perspective to a business growth standpoint, this is simply invaluable. What we have built in three months with Google will be a part of our upcoming next-gen product line in both Healthcare and Non-Healthcare settings. We deeply thank all Googlers for their exceptional participation in our journey."Francois Gand, Founder and CEO, NURO

"The accelerator provided F8th Inc. with so much more than we could have ever dreamed. The meaningful mentorship relationships that have been created continue to endure, the workshops have been impactful in helping our business scale, and we have developed new business contacts both in Canada and the US. The incredible support and guidance we received has been second to none. It’s been great to have access to a multidisciplinary team and Google’s outside-the-box thinking.” — Vivene Salmon, Co-Founder, F8th Inc."Vivene Salmon, Co-Founder, F8th Inc.

Applications are now being accepted until May 30, and the Accelerator will kick-off this July. Interested startups leveraging cloud to drive growth and innovation are encouraged to apply here.

PaLM API & MakerSuite: an approachable way to start prototyping and building generative AI applications

Posted by Scott Huffman, Vice President, Engineering and Josh Woodward, Senior Director, Product Management

We’re seeing a new wave of generative AI applications that are transforming the way people interact with technology – from games and dialog agents to creative brainstorming and coding tools. At Google, we want to continue making AI accessible by empowering all developers to start building the next generation of applications with generative AI by providing easy-to-use APIs and tools.

Earlier today, we announced the PaLM API, a new developer offering that makes it easy and safe to experiment with Google’s large language models. Alongside the API, we’re releasing MakerSuite, a tool that lets developers start prototyping quickly and easily. We’ll be making these tools available to select developers through a Private Preview, and stay tuned for our waitlist soon.


Access Google’s large language models using the PaLM API

The PaLM API is a simple entry point for Google’s large language models, which can be used for a variety of applications. It will provide developers access to models that are optimized for multi-turn use cases, such as content generation and chat, and general purpose models that are optimized for use cases such as summarization, classification, and more. Starting today, we’re making an efficient model available in terms of size and capabilities, and we’ll add other models and sizes soon.

Start building quickly

We’ve spent the last several years building and deploying large language models—from bringing MUM to Search to exploring applications with LaMDA in the AI Test Kitchen. We learned a lot about generative AI development workflows and how fragmented they can be. Developers have to use different tools to accomplish tasks like crafting and iterating on a prompt, generating synthetic data, and tuning a custom model.

That’s why we’re releasing MakerSuite, a tool that simplifies this workflow. With MakerSuite, you’ll be able to iterate on prompts, augment your dataset with synthetic data, and easily tune custom models. When you’re ready to move to code, MakerSuite will let you export your prompt as code in your favorite languages and frameworks, like Python and Node.js.

Tune a model

Generative models offer developers powerful out-of-the-box functionality. But for specialized tasks, tuning leads to better results. Our tooling will enable developers to leverage parameter-efficient tuning techniques to create models customized to their use case. And with MakerSuite, you’ll be able to quickly test and iterate on your tuned model right in the browser.

Augment your dataset with synthetic data

High-quality data is crucial when developing with AI, and developers are often limited by the data they have. Our tooling will allow you to generate additional data based on a few examples, and then you’ll be able to manage and manipulate the data from there. This synthetic data can be used in various scenarios, such as tuning or evaluations.

Generate state of the art embeddings

We’ve been excited by the range of applications developers have found for embeddings, from semantic search to recommendations and classification. With embeddings generated through the PaLM API, developers will be able to build applications with their own data or on top of external data sources. Embeddings can also be used in downstream applications built with TensorFlow, Keras, JAX, and other open-source libraries.

Build responsibly and safely

We built our models according to Google’s AI Principles to give developers a responsible AI foundation to start from. We know that control is necessary so developers can define and enforce responsibility and safety in the context of their own applications. Our tools will give developers an easy way to test and adjust safety dimensions to best suit each unique application and use case.

Scale your generative AI application

These developer tools will make it easy to start prototyping and building generative AI applications, but when you need scale, we want to make sure you have the support you need. Google's infrastructure supports the PaLM API and MakerSuite, so you don’t have to worry about hosting or serving. For developers who want to scale their ideas and get enterprise-grade support, security and compliance, and service level agreement (SLA), they can go to Google Cloud Vertex AI and access the same models, along with a host of advanced capabilities such as enterprise search and conversation AI.

It’s an exciting time in AI for developers and we want to continue to make sure we build AI tools that help make your lives easier. We plan to onboard new developers, roll out new features, and make this technology available to the broader developer community soon. During this time, we’ll listen to feedback, learn, and improve these tools to meet developers where they are.

To stay updated on our progress, subscribe to the Google Developers newsletter.

Machine Learning Communities: Q4 ‘22 highlights and achievements

Posted by Nari Yoon, Hee Jung, DevRel Community Manager / Soonson Kwon, DevRel Program Manager

Let’s explore highlights and accomplishments of vast Google Machine Learning communities over the last quarter of 2022. We are enthusiastic and grateful about all the activities by the global network of ML communities. Here are the highlights!


ML at DevFest 2022

A group of ML Developers attending DevFest 2022

A large number of members of ML GDE, TFUG, and 3P ML communities participated in DevFests 2022 worldwide covering various ML topics with Google products. Machine Learning with Jax: Zero to Hero (DevFest Conakry) by ML GDE Yannick Serge Obam Akou (Cameroon) and Easy ML on Google Cloud (DevFest Med) by ML GDE Nathaly Alarcon Torrico (Bolivia) hosted great sessions.

ML Community Summit 2022

A group of ML Developers attending ML Community Summit

ML Community Summit 2022 was hosted on Oct 22-23, 2022, in Bangkok, Thailand. Twenty-five most active community members (ML GDE or TFUG organizer) were invited and shared their past activities and thoughts on Google’s ML products. A video sketch from ML Developer Programs team and a blog posting by ML GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid (United States) help us revisit the moments.

TensorFlow

MAXIM in TensorFlow by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) shows his implementation of the MAXIM family of models in TensorFlow.

Diagram of gMLP block

gMLP: What it is and how to use it in practice with Tensorflow and Keras? by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) demonstrates the state-of-the-art results on NLP and computer vision tasks using a lot less trainable parameters than corresponding Transformer models. He also wrote Differentiable discrete sampling in TensorFlow.

Building Computer Vision Model using TensorFlow: Part 2 by TFUG Pune for the developers who want to deep dive into training an object detection model on Google Colab, inspecting the TF Lite model, and deploying the model on an Android application. ML GDE Nitin Tiwari (India) covered detailed aspects for end-to-end training and deployment of object model detection.

Advent of Code 2022 in pure TensorFlow (days 1-5) by ML GDE Paolo Galeone (Italy) solving the Advent of Code (AoC) puzzles using only TensorFlow. The articles contain a description of the solutions of the Advent of Code puzzles 1-5, in pure TensorFlow.

tf.keras.metrics / tf.keras.optimizers by TFUG Taipei helped people learn the TF libraries. They shared basic concepts and how to use them using Colab.

Screen shot of TensorFlow Lite on Android Project Practical Course
A hands-on course on TensorFlow Lite projects on Android by ML GDE Xiaoxing Wang (China) is the book mainly introducing the application of TensorFlow Lite in Android development. The content focuses on applying three typical ML applications in Android development.

Build tensorflow-lite-select-tf-ops.aar and tensorflow-lite.aar files with Colab by ML GDE George Soloupis (Greece) guides how you can shrink the final size of your Android application’s .apk by building tensorflow-lite-select-tf-ops.aar and tensorflow-lite.aar files without the need of Docker or personal PC environment.

TensorFlow Lite and MediaPipe Application by ML GDE XuHua Hu (China) explains how to use TFLite to deploy an ML model into an application on devices. He shared experiences with developing a motion sensing game with MediaPipe, and how to solve problems that we may meet usually.

Train and Deploy TensorFlow models in Go by ML GDE Paolo Galeone (Italy) delivered the basics of the TensorFlow Go bindings, the limitations, and how the tfgo library simplifies their usage.

Keras

Diagram of feature maps concatenated together and flattened

Complete Guide on Deep Learning Architectures, Chapter 1 on ConvNets by ML GDE Merve Noyan (France) brings you into the theory of ConvNets and shows how it works with Keras.

Hazy Image Restoration Using Keras by ML GDE Soumik Rakshit (India) provides an introduction to building an image restoration model using TensorFlow, Keras, and Weights & Biases. He also shared an article Improving Generative Images with Instructions: Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control.

Mixed precision in Keras based Stable Diffusion
Let’s Generate Images with Keras based Stable Diffusion by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) delivered how to generate images with given text and what stable diffusion is. He also talked about Keras-based stable diffusion, basic building blocks, and the advantages of using Keras-based stable diffusion.

A Deep Dive into Transformers with TensorFlow and Keras: Part 1, Part 2, Part3 by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) covered the journey from the intuition of attention to formulating the multi-head self-attention. And TensorFlow port of GroupViT in 🤗 transformers library was his contribution to Hugging Face transformers library.

TFX

Digits + TFX banner

How startups can benefit from TFX by ML GDE Hannes Hapke (United States) explains how the San Francisco-based FinTech startup Digits has benefitted from applying TFX early, how TFX helps Digits grow, and how other startups can benefit from TFX too.

Usha Rengaraju (India) shared TensorFlow Extended (TFX) Tutorials (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and the following TF projects: TensorFlow Decision Forests Tutorial and FT Transformer TensorFlow Implementation.

Hyperparameter Tuning and ML Pipeline by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) explained hyperparam tuning, why it is important; Introduction to KerasTuner, basic usage; how to visualize hyperparam tuning results with TensorBoard; and integration within ML pipeline with TFX.

JAX/Flax

JAX High-performance ML Research by TFUG Taipei and ML GDE Jerry Wu (Taiwan) introduced JAX and how to start using JAX to solve machine learning problems.

[TensorFlow + TPU] GatedTabTransformer[W&B] and its JAX/Flax counterpart GatedTabTransformer-FLAX[W&B] by Usha Rengaraju (India) are tutorial series containing the implementation of GatedTabTransformer paper in both TensorFlow (TPU) and FLAX.

Putting NeRF on a diet: Semantically consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis Implementation
JAX implementation of Diet NeRf by ML GDE Wan Hong Lau (Singapore) implemented the paper “Putting NeRF on a Diet (DietNeRF)” in JAX/Flax. And he also implemented a JAX-and-Flax training pipeline with the ResNet model in his Kaggle notebook, 🐳HappyWhale🔥Flax/JAX⚡TPU&GPU - ResNet Baseline.

Introduction to JAX with Flax (slides) by ML GDE Phillip Lippe (Netherlands) reviewed from the basics of the requirements we have on a DL framework to what JAX has to offer. Further, he focused on the powerful function-oriented view JAX offers and how Flax allows you to use them in training neural networks.

Screen grab of ML GDE David Cardozo and Cristian Garcia during a live coding session of a review of new features, specifically Shared Arrays, in the recent release of JAX
JAX Streams: Exploring JAX 0.4 by ML GDE David Cardozo (Canada) and Cristian Garcia (Colombia) showed a review of new features (specifically Shared Arrays) in the recent release of JAX and demonstrated live coding.

[LiveCoding] Train ResNet/MNIST with JAX/Flax by ML GDE Qinghua Duan (China) demonstrated how to train ResNet using JAX by writing code online.

Kaggle

Low-light Image Enhancement using MirNetv2 by ML GDE Soumik Rakshit (India) demonstrated the task of Low-light Image Enhancement.

Heart disease Prediction and Diabetes Prediction Competition hosted by TFUG Chandigarh were to familiarize participants with ML problems and find solutions using classification techniques.

TensorFlow User Group Bangalore Sentiment Analysis Kaggle Competition 1
TFUG Bangalore Kaggle Competition - Sentiment Analysis hosted by TFUG Bangalore was to find the best sentiment analysis algorithm. Participants were given a set of training data and asked to submit an ML/DL algorithm that could predict the sentiment of a text. The group also hosted Kaggle Challenge Finale + Vertex AI Session to support the participants and guide them in learning how to use Vertex AI in a workflow.

Cloud AI

Better Hardware Provisioning for ML Experiments on GCP by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) discussed the pain points of provisioning hardware (especially for ML experiments) and how we can get better provision hardware with code using Vertex AI Workbench instances and Terraform.

Jayesh Sharma, Platform Engineer, Zen ML; MLOps workshop with TensorFlow and Vertex AI November 12, 2022|TensorFlow User Group Chennai
MLOps workshop with TensorFlow and Vertex AI by TFUG Chennai targeted beginners and intermediate-level practitioners to give hands-on experience on the E2E MLOps pipeline with GCP. In the workshop, they shared the various stages of an ML pipeline, the top tools to build a solution, and how to design a workflow using an open-source framework like ZenML.

10 Predictions on the Future of Cloud Computing by 2025: Insights from Google Next Conference by ML GDE Victor Dibia (United States) includes a recap of his notes reflecting on the top 10 cloud technology predictions discussed at the Google Cloud Next 2022 keynote.
Workflow of Google Virtual Career Center
O uso do Vertex AI Matching Engine no Virtual Career Center (VCC) do Google Cloud by ML GDE Rubens Zimbres (Brazil) approaches the use of Vertex AI Matching Engine as part of the Google Cloud Virtual Career Center solution.

More practical time-series model with BQML by ML GDE JeongMin Kwon (Korea) introduced BQML and time-series modeling and showed some practical applications with BQML ARIMA+ and Python implementations.

Vertex AI Forecast - Demand Forecasting with AutoML by ML GDE Rio Kurihara (Japan) presented a time series forecast overview, time series fusion transformers, and the benefits and desired features of AutoML.

Research & Ecosystem

AI in Healthcare by ML GDE Sara EL-ATEIF (Morocco) introduced AI applications in healthcare and the challenges facing AI in its adoption into the health system.

Women in AI APAC finished their journey at ML Paper Reading Club. During 10 weeks, participants gained knowledge on outstanding machine learning research, learned the latest techniques, and understood the notion of “ML research” among ML engineers. See their session here.

A Natural Language Understanding Model LaMDA for Dialogue Applications by ML GDE Jerry Wu (Taiwan) introduced the natural language understanding (NLU) concept and shared the operation mode of LaMDA, model fine-tuning, and measurement indicators.

Python library for Arabic NLP preprocessing (Ruqia) by ML GDE Ruqiya Bin (Saudi Arabia) is her first python library to serve Arabic NLP.

Screengrab of ML GDEs Margaret Maynard-Reid and Akash Nain during Chat with ML GDE Akash
Chat with ML GDE Vikram & Chat with ML GDE Aakash by ML GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid (United States) shared the stories of ML GDEs’ including how they became ML GDE and how they proceeded with their ML projects.

Anatomy of Capstone ML Projects 🫀by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) discussed working on capstone ML projects that will stay with you throughout your career. He covered various topics ranging from problem selection to tightening up the technical gotchas to presentation. And in Improving as an ML Practitioner he shared his learning from experience in the field working on several aspects.

Screen grab of  statement of objectives in MLOps Development Environment by ML GDE Vinicius Carida
MLOps Development Environment by ML GDE Vinicius Caridá (Brazil) aims to build a full development environment where you can write your own pipelines connecting MLFLow, Airflow, GCP and Streamlit, and build amazing MLOps pipelines to practice your skills.

Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute by ML GDE Grigory Sapunov (UK) reviewed a recent Google article on UL2R. And his posting Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning explained how AlphaTensor works and why it is important.

Back in Person - Prompting, Instructions and the Future of Large Language Models by TFUG Singapore and ML GDE Sam Witteveen (Singapore) and Martin Andrews (Singapore). This event covered recent advances in the field of large language models (LLMs).

ML for Production: The art of MLOps in TensorFlow Ecosystem with GDG Casablanca by TFUG Agadir discussed the motivation behind using MLOps and how it can help organizations automate a lot of pain points in the ML production process. It also covered the tools used in the TensorFlow ecosystem.

Migrating from App Engine Users to Cloud Identity Platform (Module 21)

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, Google Cloud

The Serverless Migration Station series is aimed at helping developers modernize their apps running one of Google Cloud's serverless platforms. The preceding (Migration Module 20) video demonstrates how to add use of App Engine's Users service to a Python 2 App Engine sample app. Today's Module 21 video picks up from where that leaves off, migrating that usage to Cloud Identity Platform.
How to migrate the App Engine Users to Cloud Identity Platform
Moving away from proprietary App Engine bundled services like Users makes apps more portable, giving them enough flexibility to:

    Understanding the overall migration

    Overall, Module 21 features major changes to the Module 20 sample app, implementing a move from App Engine bundled services (NDB & Users) to standalone Cloud services (Cloud Datastore & Identity Platform). Identity Platform doesn't know anything about App Engine admins, so that must be built, requiring the use of the Cloud Resource Manager API. Apps dependent on Python 2 have additional required updates. Let's discuss in a bit more detail.

    Migration "parts"

    The following changes to the sample app are required:

    • Migrate from App Engine Users (server-side) to Cloud Identity Platform (client-side)
    • Migrate from App Engine NDB, the other bundled service used in Module 20, to Cloud NDB (requires use of the Cloud Datastore API)
    • Use the Cloud Resource Manager* (via its API) to fetch the Cloud project's IAM allow policy to collate the set of App Engine admin users for the app.
    • Use the Firebase Admin SDK to validate whether the user is an App Engine admin
    • Migrate from Python 2 to 3 (and possibly back to Python 2 [more on this below])
     
    *At the time of this writing, the Resource Manager documentation only features setup instructions for accessing the API from the lower-level Google APIs client library rather than the Resource Manager client library. To learn how to set up the latter, go to the Resource Manager client library documentation directly. The lower-level client library should only be used in circumstances when a Cloud client library doesn't exist or doesn't have the features your app needs. One such use case is Python 2, and we'll be covering that shortly.
     

      Move from App Engine bundled services to standalone Cloud services

      The NDB to Cloud NDB migration is identical to the Module 2 migration content, so it's not covered in-depth here in Module 21. The primary focus is on switching to Identity Platform to continue supporting user logins as well as implementing use of the Resource Manager and Firebase Admin SDK to build a proxy for recognizing App Engine admin users as provided by the Users service. Below is pseudocode implementing the key changes to the main application where new or updated lines of code are bolded:

      Table showing changes in code 'Before'(Module 20) and 'After'(Module 21)
      Migrating from App Engine Users to Cloud Identity Platform(click to enlarge)

      The key differences to note:

      1. The server-side Users service code vanishes from the main application, moving into the (client-side) web template (not shown here).
      2. Practically all of the new code in the Module 21 app above is for recognizing App Engine admin users. There are no changes to app operations or data models other than Cloud NDB requiring use of Python context managers to wrap all Datastore code (using Python with blocks).

      Complete versions of the app before and after the updates can be found in the Module 20 (Python 2) and Module 21 (Python 3) repo folders, respectively. In addition to the video, be sure to check out the Identity Platform documentation as well as the Module 21 codelab which leads you step-by-step through the migrations discussed.

      Aside from the necessary coding changes as well as moving from server-side to client-side, note that the Users service usage is covered by App Engine's pricing model while Identity Platform is an independent Cloud service billed by MAUs (monthly active users), so costs should be taken into account if migrating. More information can be found in the Identity Platform pricing documentation.

      Python 2 considerations

      With the sunset of Python 2, Java 8, PHP 5, and Go 1.11, by their respective communities, Google Cloud has assured users by expressing continued long-term support of these legacy App Engine runtimes, including maintaining the Python 2 runtime. So while there is no current requirement for users to migrate, developers themselves are expressing interest in updating their applications to the latest language releases.
      The primary Module 21 migration automatically includes a port from Python 2 to 3 as that's where most developers are headed. For those with dependencies requiring remaining on Python 2, some additional effort is required:


        The codelab covers this backport in-depth, so check out the specific section for Python 2 users if you're in this situation. If you don't want to think about it, just head to the repo for a working Python 2 version of the Module 21 app.

        Wrap-up

        Module 21 features migrations of App Engine bundled services to appropriate standalone Cloud services. While we recommend users modernize their App Engine apps by moving to the latest offerings from Google Cloud, these migrations are not required. In Fall 2021, the App Engine team extended support of many of the bundled services to 2nd generation runtimes (that have a 1st generation runtime), meaning you don't have to migrate to standalone services before porting your app to Python 3. You can continue using App Engine NDB and Users in Python 3 so long as you retrofit your code to access bundled services from next-generation runtimes. Then should you opt to migrate, you can do so on your own timeline.

        If you're using other App Engine legacy services be sure to check out the other Migration Modules in this series. All Serverless Migration Station content (codelabs, videos, source code [when available]) can be accessed at its open source repo. While our content initially focuses on Python users, the Cloud team is working on covering other language runtimes, so stay tuned. For additional video content, check out our broader Serverless Expeditions series.