Tag Archives: open source release

Truth 1.0: Fluent Assertions for Java and Android Tests

Software testing is important—and sometimes frustrating. The frustration can come from working on innately hard domains, like concurrency, but too often it comes from a thousand small cuts:
assertEquals("Message has been sent", getString(notification, EXTRA_BIG_TEXT));
assertTrue(
    getString(notification, EXTRA_TEXT)
        .contains("Kurt Kluever <[email protected]>"));
The two assertions above test almost the same thing, but they are structured differently. The difference in structure makes it hard to identify the difference in what's being tested.
A better way to structure these assertions is to use a fluent API:
assertThat(getString(notification, EXTRA_BIG_TEXT))
    .isEqualTo("Message has been sent");
assertThat(getString(notification, EXTRA_TEXT))
    .contains("Kurt Kluever <[email protected]>");
A fluent API naturally leads to other advantages:
  • IDE autocompletion can suggest assertions that fit the value under test, including rich operations like containsExactly(permission.SEND_SMS, permission.READ_SMS).
  • Failure messages can include the value under test and the expected result. Contrast this with the assertTrue call above, which lacks a failure message entirely.
Google's fluent assertion library for Java and Android is Truth. We're happy to announce that we've released Truth 1.0, which stabilizes our API after years of fine-tuning.



Truth started in 2011 as a Googler's personal open source project. Later, it was donated back to Google and cultivated by the Java Core Libraries team, the people who bring you Guava.
You might already be familiar with assertion libraries like Hamcrest and AssertJ, which provide similar features. We've designed Truth to have a simpler API and more readable failure messages. For example, here's a failure message from AssertJ:
java.lang.AssertionError:
Expecting:
  <[year: 2019
month: 7
day: 15
]>
to contain exactly in any order:
  <[year: 2019
month: 6
day: 30
]>
elements not found:
  <[year: 2019
month: 6
day: 30
]>
and elements not expected:
  <[year: 2019
month: 7
day: 15
]>
And here's the equivalent message from Truth:
value of:
    iterable.onlyElement()
expected:
    year: 2019
    month: 6
    day: 30

but was:
    year: 2019
    month: 7
    day: 15
For more details, read our comparison of the libraries, and try Truth for yourself.

Also, if you're developing for Android, try AndroidX Test. It includes Truth extensions that make assertions even easier to write and failure messages even clearer:
assertThat(notification).extras().string(EXTRA_BIG_TEXT)
    .isEqualTo("Message has been sent");
assertThat(notification).extras().string(EXTRA_TEXT)
    .contains("Kurt Kluever <[email protected]>");
Coming soon: Kotlin users of Truth can look forward to Kotlin-specific enhancements.
By Chris Povirk, Java Core Libraries

Open sourcing ClusterFuzz

Fuzzing is an automated method for detecting bugs in software that works by feeding unexpected inputs to a target program. It is effective at finding memory corruption bugs, which often have serious security implications. Manually finding these issues is both difficult and time consuming, and bugs often slip through despite rigorous code review practices. For software projects written in an unsafe language such as C or C++, fuzzing is a crucial part of ensuring their security and stability.

In order for fuzzing to be truly effective, it must be continuous, done at scale, and integrated into the development process of a software project. To provide these features for Chrome, we wrote ClusterFuzz, a fuzzing infrastructure running on over 25,000 cores. Two years ago, we began offering ClusterFuzz as a free service to open source projects through OSS-Fuzz.

Today, we’re announcing that ClusterFuzz is now open source and available for anyone to use.



We developed ClusterFuzz over eight years to fit seamlessly into developer workflows, and to make it dead simple to find bugs and get them fixed. ClusterFuzz provides end-to-end automation, from bug detection, to triage (accurate deduplication, bisection), to bug reporting, and finally to automatic closure of bug reports.

ClusterFuzz has found more than 16,000 bugs in Chrome and more than 11,000 bugs in over 160 open source projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz. It is an integral part of the development process of Chrome and many other open source projects. ClusterFuzz is often able to detect bugs hours after they are introduced and verify the fix within a day.

Check out our GitHub repository. You can try ClusterFuzz locally by following these instructions. In production, ClusterFuzz depends on some key Google Cloud Platform services, but you can use your own compute cluster. We welcome your contributions and look forward to any suggestions to help improve and extend this infrastructure. Through open sourcing ClusterFuzz, we hope to encourage all software developers to integrate fuzzing into their workflows.

By Abhishek Arya, Oliver Chang, Max Moroz, Martin Barbella and Jonathan Metzman, ClusterFuzz team

Dopamine 2.0: providing more flexibility in reinforcement learning research

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become one of the most popular fields of machine learning, and has seen a number of great advances over the last few years. As a result, there is a growing need from both researchers and educators to have access to a clear and reliable framework for RL research and education.

Last August, we announced Dopamine, our framework for flexible reinforcement learning.  For the initial version we decided to focus on a specific type of RL research: value-based agents evaluated on the Atari 2600 framework supported by the Arcade Learning Environment. We were thrilled to see how well it was received by the community, including a live coding session, its inclusion in a recently-announced benchmark for RL, considered as the top “Cool new open source project of 2018” by the Octoverse, and over 7K GitHub stars on our repository.

One of the most common requests we have received is support for more environments. This confirms what we have seen internally, where simpler environments, such as those supported by OpenAI’s Gym, are incredibly useful when testing out new algorithms. We are happy to announce Dopamine 2.0, which includes support for discrete-domain gym environments (e.g. discrete states and actions). The core of the framework remains unchanged, we have simply generalized the interface with the environment. For backwards compatibility, users will still be able to download version 1.0.

We include default configurations for two classic control environments: CartPole and Acrobot; on these environments one can train a Dopamine agent in minutes. When compared with the training time for a standard Atari 2600 game (around 5 days on a standard GPU), these environments allow researchers to iterate much faster on research ideas before testing them out on larger Atari games. We also include a Colaboratory that illustrates how to train an agent on Cartpole and Acrobot. Finally, our GymPreprocessing class serves as an example for how to use Dopamine with other custom environments.

We are excited by the new opportunities enabled by Dopamine 2.0, and look forward to seeing what the research community creates with it!

By Pablo Samuel Castro and Marc G. Bellemare, Dopamine Team

TF-Ranking: a scalable TensorFlow library for learning-to-rank

Cross-posted from the Google AI Blog.

Ranking, the process of ordering a list of items in a way that maximizes the utility of the entire list, is applicable in a wide range of domains, from search engines and recommender systems to machine translation, dialogue systems and even computational biology. In applications like these (and many others), researchers often utilize a set of supervised machine learning techniques called learning-to-rank. In many cases, these learning-to-rank techniques are applied to datasets that are prohibitively large — scenarios where the scalability of TensorFlow could be an advantage. However, there is currently no out-of-the-box support for applying learning-to-rank techniques in TensorFlow. To the best of our knowledge, there are also no other open source libraries that specialize in applying learning-to-rank techniques at scale.

Today, we are excited to share TF-Ranking, a scalable TensorFlow-based library for learning-to-rank. As described in our recent paper, TF-Ranking provides a unified framework that includes a suite of state-of-the-art learning-to-rank algorithms, and supports pairwise or listwise loss functions, multi-item scoring, ranking metric optimization, and unbiased learning-to-rank.

TF-Ranking is fast and easy to use, and creates high-quality ranking models. The unified framework gives ML researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts the ability to evaluate and choose among an array of different ranking models within a single library. Moreover, we strongly believe that a key to a useful open source library is not only providing sensible defaults, but also empowering our users to develop their own custom models. Therefore, we provide flexible API's, within which the users can define and plug in their own customized loss functions, scoring functions and metrics.

Existing Algorithms and Metrics Support

The objective of learning-to-rank algorithms is minimizing a loss function defined over a list of items to optimize the utility of the list ordering for any given application. TF-Ranking supports a wide range of standard pointwise, pairwise and listwise loss functions as described in prior work. This ensures that researchers using the TF-Ranking library are able to reproduce and extend previously published baselines, and practitioners can make the most informed choices for their applications. Furthermore, TF-Ranking can handle sparse features (like raw text) through embeddings and scales to hundreds of millions of training instances. Thus, anyone who is interested in building real-world data intensive ranking systems such as web search or news recommendation, can use TF-Ranking as a robust, scalable solution.

Empirical evaluation is an important part of any machine learning or information retrieval research. To ensure compatibility with prior work,  we support many of the commonly used ranking metrics, including Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). We also make it easy to visualize these metrics at training time on TensorBoard, an open source TensorFlow visualization dashboard.
An example of the NDCG metric (Y-axis) along the training steps (X-axis) displayed in the TensorBoard. It shows the overall progress of the metrics during training. Different methods can be compared directly on the dashboard. Best models can be selected based on the metric.

Multi-Item Scoring

TF-Ranking supports a novel scoring mechanism wherein multiple items (e.g., web pages) can be scored jointly, an extension of the traditional scoring paradigm in which single items are scored independently. One challenge in multi-item scoring is the difficulty for inference where items have to be grouped and scored in subgroups. Then, scores are accumulated per-item and used for sorting. To make these complexities transparent to the user, TF-Ranking provides a List-In-List-Out (LILO) API to wrap all this logic in the exported TF models.
The TF-Ranking library supports multi-item scoring architecture, an extension of traditional single-item scoring.
As we demonstrate in recent work, multi-item scoring is competitive in its performance to the state-of-the-art learning-to-rank models such as RankNet, MART, and LambdaMART on a public LETOR benchmark.

Ranking Metric Optimization

An important research challenge in learning-to-rank is direct optimization of ranking metrics (such as the previously mentioned NDCG and MRR).  These metrics, while being able to measure the performance of ranking systems better than the standard classification metrics like Area Under the Curve (AUC), have the unfortunate property of being either discontinuous or flat. Therefore standard stochastic gradient descent optimization of these metrics is problematic.

In recent work, we proposed a novel method, LambdaLoss, which provides a principled probabilistic framework for ranking metric optimization. In this framework, metric-driven loss functions can be designed and optimized by an expectation-maximization procedure. The TF-Ranking library integrates the recent advances in direct metric optimization and provides an implementation of LambdaLoss. We are hopeful that this will encourage and facilitate further research advances in the important area of ranking metric optimization.

Unbiased Learning-to-Rank

Prior research has shown that given a ranked list of items, users are much more likely to interact with the first few results, regardless of their relevance. This observation has inspired research interest in unbiased learning-to-rank, and led to the development of unbiased evaluation and several unbiased learning algorithms, based on training instances re-weighting. In the TF-Ranking library, metrics are implemented to support unbiased evaluation and losses are implemented for unbiased learning by natively supporting re-weighting to overcome the inherent biases in user interactions datasets.

Getting Started with TF-Ranking

TF-Ranking implements the TensorFlow Estimator interface, which greatly simplifies machine learning programming by encapsulating training, evaluation, prediction and export for serving. TF-Ranking is well integrated with the rich TensorFlow ecosystem. As described above, you can use TensorBoard to visualize ranking metrics like NDCG and MRR, as well as to pick the best model checkpoints using these metrics. Once your model is ready, it is easy to deploy it in production using TensorFlow Serving.

If you’re interested in trying TF-Ranking for yourself, please check out our GitHub repo, and walk through the tutorial examples. TF-Ranking is an active research project, and we welcome your feedback and contributions. We are excited to see how TF-Ranking can help the information retrieval and machine learning research communities.

By Xuanhui Wang and Michael Bendersky, Software Engineers, Google AI

Acknowledgements

This project was only possible thanks to the members of the core TF-Ranking team: Rama Pasumarthi, Cheng Li, Sebastian Bruch, Nadav Golbandi, Stephan Wolf, Jan Pfeifer, Rohan Anil, Marc Najork, Patrick McGregor and Clemens Mewald‎. We thank the members of the TensorFlow team for their advice and support: Alexandre Passos, Mustafa Ispir, Karmel Allison, Martin Wicke, and others. Finally, we extend our special thanks to our collaborators, interns and early adopters: Suming Chen, Zhen Qin, Chirag Sethi, Maryam Karimzadehgan, Makoto Uchida, Yan Zhu, Qingyao Ai, Brandon Tran, Donald Metzler, Mike Colagrosso, and many others at Google who helped in evaluating and testing the early versions of TF-Ranking.

Introducing a Web Component and Data API for Quick, Draw!


Over the past couple years, the Creative Lab in collaboration with the Handwriting Recognition team have released a few experiments in the realm of “doodle” recognition.  First, in 2016, there was Quick, Draw!, which uses a neural network to guess what you’re drawing.  Since Quick, Draw! launched we have collected over 1 billion drawings across 345 categories.  In the wake of that popularity, we open sourced a collection of 50 million drawings giving developers around the world access to the data set and the ability to conduct research with it.

"The different ways in which people draw are like different notes in some universally human scale" - Ian Johnson, UX Engineer @ Google

Since the initial dataset was released, it has been incredible to see how graphs, t-sne clusters, and simply overlapping millions of these doodles have given us the ability to infer interesting human behaviors, across different cultures.  One example, from the Quartz study, is that 86% of Americans (from a sample of 50,000) draw their circles counterclockwise, while 80% of Japanese (from a sample of 800) draw them clockwise. Part of this pattern in behavior can be attributed to the strict stroke order in Japanese writing, from the top left to the bottom right.


It’s also interesting to see how the data looks when it’s overlaid by country, as Kyle McDonald did, when he discovered that some countries draw their chairs in perspective while others draw them straight on.


On the more fun, artistic spectrum, there are some simple but clever uses of the data like Neil Mendoza’s face tracking experiment and Deborah Schmidt’s letter collages.
See the video here of Neil Mendoza mapping Quick, Draw! facial features to your own face in front of a webcam


See the process video here of Deborah Schmidt packing QuickDraw data into letters using OpenFrameworks
Some handy tools have also been released from the community since the release of all this data, and one of those that we’re releasing now is a Polymer component that allows you to display a doodle in your web-based project with one line of markup:

The Polymer component is coupled with a Data API that layers a massive file directory (50 million files) and returns a JSON object or an HTML canvas rendering for each drawing.  Without downloading all the data, you can start creating right away in prototyping your ideas.  We’ve also provided instructions for how to host the data and API yourself on Google Cloud Platform (for more serious projects that demand a higher request limit).  

One really handy tool when hosting an API on Google Cloud is Cloud Endpoints.  It allowed us to launch a demo API with a quota limit and authentication via an API key.  

By defining an OpenAPI specification (here is the Quick, Draw! Data API spec) and adding these three lines to our app.yaml file, an Extensible Service Proxy (ESP) gets deployed with our API backend code (more instructions here):
endpoints_api_service:
  name: quickdrawfiles.appspot.com
  rollout_strategy: managed
Based on the OpenAPI spec, documentation is also automatically generated for you:


We used a public Google Group as an access control list, so anyone who joins can then have the API available in their API library.
The Google Group used as an Access Control List
This component and Data API will make it easier for  creatives out there to manipulate the data for their own research.  Looking to the future, a potential next step for the project could be to store everything in a single database for more complex queries (i.e. “give me an recognized drawing from China in March 2017”).  Feedback is always welcome, and we hope this inspires even more types of projects using the data! More details on the project and the incredible research projects done using it can be found on our GitHub repo. 

By Nick Jonas, Creative Technologist, Creative Lab

Editor's Note: Some may notice that this isn’t the only dataset we’ve open sourced recently! You can find many more datasets in our open source project directory.

Outline: secure access to the open web

Censorship and surveillance are challenges that many journalists around the world face on a daily basis. Some of them use a virtual private network (VPN) to provide safer access to the open internet, but not all VPNs are equally reliable and trustworthy, and even fewer are open source.

That’s why Jigsaw created Outline, a new open source, independently audited platform that lets any organization easily create and operate their own VPN.

Outline’s most striking feature is arguably how easy it is to use. An organization starts by downloading the Outline Manager app, which lets them sign in to DigitalOcean, where they can host their own VPN, and set it up with just a few clicks. They can also easily use other cloud providers, provided they have shell access to run the installation script. Once an Outline server is set up, the server administrator can create access credentials and share with their network of contacts, who can then use the Outline clients to connect to it.


A core element to any VPN’s security is the protocol that the server and clients use to communicate. When we looked at the existing protocols, we realized that many of them were easily identifiable by network adversaries looking to spot and block VPN traffic. To make Outline more resilient against this threat, we chose Shadowsocks, a secure, handshake-less, and open source protocol that is known for its strength and performance, and enjoys the support of many developers worldwide. Shadowsocks is a combination of a simplified SOCKS5-like routing protocol, running on top of an encrypted channel. We chose the AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305 cipher, which is an IETF standard and provides the security and performance users need.

Another important component to security is running up-to-date software. We package the server code as a Docker image, enabling us to run on multiple platforms, and allowing for automatic updates using Watchtower. On DigitalOcean installations, we also enable automatic security updates on the host machine.

If security is one of the most critical parts of creating a better VPN, usability is the other. We wanted Outline to offer a consistent, simple user experience across platforms, and for it to be easy for developers around the world to contribute to it. With that in mind, we use the cross-platform development framework Apache Cordova for Android, iOS, macOS and ChromeOS, and Electron for Windows. The application logic is a web application written in TypeScript, while the networking code had to be written in native code for each platform. This setup allows us to reutilize most of code, and create consistent user experiences across diverse platforms.

In order to encourage a robust developer community we wanted to strike a balance between simplicity, reproducibility, and automation of future contributions. To that end, we use Travis for continuous builds and to generate the binaries that are ultimately uploaded to the app stores. Thanks to its cross-platform support, any team member can produce a macOS or Windows binary with a single click. We also use Docker to package the build tools for client platforms, and thanks to Electron, developers familiar with the server's Node.js code base can also contribute to the Outline Manager application.

You can find our code in the Outline GitHub repositories and more information on the Outline website. We hope that more developers join the project to build technology that helps people connect to the open web and stay more safe online.

By Vinicius Fortuna, Jigsaw

Introducing the Tink cryptographic software library

Cross-posted on the Google Security Blog

At Google, many product teams use cryptographic techniques to protect user data. In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have serious consequences, and understanding how to implement cryptography correctly requires digesting decades' worth of academic literature. Needless to say, many developers don’t have time for that.

To help our developers ship secure cryptographic code we’ve developed Tink—a multi-language, cross-platform cryptographic library. We believe in open source and want Tink to become a community project—thus Tink has been available on GitHub since the early days of the project, and it has already attracted several external contributors. At Google, Tink is already being used to secure data of many products such as AdMob, Google Pay, Google Assistant, Firebase, the Android Search App, etc. After nearly two years of development, today we’re excited to announce Tink 1.2.0, the first version that supports cloud, Android, iOS, and more!

Tink aims to provide cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use correctly, and hard(er) to misuse. Tink is built on top of existing libraries such as BoringSSL and Java Cryptography Architecture, but includes countermeasures to many weaknesses in these libraries, which were discovered by Project Wycheproof, another project from our team.

With Tink, many common cryptographic operations such as data encryption, digital signatures, etc. can be done with only a few lines of code. Here is an example of encrypting and decrypting with our AEAD interface in Java:
 import com.google.crypto.tink.Aead;
    import com.google.crypto.tink.KeysetHandle;
    import com.google.crypto.tink.aead.AeadFactory;
    import com.google.crypto.tink.aead.AeadKeyTemplates;
     // 1. Generate the key material.
    KeysetHandle keysetHandle = KeysetHandle.generateNew(
        AeadKeyTemplates.AES256_EAX);
     // 2. Get the primitive.
    Aead aead = AeadFactory.getPrimitive(keysetHandle);
     // 3. Use the primitive.
    byte[] plaintext = ...;
    byte[] additionalData = ...;
    byte[] ciphertext = aead.encrypt(plaintext, additionalData);
Tink aims to eliminate as many potential misuses as possible. For example, if the underlying encryption mode requires nonces and nonce reuse makes it insecure, then Tink does not allow the user to pass nonces. Interfaces have security guarantees that must be satisfied by each primitive implementing the interface. This may exclude some encryption modes. Rather than adding them to existing interfaces and weakening the guarantees of the interface, it is possible to add new interfaces and describe the security guarantees appropriately.

We’re cryptographers and security engineers working to improve Google’s product security, so we built Tink to make our job easier. Tink shows the claimed security properties (e.g., safe against chosen-ciphertext attacks) right in the interfaces, allowing security auditors and automated tools to quickly discover usages where the security guarantees don’t match the security requirements. Tink also isolates APIs for potentially dangerous operations (e.g., loading cleartext keys from disk), which allows discovering, restricting, monitoring and logging their usage.

Tink provides support for key management, including key rotation and phasing out deprecated ciphers. For example, if a cryptographic primitive is found to be broken, you can switch to a different primitive by rotating keys, without changing or recompiling code.

Tink is also extensible by design: it is easy to add a custom cryptographic scheme or an in-house key management system so that it works seamlessly with other parts of Tink. No part of Tink is hard to replace or remove. All components are composable, and can be selected and assembled in various combinations. For example, if you need only digital signatures, you can exclude symmetric key encryption components to minimize code size in your application.

To get started, please check out our HOW-TO for Java, C++ and Obj-C. If you'd like to talk to the developers or get notified about project updates, you may want to subscribe to our mailing list. To join, simply send an empty email to [email protected]. You can also post your questions to StackOverflow, just remember to tag them with tink.

We’re excited to share this with the community, and welcome your feedback!

By Thai Duong, Information Security Engineer, on behalf of Tink team

How we brought the latest version of Python to App Engine and Cloud Functions

At Cloud Next 2018, we added Python 3.7 support to Cloud Functions and now we’ve announced Python 3.7 support for the App Engine standard environment. These new runtimes allow you to write Python functions and apps using the latest version of Python and the rich ecosystem of packages available on Python Packaging Index (PyPI).

This new runtime marks a significant update to App Engine and was enabled by new open source software that we recently released: gVisor and FTL.

Python, straight from the source

Running Python 3.7 on App Engine and Cloud Functions required us to fundamentally rethink our infrastructure. Traditionally, meeting Google Cloud’s security requirements meant that we had to run a modified version of the Python interpreter. However, using a modified interpreter constrained some language features and only allowed us to support a limited set of whitelisted Python libraries.

Thanks to gVisor, a container sandbox that provides improved security and process isolation, we can now run the unmodified Python 3.7.0 interpreter. We’ve done extensive testing to make sure Python 3.7 is compatible with gVisor. As part of our compatibility testing, we run Python’s full suite of language tests, and tests for Python packages that are popular on PyPI. We’re committed to ensuring that everything you’ve come to know and love about Python is supported on our platform.

Seamless deployments

Most importantly, this change in our infrastructure makes it easier to take advantage of Python’s vast ecosystem. As a developer, you just add project dependencies to a requirements.txt file and deploy.

During deployment, FTL, a tool for building containers, fetches dependencies listed in your requirements.txt file and installs them alongside your app or function. FTL also includes a short-lived dependency cache, which speeds up repeated deployments if no changes are detected in your requirements.txt file. This is particularly useful if you find just need to re-deploy because you found a typo.

Keeping up with the Pythonistas

In making these changes, we also decided to expand the list of system packages that are included with each runtime’s Ubuntu 18.04 distribution. We think that will make life just a little bit easier for developers working with the latest release of Python.

Looking forward, we’re excited about how these changes will allow us to keep up with the Python community’s progress as they release new versions and libraries. Please let us know what you think and if you run into any challenges.

You can learn more about how to get started with it on App Engine and Cloud Functions in our documentation. We can’t wait to see what you build with Python 3.7.

By Stewart Reichling, Product Manager

Introducing the new lead for Android Open Source Project

This week began with the announcement of Android 9 Pie and, as usual, the subsequent upstreaming of code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). But the release of Android 9 isn’t the only important Android news!

Tucked away in the announcement to the Android Building mailing list was this note:

“I also wanted to take a moment to introduce myself as the new Tech Lead / Manager for AOSP. My name is Jeff Bailey, and I’ve been involved in the Open Source community for more than two decades. Since I joined the Android team a few months ago, I’ve been learning how we do things and getting an understanding of how we could work better with the community. I’d love to hear from you: @JeffBaileyAOSP on Twitter or [email protected]. Be well!”

As Jeff notes in his introduction, he has a history in free and open source software (FOSS). He’s been an avid user, contributor, and maintainer since before the Open Source Definition was inked!

Jeff co-founded Savannah, where GNU software is developed and distributed, spent 15 years working on Debian, and has been an Ubuntu core developer. Further, he spent some time on the Google Open Source team and was involved in open sourcing Android back in 2008.

Open source projects, even those which originate inside of companies, are powered by the community of users and contributors that surround them. And those communities thrive when they have stewards who are steeped in the traditions of free and open source software. We’re excited for AOSP as Jeff takes the reins. He brings both technical and cultural skills to the table, and he’s been involved with the project since the beginning!

Suffice it to say, AOSP is in good hands. We welcome Jeff to his new role and, as he said in his introduction, he’d love to hear from the community: you can reach Jeff on Twitter and via email.

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Announcing Cirq: an open source framework for NISQ algorithms

Cross-posted from the Google AI Blog

Over the past few years, quantum computing has experienced a growth not only in the construction of quantum hardware, but also in the development of quantum algorithms. With the availability of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers (devices with ~50 - 100 qubits and high fidelity quantum gates), the development of algorithms to understand the power of these machines is of increasing importance. However, a common problem when designing a quantum algorithm on a NISQ processor is how to take full advantage of these limited quantum devices—using resources to solve the hardest part of the problem rather than on overheads from poor mappings between the algorithm and hardware. Furthermore some quantum processors have complex geometric constraints and other nuances, and ignoring these will either result in faulty quantum computation, or a computation that is modified and sub-optimal.*

Today at the First International Workshop on Quantum Software and Quantum Machine Learning (QSML), the Google AI Quantum team announced the public alpha of Cirq, an open source framework for NISQ computers. Cirq is focused on near-term questions and helping researchers understand whether NISQ quantum computers are capable of solving computational problems of practical importance. Cirq is licensed under Apache 2, and is free to be modified or embedded in any commercial or open source package.

Once installed, Cirq enables researchers to write quantum algorithms for specific quantum processors. Cirq gives users fine tuned control over quantum circuits, specifying gate behavior using native gates, placing these gates appropriately on the device, and scheduling the timing of these gates within the constraints of the quantum hardware. Data structures are optimized for writing and compiling these quantum circuits to allow users to get the most out of NISQ architectures. Cirq supports running these algorithms locally on a simulator, and is designed to easily integrate with future quantum hardware or larger simulators via the cloud.


We are also announcing the release of OpenFermion-Cirq, an example of a Cirq based application enabling near-term algorithms. OpenFermion is a platform for developing quantum algorithms for chemistry problems, and OpenFermion-Cirq is an open source library which compiles quantum simulation algorithms to Cirq. The new library uses the latest advances in building low depth quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry problems to enable users to go from the details of a chemical problem to highly optimized quantum circuits customized to run on particular hardware. For example, this library can be used to easily build quantum variational algorithms for simulating properties of molecules and complex materials.

Quantum computing will require strong cross-industry and academic collaborations if it is going to realize its full potential. In building Cirq, we worked with early testers to gain feedback and insight into algorithm design for NISQ computers. Below are some examples of Cirq work resulting from these early adopters:
To learn more about how Cirq is helping enable NISQ algorithms, please visit the links above where many of the adopters have provided example source code for their implementations.

Today, the Google AI Quantum team is using Cirq to create circuits that run on Google’s Bristlecone processor. In the future, we plan to make this processor available in the cloud, and Cirq will be the interface in which users write programs for this processor. In the meantime, we hope Cirq will improve the productivity of NISQ algorithm developers and researchers everywhere. Please check out the GitHub repositories for Cirq and OpenFermion-Cirq — pull requests welcome!

By Alan Ho, Product Lead and Dave Bacon, Software Lead, Google AI Quantum Team

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Craig Gidney for leading the development of Cirq, Ryan Babbush and Kevin Sung for building OpenFermion-Cirq and a whole host of code contributors to both frameworks.


* An analogous situation is how early classical programmers needed to run complex programs in very small memory spaces by paying careful attention to the lowest level details of the hardware.↩