Google Data » students https://googledata.org Everything Google: News, Products, Services, Content, Culture Wed, 28 Dec 2016 21:09:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.13 Taking the pulse of Google Code-in 2016 https://googledata.org/google-open-source/taking-the-pulse-of-google-code-in-2016/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/taking-the-pulse-of-google-code-in-2016/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=76ae3aa02aff51d89634d25a3ac093e2 GCI official horizontal_1372x448dp.png
Today is the official midpoint of this year’s Google Code-in contest and we are delighted to announce this is our most popular year ever! 930 teenagers from 60 countries have completed 3,503 tasks with 17 open source organizations. The number of students successfully completing tasks has almost met the total number of students from the 2015 contest already.

Tasks that the students have completed include:
  • writing test suites
  • improving mobile UI 
  • writing documentation and creating videos to help new users 
  • working on internationalization efforts
  • fixing and finding bugs in the organization's’ software 
Participants from all over the world
In total, over 2,800 students from 87 countries have registered for the contest and we look forward to seeing great work from these (and more!) students over the next few weeks. 2016 has also seen a huge increase in student participation in places such as Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Google Code-in participants by country

Please welcome two new countries to the GCI family: Mauritius and Moldova! Mauritius made a very strong debut to the contest and currently has 13 registered students who have completed 31 tasks.

The top five countries with the most completed tasks are:
  1. India: 982
  2. United States: 801
  3. Singapore: 202
  4. Vietnam: 119
  5. Canada: 117
Students, there is still plenty of time to get started with Google Code-in. New tasks are being added daily to the contest site — there are over 1,500 tasks available for students to choose from right now! If you don’t see something that interests you today, check back again every couple of days for new tasks.

The last day to register for the contest and claim a task is Friday, January 13, 2017 with all work being due on Monday, January 16, 2017 at 9:00 am PT.

Good luck to all of the students participating this year in Google Code-in!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager

All numbers reported as of 8:00 PM Pacific Time, December 22, 2016.]]> GCI official horizontal_1372x448dp.png
Today is the official midpoint of this year’s Google Code-in contest and we are delighted to announce this is our most popular year ever! 930 teenagers from 60 countries have completed 3,503 tasks with 17 open source organizations. The number of students successfully completing tasks has almost met the total number of students from the 2015 contest already.

Tasks that the students have completed include:
  • writing test suites
  • improving mobile UI 
  • writing documentation and creating videos to help new users 
  • working on internationalization efforts
  • fixing and finding bugs in the organization's’ software 
Participants from all over the world
In total, over 2,800 students from 87 countries have registered for the contest and we look forward to seeing great work from these (and more!) students over the next few weeks. 2016 has also seen a huge increase in student participation in places such as Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Google Code-in participants by country

Please welcome two new countries to the GCI family: Mauritius and Moldova! Mauritius made a very strong debut to the contest and currently has 13 registered students who have completed 31 tasks.

The top five countries with the most completed tasks are:
  1. India: 982
  2. United States: 801
  3. Singapore: 202
  4. Vietnam: 119
  5. Canada: 117
Students, there is still plenty of time to get started with Google Code-in. New tasks are being added daily to the contest site — there are over 1,500 tasks available for students to choose from right now! If you don’t see something that interests you today, check back again every couple of days for new tasks.

The last day to register for the contest and claim a task is Friday, January 13, 2017 with all work being due on Monday, January 16, 2017 at 9:00 am PT.

Good luck to all of the students participating this year in Google Code-in!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager

All numbers reported as of 8:00 PM Pacific Time, December 22, 2016.]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/taking-the-pulse-of-google-code-in-2016/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: Public Lab https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-public-lab/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-public-lab/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=cb1507701efeecf9653f175a7e1d49cc This post is part of our series of guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code 2016.


How we made this our best Google Summer of Code ever

This was our fourth year doing Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and it was our best year ever by a wide margin! We had five hard-working students who contributed over 17,000 new lines of (very useful) code to our high-priority projects.

Students voluntarily started coding early and hit the ground running, with full development environments and a working knowledge of GitHub Flow-style pull request process. They communicated with one another and provided peer support. They wrote tests. Hundreds of them! They blogged about their work as they went, and chatted with other community members about how to design features.

All of that was amazing, and it was made better by the fact that we were accepting pull requests with new code twice weekly. Tuesdays and Fridays, I went through new submissions, provided feedback, and pulled new code into our master branch, usually publishing it to our production site once a week.

I don't know how other projects do things, but this was very new for us, and it's revolutionized how we work together. In past years, students would work on their forks, slowly building up features. Then in a mad dash at the end, we’d try to merge them into trunk, with lots of conflicts and many hours (weeks!) of work on the part of project maintainers.

Screenshot_2016-08-26_at_11.44.16_AM.png
What made this year so good?

Many things aligned to make this summer great, and basically none of them are our ideas. I'm sure plenty of you are cringing at how we used to do things, but I also don't think that it's that unusual for projects not "born" in the fast-paced world of modern code collaboration.

We used ideas and learned from Nicolas Bevacqua, author of JavaScript Application Design and of the woofmark and horsey libraries which I've contributed to. We've also learned a great deal from the Hoodie community, particularly Gregor Martynus, who we ran into at a BostonJS meetup. Lastly, we learned from SpinachCon, organized by Shauna Gordon McKeon and Deb Nicholson, where people refine their install process by actually going through the process while sitting next to each other.

Broadly, our strategies were:

  • Good documentation for newcomers (duh)
  • Short and sweet install process that you've tried yourself (thanks, SpinachCon!)
  • Predictable, regular merge schedule
  • Thorough test suite, and requiring tests with each pull request
  • Modularity, insisting that projects be broken into small, independently testable parts and merged as they’re written

Installation and pull requests

Most of the above sound kind of obvious or trivial, but we saw a lot of changes when we put it all together. Having a really fast install process, and guidance on getting it running in a completely consistent environment like the virtualized Cloud9 service, meant that many students were able to get the code running the same day they found the project. We aimed for an install time of 15 minutes max, and supplied a video of this for one of our codebases.

We also asked students to make a small change (even just add a space to a file) and walk through the GitHub Flow pull request (PR) submission process. We had clear step-by-step guidance for this, and we took it as a good sign when students were able to read through it and do this.

Importantly, we really tried to make each step welcoming, not demanding or dismissive, of folks who weren’t familiar with this process. This ultimately meant that all five students already knew the PR process when they began coding.

Twice-weekly merge schedule

We were concerned that, in past years, students only tried merging a few times and typically towards the end of the summer. This meant really big conflicts (with each other, often) and frustration.

This year we decided that, even though we’re a tiny organization with just one staff coder, we’d try merging on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and we mostly succeeded. Any code that wasn’t clearly presented, commits squashed, passing tests, and submitting new tests, was reviewed and I left friendly comments and requests so it could be merged the following week.

At first I felt bad rejecting PRs, but we had such great students that they got used to the strictness. They got really good at separating out features, demonstrating their features through clear tests, and some began submitting more than two PRs per week - always rebasing on top of the latest master to ensure a linear commit history. Sweet!

Wrap-up and next steps

The last thing we did was to ask each student, essentially as their documentation, to write a series of new issues which clearly described the problem and/or desired behavior, leave suggestions and links to specific lines of code or example code, and mark them with the special “help-wanted” tag which was so helpful to them when they first started out. We asked each to also make one extra-welcoming “first-timers-only” issue which walks a new contributor through every step of making a commit and even provides suggested code to be inserted.

This final requirement was key. While I personally made each of the initial set of “help-wanted” and “first-timers-only” issues before GSoC, now five students were offloading their unfinished to-dos as very readable and inviting issues for others. The effect was immediate, in part because these special tags are syndicated on some sites. Newcomers began picking them up within hours and our students were very helpful in guiding them through their first contributions to open source.

I want to thank everyone who made this past summer so great, from our champion mentors and community members, to our stellar students, to all our inspirations in this new process, to the dozen or so new contributors we’ve attracted since the end of August.

By Jeff Warren, Organization Administrator for PublicLab.org]]> This post is part of our series of guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code 2016.


How we made this our best Google Summer of Code ever

This was our fourth year doing Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and it was our best year ever by a wide margin! We had five hard-working students who contributed over 17,000 new lines of (very useful) code to our high-priority projects.

Students voluntarily started coding early and hit the ground running, with full development environments and a working knowledge of GitHub Flow-style pull request process. They communicated with one another and provided peer support. They wrote tests. Hundreds of them! They blogged about their work as they went, and chatted with other community members about how to design features.

All of that was amazing, and it was made better by the fact that we were accepting pull requests with new code twice weekly. Tuesdays and Fridays, I went through new submissions, provided feedback, and pulled new code into our master branch, usually publishing it to our production site once a week.

I don't know how other projects do things, but this was very new for us, and it's revolutionized how we work together. In past years, students would work on their forks, slowly building up features. Then in a mad dash at the end, we’d try to merge them into trunk, with lots of conflicts and many hours (weeks!) of work on the part of project maintainers.

Screenshot_2016-08-26_at_11.44.16_AM.png
What made this year so good?

Many things aligned to make this summer great, and basically none of them are our ideas. I'm sure plenty of you are cringing at how we used to do things, but I also don't think that it's that unusual for projects not "born" in the fast-paced world of modern code collaboration.

We used ideas and learned from Nicolas Bevacqua, author of JavaScript Application Design and of the woofmark and horsey libraries which I've contributed to. We've also learned a great deal from the Hoodie community, particularly Gregor Martynus, who we ran into at a BostonJS meetup. Lastly, we learned from SpinachCon, organized by Shauna Gordon McKeon and Deb Nicholson, where people refine their install process by actually going through the process while sitting next to each other.

Broadly, our strategies were:

  • Good documentation for newcomers (duh)
  • Short and sweet install process that you've tried yourself (thanks, SpinachCon!)
  • Predictable, regular merge schedule
  • Thorough test suite, and requiring tests with each pull request
  • Modularity, insisting that projects be broken into small, independently testable parts and merged as they’re written

Installation and pull requests

Most of the above sound kind of obvious or trivial, but we saw a lot of changes when we put it all together. Having a really fast install process, and guidance on getting it running in a completely consistent environment like the virtualized Cloud9 service, meant that many students were able to get the code running the same day they found the project. We aimed for an install time of 15 minutes max, and supplied a video of this for one of our codebases.

We also asked students to make a small change (even just add a space to a file) and walk through the GitHub Flow pull request (PR) submission process. We had clear step-by-step guidance for this, and we took it as a good sign when students were able to read through it and do this.

Importantly, we really tried to make each step welcoming, not demanding or dismissive, of folks who weren’t familiar with this process. This ultimately meant that all five students already knew the PR process when they began coding.

Twice-weekly merge schedule

We were concerned that, in past years, students only tried merging a few times and typically towards the end of the summer. This meant really big conflicts (with each other, often) and frustration.

This year we decided that, even though we’re a tiny organization with just one staff coder, we’d try merging on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and we mostly succeeded. Any code that wasn’t clearly presented, commits squashed, passing tests, and submitting new tests, was reviewed and I left friendly comments and requests so it could be merged the following week.

At first I felt bad rejecting PRs, but we had such great students that they got used to the strictness. They got really good at separating out features, demonstrating their features through clear tests, and some began submitting more than two PRs per week - always rebasing on top of the latest master to ensure a linear commit history. Sweet!

Wrap-up and next steps

The last thing we did was to ask each student, essentially as their documentation, to write a series of new issues which clearly described the problem and/or desired behavior, leave suggestions and links to specific lines of code or example code, and mark them with the special “help-wanted” tag which was so helpful to them when they first started out. We asked each to also make one extra-welcoming “first-timers-only” issue which walks a new contributor through every step of making a commit and even provides suggested code to be inserted.

This final requirement was key. While I personally made each of the initial set of “help-wanted” and “first-timers-only” issues before GSoC, now five students were offloading their unfinished to-dos as very readable and inviting issues for others. The effect was immediate, in part because these special tags are syndicated on some sites. Newcomers began picking them up within hours and our students were very helpful in guiding them through their first contributions to open source.

I want to thank everyone who made this past summer so great, from our champion mentors and community members, to our stellar students, to all our inspirations in this new process, to the dozen or so new contributors we’ve attracted since the end of August.

By Jeff Warren, Organization Administrator for PublicLab.org]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-public-lab/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: CSE@TU Wien https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-csetu-wien/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-csetu-wien/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=f9e42ed53fd260631c61f610f018f177 Every year over a thousand university students work with more than a hundred open source organizations as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This post is part of a series of guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators reflecting on GSoC 2016.

CSE@TU Wien is a loose interest group at the Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) focused on developing, providing and utilizing free and open source software for research. We’re an umbrella organization for several open source projects and we participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to ensure that future generations continue building open source software for scientific computing.

We’ve participated in GSoC most years since 2011, and in 2016 we had ten successful projects. The thematic areas are -- befitting an engineering-focused university -- very diverse. Let’s take a look at the projects and what students accomplished:

Carbon Footprint for Google Maps is a browser extension that calculates CO2 emissions that users would incur by driving on routes suggested by popular mapping services and displays this information alongside time and distance. The aim is to raise awareness of the environmental impact of driving cars.

Kolya Opahle brilliantly re-factored the extension, making it much more modular. This enabled expansion to include other map services and port to other browsers, with browser-specific implementations reduced to a minimum. Building for specific browsers was made easy through a Gradle build script. He took on the Firefox port himself, which turned out to be more challenging than expected due to incompatibilities between the extension API’s of Firefox and Chrome. Overcoming this challenge required ingenuity. 

Prateek Gupta completely re-designed and reimplemented the extension’s user interface, optimizing the storage of user options and allowing localization. He added support for more mapping services and calculations of additional greenhouse gases. He added new features to give the user more information about greenhouse gas emissions, including: 
  • a page with air quality index using an API from the World Air Quality Index
  • a page with tips to reduce emissions; a calculator to compute CO2 absorption by trees
  • another calculator for the benefits of walking and cycling instead of driving
Chirag Arora ported the extension to the Safari web browser. Like the port to Firefox, this proved challenging due to discrepancies between the Chrome and Safari extension API’s. Chirag also implemented several new features, including: 
  • more unit systems in the options page
  • automatic configuration of fuel price based on location and the Global Petrol Prices API
  • approximate calculation of CO2 emissions for public transportation
The Colibri project focuses on smart building energy management. Intelligent control strategies are becoming more and more important for efficiently operating residential and commercial buildings, as buildings are responsible for a significant amount of global energy consumption.

Georg Faustmann implemented a connector for Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) networks. OpenADR information and signals can now be processed and stored in the Colibri data store. One challenge for this student was comprehensive handling of the OpenADR specification. Based on the specification, Georg identified a set of relevant use cases which were finally realized in this Colibri component.

Josef Wechselauer worked on a connector for gateways based on the OASIS Open Building Information Exchange (OBIX) standard. This connector links physical devices and data from building automation systems to Colibri. Josef was very enthusiastic and he implemented the connector with an additional graphical user interface for browsing through available OBIX objects. The system test with real hardware was challenging, but he solved all of the problems.

Pratyush Talreja implemented a connector that enables the integration of MATLAB Simulink simulations. More precisely, the connector links to the MATLAB environment and can read and write data over interfaces provided by the simulation. Pratyush had some initial troubles with the system design and the role of the connector in the overall system. However, he tackled those challenges and succeeded in the end.

Mind the Word is a browser extension that helps users learn a new language. It randomly translates a few words per sentence on websites as the user browsers. Since the user sees the translated words in context, they can infer its meaning and thus gradually learns new vocabulary with minimal effort. The extension uses Google, Microsoft and Yandex translation APIs.

Ankit Muchhala re-factored and modernized the code base to ES6 using JSPM, fixing critical bugs in the process and setting up a test environment in Karma and Jasmine. After that, he redesigned the user interface, making extensive use of Bootstrap 3 along with AngularJS. He also implemented various features to make the extension more usable, such as: 
  • dispersed word translation
  • (automatic) blacklisting and easy whitelisting of words and websites
  • and the ability to backup and restore the user's configurations
Rohan Katyal ported the extension to Firefox and implemented several new features, including: 
  • speech of translated words
  • generation of quizzes with the translated words
  • search for visual hints, similar words and usage examples, and more. 
R/sdcMicro is the state-of-the-art R package for data anonymization and is used by national and international institutions. Data privacy has become a hot topic in research and requires serious effort to ensure that individuals cannot be identified.

Probhonjon Baruah improved the code quality of sdcMicro. He wrote unit tests that should help other contributors keep the package consistent and free of bugs. The main challenge for the student was understanding the object-oriented implementation of sdcMicro that goes beyond typical R packages. The student learned that standardized tests are too general to be useful, and that more problem-oriented and specific tests are more effective.

Classilist is an open source visualization dashboard for probabilistic classification data.

Medha Katehara of LNMIIT India developed Classilist, an interactive system for visualizing the performance of probabilistic classifiers. Additionally, she developed plugins to pull classification data from machine learning frameworks such as RapidMiner, WEKA and R.

In conclusion, we are -- again -- very happy with Google Summer of Code. Students advanced themselves and our research software, a clear win-win. Our large team of experienced mentors performed well and we’re grateful for their continued dedication and the support of our university. We hope to participate again in 2017!

By Josef Weinbub and Florian Rudolf, Organization Administrators for TU Wien, Austria
]]> Every year over a thousand university students work with more than a hundred open source organizations as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This post is part of a series of guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators reflecting on GSoC 2016.

CSE@TU Wien is a loose interest group at the Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) focused on developing, providing and utilizing free and open source software for research. We’re an umbrella organization for several open source projects and we participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to ensure that future generations continue building open source software for scientific computing.

We’ve participated in GSoC most years since 2011, and in 2016 we had ten successful projects. The thematic areas are -- befitting an engineering-focused university -- very diverse. Let’s take a look at the projects and what students accomplished:

Carbon Footprint for Google Maps is a browser extension that calculates CO2 emissions that users would incur by driving on routes suggested by popular mapping services and displays this information alongside time and distance. The aim is to raise awareness of the environmental impact of driving cars.

Kolya Opahle brilliantly re-factored the extension, making it much more modular. This enabled expansion to include other map services and port to other browsers, with browser-specific implementations reduced to a minimum. Building for specific browsers was made easy through a Gradle build script. He took on the Firefox port himself, which turned out to be more challenging than expected due to incompatibilities between the extension API’s of Firefox and Chrome. Overcoming this challenge required ingenuity. 

Prateek Gupta completely re-designed and reimplemented the extension’s user interface, optimizing the storage of user options and allowing localization. He added support for more mapping services and calculations of additional greenhouse gases. He added new features to give the user more information about greenhouse gas emissions, including: 
  • a page with air quality index using an API from the World Air Quality Index
  • a page with tips to reduce emissions; a calculator to compute CO2 absorption by trees
  • another calculator for the benefits of walking and cycling instead of driving
Chirag Arora ported the extension to the Safari web browser. Like the port to Firefox, this proved challenging due to discrepancies between the Chrome and Safari extension API’s. Chirag also implemented several new features, including: 
  • more unit systems in the options page
  • automatic configuration of fuel price based on location and the Global Petrol Prices API
  • approximate calculation of CO2 emissions for public transportation
The Colibri project focuses on smart building energy management. Intelligent control strategies are becoming more and more important for efficiently operating residential and commercial buildings, as buildings are responsible for a significant amount of global energy consumption.

Georg Faustmann implemented a connector for Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) networks. OpenADR information and signals can now be processed and stored in the Colibri data store. One challenge for this student was comprehensive handling of the OpenADR specification. Based on the specification, Georg identified a set of relevant use cases which were finally realized in this Colibri component.

Josef Wechselauer worked on a connector for gateways based on the OASIS Open Building Information Exchange (OBIX) standard. This connector links physical devices and data from building automation systems to Colibri. Josef was very enthusiastic and he implemented the connector with an additional graphical user interface for browsing through available OBIX objects. The system test with real hardware was challenging, but he solved all of the problems.

Pratyush Talreja implemented a connector that enables the integration of MATLAB Simulink simulations. More precisely, the connector links to the MATLAB environment and can read and write data over interfaces provided by the simulation. Pratyush had some initial troubles with the system design and the role of the connector in the overall system. However, he tackled those challenges and succeeded in the end.

Mind the Word is a browser extension that helps users learn a new language. It randomly translates a few words per sentence on websites as the user browsers. Since the user sees the translated words in context, they can infer its meaning and thus gradually learns new vocabulary with minimal effort. The extension uses Google, Microsoft and Yandex translation APIs.

Ankit Muchhala re-factored and modernized the code base to ES6 using JSPM, fixing critical bugs in the process and setting up a test environment in Karma and Jasmine. After that, he redesigned the user interface, making extensive use of Bootstrap 3 along with AngularJS. He also implemented various features to make the extension more usable, such as: 
  • dispersed word translation
  • (automatic) blacklisting and easy whitelisting of words and websites
  • and the ability to backup and restore the user's configurations
Rohan Katyal ported the extension to Firefox and implemented several new features, including: 
  • speech of translated words
  • generation of quizzes with the translated words
  • search for visual hints, similar words and usage examples, and more. 
R/sdcMicro is the state-of-the-art R package for data anonymization and is used by national and international institutions. Data privacy has become a hot topic in research and requires serious effort to ensure that individuals cannot be identified.

Probhonjon Baruah improved the code quality of sdcMicro. He wrote unit tests that should help other contributors keep the package consistent and free of bugs. The main challenge for the student was understanding the object-oriented implementation of sdcMicro that goes beyond typical R packages. The student learned that standardized tests are too general to be useful, and that more problem-oriented and specific tests are more effective.

Classilist is an open source visualization dashboard for probabilistic classification data.

Medha Katehara of LNMIIT India developed Classilist, an interactive system for visualizing the performance of probabilistic classifiers. Additionally, she developed plugins to pull classification data from machine learning frameworks such as RapidMiner, WEKA and R.

In conclusion, we are -- again -- very happy with Google Summer of Code. Students advanced themselves and our research software, a clear win-win. Our large team of experienced mentors performed well and we’re grateful for their continued dedication and the support of our university. We hope to participate again in 2017!

By Josef Weinbub and Florian Rudolf, Organization Administrators for TU Wien, Austria
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-csetu-wien/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: AOSSIE https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-aossie/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-aossie/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=5557d8245d784f3b19ccdeac72349a21 We’re sharing guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. This is the seventh post in the series.


AOSSIE (Australian Open Source Software Innovation and Education) is an organization created by the leaders of four research-oriented open source projects at the Australian National University. This was our first year in Google Summer of Code, but one of our projects had already participated three times as part of another organization.

We had 6 students and they surpassed our expectations. It was a great experience to mentor these students and provide them the opportunity to get involved in our cutting-edge research. We expect that their projects will lead to several publications and will be the starting point for long term collaborations.

Here are some highlights of their contributions:

Extempore is a programming language and runtime environment that supports live programming.

Joseph Penington adapted some cpp fluid dynamics code to show how live programming could be used to improve the workflow of scientific simulation. Joseph's project builds a series of increasingly complex fluid solvers in Extempore, allowing the programmer to make interesting and non-trivial changes to the simulation at runtime, including switching the way the fluids are solved in the middle of a simulation.

PriMedLink is software for matching similar patients in a way that preserves privacy (i.e. only using masked or encoded values of records without compromising privacy and confidentiality of patients) for health informatics applications such as clinical trials, advanced treatments and personalized patient care. The initial version of PPSPM software included masking and matching techniques for string, categorical and numerical (integer, floating point and modulus) data.

Mathu Mounasamy developed a module for PPSPM for masking and matching textual data which commonly occur in patient records (such as clinical notes and medical reports containing text data). The TextMM module developed by Mathu extends the functionality of PPSPM by allowing advanced privacy-preserving matching of similar patients based on various features containing textual data, thereby improving the quality and scope of PPSPM.

Rogas is a platform which integrates a collection of graph analysis tools and algorithms into a unified framework in order to support network analysis tasks.

Mojtaba Rezvani added the local community search (also known as local community detection) capability to Rogas. He has implemented several state-of-the-art algorithms proposed for local community detection, such as: k-core, k-truss, k-edge-connected, γ-quasi, and k-cliques. He has also designed a new algorithm for local community detection, which can efficiently identify local communities in large-scale networks.

Yan Xiao redesigned the GUI of Rogas in order to improve usability. He also implemented several visualization techniques to support the graph primitives of Rogas, including cluster, rank and path finding. These developments support dynamic network analysis at different scales so as to predict trends and patterns.

Skeptik is a Scala-based framework for proof theory and automated reasoning.

Ezequiel Postan generalized a challenging proof compression algorithm (the Split algorithm) from propositional logic to first-order logic and implemented it. This enables Skeptik to execute this algorithm not only on proofs output by SAT- and SMT-solvers but also on proofs output by resolution-based automated theorem provers. Ezequiel also implemented parsers for the TPTP and TSTP formats for theorem proving problems and proofs, and implemented a random proof generator to allow comprehensive experimental evaluation of the algorithms.

Daniyar Itegulov implemented a theorem prover for classical first-order logic using Skeptik's data structures and based on a novel logical calculus recently proposed by his mentor. This new calculus, called Conflict Resolution, is inspired by the propositional conflict-driven clause learning procedure used by SAT- and SMT-solvers and generalizes it to first-order logic. Daniyar also went further, conceiving and developing a concurrent proof search strategy for this calculus using Akka actors.

By Bruno Paleo, Organization Administrator for AOSSIE]]> We’re sharing guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. This is the seventh post in the series.


AOSSIE (Australian Open Source Software Innovation and Education) is an organization created by the leaders of four research-oriented open source projects at the Australian National University. This was our first year in Google Summer of Code, but one of our projects had already participated three times as part of another organization.

We had 6 students and they surpassed our expectations. It was a great experience to mentor these students and provide them the opportunity to get involved in our cutting-edge research. We expect that their projects will lead to several publications and will be the starting point for long term collaborations.

Here are some highlights of their contributions:

Extempore is a programming language and runtime environment that supports live programming.

Joseph Penington adapted some cpp fluid dynamics code to show how live programming could be used to improve the workflow of scientific simulation. Joseph's project builds a series of increasingly complex fluid solvers in Extempore, allowing the programmer to make interesting and non-trivial changes to the simulation at runtime, including switching the way the fluids are solved in the middle of a simulation.

PriMedLink is software for matching similar patients in a way that preserves privacy (i.e. only using masked or encoded values of records without compromising privacy and confidentiality of patients) for health informatics applications such as clinical trials, advanced treatments and personalized patient care. The initial version of PPSPM software included masking and matching techniques for string, categorical and numerical (integer, floating point and modulus) data.

Mathu Mounasamy developed a module for PPSPM for masking and matching textual data which commonly occur in patient records (such as clinical notes and medical reports containing text data). The TextMM module developed by Mathu extends the functionality of PPSPM by allowing advanced privacy-preserving matching of similar patients based on various features containing textual data, thereby improving the quality and scope of PPSPM.

Rogas is a platform which integrates a collection of graph analysis tools and algorithms into a unified framework in order to support network analysis tasks.

Mojtaba Rezvani added the local community search (also known as local community detection) capability to Rogas. He has implemented several state-of-the-art algorithms proposed for local community detection, such as: k-core, k-truss, k-edge-connected, γ-quasi, and k-cliques. He has also designed a new algorithm for local community detection, which can efficiently identify local communities in large-scale networks.

Yan Xiao redesigned the GUI of Rogas in order to improve usability. He also implemented several visualization techniques to support the graph primitives of Rogas, including cluster, rank and path finding. These developments support dynamic network analysis at different scales so as to predict trends and patterns.

Skeptik is a Scala-based framework for proof theory and automated reasoning.

Ezequiel Postan generalized a challenging proof compression algorithm (the Split algorithm) from propositional logic to first-order logic and implemented it. This enables Skeptik to execute this algorithm not only on proofs output by SAT- and SMT-solvers but also on proofs output by resolution-based automated theorem provers. Ezequiel also implemented parsers for the TPTP and TSTP formats for theorem proving problems and proofs, and implemented a random proof generator to allow comprehensive experimental evaluation of the algorithms.

Daniyar Itegulov implemented a theorem prover for classical first-order logic using Skeptik's data structures and based on a novel logical calculus recently proposed by his mentor. This new calculus, called Conflict Resolution, is inspired by the propositional conflict-driven clause learning procedure used by SAT- and SMT-solvers and generalizes it to first-order logic. Daniyar also went further, conceiving and developing a concurrent proof search strategy for this calculus using Akka actors.

By Bruno Paleo, Organization Administrator for AOSSIE]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-aossie/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: STE||AR https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-stear/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-stear/#comments Tue, 29 Nov 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=ca8b7a4cb45e1c6448e3e81ffecfe322 This is part of a series of guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. GSoC is an annual program which pairs university students with mentors to work on open source software.


This summer the STE||AR Group was proud to mentor four students through Google Summer of Code. These students worked on a variety of projects which helped improve our software, HPX. This library is a distributed C++ runtime system which supports a standards compliant API and helps users scale their applications across thousands of machines.

The improvements to the code base will help our team and users of HPX around the world. A summary of our students’ projects:

Parsa Amini – HPX Debugger

Developing a better distributed debugging tool is essential to increase the programmability of HPX. Parsa’s project, Scimitar, aims to facilitate the debugging process for HPX programmers by extending the features of GDB, an existing debugger. The project then complements it with new commands for easier switching between localities across clusters, HPX thread debugging, awareness of internal HPX data structures, and semi-automated preparation for distributed debugging sessions. Additional functionality such as locating an object and viewing the queue information on each core is provided through using API provided by HPX itself. His work can be found on GitHub.

Aalekh Nigam – Implement a Map/Reduce Framework

This project aimed to expose a Map/Reduce programming model over HPX. During the summer, Aalekh was able to develop a single node implementation of HPXflow (map/reduce programming model) and laid the groundwork for the further multi-node version with database support. Although the initial task was limited to implementing the Map/Reduce model, he was also able to implement an improved dataflow model as well.

Minh-Khanh Do - Working on Parallel Algorithms for HPX::Vector

Minh-Khanh’s task was to take the parallel algorithms and add the functionality required to work on the segmented hpx::vector. Under his mentor John Biddscombe, he implemented the segmented_fill algorithm, which was successfully merged into the main codebase. Additionally, Minh-Khanh implemented the segmented_scan algorithm which includes inclusive and exclusive_scan. These changes are included in a pull request and have been merged. Using the segmented scan algorithm it is possible to perform tasks such as evaluating polynomials and to implement other algorithms such as quicksort.

Satyaki Upadhyay - Plugin Mechanism for thread schedulers in HPX

In HPX, schedulers are statically linked and must be built at compile-time. Satyaki’s project involved converting this statically linked scheme into a plugin system which would allow arbitrary schedulers to be dynamically loaded. These changes bring several benefits. They provide a layer of abstraction and follow the open/closed principle of software design as well as allowing developers to write their own custom schedulers while conforming to a uniform API. The project proceeded in two steps. The first involved the creation of plugin modules of the schedulers and registering them with HPX. The second step was to implement the loading and subsequent use of the chosen scheduler.

We would like to thank our students and mentors for the time that they have contributed to HPX this summer. In addition, we would like to thank Google for the opportunity that they provided the STE||AR Group to work with developers around the globe as well as the ability for students to interact with vibrant open source projects worldwide.

By Adrian Serio, Organization Administrator for The STE||AR Group]]> This is part of a series of guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. GSoC is an annual program which pairs university students with mentors to work on open source software.


This summer the STE||AR Group was proud to mentor four students through Google Summer of Code. These students worked on a variety of projects which helped improve our software, HPX. This library is a distributed C++ runtime system which supports a standards compliant API and helps users scale their applications across thousands of machines.

The improvements to the code base will help our team and users of HPX around the world. A summary of our students’ projects:

Parsa Amini – HPX Debugger

Developing a better distributed debugging tool is essential to increase the programmability of HPX. Parsa’s project, Scimitar, aims to facilitate the debugging process for HPX programmers by extending the features of GDB, an existing debugger. The project then complements it with new commands for easier switching between localities across clusters, HPX thread debugging, awareness of internal HPX data structures, and semi-automated preparation for distributed debugging sessions. Additional functionality such as locating an object and viewing the queue information on each core is provided through using API provided by HPX itself. His work can be found on GitHub.

Aalekh Nigam – Implement a Map/Reduce Framework

This project aimed to expose a Map/Reduce programming model over HPX. During the summer, Aalekh was able to develop a single node implementation of HPXflow (map/reduce programming model) and laid the groundwork for the further multi-node version with database support. Although the initial task was limited to implementing the Map/Reduce model, he was also able to implement an improved dataflow model as well.

Minh-Khanh Do - Working on Parallel Algorithms for HPX::Vector

Minh-Khanh’s task was to take the parallel algorithms and add the functionality required to work on the segmented hpx::vector. Under his mentor John Biddscombe, he implemented the segmented_fill algorithm, which was successfully merged into the main codebase. Additionally, Minh-Khanh implemented the segmented_scan algorithm which includes inclusive and exclusive_scan. These changes are included in a pull request and have been merged. Using the segmented scan algorithm it is possible to perform tasks such as evaluating polynomials and to implement other algorithms such as quicksort.

Satyaki Upadhyay - Plugin Mechanism for thread schedulers in HPX

In HPX, schedulers are statically linked and must be built at compile-time. Satyaki’s project involved converting this statically linked scheme into a plugin system which would allow arbitrary schedulers to be dynamically loaded. These changes bring several benefits. They provide a layer of abstraction and follow the open/closed principle of software design as well as allowing developers to write their own custom schedulers while conforming to a uniform API. The project proceeded in two steps. The first involved the creation of plugin modules of the schedulers and registering them with HPX. The second step was to implement the loading and subsequent use of the chosen scheduler.

We would like to thank our students and mentors for the time that they have contributed to HPX this summer. In addition, we would like to thank Google for the opportunity that they provided the STE||AR Group to work with developers around the globe as well as the ability for students to interact with vibrant open source projects worldwide.

By Adrian Serio, Organization Administrator for The STE||AR Group]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-stear/feed/ 0 It’s that time again: Google Code-in starts today! https://googledata.org/google-open-source/its-that-time-again-google-code-in-starts-today/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/its-that-time-again-google-code-in-starts-today/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2016 17:15:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=1d75ec457db2dafd88dbec836572c8be Google Code-in (GCI), our pre-university contest introducing students to open source development. GCI takes place entirely online and is open to students between the ages of 13 and 17 around the globe.
The concept is simple: complete bite-sized tasks (at your own pace) created by 17 participating open source organizations on topic areas you find interesting:

  • Coding
  • Documentation/Training
  • Outreach/Research
  • Quality Assurance
  • User Interface

Tasks take an average of 3-5 hours to complete and include the guidance of a mentor to help along the way. Complete one task? Get a digital certificate. Three tasks? Get a sweet Google t-shirt. Finalists get a hoodie. Grand Prize winners get a trip to Google headquarters in California.

Over the last 6 years, 3213 students from 99 countries have successfully completed tasks in GCI. Intrigued? Learn more about GCI by checking out our rules and FAQs. And please visit our contest site and read the Getting Started Guide.

Teachers, if you are interested in getting your students involved in Google Code-in you can find resources here to help you get started.

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs Office]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/its-that-time-again-google-code-in-starts-today/feed/ 0 Stories from Google Code-in: Sugar Labs and Systers https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-sugar-labs-and-systers/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-sugar-labs-and-systers/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=36aabde80b35d482b240188dcb5ce40a Google Code-in (GCI) is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the final installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first three posts.

The Google Code-in contest begins on Monday, November 28th at 9am PT for students. Right now you can learn more about the 17 mentoring organizations that students will be able to work with by going to the contest site. To get students excited for GCI 2016, we’re sharing three more stories from GCI 2015 grand prize winners. These stories illustrate how global the competition is, the challenges students face and the valuable skills they learn working with these open source organizations.

IMG_20160614_152138.jpg
A group of Google Code-in 2015 mentors joined grand prize winners for a day of exploring
San Francisco including the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
First up is the story of Ezequiel Pereira, a student from Uruguay who worked with Sugar Labs. Sugar Labs is the organization behind Sugar, the operating system for the OLPC XO-1 which the Uruguayan government has distributed to public primary schools. The XO-1 was Ezequiel’s first computer.

Ezequiel’s curiosity in computer science was piqued when a technician came to his school to solve a simple bug that was affecting most XO’s. The technician used the command line which, up to that point, Ezequiel thought was useless. Realizing that the command line offered him a lot of power, Ezequiel began his exploration.

He discovered Google Code-in by reading about another Uruguayan teenager, one who was a grand prize winner in Google Code-in 2012. Ezequiel jumped into the contest and participated for several years expanding his skills before finishing as a grand prize winner of Google Code-in 2015. Along the way Ezequiel got comfortable with IRC and began helping other students, even finding new friends among along the way.


Next we have Sara Du from the United States. Sara had been coding for six months when she discovered Google Code-in on Christmas Eve, halfway through the competition. She found lots of interesting tasks, but had trouble finding the right organization to focus on before selecting Systers.

Like many students, Sara was able to quickly jump into code but spent a couple days just getting acquainted with Git and GitHub. This is something we hear from a lot of students and it’s just one of the skills that they pick up by working on real-world projects, along with testing and communication.

Another challenge Sara faced was working with a mentor 16 time zones away from her, which meant that correspondence would often take a day or two. While this was a challenge, she found the long feedback loop encouraged her to get on the Slack channel and reach out to other contributors for help. Ultimately, this made her even more a part of the Systers community.

Sara said Google Code-in was one of the most awesome experiences she’s had and has this advice to offer future participants: “The organization you end up working with has a vibrant community of hackers from everywhere; try to interact with them and you will be sure to learn from others as they will from you!”


Last, but certainly not least, we have Ahmed Sabie, a student from Canada who also worked with Systers. Ahmed started coding competitively several years ago, focusing on graph theory, dynamic programming and data structures. He loved the problem solving, but knew that these competitions took place in a sandbox. To grow, Ahmed would need to explore.

Enter Google Code-in. Ahmed was most comfortable with Python and saw that the Systers Volunteer Management System used that language, so that’s where he started.

Ahmed, like many students and even professional developers, spent much of his first week setting up his development environment. It was a grueling process but with the help of search and the people in the Systers Slack channel he was finally able to see the project’s login screen.

As he completed easy tasks, Ahmed moved on to more difficult tasks and began to help other students, many who got stuck on the same issues he had encountered earlier. Ahmed found that each task provided an opportunity to stretch his skills a little bit more. He was excited about how quickly he was learning. Though Ahmed learned a lot on his own, he says the vast majority of what he learned was through the help of other people -- students, mentors and other project contributors -- and that he felt like he was truly a part of the Systers community by the end of the process. 

Ahmed’s favorite task was an appropriate finale for the competition: he added multilingual support to an application he had worked on and added the French translation.
“Overall, Google Code-in was the experience of a lifetime. It set me up for the future, by teaching me relevant and critical skills necessary in software development. I have contributed to a good cause, and met fantastic mentors and friends along the way. Open source development is not a onetime thing, it is an ongoing process. I hope to continue to be part of it, and to me it is a form of volunteering and giving back to the community.” - Ahmed Sabie

With that, we conclude our series of posts reflecting on Google Code-in 2015. We thank Ezequiel, Sara, Ahmed and all the other participants for sharing their stories and contributing to the software we all rely on. We hope you will join us in carrying on the tradition with Google Code-in 2016!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
]]> Google Code-in (GCI) is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the final installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first three posts.

The Google Code-in contest begins on Monday, November 28th at 9am PT for students. Right now you can learn more about the 17 mentoring organizations that students will be able to work with by going to the contest site. To get students excited for GCI 2016, we’re sharing three more stories from GCI 2015 grand prize winners. These stories illustrate how global the competition is, the challenges students face and the valuable skills they learn working with these open source organizations.

IMG_20160614_152138.jpg
A group of Google Code-in 2015 mentors joined grand prize winners for a day of exploring
San Francisco including the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
First up is the story of Ezequiel Pereira, a student from Uruguay who worked with Sugar Labs. Sugar Labs is the organization behind Sugar, the operating system for the OLPC XO-1 which the Uruguayan government has distributed to public primary schools. The XO-1 was Ezequiel’s first computer.

Ezequiel’s curiosity in computer science was piqued when a technician came to his school to solve a simple bug that was affecting most XO’s. The technician used the command line which, up to that point, Ezequiel thought was useless. Realizing that the command line offered him a lot of power, Ezequiel began his exploration.

He discovered Google Code-in by reading about another Uruguayan teenager, one who was a grand prize winner in Google Code-in 2012. Ezequiel jumped into the contest and participated for several years expanding his skills before finishing as a grand prize winner of Google Code-in 2015. Along the way Ezequiel got comfortable with IRC and began helping other students, even finding new friends among along the way.


Next we have Sara Du from the United States. Sara had been coding for six months when she discovered Google Code-in on Christmas Eve, halfway through the competition. She found lots of interesting tasks, but had trouble finding the right organization to focus on before selecting Systers.

Like many students, Sara was able to quickly jump into code but spent a couple days just getting acquainted with Git and GitHub. This is something we hear from a lot of students and it’s just one of the skills that they pick up by working on real-world projects, along with testing and communication.

Another challenge Sara faced was working with a mentor 16 time zones away from her, which meant that correspondence would often take a day or two. While this was a challenge, she found the long feedback loop encouraged her to get on the Slack channel and reach out to other contributors for help. Ultimately, this made her even more a part of the Systers community.

Sara said Google Code-in was one of the most awesome experiences she’s had and has this advice to offer future participants: “The organization you end up working with has a vibrant community of hackers from everywhere; try to interact with them and you will be sure to learn from others as they will from you!”


Last, but certainly not least, we have Ahmed Sabie, a student from Canada who also worked with Systers. Ahmed started coding competitively several years ago, focusing on graph theory, dynamic programming and data structures. He loved the problem solving, but knew that these competitions took place in a sandbox. To grow, Ahmed would need to explore.

Enter Google Code-in. Ahmed was most comfortable with Python and saw that the Systers Volunteer Management System used that language, so that’s where he started.

Ahmed, like many students and even professional developers, spent much of his first week setting up his development environment. It was a grueling process but with the help of search and the people in the Systers Slack channel he was finally able to see the project’s login screen.

As he completed easy tasks, Ahmed moved on to more difficult tasks and began to help other students, many who got stuck on the same issues he had encountered earlier. Ahmed found that each task provided an opportunity to stretch his skills a little bit more. He was excited about how quickly he was learning. Though Ahmed learned a lot on his own, he says the vast majority of what he learned was through the help of other people -- students, mentors and other project contributors -- and that he felt like he was truly a part of the Systers community by the end of the process. 

Ahmed’s favorite task was an appropriate finale for the competition: he added multilingual support to an application he had worked on and added the French translation.
“Overall, Google Code-in was the experience of a lifetime. It set me up for the future, by teaching me relevant and critical skills necessary in software development. I have contributed to a good cause, and met fantastic mentors and friends along the way. Open source development is not a onetime thing, it is an ongoing process. I hope to continue to be part of it, and to me it is a form of volunteering and giving back to the community.” - Ahmed Sabie

With that, we conclude our series of posts reflecting on Google Code-in 2015. We thank Ezequiel, Sara, Ahmed and all the other participants for sharing their stories and contributing to the software we all rely on. We hope you will join us in carrying on the tradition with Google Code-in 2016!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-sugar-labs-and-systers/feed/ 0 Spotlight on Women Techmakers Scholars: Amy & Alma (Spoiler alert: application advice!) https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/spotlight-on-women-techmakers-scholars-amy-alma-spoiler-alert-application-advice/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/spotlight-on-women-techmakers-scholars-amy-alma-spoiler-alert-application-advice/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2016 18:17:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=cc6e5bc4a4feb1f54610101ece594b18
Through the Women Techmakers Scholars Program - formerly the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship - Google is furthering Dr. Anita Borg’s vision of creating gender equality in the field of computer science by encouraging women to excel in computing and technology and become active leaders and role models in the field.

We have awarded the scholarship to women from all over the world since 2004 who continue to inspire us with their leadership and achievements. We recently caught up with Alma Castillo (2015 scholar from EMEA) and Amy Baldwin (2014 scholar from the US) to share their experiences as scholars and advice for potential applicants:
Amy Baldwin
Alma Castillo
 

Tell us a little about yourself:
Alma Castillo: I studied Computer Science and Mathematics as an undergrad at the Autonomous University of Madrid and at the time I received the scholarship, I was studying a MSc. in HCI at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. I always knew I wanted to make software people could interact with to make their lives easier and better.

Amy Baldwin: I grew up in Prescott, Arizona and graduated from Arizona State University in 2015 with a BS in Computer Science. While I was a student I did two internships at Google — as an Engineering Practicum intern in 2013 and a Software Engineering intern in 2014. I came back to Google as a full-time Software Engineer in August 2015 and currently work on home automation for the Google Assistant. In my free time, I love to knit, do yoga, and hike.

What do you think of the application process?
Alma: The application process is a great way to reflect on yourself and the hard work you have done until now. Take your time and make sure you show who you are in your essay.

Amy: Essay questions are always nerve-racking and, of course, the part of the application process that scares us all the most. I believe the key is to just be yourself and speak honestly in your own voice. Make sure the readers know who you are and what you're passionate about. Once you dive in with this mindset, it's not too bad!

Besides the financial benefit, what else did you gain from the scholarship?
Alma: When I think about the scholarship, the most important thing I see is the amazing people I have met through it. At the scholar's' retreat I met other women studying Computer Science in different countries that have now become great friends I turn to for collaboration and advice. The scholars network expands through the years and the different regions providing an incredible family of computer scientists full of women ready to help each other.

What impact has the Scholarship had on you and your academic career?
Amy: Thanks to the scholarship, I was able to leave my off-campus job to only work on campus, and better focus on school. I actually had enough time to finish my undergraduate honors thesis, which I'm thankful I did! I [also] was invited to attend the annual award night held by my school, which is typically exclusive to graduating students, to be recognized for the award. It was really cool to be recognized in front of my professors and staff for my accomplishments, and I ended up attending the following spring as the Outstanding Undergraduate in Computer Science.

What advice would you give to someone considering applying for the scholarship next Year?
Alma: Apply! Even if you think it will be difficult. The application process is a great way to reflect on yourself and discover the great things you have done. Don't be afraid. Just show who you are and what you are passionate about.

Amy: As I mentioned before, just be honest and speak in your own voice. The scholarship committee wants to know who you are, which includes all of the awesome things you've accomplished but also the road you've taken to get where you are and your potential to do the many incredible things you'll do in the future. Also, don't hesitate to apply! I was so close to never submitting my application because I truly believed there was no way I was possibly good enough. I had the same fear when applying for my first internship. You just need to remember that you are awesome, and if you don't apply, you'll never know you had it in you!

What are the next steps for you?
Alma: I recently graduated from my MSc. and I now work as a Software Engineer at Google Play. I hope to continue passing it on through the scholars community.

Amy: I certainly can't see myself leaving Google anytime soon. I love my job and my team - it's exciting being at the center of a product that is so important to the company and our users!

Read more about the program and apply here! We are currently accepting applications for the US, Canada and EMEA. Applications for Asia Pacific will open in early 2017.
]]>
Through the Women Techmakers Scholars Program - formerly the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship - Google is furthering Dr. Anita Borg’s vision of creating gender equality in the field of computer science by encouraging women to excel in computing and technology and become active leaders and role models in the field.

We have awarded the scholarship to women from all over the world since 2004 who continue to inspire us with their leadership and achievements. We recently caught up with Alma Castillo (2015 scholar from EMEA) and Amy Baldwin (2014 scholar from the US) to share their experiences as scholars and advice for potential applicants:
Amy Baldwin
Alma Castillo
 

Tell us a little about yourself:
Alma Castillo: I studied Computer Science and Mathematics as an undergrad at the Autonomous University of Madrid and at the time I received the scholarship, I was studying a MSc. in HCI at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. I always knew I wanted to make software people could interact with to make their lives easier and better.

Amy Baldwin: I grew up in Prescott, Arizona and graduated from Arizona State University in 2015 with a BS in Computer Science. While I was a student I did two internships at Google — as an Engineering Practicum intern in 2013 and a Software Engineering intern in 2014. I came back to Google as a full-time Software Engineer in August 2015 and currently work on home automation for the Google Assistant. In my free time, I love to knit, do yoga, and hike.

What do you think of the application process?
Alma: The application process is a great way to reflect on yourself and the hard work you have done until now. Take your time and make sure you show who you are in your essay.

Amy: Essay questions are always nerve-racking and, of course, the part of the application process that scares us all the most. I believe the key is to just be yourself and speak honestly in your own voice. Make sure the readers know who you are and what you're passionate about. Once you dive in with this mindset, it's not too bad!

Besides the financial benefit, what else did you gain from the scholarship?
Alma: When I think about the scholarship, the most important thing I see is the amazing people I have met through it. At the scholar's' retreat I met other women studying Computer Science in different countries that have now become great friends I turn to for collaboration and advice. The scholars network expands through the years and the different regions providing an incredible family of computer scientists full of women ready to help each other.

What impact has the Scholarship had on you and your academic career?
Amy: Thanks to the scholarship, I was able to leave my off-campus job to only work on campus, and better focus on school. I actually had enough time to finish my undergraduate honors thesis, which I'm thankful I did! I [also] was invited to attend the annual award night held by my school, which is typically exclusive to graduating students, to be recognized for the award. It was really cool to be recognized in front of my professors and staff for my accomplishments, and I ended up attending the following spring as the Outstanding Undergraduate in Computer Science.

What advice would you give to someone considering applying for the scholarship next Year?
Alma: Apply! Even if you think it will be difficult. The application process is a great way to reflect on yourself and discover the great things you have done. Don't be afraid. Just show who you are and what you are passionate about.

Amy: As I mentioned before, just be honest and speak in your own voice. The scholarship committee wants to know who you are, which includes all of the awesome things you've accomplished but also the road you've taken to get where you are and your potential to do the many incredible things you'll do in the future. Also, don't hesitate to apply! I was so close to never submitting my application because I truly believed there was no way I was possibly good enough. I had the same fear when applying for my first internship. You just need to remember that you are awesome, and if you don't apply, you'll never know you had it in you!

What are the next steps for you?
Alma: I recently graduated from my MSc. and I now work as a Software Engineer at Google Play. I hope to continue passing it on through the scholars community.

Amy: I certainly can't see myself leaving Google anytime soon. I love my job and my team - it's exciting being at the center of a product that is so important to the company and our users!

Read more about the program and apply here! We are currently accepting applications for the US, Canada and EMEA. Applications for Asia Pacific will open in early 2017.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/spotlight-on-women-techmakers-scholars-amy-alma-spoiler-alert-application-advice/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: Linux XIA https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-linux-xia/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-linux-xia/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2016 18:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=2056b88cad6d9978d14e1ffd93de06f8 We're sharing guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code 2016. This is the fifth post in that series and there are more on the way.


Linux XIA is the native implementation of XIA, a meta network architecture that supports evolution of all of its components, which we call “principals,” and promotes interoperability between these principals. It is the second year that our organization, Boston University / XIA, has participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and this year we received 31 proposals from 8 countries.

Our ideas list this year focused on upgrading key forwarding data structures to their best known versions. Our group chose the most deserving students for each of the following projects:

Accelerating the forwarding speed of the LPM principal with poptrie

Student André Ferreira Eleuterio and mentor Cody Doucette implemented the first version of the LPM principal in Linux XIA for GSoC 2015. The LPM principal enables Linux XIA to leverage routing tables derived from BGP, OSPF, IS-IS and any other IP routing protocol to forward XIA packets natively, that is, without encapsulation in IP. For GSoC 2016, student Vaibhav Raj Gupta from India partnered with mentor Cody Doucette to speed up the LPM principal by employing a state-of-the-art data structure to find the longest prefix matching using general purpose processors: poptrie.

Upgrading the FIB hash table of principals to the relativistic hash table

Principals that rely on routing flat names have used a resizable hash table that supports lockless readers since 2011. While this data structure was unique in 2011, in the same year, relativistic hash tables were published. The appeal to upgrade to relativistic hash tables was twofold: reduced memory footprint per hashed element, and the fact they were implemented in the Linux kernel in 2014. Student Sachin Paryani, also from India, worked with mentor Qiaobin Fu to replace our resizable hash table with the relativistic hash table.

Google Summer of Code nurtures a brighter future. Thanks to GSoC, our project has received important code contributions, and our community has been enlarged. It was rewarding to learn that two of our GSoC students have decided to pursue graduate school after their GSoC experience with us: Pranav Goswami (2015) and Sachin Paryani (2016). We hope these examples will motivate other students to do their best because the world is what we make of it.

By Michel Machado, Boston University / XIA organization administrator]]> We're sharing guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code 2016. This is the fifth post in that series and there are more on the way.


Linux XIA is the native implementation of XIA, a meta network architecture that supports evolution of all of its components, which we call “principals,” and promotes interoperability between these principals. It is the second year that our organization, Boston University / XIA, has participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and this year we received 31 proposals from 8 countries.

Our ideas list this year focused on upgrading key forwarding data structures to their best known versions. Our group chose the most deserving students for each of the following projects:

Accelerating the forwarding speed of the LPM principal with poptrie

Student André Ferreira Eleuterio and mentor Cody Doucette implemented the first version of the LPM principal in Linux XIA for GSoC 2015. The LPM principal enables Linux XIA to leverage routing tables derived from BGP, OSPF, IS-IS and any other IP routing protocol to forward XIA packets natively, that is, without encapsulation in IP. For GSoC 2016, student Vaibhav Raj Gupta from India partnered with mentor Cody Doucette to speed up the LPM principal by employing a state-of-the-art data structure to find the longest prefix matching using general purpose processors: poptrie.

Upgrading the FIB hash table of principals to the relativistic hash table

Principals that rely on routing flat names have used a resizable hash table that supports lockless readers since 2011. While this data structure was unique in 2011, in the same year, relativistic hash tables were published. The appeal to upgrade to relativistic hash tables was twofold: reduced memory footprint per hashed element, and the fact they were implemented in the Linux kernel in 2014. Student Sachin Paryani, also from India, worked with mentor Qiaobin Fu to replace our resizable hash table with the relativistic hash table.

Google Summer of Code nurtures a brighter future. Thanks to GSoC, our project has received important code contributions, and our community has been enlarged. It was rewarding to learn that two of our GSoC students have decided to pursue graduate school after their GSoC experience with us: Pranav Goswami (2015) and Sachin Paryani (2016). We hope these examples will motivate other students to do their best because the world is what we make of it.

By Michel Machado, Boston University / XIA organization administrator]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-linux-xia/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: Debian https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-debian/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-debian/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2016 17:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=6f368f9dd074ae2ea45b67339da6dfcd This is the fourth post in our series of wrap-ups and guest posts from participants reflecting on Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. Explore the first three posts and stay tuned for more wrap-ups and announcements.



Debian, founded in 1993, is a project aimed at building a 100% free and open source “Universal Operating System.” It’s a volunteer-driven project based on Linux, FreeBSD
and Hurd kernels for devices ranging from mobile phones to large clusters.

Being a wide umbrella project, Debian offered a diverse array of opportunities for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students. For example, students worked on making our distribution more trustworthy (reproducible builds), porting our OS to Android devices and improving infrastructure for developers. This year I joined the Debian Real-Time Communications (RTC) mentoring team which engaged 13 students to improve voice, video and chat communication with free software.

WebRTC, an open standard enabling real-time video and audio communication in the browser, is central to this work. It was used to create JSCommunicator, an embeddable WebRTC phone developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, supporting voice, video and chat using SIP over WebSockets. A GSoC 2014 student, Juliana Louback, significantly enhanced JSCommunicator during her summer with Debian.

JSCommunicator is now being adapted for use with content management systems (CMS) and blogging platforms, making it easy to embed rich communication features in existing systems. It was this work that our current GSoC students built on.

This year I mentored GSoC student Mesut Can Gurle who used DruCall, a Drupal module for integrating JSCommunicator, as inspiration for building WPCall for WordPress. With this new plug-in, standards-based voice, video and chat is now available on the world’s two most popular CMS without the need for browser plugins.

The way WPCall was extrapolated from the DruCall plugin provides a pattern that other communities can follow to rapidly create WebRTC plugins for their own web frameworks. The JSCommunicator Integration Guide provides step-by-step instructions that developers and future students can follow. If you’re interested in learning more about significant developments in this space, please subscribe to the Free-RTC Announce mailing list and follow planet.freertc.org.

This was my first year as a GSoC mentor and I had such a great experience. It was rewarding working with Mesut on achieving his goals and we learned a lot along the way. Despite some setbacks (he narrowly missed a bombing as his country experienced an attempted coup), Mesut has made valuable contributions to free software.

As the summer wound down, I received an invitation to participate in a t-shirt design contest for the annual Mentor Summit. I thought it would be fun to try and put together a design focusing on GSoC’s key values.

The front of the t-shirt shows developers from all over the world collaborating on free software, representing the amazing scope and diversity of the projects. On the back, above the clouds, a space shuttle symbolizes what’s achieved through GSoC.

A group of attendees wearing the Google Summer of Code 2016 Mentor Summit t-shirt.

Happily, my design was selected and it was great seeing all the attendees wearing it at the Mentor Summit!

By Bruno Magalhães, Mentor for Debian]]> This is the fourth post in our series of wrap-ups and guest posts from participants reflecting on Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. Explore the first three posts and stay tuned for more wrap-ups and announcements.



Debian, founded in 1993, is a project aimed at building a 100% free and open source “Universal Operating System.” It’s a volunteer-driven project based on Linux, FreeBSD
and Hurd kernels for devices ranging from mobile phones to large clusters.

Being a wide umbrella project, Debian offered a diverse array of opportunities for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students. For example, students worked on making our distribution more trustworthy (reproducible builds), porting our OS to Android devices and improving infrastructure for developers. This year I joined the Debian Real-Time Communications (RTC) mentoring team which engaged 13 students to improve voice, video and chat communication with free software.

WebRTC, an open standard enabling real-time video and audio communication in the browser, is central to this work. It was used to create JSCommunicator, an embeddable WebRTC phone developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, supporting voice, video and chat using SIP over WebSockets. A GSoC 2014 student, Juliana Louback, significantly enhanced JSCommunicator during her summer with Debian.

JSCommunicator is now being adapted for use with content management systems (CMS) and blogging platforms, making it easy to embed rich communication features in existing systems. It was this work that our current GSoC students built on.

This year I mentored GSoC student Mesut Can Gurle who used DruCall, a Drupal module for integrating JSCommunicator, as inspiration for building WPCall for WordPress. With this new plug-in, standards-based voice, video and chat is now available on the world’s two most popular CMS without the need for browser plugins.

The way WPCall was extrapolated from the DruCall plugin provides a pattern that other communities can follow to rapidly create WebRTC plugins for their own web frameworks. The JSCommunicator Integration Guide provides step-by-step instructions that developers and future students can follow. If you’re interested in learning more about significant developments in this space, please subscribe to the Free-RTC Announce mailing list and follow planet.freertc.org.

This was my first year as a GSoC mentor and I had such a great experience. It was rewarding working with Mesut on achieving his goals and we learned a lot along the way. Despite some setbacks (he narrowly missed a bombing as his country experienced an attempted coup), Mesut has made valuable contributions to free software.

As the summer wound down, I received an invitation to participate in a t-shirt design contest for the annual Mentor Summit. I thought it would be fun to try and put together a design focusing on GSoC’s key values.

The front of the t-shirt shows developers from all over the world collaborating on free software, representing the amazing scope and diversity of the projects. On the back, above the clouds, a space shuttle symbolizes what’s achieved through GSoC.

A group of attendees wearing the Google Summer of Code 2016 Mentor Summit t-shirt.

Happily, my design was selected and it was great seeing all the attendees wearing it at the Mentor Summit!

By Bruno Magalhães, Mentor for Debian]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-debian/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 blog post round-up https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-blog-post-round-up/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-blog-post-round-up/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2016 15:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=305a56aa725771b2c00c39aca8774ede Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students, mentors and organizations every week and more are coming. Many have already written GSoC wrap-up posts on their own blogs, so we’ve rounded them up for you to explore.


“Static types in Python, oh my(py)!” by Tim Abbott, org admin for Zulip
“We posted mypy annotations as one of our project ideas for Google Summer of Code (GSoC). We found an incredible student, Eklavya Sharma, for the project. Eklavya did the vast majority of the hard work of annotating Zulip. Amazingly, he also found the time during the summer to migrate Zulip to use virtualenvs and then upgrade Zulip to Python 3!”


“A road from Google Summer of Code student to organization administrator” by Araz Abishov, org admin for HISP
“Google has created unprecedented opportunity both for young developers and open source communities, which I think everyone should take advantage of. GSoC is more than just a three months internship, and I hope that this post will be a good example of how it can change anyone’s life.”


“Summer of Code 2016: Wrapping it up” by Martin Braun, org admin for GNU Radio
“This summer was a great summer in terms of student participation. All three students will be presenting their work (either in person, or via poster) at this year’s GNU Radio Conference in Boulder, Colorado.”


“2016 Google Summer of Code Wrap-Up” by Ed Cable, org admin for Mifos Initiative
“Each year GSoC continues to unite and grow our community in different ways. Once again, we received incredibly valuable contributions to our Mifos X web and mobile clients this summer; most importantly we have cultivated numerous passionate contributors that will be a part of our community long into the future.”


“Road to GSoC 2016” by Minh Chu, student who worked on Neverland for KDE
“I was nervous about choosing a project. So many projects and requirements! After many hours, I finally decided to write a proposal for KDE’s Neverland Theme Builder and was accepted.”


“Git Rev News” by Christian Couder, mentor for Git
“Such performance improvements as well as the code consolidations around the sequencer are of course very nice. It is interesting and satisfying to see that they are the result of building on top of previous work over the years by GSoC students, mentors and reviewers.”


“Google Summer of Code 2016 Conclusion” by Amine Khaldi, org admin for ReactOS
“Students stumble upon many of the same difficulties ReactOS' own senior developers encountered during their early days, including that ever painful but necessary step to using a proper debugger instead of relying on printf statements in the code.”


“My Journey in Open Source / How to Get Started Contributing” by Nelson Liu, student who worked on scikit-learn for PSF
“The best way to get started is to simply jump in! There are a myriad of ways to contribute to an open source project. Obviously, writing code to fix bugs, add new features, or enhance existing ones are useful. However, you don't have to write code to help out!”


“Lasp and the Google Summer of Code” by Borja o’Cook, student who worked on Lasp for BEAM Community
“All in all, it's been an amazing experience. I've received a lot of support from my mentors and teammates; the Lasp team is full of incredible people.”


“GSoC 2016 Students in TEAMMATES” by Damith C. Rajapakse, org admin for TEAMMATES
“We had our biggest batch of students (7 students) in GSoC 2016, selected from 93 proposals, and representing 4 countries and 4 universities, working on TEAMMATES (an online feedback management system for education) and related sub projects.”


“User-friendly encryption now in Drupal 8!” by Colan Schwartz, mentor for Drupal
“There were several students interested in the topic, and wrote proposals to match. Talha Paracha's excellent proposal was accepted, and he began in earnest. With Adam Bergstein (nerdstein) and I mentoring him, Talha successfully worked through all phases of the project.”


“GSoC with Shogun” by Sanuj Sharma, student who worked on Shogun
“This was an excellent learning experience for me and I got to work with people from different countries (UK, Russia, Singapore, Germany) and cultures. I highly recommend students to participate in Google Summer of Code by looking for projects that interest them because having open source experience is highly beneficial, especially for programmers.”


We have wrap-up posts coming out every week so stay tuned for more. If you’re interested in participating in Google Summer of Code 2017, you can find details here.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office]]> Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students, mentors and organizations every week and more are coming. Many have already written GSoC wrap-up posts on their own blogs, so we’ve rounded them up for you to explore.


“Static types in Python, oh my(py)!” by Tim Abbott, org admin for Zulip
“We posted mypy annotations as one of our project ideas for Google Summer of Code (GSoC). We found an incredible student, Eklavya Sharma, for the project. Eklavya did the vast majority of the hard work of annotating Zulip. Amazingly, he also found the time during the summer to migrate Zulip to use virtualenvs and then upgrade Zulip to Python 3!”


“A road from Google Summer of Code student to organization administrator” by Araz Abishov, org admin for HISP
“Google has created unprecedented opportunity both for young developers and open source communities, which I think everyone should take advantage of. GSoC is more than just a three months internship, and I hope that this post will be a good example of how it can change anyone’s life.”


“Summer of Code 2016: Wrapping it up” by Martin Braun, org admin for GNU Radio
“This summer was a great summer in terms of student participation. All three students will be presenting their work (either in person, or via poster) at this year’s GNU Radio Conference in Boulder, Colorado.”


“2016 Google Summer of Code Wrap-Up” by Ed Cable, org admin for Mifos Initiative
“Each year GSoC continues to unite and grow our community in different ways. Once again, we received incredibly valuable contributions to our Mifos X web and mobile clients this summer; most importantly we have cultivated numerous passionate contributors that will be a part of our community long into the future.”


“Road to GSoC 2016” by Minh Chu, student who worked on Neverland for KDE
“I was nervous about choosing a project. So many projects and requirements! After many hours, I finally decided to write a proposal for KDE’s Neverland Theme Builder and was accepted.”


“Git Rev News” by Christian Couder, mentor for Git
“Such performance improvements as well as the code consolidations around the sequencer are of course very nice. It is interesting and satisfying to see that they are the result of building on top of previous work over the years by GSoC students, mentors and reviewers.”


“Google Summer of Code 2016 Conclusion” by Amine Khaldi, org admin for ReactOS
“Students stumble upon many of the same difficulties ReactOS' own senior developers encountered during their early days, including that ever painful but necessary step to using a proper debugger instead of relying on printf statements in the code.”


“My Journey in Open Source / How to Get Started Contributing” by Nelson Liu, student who worked on scikit-learn for PSF
“The best way to get started is to simply jump in! There are a myriad of ways to contribute to an open source project. Obviously, writing code to fix bugs, add new features, or enhance existing ones are useful. However, you don't have to write code to help out!”


“Lasp and the Google Summer of Code” by Borja o’Cook, student who worked on Lasp for BEAM Community
“All in all, it's been an amazing experience. I've received a lot of support from my mentors and teammates; the Lasp team is full of incredible people.”


“GSoC 2016 Students in TEAMMATES” by Damith C. Rajapakse, org admin for TEAMMATES
“We had our biggest batch of students (7 students) in GSoC 2016, selected from 93 proposals, and representing 4 countries and 4 universities, working on TEAMMATES (an online feedback management system for education) and related sub projects.”


“User-friendly encryption now in Drupal 8!” by Colan Schwartz, mentor for Drupal
“There were several students interested in the topic, and wrote proposals to match. Talha Paracha's excellent proposal was accepted, and he began in earnest. With Adam Bergstein (nerdstein) and I mentoring him, Talha successfully worked through all phases of the project.”


“GSoC with Shogun” by Sanuj Sharma, student who worked on Shogun
“This was an excellent learning experience for me and I got to work with people from different countries (UK, Russia, Singapore, Germany) and cultures. I highly recommend students to participate in Google Summer of Code by looking for projects that interest them because having open source experience is highly beneficial, especially for programmers.”


We have wrap-up posts coming out every week so stay tuned for more. If you’re interested in participating in Google Summer of Code 2017, you can find details here.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-blog-post-round-up/feed/ 0 Announcing the Google Code-in 2016 mentor organizations https://googledata.org/google-open-source/announcing-the-google-code-in-2016-mentor-organizations/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/announcing-the-google-code-in-2016-mentor-organizations/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2016 17:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=47e5387e993d2632a0793357aebf0174 Google Code-in 2016. The contest, now in its seventh year, gives 13-17 year old pre-university students the opportunity to learn under the guidance of mentors by using their skills on real world applications, that is, open source projects.

Google Code-in officially starts for students on November 28, but students are encouraged to learn about the mentor organizations ahead of time and can get started by clicking on the links below.


  • Apertium - rule-based machine translation platform
  • BRL-CAD - computer graphics, 2D and 3D geometry modeling, and computer-aided design (CAD)
  • CCExtractor - open source tools for subtitle generation
  • Copyleft Games - building game development platforms for tomorrow
  • Drupal - content management platform
  • FOSSASIA - developing communities across all ages and borders to form a better future with Open Technologies and ICT
  • Haiku - operating system specifically targeting personal computing
  • KDE - team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing
  • MetaBrainz - builds community maintained databases
  • Mifos Initiative - transforming the delivery of financial services to the poor and the unbanked
  • MovingBlocks - like an open source Minecraft
  • OpenMRS - open source medical records system for the world
  • SCoRe - research lab that seeks sustainable solutions for problems faced by developing countries
  • Sugar Labs - learning platform and activities for elementary education
  • Systers - community for women involved in the technical aspects of computing
  • Wikimedia - non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world, operating Wikipedia
  • Zulip - powerful, threaded open source group chat with apps for every major platform
Mentor organizations are currently creating thousands of tasks for students covering code, documentation, user interface, quality assurance, outreach, research and training. The contest officially starts for students on Monday, November 28th at 9:00am PST.

You can learn more about Google Code-in on the contest site where you’ll find Contest Rules, Frequently Asked Questions and Important Dates. There you’ll also find flyers and other helpful information including the Getting Started Guide. Our discussion mailing list is a great way to talk with other students, mentors and organization administrators about the contest. For questions about eligibility or other general questions, you can contact us at gci-support@google.com.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

]]> Google Code-in 2016. The contest, now in its seventh year, gives 13-17 year old pre-university students the opportunity to learn under the guidance of mentors by using their skills on real world applications, that is, open source projects.

Google Code-in officially starts for students on November 28, but students are encouraged to learn about the mentor organizations ahead of time and can get started by clicking on the links below.


  • Apertium - rule-based machine translation platform
  • BRL-CAD - computer graphics, 2D and 3D geometry modeling, and computer-aided design (CAD)
  • CCExtractor - open source tools for subtitle generation
  • Copyleft Games - building game development platforms for tomorrow
  • Drupal - content management platform
  • FOSSASIA - developing communities across all ages and borders to form a better future with Open Technologies and ICT
  • Haiku - operating system specifically targeting personal computing
  • KDE - team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing
  • MetaBrainz - builds community maintained databases
  • Mifos Initiative - transforming the delivery of financial services to the poor and the unbanked
  • MovingBlocks - like an open source Minecraft
  • OpenMRS - open source medical records system for the world
  • SCoRe - research lab that seeks sustainable solutions for problems faced by developing countries
  • Sugar Labs - learning platform and activities for elementary education
  • Systers - community for women involved in the technical aspects of computing
  • Wikimedia - non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world, operating Wikipedia
  • Zulip - powerful, threaded open source group chat with apps for every major platform
Mentor organizations are currently creating thousands of tasks for students covering code, documentation, user interface, quality assurance, outreach, research and training. The contest officially starts for students on Monday, November 28th at 9:00am PST.

You can learn more about Google Code-in on the contest site where you’ll find Contest Rules, Frequently Asked Questions and Important Dates. There you’ll also find flyers and other helpful information including the Getting Started Guide. Our discussion mailing list is a great way to talk with other students, mentors and organization administrators about the contest. For questions about eligibility or other general questions, you can contact us at gci-support@google.com.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/announcing-the-google-code-in-2016-mentor-organizations/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: GNU Radio https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-gnu-radio/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-gnu-radio/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=a7ab8174580747d9a17888bae92c483f This post is the third installment in our series of wrap-up posts reflecting on Google Summer of Code 2016. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

Originally posted on GNU Radio Blog

The summer has come to an end -- along with the Summer of Code for GNU Radio. It was a great season in terms of student participation, and as the students are preparing their last commits, this seems a good time to summarize their efforts.

All students presented their work (either in person, or via poster) at this year’s GNU Radio Conference in Boulder, Colorado.

gr-inspector

With gr-inspector, GNU Radio now has its own out-of-tree module, which serves as a repository for signal analysis algorithms, but also as a collection of fantastic examples. This module was created and worked on by Sebastian Müller, who was funded by Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and Christopher Richardson, who participated as a Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) student funded by the European Space Agency. Sebastian also created a video demonstrating some of the features:


Both Sebastian and Chris have written up their efforts on their own blogs.

PyBOMBS GUI

Ravi Sharan was our other GSoC student, primarily working on a GUI for PyBOMBS, our installation helper tool. Ravi also worked on a bunch of other things, and has summarized his efforts as well.

The PyBOMBS GUI is written in Qt, and is a nice extension to our out-of-tree module ecosystem:


While some developers prefer the comfort of their command line environments, we hope that the PyBOMBS GUI will ease the entry for more new developers. The GUI ties in nicely with CGRAN, and with the correct setup, users can directly launch installation of out-of-tree modules from their browser.

Want to participate? Have ideas?

We will definitely apply for GSoC and SOCIS again next year! If you want to participate as a student, it helps a lot to get involved with the community early on. We also recommend you sign up for the mailing list, and get involved with GNU Radio by using it, reporting and fixing issues, or even publishing your own out-of-tree module. For more ideas, take a look at our summer of code wiki pages.

If you simply have ideas for future projects, those are welcome too! Suggest those on the mailing list, or simply edit the wiki page.

By Martin Braun, Organization Administrator for GNU Radio]]> This post is the third installment in our series of wrap-up posts reflecting on Google Summer of Code 2016. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

Originally posted on GNU Radio Blog

The summer has come to an end -- along with the Summer of Code for GNU Radio. It was a great season in terms of student participation, and as the students are preparing their last commits, this seems a good time to summarize their efforts.

All students presented their work (either in person, or via poster) at this year’s GNU Radio Conference in Boulder, Colorado.

gr-inspector

With gr-inspector, GNU Radio now has its own out-of-tree module, which serves as a repository for signal analysis algorithms, but also as a collection of fantastic examples. This module was created and worked on by Sebastian Müller, who was funded by Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and Christopher Richardson, who participated as a Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) student funded by the European Space Agency. Sebastian also created a video demonstrating some of the features:


Both Sebastian and Chris have written up their efforts on their own blogs.

PyBOMBS GUI

Ravi Sharan was our other GSoC student, primarily working on a GUI for PyBOMBS, our installation helper tool. Ravi also worked on a bunch of other things, and has summarized his efforts as well.

The PyBOMBS GUI is written in Qt, and is a nice extension to our out-of-tree module ecosystem:


While some developers prefer the comfort of their command line environments, we hope that the PyBOMBS GUI will ease the entry for more new developers. The GUI ties in nicely with CGRAN, and with the correct setup, users can directly launch installation of out-of-tree modules from their browser.

Want to participate? Have ideas?

We will definitely apply for GSoC and SOCIS again next year! If you want to participate as a student, it helps a lot to get involved with the community early on. We also recommend you sign up for the mailing list, and get involved with GNU Radio by using it, reporting and fixing issues, or even publishing your own out-of-tree module. For more ideas, take a look at our summer of code wiki pages.

If you simply have ideas for future projects, those are welcome too! Suggest those on the mailing list, or simply edit the wiki page.

By Martin Braun, Organization Administrator for GNU Radio]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-gnu-radio/feed/ 0 Google Code-in 2016 now accepting organization applications https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-code-in-2016-now-accepting-organization-applications/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-code-in-2016-now-accepting-organization-applications/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=7964be2fb1a1533654a66ab53ef93807
Google Code-in is our global online contest that invites pre-university students ages 13-17 to learn by contributing to open source software. The contest begins its 7th year on November 28th, 2016. With the start date of the contest rapidly approaching, we are now accepting applications for open source projects interested in being a part of Google Code-in.

Working with young students is a special responsibility and each year we hear inspiring stories from mentors who participate. To ensure these new, young contributors have a great support system, we select organizations that have gained experience in mentoring students by previously taking part in Google Summer of Code.

There were 14 organizations in 2015 that collectively created thousands of bite-sized tasks for students to choose from. Tasks are created in 5 categories:

  • Code: writing or refactoring 
  • Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
  • Outreach/Research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
  • Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  • User Interface: user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Once an organization is selected for Google Code-in 2016 they will define these tasks and recruit mentors who are interested in providing online support for students.

You can find a timeline, FAQ and other information about Google Code-in on our website. If you’re an educator interested in sharing Google Code-in with your students, you can find resources here.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

]]>
Google Code-in is our global online contest that invites pre-university students ages 13-17 to learn by contributing to open source software. The contest begins its 7th year on November 28th, 2016. With the start date of the contest rapidly approaching, we are now accepting applications for open source projects interested in being a part of Google Code-in.

Working with young students is a special responsibility and each year we hear inspiring stories from mentors who participate. To ensure these new, young contributors have a great support system, we select organizations that have gained experience in mentoring students by previously taking part in Google Summer of Code.

There were 14 organizations in 2015 that collectively created thousands of bite-sized tasks for students to choose from. Tasks are created in 5 categories:

  • Code: writing or refactoring 
  • Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
  • Outreach/Research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
  • Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  • User Interface: user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Once an organization is selected for Google Code-in 2016 they will define these tasks and recruit mentors who are interested in providing online support for students.

You can find a timeline, FAQ and other information about Google Code-in on our website. If you’re an educator interested in sharing Google Code-in with your students, you can find resources here.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-code-in-2016-now-accepting-organization-applications/feed/ 0 Bring developers at your university together for Hash Code 2017! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/bring-developers-at-your-university-together-for-hash-code-2017/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/bring-developers-at-your-university-together-for-hash-code-2017/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2016 10:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=850dad8462f3b62373f3c3a679568f51




Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be an engineer at Google?

Now’s your chance to satisfy your curiosity by volunteering to host a Hash Code hub at your university. Hash Code, a team-based programming competition, tasks university students and professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa with solving a real Google engineering problem. And we’re looking for developers to help bring the excitement to their own communities in February 2017. Are you up for the challenge?

Students compete in the Online Qualification Round in February 2016 from a hub at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain

Last year, 17,000 students and professionals from more than 90 countries teamed up to optimize drone delivery schedules for Hash Code’s Online Qualification Round. While teams can compete from wherever they’d like to, many opted to join in from one of the 300+ hubs organized by fellow developers (where, it’s safe to say, they had a lot of fun).

Laco Pápay organized the hub at his university in Bratislava last year (and is now a Googler based in Zurich). “Before the competition started, we had a lot of fun with set-up: decorating the room, taking pictures for the hub photo contest,” he said. “When the problem was announced and people sat down to work, the fun continued. Competing against teams on a scoreboard is great, but it’s even more exciting if the teams you’re up against are sitting just one desk over.

Teams work together to schedule satellite operations during the 2016 Final Round at Google Paris.

The Online Qualification Round for 2017 will take place on February 23, 2017. From there, the top 50 teams will be invited to Google Paris for the Final Round on April 1.

If you think you might want to host a hub, find out more and sign up on our site. If you’re not able to host but would like to compete, you can be among the first to know when registration opens in December.


]]>




Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be an engineer at Google?

Now’s your chance to satisfy your curiosity by volunteering to host a Hash Code hub at your university. Hash Code, a team-based programming competition, tasks university students and professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa with solving a real Google engineering problem. And we’re looking for developers to help bring the excitement to their own communities in February 2017. Are you up for the challenge?

Students compete in the Online Qualification Round in February 2016 from a hub at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain

Last year, 17,000 students and professionals from more than 90 countries teamed up to optimize drone delivery schedules for Hash Code’s Online Qualification Round. While teams can compete from wherever they’d like to, many opted to join in from one of the 300+ hubs organized by fellow developers (where, it’s safe to say, they had a lot of fun).

Laco Pápay organized the hub at his university in Bratislava last year (and is now a Googler based in Zurich). “Before the competition started, we had a lot of fun with set-up: decorating the room, taking pictures for the hub photo contest,” he said. “When the problem was announced and people sat down to work, the fun continued. Competing against teams on a scoreboard is great, but it’s even more exciting if the teams you’re up against are sitting just one desk over.

Teams work together to schedule satellite operations during the 2016 Final Round at Google Paris.

The Online Qualification Round for 2017 will take place on February 23, 2017. From there, the top 50 teams will be invited to Google Paris for the Final Round on April 1.

If you think you might want to host a hub, find out more and sign up on our site. If you’re not able to host but would like to compete, you can be among the first to know when registration opens in December.


]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/bring-developers-at-your-university-together-for-hash-code-2017/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: NRNB https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-nrnb/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-nrnb/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=0883925dd4083e829ada282334ae5a65 This post is part of our series of Google Summer of Code wrap-ups, guest posts from students, mentors and organization admins reflecting on Google Summer of Code 2016. Don't miss our first post and follow along for more wrap-up posts and announcements.

We were so excited to be a part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) again after a year off, we pulled together over 50 project ideas and dozens of eager mentors to develop open source code for network biology research. Organized as the National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB), we selected 15 proposals that brought together well-matched students, mentors and project ideas.

All 15 students passed their midterm and final evaluations, resulting in a wide range of (mostly) production-ready code, covering algorithm, UI, importer and converter development for both web and desktop for Cytoscape, cytoscape.js, SBML, SBGN, cBioPortal, Cell Designer, GraphSpace and more.

We are proud of the technical accomplishments and productivity of our students, and we are also proud of the many important aspects of diversity our students represent in the GSoC program, including geographical, gender and academic. Here are some numbers and facts about our 15 students compared to overall GSoC 2016 student stats in parentheses:
  • 9 different countries, including 1 (of 2) from Croatia, 1 (of 3) from Armenia and 2 (of 12) from Turkey
  • 20% female (compared to 12% overall)
  • 67% Computer Science (compared to 78% overall), including PhD students in Biological Oceanography and Medical Biochemistry & Biotechnology, an MS student in Bioinformatics, and a pre-med undergraduate.



Here are some quotes and blogs from our students this year. If you are considering applying as student (or mentor) next year, here is some inspiration:

“I had the opportunity to learn and practice JavaScript with a very interesting project and having a mentor available was great for getting help when needed. The program seemed extremely well run and I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested.”

“Working in an NRNB [GSoC] training program helped to strengthen my resume and introduced me to the idea of combining a career in medicine with computer-based research.”

“I love the friendly atmosphere and the way the team works together. From the very beginning I [felt] well integrated in the group. It was pure fun to work together on the same project and to see how it [has] grown over the time. I [would] recommend everybody try the NRNB training program.”

Some of our student blogs:
  • Hovakim Grabski – "Java support for Deviser, a code generation system for SBML libraries"
  • Kaito Ii – "Interconvertible Layout software for CellDesigner" 
  • Roman Schulte – "Offline SBML validation in the Java-based JSBML library"
  • Mridul Seth – "Import graphs in multiple formats and Cytoscape files into GraphSpace"

By Alex Pico and Kristina Hanspers, Organization Administrators for NRNB
]]> This post is part of our series of Google Summer of Code wrap-ups, guest posts from students, mentors and organization admins reflecting on Google Summer of Code 2016. Don't miss our first post and follow along for more wrap-up posts and announcements.

We were so excited to be a part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) again after a year off, we pulled together over 50 project ideas and dozens of eager mentors to develop open source code for network biology research. Organized as the National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB), we selected 15 proposals that brought together well-matched students, mentors and project ideas.

All 15 students passed their midterm and final evaluations, resulting in a wide range of (mostly) production-ready code, covering algorithm, UI, importer and converter development for both web and desktop for Cytoscape, cytoscape.js, SBML, SBGN, cBioPortal, Cell Designer, GraphSpace and more.

We are proud of the technical accomplishments and productivity of our students, and we are also proud of the many important aspects of diversity our students represent in the GSoC program, including geographical, gender and academic. Here are some numbers and facts about our 15 students compared to overall GSoC 2016 student stats in parentheses:
  • 9 different countries, including 1 (of 2) from Croatia, 1 (of 3) from Armenia and 2 (of 12) from Turkey
  • 20% female (compared to 12% overall)
  • 67% Computer Science (compared to 78% overall), including PhD students in Biological Oceanography and Medical Biochemistry & Biotechnology, an MS student in Bioinformatics, and a pre-med undergraduate.



Here are some quotes and blogs from our students this year. If you are considering applying as student (or mentor) next year, here is some inspiration:

“I had the opportunity to learn and practice JavaScript with a very interesting project and having a mentor available was great for getting help when needed. The program seemed extremely well run and I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested.”

“Working in an NRNB [GSoC] training program helped to strengthen my resume and introduced me to the idea of combining a career in medicine with computer-based research.”

“I love the friendly atmosphere and the way the team works together. From the very beginning I [felt] well integrated in the group. It was pure fun to work together on the same project and to see how it [has] grown over the time. I [would] recommend everybody try the NRNB training program.”

Some of our student blogs:
  • Hovakim Grabski – "Java support for Deviser, a code generation system for SBML libraries"
  • Kaito Ii – "Interconvertible Layout software for CellDesigner" 
  • Roman Schulte – "Offline SBML validation in the Java-based JSBML library"
  • Mridul Seth – "Import graphs in multiple formats and Cytoscape files into GraphSpace"

By Alex Pico and Kristina Hanspers, Organization Administrators for NRNB
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-nrnb/feed/ 0 Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: HUES Platform https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-hues-platform/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-hues-platform/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2016 15:47:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=c36944e6269a1415e7bdda23a568ed59 Every year Google Summer of Code pairs university students with mentors to hone their skills while working on open source projects, and every year we like to post wrap-ups from the open source projects about their experience and what students accomplished. Stay tuned for more!



The Holistic Urban Energy Simulation (HUES) platform is an open source platform for facilitating the design and control of renewables-based distributed energy systems. The platform is an initiative of the Urban Energy Systems Laboratory at Empa in Switzerland, in collaboration with our research partners at ETH-Zurich, EPFL, the University of Geneva and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences. As we push towards the second version of the HUES platform, we had help from three bright and enthusiastic students as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Project 1: Real-time wind flow in cities
Air flow pattern around a building configuration (left); link to Rhinoceros/Grasshopper (middle & right)
People in cities are suffering more and more from scorching heat, caused by global warming and bad urban planning. This traps heat inside cities and has led to soaring air conditioning demand, making cities even hotter - a vicious circle!  Clever bioclimatic urban design can mitigate urban heat by facilitating the use of natural ventilation and guiding air streams. However, the simulation of wind flow is a computationally and technically demanding task. There is a need to provide urban planners and architects with a tool able to predict wind flow patterns in real-time to facilitate development of energy efficient and passive designs.

Lukas Bystricky, a student at Florida State University, developed a Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) library in C# exactly for this purpose. Lukas’s implementation is based on the  paper by Jos Stam (1999). In contrast to the original implementation, where a cell centred finite difference is used to discretize the equations, Lukas applies a staggered grid finite difference, which is the standard finite difference in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This is done to prevent spurious pressure oscillations near the boundary which can occur in cell centered finite difference for the Navier-Stokes equations. This does not change much in the algorithm or solvers, but makes enforcing the boundary conditions significantly more complicated. So far, Lukas uses a simple Jacobi solver as linear solver, as was the case in Stam's original implementation, but he plans to replace it with more efficient solvers in the future. Also, he is validating his library with typical benchmarks. 

We are now coupling Lukas’s library into our HUES platform, more specifically into the 3D CAD software Rhinoceros and its visual programming platform Grasshopper. The final goal is to have an intuitive real-time visual design tool of wind flow for urban planners and architects. Also, we will use it to couple it to whole year dynamic building energy simulation programs, to better capture microclimatic effects of the urban context in simulating building energy consumption of designs.

Project 2: Modular energy hub modeling framework
A connection between two bus objects in a CopyHub container
Distributed energy system components are modular in nature and interact across multiple scales. As such, there is a need for a modeling framework that can easily construct and configure systems of modular entities (energy demands, sources, converters, storages and network links) across scales. Frederik Banis, a student at the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart, developed a modular approach to modeling distributed multi-energy systems (energy hubs) in Python, based on the Open Energy System Modelling Framework (Oemof) and Pyomo. 

In the developed framework, energy systems components are specified in a common format allowing for easy duplication and reconfiguring at larger scales. The platform enables easy manipulation of an energy hub grouping multiple components (demand, sources: electricity, natural gas; systems: photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, gas boils, combined heat and power engines, etc.), as well as copying it (from hub1 to hub2) to create a larger interlinked system (district) where multiple energy hubs are connected. This hierarchical nested structure can be repeated as needed, and detailed results about the energy supply of each technology or energy stream can be analyzed in the form of different plots for each system or sub-system.

Project 3: Open source energy simulation database

The HUES platform includes a growing array of datasets describing the technical and economic characteristics of distributed energy technologies.  Currently, this data is stored in separate modules using different data structures and file formats, making it difficult to explore holistically and query systematically. To address this, GSoC student Khushboo Mandlecha has developed an open source database to enable the linked exploration, querying and visualization of data in the platform. 

The first part of the project involved the development of server based scripts to automatically extract relevant data from the modules of the existing HUES platform, and write this data to a common database. A standard format for technology component data was developed, enabling users to upload technology data files to be stored in the new database.  The new database has been developed in MongoDB, enabling fast data retrieval and allowing everything to be retrieved in the form of JSON objects. The second part of the project involved the development of a web-based portal for querying, visualizing and downloading data. Once this portal is complete, it will be possible to visualize the contents of the database in different ways, enabling users to get a sense of the distribution of property values and facilitating the identification of outliers.  Ultimately, the database will help researchers and practitioners using the HUES platform to develop models and perform comprehensive analyses of distributed energy systems.

By L. Andrew Bollinger, Julien Marquant and Christoph Waibel; Urban Energy Systems Laboratory, Empa, Switzerland
]]> Every year Google Summer of Code pairs university students with mentors to hone their skills while working on open source projects, and every year we like to post wrap-ups from the open source projects about their experience and what students accomplished. Stay tuned for more!



The Holistic Urban Energy Simulation (HUES) platform is an open source platform for facilitating the design and control of renewables-based distributed energy systems. The platform is an initiative of the Urban Energy Systems Laboratory at Empa in Switzerland, in collaboration with our research partners at ETH-Zurich, EPFL, the University of Geneva and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences. As we push towards the second version of the HUES platform, we had help from three bright and enthusiastic students as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Project 1: Real-time wind flow in cities
Air flow pattern around a building configuration (left); link to Rhinoceros/Grasshopper (middle & right)
People in cities are suffering more and more from scorching heat, caused by global warming and bad urban planning. This traps heat inside cities and has led to soaring air conditioning demand, making cities even hotter - a vicious circle!  Clever bioclimatic urban design can mitigate urban heat by facilitating the use of natural ventilation and guiding air streams. However, the simulation of wind flow is a computationally and technically demanding task. There is a need to provide urban planners and architects with a tool able to predict wind flow patterns in real-time to facilitate development of energy efficient and passive designs.

Lukas Bystricky, a student at Florida State University, developed a Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) library in C# exactly for this purpose. Lukas’s implementation is based on the  paper by Jos Stam (1999). In contrast to the original implementation, where a cell centred finite difference is used to discretize the equations, Lukas applies a staggered grid finite difference, which is the standard finite difference in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This is done to prevent spurious pressure oscillations near the boundary which can occur in cell centered finite difference for the Navier-Stokes equations. This does not change much in the algorithm or solvers, but makes enforcing the boundary conditions significantly more complicated. So far, Lukas uses a simple Jacobi solver as linear solver, as was the case in Stam's original implementation, but he plans to replace it with more efficient solvers in the future. Also, he is validating his library with typical benchmarks. 

We are now coupling Lukas’s library into our HUES platform, more specifically into the 3D CAD software Rhinoceros and its visual programming platform Grasshopper. The final goal is to have an intuitive real-time visual design tool of wind flow for urban planners and architects. Also, we will use it to couple it to whole year dynamic building energy simulation programs, to better capture microclimatic effects of the urban context in simulating building energy consumption of designs.

Project 2: Modular energy hub modeling framework
A connection between two bus objects in a CopyHub container
Distributed energy system components are modular in nature and interact across multiple scales. As such, there is a need for a modeling framework that can easily construct and configure systems of modular entities (energy demands, sources, converters, storages and network links) across scales. Frederik Banis, a student at the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart, developed a modular approach to modeling distributed multi-energy systems (energy hubs) in Python, based on the Open Energy System Modelling Framework (Oemof) and Pyomo. 

In the developed framework, energy systems components are specified in a common format allowing for easy duplication and reconfiguring at larger scales. The platform enables easy manipulation of an energy hub grouping multiple components (demand, sources: electricity, natural gas; systems: photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, gas boils, combined heat and power engines, etc.), as well as copying it (from hub1 to hub2) to create a larger interlinked system (district) where multiple energy hubs are connected. This hierarchical nested structure can be repeated as needed, and detailed results about the energy supply of each technology or energy stream can be analyzed in the form of different plots for each system or sub-system.

Project 3: Open source energy simulation database

The HUES platform includes a growing array of datasets describing the technical and economic characteristics of distributed energy technologies.  Currently, this data is stored in separate modules using different data structures and file formats, making it difficult to explore holistically and query systematically. To address this, GSoC student Khushboo Mandlecha has developed an open source database to enable the linked exploration, querying and visualization of data in the platform. 

The first part of the project involved the development of server based scripts to automatically extract relevant data from the modules of the existing HUES platform, and write this data to a common database. A standard format for technology component data was developed, enabling users to upload technology data files to be stored in the new database.  The new database has been developed in MongoDB, enabling fast data retrieval and allowing everything to be retrieved in the form of JSON objects. The second part of the project involved the development of a web-based portal for querying, visualizing and downloading data. Once this portal is complete, it will be possible to visualize the contents of the database in different ways, enabling users to get a sense of the distribution of property values and facilitating the identification of outliers.  Ultimately, the database will help researchers and practitioners using the HUES platform to develop models and perform comprehensive analyses of distributed energy systems.

By L. Andrew Bollinger, Julien Marquant and Christoph Waibel; Urban Energy Systems Laboratory, Empa, Switzerland
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/google-summer-of-code-2016-wrap-up-hues-platform/feed/ 0 Google UK launches applications for Higher Level Apprenticeships in Digital Innovation https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-uk-launches-applications-for-higher-level-apprenticeships-in-digital-innovation/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-uk-launches-applications-for-higher-level-apprenticeships-in-digital-innovation/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2016 16:47:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=2d8ceec7d4126cfa4fa532e35bc8db06 We are delighted to open applications for the Higher Level Apprenticeship in Digital Innovation Program with Google UK! As the entry point for students’ career in technology, the Higher Level Apprenticeship in Digital Innovation Program provides the skills students need to pursue a career in tech. This apprenticeship targets students who want to experience working in a tech company, while at the same time studying towards a foundation degree in Computer Science.

Googler Divya Vishwanath.jpg


Students selected as apprentices will be assigned to a Google host for the duration of their two-year apprenticeship and will get the opportunity to work alongside a team of engineers to solve real-life problems. The program will start with a two-month initial training with our partner Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, in May 2017.



If this sounds interesting and you meet the minimum qualifications listed below, we encourage you to apply at goo.gl/tTkW52 before 31st December, 2016.


Minimum qualifications:
  • Have authorisation to work in the United Kingdom
  • A Levels (or equivalent) at grade B or above (or equivalent) in Math or Science related subjects
  • Ability to speak and write in English fluently and idiomatically
  • Prior coding experience in any programming language
For any questions, please email us at apprenticeship.lon@google.com.

Posted by the Tech Student Development team]]> We are delighted to open applications for the Higher Level Apprenticeship in Digital Innovation Program with Google UK! As the entry point for students’ career in technology, the Higher Level Apprenticeship in Digital Innovation Program provides the skills students need to pursue a career in tech. This apprenticeship targets students who want to experience working in a tech company, while at the same time studying towards a foundation degree in Computer Science.

Googler Divya Vishwanath.jpg


Students selected as apprentices will be assigned to a Google host for the duration of their two-year apprenticeship and will get the opportunity to work alongside a team of engineers to solve real-life problems. The program will start with a two-month initial training with our partner Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, in May 2017.



If this sounds interesting and you meet the minimum qualifications listed below, we encourage you to apply at goo.gl/tTkW52 before 31st December, 2016.


Minimum qualifications:
  • Have authorisation to work in the United Kingdom
  • A Levels (or equivalent) at grade B or above (or equivalent) in Math or Science related subjects
  • Ability to speak and write in English fluently and idiomatically
  • Prior coding experience in any programming language
For any questions, please email us at apprenticeship.lon@google.com.

Posted by the Tech Student Development team]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-uk-launches-applications-for-higher-level-apprenticeships-in-digital-innovation/feed/ 0 2017 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) Registrations are Now Open https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/2017-google-online-marketing-challenge-gomc-registrations-are-now-open/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/2017-google-online-marketing-challenge-gomc-registrations-are-now-open/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2016 18:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=d67b6959a80b59806f743f437bd42357 We are excited to announce the launch of the 10th edition of the Google Online Marketing Challenge! Professor and student registrations for the 2017 GOMC are now open.

What is GOMC?
GOMC is an annual global online marketing competition for students from higher education institutions around the world. Google provides student teams with a $250 Google AdWords budget to develop and run an online advertising campaign for a real business or nonprofit organization of their choice. An independent Academic Panel, along with AdWords experts at Google, review the campaigns and select winning teams based on the success of their campaigns and the quality of their competition reports.


Why GOMC?
GOMC gives professors a chance to bring marketing theory to life by engaging students and allowing them to:


  • Gain relevant and valuable skills through a practical hands-on learning experience
  • Build a true relationship with a client and make a real-life impact in their community
  • Gain exposure to the digital marketing landscape using real money on a live advertising platform
  • Become AdWords Certified as a way to showcase their AdWords knowledge to potential employers
  • Win awesome prizes like a trip to the Googleplex, a donation for their nonprofit partner, digital devices, cool Google swag and more


2016GOMCEuropeWinners.jpg
2016 GOMC Regional Europe Winners visiting the Google Ireland office.


Many students have found a real passion for helping businesses/nonprofits build awareness and find new customers by growing their online presence in this fast-paced digital world. Students have graduated and continued to work with their GOMC competition client, some have launched their career at a digital marketing agency, others have become entrepreneurs and used their skills to market their own business (or even start their own digital marketing agency to help local businesses in their community), and others have embarked on a career path at Google. Whether students find that digital marketing is the career for them or not, the valuable business, consulting and communication skills gained from working with their team on a comprehensive project, from strategy development, to execution and analysis, and working with a real business or nonprofit will help them prepare for a successful career.


To learn about the impact of the GOMC, check out the video below.



What's new?
Over 110,000 students and professors from almost 100 countries have participated in the past 9 years, and this year GOMC is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary with some exciting updates to the competition:


  • The optional Google+ Social Media Marketing category is being replaced with a new and exciting AdWords Certification Award.
  • In addition to all Winners, Finalists and Semi-Finalists, student teams completing the Challenge with a Strong performance rating will also receive a personalized certificate noting their status in the competition this year.
  • The algorithm has been updated to evaluate AdWords performance beyond text ads with a primary focus on the Search Network, and will now factor in the structure and performance of the following campaign types: Search Network Only Campaigns, Display Network Only Campaigns, Video Campaigns, Shopping Campaigns and Mobile App Promotion/Universal App Campaigns.
  • This year campaigns do not need to serve for a maximum of 21 consecutive calendar days and instead student teams have the option to pause their campaigns to optimize for their client’s business needs. See the competition Terms & Conditions for more details.
  • The Digital Marketing Course content has been completely revamped and includes new resources like the Digital Garage, a one-stop shop for mastering digital marketing with free courses on everything from search to social media, the Analytics Academy and resources on Google My Business.


How do I sign up?
In order for a student team to participate in the competition, they need to have their professor register first. Professors can choose to incorporate GOMC into their curriculum or informally support a group of interested students. Once the professor has registered, students can develop teams of 3-6 members and elect one team captain to register their team for the competition.


Professors Registrations Open: October 5, 2016 - March 22, 2017
Students Registrations Open: October 5, 2016 - April 5, 2017


For more information on the competition, please visit www.google.com/onlinechallenge and add our Google+ Page to your circles (google.com/+googleonlinemarketingchallenge) to receive regular competition updates and reminders.


Don’t miss out on this learning opportunity and chance to make a real-life impact. Register today!

The Google Online Marketing Challenge Team
]]> We are excited to announce the launch of the 10th edition of the Google Online Marketing Challenge! Professor and student registrations for the 2017 GOMC are now open.

What is GOMC?
GOMC is an annual global online marketing competition for students from higher education institutions around the world. Google provides student teams with a $250 Google AdWords budget to develop and run an online advertising campaign for a real business or nonprofit organization of their choice. An independent Academic Panel, along with AdWords experts at Google, review the campaigns and select winning teams based on the success of their campaigns and the quality of their competition reports.


Why GOMC?
GOMC gives professors a chance to bring marketing theory to life by engaging students and allowing them to:


  • Gain relevant and valuable skills through a practical hands-on learning experience
  • Build a true relationship with a client and make a real-life impact in their community
  • Gain exposure to the digital marketing landscape using real money on a live advertising platform
  • Become AdWords Certified as a way to showcase their AdWords knowledge to potential employers
  • Win awesome prizes like a trip to the Googleplex, a donation for their nonprofit partner, digital devices, cool Google swag and more


2016GOMCEuropeWinners.jpg
2016 GOMC Regional Europe Winners visiting the Google Ireland office.


Many students have found a real passion for helping businesses/nonprofits build awareness and find new customers by growing their online presence in this fast-paced digital world. Students have graduated and continued to work with their GOMC competition client, some have launched their career at a digital marketing agency, others have become entrepreneurs and used their skills to market their own business (or even start their own digital marketing agency to help local businesses in their community), and others have embarked on a career path at Google. Whether students find that digital marketing is the career for them or not, the valuable business, consulting and communication skills gained from working with their team on a comprehensive project, from strategy development, to execution and analysis, and working with a real business or nonprofit will help them prepare for a successful career.


To learn about the impact of the GOMC, check out the video below.



What's new?
Over 110,000 students and professors from almost 100 countries have participated in the past 9 years, and this year GOMC is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary with some exciting updates to the competition:


  • The optional Google+ Social Media Marketing category is being replaced with a new and exciting AdWords Certification Award.
  • In addition to all Winners, Finalists and Semi-Finalists, student teams completing the Challenge with a Strong performance rating will also receive a personalized certificate noting their status in the competition this year.
  • The algorithm has been updated to evaluate AdWords performance beyond text ads with a primary focus on the Search Network, and will now factor in the structure and performance of the following campaign types: Search Network Only Campaigns, Display Network Only Campaigns, Video Campaigns, Shopping Campaigns and Mobile App Promotion/Universal App Campaigns.
  • This year campaigns do not need to serve for a maximum of 21 consecutive calendar days and instead student teams have the option to pause their campaigns to optimize for their client’s business needs. See the competition Terms & Conditions for more details.
  • The Digital Marketing Course content has been completely revamped and includes new resources like the Digital Garage, a one-stop shop for mastering digital marketing with free courses on everything from search to social media, the Analytics Academy and resources on Google My Business.


How do I sign up?
In order for a student team to participate in the competition, they need to have their professor register first. Professors can choose to incorporate GOMC into their curriculum or informally support a group of interested students. Once the professor has registered, students can develop teams of 3-6 members and elect one team captain to register their team for the competition.


Professors Registrations Open: October 5, 2016 - March 22, 2017
Students Registrations Open: October 5, 2016 - April 5, 2017


For more information on the competition, please visit www.google.com/onlinechallenge and add our Google+ Page to your circles (google.com/+googleonlinemarketingchallenge) to receive regular competition updates and reminders.


Don’t miss out on this learning opportunity and chance to make a real-life impact. Register today!

The Google Online Marketing Challenge Team
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/2017-google-online-marketing-challenge-gomc-registrations-are-now-open/feed/ 0 Applications are open for 2017 scholarship opportunities in the US, Canada and EMEA! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-are-open-for-2017-scholarship-opportunities-in-the-us-canada-and-emea/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-are-open-for-2017-scholarship-opportunities-in-the-us-canada-and-emea/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2016 16:09:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=c496322a36ebf1c0cbbd7b3935650cfa Google is proud to offer academic scholarships and development opportunities to students from historically underrepresented groups pursuing computer science degrees.  We aim to help students from diverse backgrounds become future leaders and role models in computing and technology by breaking down the barriers that prevent them from entering these fields.  


Selected students will receive a financial award for the 2017-18 academic year and be invited to the annual Google Scholars' Retreat in their region next summer. At the retreat, scholars will participate in networking and development sessions, including sessions on how to lead outreach in their communities. Scholars also join long term a community of former scholarship recipients for continued networking and development.  Check out each program below:

Women Techmakers Scholars Program (US/Canada/EMEA - Asia Pacific will open in early 2017)
Formerly known as the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, we have joined forces with Google’s Women Techmakers program to continue to honor Dr. Anita Borg and her legacy. Dr. Borg devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing. The program is open to current female undergraduate or graduate students who will be studying at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.

The Generation Google Scholarship was established to help aspiring computer scientists excel in technology and become leaders in the field. This program supports current university students from underrepresented groups including African American, Hispanic, American Indian or Filipino/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander who will be studying at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.
The Generation Google Scholarship for current high school seniors in the US/Canada will open in early 2017.

We’ve partnered with Lime Connect (US/Canada) and EmployAbility (Europe), nonprofit organizations that support students with disabilities while they pursue education and promising careers, to help university students with disabilities work toward their academic goals in the field of computer science. The scholarship is open to current undergraduate or graduate students with disabilities who will be studying at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.

As part of our commitment to military veterans, Google established the Google SVA Scholarship in partnership with Student Veterans of America. The scholarship provides assistance to student veterans or students on Active Duty who are pursuing a degree in computer science at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Please visit each program’s website for specific details, application information and deadlines. We encourage all students who meet the eligibility criteria to apply!

]]> Google is proud to offer academic scholarships and development opportunities to students from historically underrepresented groups pursuing computer science degrees.  We aim to help students from diverse backgrounds become future leaders and role models in computing and technology by breaking down the barriers that prevent them from entering these fields.  


Selected students will receive a financial award for the 2017-18 academic year and be invited to the annual Google Scholars' Retreat in their region next summer. At the retreat, scholars will participate in networking and development sessions, including sessions on how to lead outreach in their communities. Scholars also join long term a community of former scholarship recipients for continued networking and development.  Check out each program below:

Women Techmakers Scholars Program (US/Canada/EMEA - Asia Pacific will open in early 2017)
Formerly known as the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, we have joined forces with Google’s Women Techmakers program to continue to honor Dr. Anita Borg and her legacy. Dr. Borg devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing. The program is open to current female undergraduate or graduate students who will be studying at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.

The Generation Google Scholarship was established to help aspiring computer scientists excel in technology and become leaders in the field. This program supports current university students from underrepresented groups including African American, Hispanic, American Indian or Filipino/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander who will be studying at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.
The Generation Google Scholarship for current high school seniors in the US/Canada will open in early 2017.

We’ve partnered with Lime Connect (US/Canada) and EmployAbility (Europe), nonprofit organizations that support students with disabilities while they pursue education and promising careers, to help university students with disabilities work toward their academic goals in the field of computer science. The scholarship is open to current undergraduate or graduate students with disabilities who will be studying at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.

As part of our commitment to military veterans, Google established the Google SVA Scholarship in partnership with Student Veterans of America. The scholarship provides assistance to student veterans or students on Active Duty who are pursuing a degree in computer science at a university for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Please visit each program’s website for specific details, application information and deadlines. We encourage all students who meet the eligibility criteria to apply!

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-are-open-for-2017-scholarship-opportunities-in-the-us-canada-and-emea/feed/ 0 Contest Spotlight: ‘Paying It Forward’ in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/contest-spotlight-paying-it-forward-in-honor-of-hispanic-heritage-month/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/contest-spotlight-paying-it-forward-in-honor-of-hispanic-heritage-month/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2016 20:50:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=5b802ee2ec96d9f793a956ee8358d409
Are you passionate about helping your community? Know someone who is? If so, check out Google’s annual Pay It Forward contest!

In honor of Hispanic Heritage month, the Google Staffing Programs team has worked closely with the Hispanic Googler Network to recognize leaders in education who are advancing opportunities for their local communities.

Students (high school or college, 14 and older), educators (teachers, administrators, school staff), and education-focused organization leaders (non-profit, private) are invited to tell us how they have positively impacted and influenced Hispanic communities within the U.S. We’re seeking leaders whose work in education demonstrates a commitment to expanding access and opportunities for the Hispanic community.

The deadline to enter the contest is October 3rd, 2016 at 11:59pm PT.

Submissions will be judged by a team of Googlers, who will be assessing the innovation, scale and the short- and  long-term effects of your impact. Contest winners will have the opportunity to have their work featured on the Google Student Blog and connect with experts from our education outreach team.

To both enter the competition and get more info, visit our 2016 Pay It Forward website.

Excited to see your submissions!]]>
Are you passionate about helping your community? Know someone who is? If so, check out Google’s annual Pay It Forward contest!

In honor of Hispanic Heritage month, the Google Staffing Programs team has worked closely with the Hispanic Googler Network to recognize leaders in education who are advancing opportunities for their local communities.

Students (high school or college, 14 and older), educators (teachers, administrators, school staff), and education-focused organization leaders (non-profit, private) are invited to tell us how they have positively impacted and influenced Hispanic communities within the U.S. We’re seeking leaders whose work in education demonstrates a commitment to expanding access and opportunities for the Hispanic community.

The deadline to enter the contest is October 3rd, 2016 at 11:59pm PT.

Submissions will be judged by a team of Googlers, who will be assessing the innovation, scale and the short- and  long-term effects of your impact. Contest winners will have the opportunity to have their work featured on the Google Student Blog and connect with experts from our education outreach team.

To both enter the competition and get more info, visit our 2016 Pay It Forward website.

Excited to see your submissions!]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/contest-spotlight-paying-it-forward-in-honor-of-hispanic-heritage-month/feed/ 0 Announcing the Winning Team for the AdMob Student App Challenge https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/announcing-the-winning-team-for-the-admob-student-app-challenge/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/announcing-the-winning-team-for-the-admob-student-app-challenge/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2016 16:55:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=6cbb247f65466be60a030b387aedec58 We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2016 AdMob Student App Challenge, an app building competition for students. Over 100 student teams from around the world took on the challenge to build a great app and monetize it using AdMob, with a chance to win awesome prizes.
After reviewing our 4 regional finalists, our judges have selected the global winner who will receive will receive a trip to San Francisco, including a visit to the Googleplex. Chris Akhavnr, a judge for the Challenge and President of Publishing, Glu Mobile, enjoyed reviewing the apps, noting that “After reading the business reports, I was impressed by the amount of thought each team put into their app. I'm sure these finalists will go on to have a big impact in the mobile ecosystem."


Drumroll please…


Global Winner - Turbo Rocket Games

About the team
Turbo Rocket Games is a team of four: Vladimir, Yaroslava, Illya, and Serhii from Kiev, Ukraine. Vladimir and Serhii are studying informatics at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Yaroslava and Illya are studying computer science at Brock University. To build the app effectively, the team divided the work so everyone could focus on the aspect they were best at. As the project lead, Vladimir focused on managing the development process while Yaroslava took charge of game design. As programmers, Illya and Serhii worked in tandem to write the code for the game.

About the app
Dragon Sim Online is a game where you can become a dragon and play online with friends or by yourself. The app provides a true simulation experience by challenging players to maintain their dragons’ health and energy, raise a family of dragons, fight dangerous enemies and explore the massive 3D world. The app has been downloaded over 500K times worldwide with an average review of 4.5 stars.

Congratulations to Turbo Rocket Games and thanks again to every single student who participated!

Henry Wang

Product Marketing, AdMob

]]> We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2016 AdMob Student App Challenge, an app building competition for students. Over 100 student teams from around the world took on the challenge to build a great app and monetize it using AdMob, with a chance to win awesome prizes.
After reviewing our 4 regional finalists, our judges have selected the global winner who will receive will receive a trip to San Francisco, including a visit to the Googleplex. Chris Akhavnr, a judge for the Challenge and President of Publishing, Glu Mobile, enjoyed reviewing the apps, noting that “After reading the business reports, I was impressed by the amount of thought each team put into their app. I'm sure these finalists will go on to have a big impact in the mobile ecosystem."


Drumroll please…


Global Winner - Turbo Rocket Games

About the team
Turbo Rocket Games is a team of four: Vladimir, Yaroslava, Illya, and Serhii from Kiev, Ukraine. Vladimir and Serhii are studying informatics at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Yaroslava and Illya are studying computer science at Brock University. To build the app effectively, the team divided the work so everyone could focus on the aspect they were best at. As the project lead, Vladimir focused on managing the development process while Yaroslava took charge of game design. As programmers, Illya and Serhii worked in tandem to write the code for the game.

About the app
Dragon Sim Online is a game where you can become a dragon and play online with friends or by yourself. The app provides a true simulation experience by challenging players to maintain their dragons’ health and energy, raise a family of dragons, fight dangerous enemies and explore the massive 3D world. The app has been downloaded over 500K times worldwide with an average review of 4.5 stars.

Congratulations to Turbo Rocket Games and thanks again to every single student who participated!

Henry Wang

Product Marketing, AdMob

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/announcing-the-winning-team-for-the-admob-student-app-challenge/feed/ 0 From Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 3) https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-3/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-3/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:45:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=ffb3e1947def2a9be087544d42594f3b This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

This blog post marks the end of our short series following our adventures in open source. As you may recall, it all started thanks to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which brought our team together. The GSoC collaboration spurred us to start a class at Technical University of Munich (TUM) that eventually took on the Game of Thrones data science project which became an international sensation.

The success of our Game of Thrones project opened a lot of doors. First, we were invited to participate in the Morpheus Cup which is a prestigious university olympiad that brings together students from all over Europe to compete in digital challenges.

Our team rocked the competition winning two challenges and making it to the finalist stage in the third challenge. We were honored to represent our university and grateful for Google’s sponsorship of our team.
WhatsApp-Image-20160510 (1).jpeg
The students and mentors of the Game of Thrones project at the Morpheus Cup challenge in May 2016. From left to right: Georgi Anastasov, Emiliyana Kalinova, Maximilian Bandle (all students), Guy Yachdav (mentor), Christian Dallago (mentor), Tobias Piffrader, Theodor Chesleran (both students) and Tatyana Goldberg (mentor).
Another opportunity that followed was an invitation to speak at a TEDx event at TUM on July 28th, 2016. In the event, titled “The Common Extraordinary,” Guy presented our work with data mining as bioinformaticians, sharing how we’ve made the field of data science accessible to our students and how we helped popularize it through the Game of Thrones project.

More speaking engagements are already scheduled: at meetups, coffee talks and conferences where we plan to keep evangelizing data mining and tell the story of our open source adventure.

What’s next? We’re excited to continue as mentors and org admins in GSoC and to carry on teaching data science and JavaScript at the university. In between classes and our daily research work we’re now being asked by friends, family members, colleagues and even strangers whether we can help them use data mining to answer questions on subjects ranging from politics, science, sports and even their personal lives.

Just the other day we were approached with the idea of developing an app that would take in a set of personality traits, process them along with social network data and help in suggesting life decisions: Should I date that person? Should I really take this job? Is Baltimore the city for me?

That interest goes even beyond our personal circles. A recent trade media report pointed out that by using machine learning in an unexpected context, the Game of Thrones project demonstrated the disruptive force of data mining. This force, the article continues, could make an impact on the next industrial revolution - Industry 4.0 - where data plays a key role.

Do you have interesting questions you’d like to answer or a data set you’d like to make predictions with? Curious about BioJS or our JavaScript course? Please reach out to us on Twitter or in the comments.

In the near future we dream of starting our own consultancy, as we already have requests from companies that want our help with upcoming data science projects. It seems our team has found its entrepreneurial bent!

We hope enjoyed this trilogy of blog posts, that our story has inspired you and that you too will continue to adventure in open source and collaborative development. If you’re not involved with Google Summer of Code, consider joining. It’s a great way to build up your project and share it with the world. More importantly, it lets you work with amazing people with whom, as we learned, it is possible to reach the sky.

By Tatyana Goldberg, Christian Dallago, and Guy Yachdav, BioJS
]]> This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

This blog post marks the end of our short series following our adventures in open source. As you may recall, it all started thanks to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which brought our team together. The GSoC collaboration spurred us to start a class at Technical University of Munich (TUM) that eventually took on the Game of Thrones data science project which became an international sensation.

The success of our Game of Thrones project opened a lot of doors. First, we were invited to participate in the Morpheus Cup which is a prestigious university olympiad that brings together students from all over Europe to compete in digital challenges.

Our team rocked the competition winning two challenges and making it to the finalist stage in the third challenge. We were honored to represent our university and grateful for Google’s sponsorship of our team.
WhatsApp-Image-20160510 (1).jpeg
The students and mentors of the Game of Thrones project at the Morpheus Cup challenge in May 2016. From left to right: Georgi Anastasov, Emiliyana Kalinova, Maximilian Bandle (all students), Guy Yachdav (mentor), Christian Dallago (mentor), Tobias Piffrader, Theodor Chesleran (both students) and Tatyana Goldberg (mentor).
Another opportunity that followed was an invitation to speak at a TEDx event at TUM on July 28th, 2016. In the event, titled “The Common Extraordinary,” Guy presented our work with data mining as bioinformaticians, sharing how we’ve made the field of data science accessible to our students and how we helped popularize it through the Game of Thrones project.

More speaking engagements are already scheduled: at meetups, coffee talks and conferences where we plan to keep evangelizing data mining and tell the story of our open source adventure.

What’s next? We’re excited to continue as mentors and org admins in GSoC and to carry on teaching data science and JavaScript at the university. In between classes and our daily research work we’re now being asked by friends, family members, colleagues and even strangers whether we can help them use data mining to answer questions on subjects ranging from politics, science, sports and even their personal lives.

Just the other day we were approached with the idea of developing an app that would take in a set of personality traits, process them along with social network data and help in suggesting life decisions: Should I date that person? Should I really take this job? Is Baltimore the city for me?

That interest goes even beyond our personal circles. A recent trade media report pointed out that by using machine learning in an unexpected context, the Game of Thrones project demonstrated the disruptive force of data mining. This force, the article continues, could make an impact on the next industrial revolution - Industry 4.0 - where data plays a key role.

Do you have interesting questions you’d like to answer or a data set you’d like to make predictions with? Curious about BioJS or our JavaScript course? Please reach out to us on Twitter or in the comments.

In the near future we dream of starting our own consultancy, as we already have requests from companies that want our help with upcoming data science projects. It seems our team has found its entrepreneurial bent!

We hope enjoyed this trilogy of blog posts, that our story has inspired you and that you too will continue to adventure in open source and collaborative development. If you’re not involved with Google Summer of Code, consider joining. It’s a great way to build up your project and share it with the world. More importantly, it lets you work with amazing people with whom, as we learned, it is possible to reach the sky.

By Tatyana Goldberg, Christian Dallago, and Guy Yachdav, BioJS
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-3/feed/ 0 Stories from Google Code-in: OpenMRS and SCoRe https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-openmrs-and-score/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-openmrs-and-score/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=16d40f4d64ed27aeeb4093b1264e818b Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the third installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first and second posts in the series, too.

In this post we look at the stories of three more Google Code-in (GCI) grand prize winners. Our grand prize winners come from a pool of 980 students from 65 countries who, all told, completed 4,776 tasks for 14 open source projects.

We were lucky enough to host many of these extraordinary young coders at Google HQ for a few days this summer. Over that time, we learned more about where they came from, what they gained by participating in GCI and what they plan to do as new members of the open source community.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners explore the SF Bay Area in this immersive Google Street View display with fellow open source program managers Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman who run GCI.
Our first story today is that of Břetislav Hájek from the Czech Republic, who chose to work with the OpenMRS project because he sees their work as important. OpenMRS is an open source medical record system that improves healthcare delivery in resource-constrained regions.

Břetislav got into computer science through web development, so he started by working on tasks related to HTML and CSS. This gave him confidence to take on more challenging tasks. His favorite task was creating a web application for searching through patients. While he didn’t find it hard, he learned a lot and was proud to have made something useful. Reflecting on Google Code-in, Břetislav said: “That's the thing I like about GCI. I always treat tasks as opportunities to learn something new. And the learning is more entertaining since I work on real problems.”

IRC communication proved to be an important part of Břetislav’s success. Other students were there and tried to help each other out as best they could, and there were always mentors available to help guide them. He enjoyed the friendly environment. The community motivated him to work harder and try new things. In the end, Břetislav was glad to have participated and is motivated to continue his work.

Next we have Vicente Bermudez from Uruguay who discovered Google Code-in through a story in the local news celebrating a Uruguayan grand prize winner from a previous year. Like Břetislav, Vicente chose to work on the OpenMRS project because the cause spoke to him.

He got into programming through his love of video games and his desire to create his own. He hadn’t heard about programming before but initial research piqued his interest. Following his curiosity, he learned Java and expanded his knowledge from there. Conveniently, much of OpenMRS is built with Java!

The task-based structure worked well for Vicente. He was unsure of some tasks, recognizing that he didn’t know much about what they required. For instance, he hesitated to take on one that involved creating a Windows Phone app because he had never created a mobile app. But he persisted and, five days later, he had completed it and learned a lot about mobile development.

It surprised Vicente how much he learned in such a short time span. He had this to say: “During the contest I gained knowledge in a variety of fields such as programming, testing, video editing, and graphic design. The mentors encouraged us to think about quality instead of quantity, and I learned a lot from that.”

Vicente loved his Google Code-in experience and plans to continue contributing to open source projects, especially OpenMRS.

The last student story we’ll share today is that of Anesu Mafuvadze, a student from the US who worked with the Sustainable Computing Research Group (SCoRe). His introduction to computer science came through robotics in one of his high school classes which used a language similar to C++.

Anesu was thrilled by the experience of bringing the robots to life with code. He described his introduction this way: “The more I programmed the more captivated I became; I loved how easily I could convert my wildest ideas into fully functioning programs; I loved the thrill of working in an environment that demands minute precision; above all, I loved creating programs that other people found useful.”

Online documentation and YouTube tutorials fueled Anesu’s education for several years as he picked up multiple languages and began participating in programming contests. But he knew something was missing, Anesu lacked real world coding experience and had never collaborated with others. As such, he didn’t pay much attention to the readability of his code, wasn’t aware of version control, didn’t write extensive tests and had never built something for the common good.

Enter Google Code-in. Working with mentors helped Anesu deliver quality and building open source software required him to learn collaboration tools and value readability. The contest also gave him an opportunity to build on skills that he hadn’t developed, such as web development. Anesu says the experience made him a better programmer and that the introduction to open source has motivated him to use his skills on projects that benefit society.

Thank you to Břetislav, Vicente and Anesu for their hard work contributing to open source projects and for sharing their stories with us. We have one more blog post coming with more student stories so stay tuned!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office]]> Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the third installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first and second posts in the series, too.

In this post we look at the stories of three more Google Code-in (GCI) grand prize winners. Our grand prize winners come from a pool of 980 students from 65 countries who, all told, completed 4,776 tasks for 14 open source projects.

We were lucky enough to host many of these extraordinary young coders at Google HQ for a few days this summer. Over that time, we learned more about where they came from, what they gained by participating in GCI and what they plan to do as new members of the open source community.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners explore the SF Bay Area in this immersive Google Street View display with fellow open source program managers Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman who run GCI.
Our first story today is that of Břetislav Hájek from the Czech Republic, who chose to work with the OpenMRS project because he sees their work as important. OpenMRS is an open source medical record system that improves healthcare delivery in resource-constrained regions.

Břetislav got into computer science through web development, so he started by working on tasks related to HTML and CSS. This gave him confidence to take on more challenging tasks. His favorite task was creating a web application for searching through patients. While he didn’t find it hard, he learned a lot and was proud to have made something useful. Reflecting on Google Code-in, Břetislav said: “That's the thing I like about GCI. I always treat tasks as opportunities to learn something new. And the learning is more entertaining since I work on real problems.”

IRC communication proved to be an important part of Břetislav’s success. Other students were there and tried to help each other out as best they could, and there were always mentors available to help guide them. He enjoyed the friendly environment. The community motivated him to work harder and try new things. In the end, Břetislav was glad to have participated and is motivated to continue his work.

Next we have Vicente Bermudez from Uruguay who discovered Google Code-in through a story in the local news celebrating a Uruguayan grand prize winner from a previous year. Like Břetislav, Vicente chose to work on the OpenMRS project because the cause spoke to him.

He got into programming through his love of video games and his desire to create his own. He hadn’t heard about programming before but initial research piqued his interest. Following his curiosity, he learned Java and expanded his knowledge from there. Conveniently, much of OpenMRS is built with Java!

The task-based structure worked well for Vicente. He was unsure of some tasks, recognizing that he didn’t know much about what they required. For instance, he hesitated to take on one that involved creating a Windows Phone app because he had never created a mobile app. But he persisted and, five days later, he had completed it and learned a lot about mobile development.

It surprised Vicente how much he learned in such a short time span. He had this to say: “During the contest I gained knowledge in a variety of fields such as programming, testing, video editing, and graphic design. The mentors encouraged us to think about quality instead of quantity, and I learned a lot from that.”

Vicente loved his Google Code-in experience and plans to continue contributing to open source projects, especially OpenMRS.

The last student story we’ll share today is that of Anesu Mafuvadze, a student from the US who worked with the Sustainable Computing Research Group (SCoRe). His introduction to computer science came through robotics in one of his high school classes which used a language similar to C++.

Anesu was thrilled by the experience of bringing the robots to life with code. He described his introduction this way: “The more I programmed the more captivated I became; I loved how easily I could convert my wildest ideas into fully functioning programs; I loved the thrill of working in an environment that demands minute precision; above all, I loved creating programs that other people found useful.”

Online documentation and YouTube tutorials fueled Anesu’s education for several years as he picked up multiple languages and began participating in programming contests. But he knew something was missing, Anesu lacked real world coding experience and had never collaborated with others. As such, he didn’t pay much attention to the readability of his code, wasn’t aware of version control, didn’t write extensive tests and had never built something for the common good.

Enter Google Code-in. Working with mentors helped Anesu deliver quality and building open source software required him to learn collaboration tools and value readability. The contest also gave him an opportunity to build on skills that he hadn’t developed, such as web development. Anesu says the experience made him a better programmer and that the introduction to open source has motivated him to use his skills on projects that benefit society.

Thank you to Břetislav, Vicente and Anesu for their hard work contributing to open source projects and for sharing their stories with us. We have one more blog post coming with more student stories so stay tuned!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-openmrs-and-score/feed/ 0 From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 2) https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-google-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-2/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-google-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-2/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2016 22:16:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=8bdce4132d1d2e4638f9b8d25079c168 This guest post is a part of a short series about Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Don’t miss the first post in the series. Heads up, this post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones seasons 5 and 6!

We built on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) philosophy and the lessons we learned from participating in 2014 by starting a JavaScript Technology class at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

We began with two dozen students who worked on expanding the BioJS visualization library. Our class became popular quickly and the number of applicants doubled each semester (nearly 180 applicants for 40 seats in the 2016 summer term).

In 2016 our team grew to include Christian Dallago, who had joined as a GSoC mentor. Together we decided to break with tradition of our course’s previous semesters. Instead of focusing on data visualization, we wanted to introduce students to data science with JavaScript. To get our students fully engaged, we decided the project would center on data from the hit TV show, Game of Thrones.

Our aim was to create an online portal for Game of Thrones fans which would:
  1. Provide the most comprehensive, structured and open data set about the Game of Thrones world accessible via API.
  2. Present an interactive map based on JavaScript.
  3. Listen to what people are saying on Twitter about each of the show’s characters.
  4. Use machine learning algorithms to predict the likelihood of each character’s death.
Our plan worked — the students were engaged. It was a beautiful sight to see: GitHub repos humming with activity as each dev team delved deeper into their projects. As a project manager, you know you’ve got something good when issues are being opened and closed at 4:00 AM!

The results were mind blowing. In 50 days of programming, 36 students opened over 1,200 issues and pull requests, pushed 3,300 commits, released four apps to NPM, and, of course, produced one absolutely amazing website.

The website amasses data from 2,028 characters. Our map shows 240 landmarks and the paths traveled by 28 characters. Our Twitter sentiment analysis tool analyzed over 3 million tweets. And we launched the first ever machine learning-based prediction algorithm that predicts the likelihood of dying for the 1,451 characters in the show that are still alive.

image02fix.png
Visualization of Twitter sentiment analysis data for Jon Snow during season 5 of Game of Thrones. The X axis shows the timeline and the Y axis shows the number of positive (green) and negative (red) tweets. Each tweet is analyzed by an algorithm using a neural network to determine whether the tweet’s writer has a positive, negative or neutral attitude toward the character. 
Since launch, the site’s popularity has skyrocketed. Following our press release, we were covered by over 1,500 media outlets, most notably Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Daily Mail, BBC, Reuters, The Telegraph, CNET and many more. HowStuffWorks, The Vulture and others produced videos about the site and Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show did a segment about us. We've also given countless interviews to TV, radio and newspapers.

Blog2_Figure1_v3.png
Google Analytics for the website. Left chart shows the number of visitors to the website during the first week after launch, reaching over 73K visitors on April 25th. Right chart shows the number of visitors at a given time point during the same week.
The most exciting part of the project was predicting the likelihood that any given character would die using machine learning. Machine learning algorithms find rules and patterns in the data, things that humans cannot obviously and simply detect. Once the rules and patterns are identified, we apply machine learning to make inferences or predictions from novel, previously unseen, data sets.

Warning: The next paragraphs contain spoilers for seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones!

In order to predict the likelihood of a character’s death, we collected information about all of the characters that appeared in books 1 to 5 and analyzed over 30 features, including age, gender, marital status and others. Then we used a support vector machine (SVM) to statistically compare the features of characters, both dead and alive, to predict who would get the axe next. Our prediction was correct for 74% of all cases and surprised us by placing a number of characters thought to be relatively safe in grave danger.

According to our predictions, Jon Snow, who was seemingly betrayed and murdered by fellow members of the Night’s Watch at the end of season 5, had only an 11% chance of dying. Indeed, Jon has risen from the dead in the second episode of season 6! We also predicted that the rulers of Dorn (Doran and Trystane) Martell are at a high likelihood of death and, as predicted, they were taken out in the first episode of the new season.

Of course, as is always the case with predictions, there were also misses. We didn’t expect Roose Bolton to be killed off nor did we see Hodor’s departure coming.

This experience was an amazing ride for our team and it all started with Google Summer of Code! In the next post we’ll share what followed and where we see ourselves heading in the future.

By Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago, BioJS
]]> This guest post is a part of a short series about Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Don’t miss the first post in the series. Heads up, this post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones seasons 5 and 6!

We built on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) philosophy and the lessons we learned from participating in 2014 by starting a JavaScript Technology class at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

We began with two dozen students who worked on expanding the BioJS visualization library. Our class became popular quickly and the number of applicants doubled each semester (nearly 180 applicants for 40 seats in the 2016 summer term).

In 2016 our team grew to include Christian Dallago, who had joined as a GSoC mentor. Together we decided to break with tradition of our course’s previous semesters. Instead of focusing on data visualization, we wanted to introduce students to data science with JavaScript. To get our students fully engaged, we decided the project would center on data from the hit TV show, Game of Thrones.

Our aim was to create an online portal for Game of Thrones fans which would:
  1. Provide the most comprehensive, structured and open data set about the Game of Thrones world accessible via API.
  2. Present an interactive map based on JavaScript.
  3. Listen to what people are saying on Twitter about each of the show’s characters.
  4. Use machine learning algorithms to predict the likelihood of each character’s death.
Our plan worked — the students were engaged. It was a beautiful sight to see: GitHub repos humming with activity as each dev team delved deeper into their projects. As a project manager, you know you’ve got something good when issues are being opened and closed at 4:00 AM!

The results were mind blowing. In 50 days of programming, 36 students opened over 1,200 issues and pull requests, pushed 3,300 commits, released four apps to NPM, and, of course, produced one absolutely amazing website.

The website amasses data from 2,028 characters. Our map shows 240 landmarks and the paths traveled by 28 characters. Our Twitter sentiment analysis tool analyzed over 3 million tweets. And we launched the first ever machine learning-based prediction algorithm that predicts the likelihood of dying for the 1,451 characters in the show that are still alive.

image02fix.png
Visualization of Twitter sentiment analysis data for Jon Snow during season 5 of Game of Thrones. The X axis shows the timeline and the Y axis shows the number of positive (green) and negative (red) tweets. Each tweet is analyzed by an algorithm using a neural network to determine whether the tweet’s writer has a positive, negative or neutral attitude toward the character. 
Since launch, the site’s popularity has skyrocketed. Following our press release, we were covered by over 1,500 media outlets, most notably Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Daily Mail, BBC, Reuters, The Telegraph, CNET and many more. HowStuffWorks, The Vulture and others produced videos about the site and Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show did a segment about us. We've also given countless interviews to TV, radio and newspapers.

Blog2_Figure1_v3.png
Google Analytics for the website. Left chart shows the number of visitors to the website during the first week after launch, reaching over 73K visitors on April 25th. Right chart shows the number of visitors at a given time point during the same week.
The most exciting part of the project was predicting the likelihood that any given character would die using machine learning. Machine learning algorithms find rules and patterns in the data, things that humans cannot obviously and simply detect. Once the rules and patterns are identified, we apply machine learning to make inferences or predictions from novel, previously unseen, data sets.

Warning: The next paragraphs contain spoilers for seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones!

In order to predict the likelihood of a character’s death, we collected information about all of the characters that appeared in books 1 to 5 and analyzed over 30 features, including age, gender, marital status and others. Then we used a support vector machine (SVM) to statistically compare the features of characters, both dead and alive, to predict who would get the axe next. Our prediction was correct for 74% of all cases and surprised us by placing a number of characters thought to be relatively safe in grave danger.

According to our predictions, Jon Snow, who was seemingly betrayed and murdered by fellow members of the Night’s Watch at the end of season 5, had only an 11% chance of dying. Indeed, Jon has risen from the dead in the second episode of season 6! We also predicted that the rulers of Dorn (Doran and Trystane) Martell are at a high likelihood of death and, as predicted, they were taken out in the first episode of the new season.

Of course, as is always the case with predictions, there were also misses. We didn’t expect Roose Bolton to be killed off nor did we see Hodor’s departure coming.

This experience was an amazing ride for our team and it all started with Google Summer of Code! In the next post we’ll share what followed and where we see ourselves heading in the future.

By Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago, BioJS
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-google-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-2/feed/ 0 Regional Finalists Announced for the AdMob Student Challenge https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/regional-finalists-announced-for-the-admob-student-challenge/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/regional-finalists-announced-for-the-admob-student-challenge/#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=b884adad0183c04f080d33c109902b26 Since January, students from around the world have been submitting entries for the AdMob Student App Challenge. Students around the world were challenged to build an app that that demonstrates their skills and monetize it with AdMob. Today, we are excited to announce the four regional finalists, hand picked based on app quality and traffic.
The regional finalists are made up of the top entry in each of our 4 participating regions - North America, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Their apps have made a huge splash in the Google Play Store, with over 500,000 downloads and 10,000 reviews combined! Each member of the regional finalist teams will receive brand new Pixel C tablets and advance into the final round where the global winner will receive a seven night trip to San Francisco and a visit to Googleplex.

North America:
Team: Dodo Built
Average review: 4.6 / 5.0
Block Havoc is North America’s finalist, and deservingly so! The app is an extremely entertaining game with endless modes and patterns that challenges users to improve their reaction time on a beautiful and polished interface.

Latin America:
Team: KUNIC Apps
Average review: 5.0 / 5.0
And, LATAM’s finalist is #booleaning, a handy and well-featured calculator for boolean functions. This productivity application looks professional and is designed to save users’ time with built in logic operators, like NOT, AND, OR.

Asia/Pacific:
Team: Upskew
Average review: 4.5 / 5.0
Encode: Learn to Code is APAC’s finalist, differentiating themselves with an extremely straightforward and fun way to teach beginners how to code. The simple and intuitive tutorials and lessons allowed users to immerse themselves to build a quick and strong foundation.

Europe/Middle East/Africa:
Team: Turbo Rocket Games
Average review: 4.4 / 5.0
Our last finalist is Dragon Sim Online, an addictive game with outstanding graphics. The application provides an epic adventure that allows you to engage and join other online players through beautiful flying and fighting animation to level up in this fantasy world.

Congratulations to the Regional Finalists, and thank you again to everyone who participated. The Global Winner will be announced on August 25, 2016, so stay tuned!

Cindy Tran

The AdMob Challenge Team

]]> Since January, students from around the world have been submitting entries for the AdMob Student App Challenge. Students around the world were challenged to build an app that that demonstrates their skills and monetize it with AdMob. Today, we are excited to announce the four regional finalists, hand picked based on app quality and traffic.
The regional finalists are made up of the top entry in each of our 4 participating regions - North America, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Their apps have made a huge splash in the Google Play Store, with over 500,000 downloads and 10,000 reviews combined! Each member of the regional finalist teams will receive brand new Pixel C tablets and advance into the final round where the global winner will receive a seven night trip to San Francisco and a visit to Googleplex.

North America:
Team: Dodo Built
Average review: 4.6 / 5.0
Block Havoc is North America’s finalist, and deservingly so! The app is an extremely entertaining game with endless modes and patterns that challenges users to improve their reaction time on a beautiful and polished interface.

Latin America:
Team: KUNIC Apps
Average review: 5.0 / 5.0
And, LATAM’s finalist is #booleaning, a handy and well-featured calculator for boolean functions. This productivity application looks professional and is designed to save users’ time with built in logic operators, like NOT, AND, OR.

Asia/Pacific:
Team: Upskew
Average review: 4.5 / 5.0
Encode: Learn to Code is APAC’s finalist, differentiating themselves with an extremely straightforward and fun way to teach beginners how to code. The simple and intuitive tutorials and lessons allowed users to immerse themselves to build a quick and strong foundation.

Europe/Middle East/Africa:
Team: Turbo Rocket Games
Average review: 4.4 / 5.0
Our last finalist is Dragon Sim Online, an addictive game with outstanding graphics. The application provides an epic adventure that allows you to engage and join other online players through beautiful flying and fighting animation to level up in this fantasy world.

Congratulations to the Regional Finalists, and thank you again to everyone who participated. The Global Winner will be announced on August 25, 2016, so stay tuned!

Cindy Tran

The AdMob Challenge Team

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/regional-finalists-announced-for-the-admob-student-challenge/feed/ 0 Stories from Google Code-in: KDE, MetaBrainz and Haiku https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-kde-metabrainz-and-haiku/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-kde-metabrainz-and-haiku/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=09ba6da3fa1740c1c37c5d759188e4b6 Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the second installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first post in the series.

This week we profile three more grand prize winners from Google Code-in 2015. These students came from all around the world to celebrate with us in June after successfully completing 692 tasks that resulted in significant contributions to the participating open source projects.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors were treated to a cruise around San Francisco Bay.

Students were paired with mentors who guided them as they learned both new technologies and how to collaborate on real-world projects. While most students had some programming experience, many were new to open source. In the end, they learned new skills, connected with open source communities and many will continue to contribute to open source projects.

We’re proud of all of the participants and grateful to the mentors who helped them. We invited the contest winners to write about their experience and many took us up on the offer. Here are their stories:

First up today is Imran Tatriev, a student from Kazakhstan who decided to work on the KDE project because loved their philosophy and had experience with C++ and Qt. He was a finalist in Google Code-in 2014 when he worked with the OpenMRS project.

Imran’s work on KDE included contributing to projects such as KDevelop, Marble and GCompris. His biggest challenge was working on the KDevelop IDE’s debugger where he was tasked with highlighting crashed threads. Highlighting the crashed thread was trivial, finding the thread that had crashed was not. It took him five days to solve that problem and he credits his mentor with helping him to work through it.

In the end, Imran learned a lot about regular expressions, the architecture of large software projects, C++ and unit testing. What did he like most about his Google Code-in experience? Imran writes: “The most valuable moments were meeting wonderful and smart people.” He plans to continue working with KDE and apply for Google Summer of Code.

Next is Caroline Gschwend, a student from the US who worked on the MetaBrainz project. Both of her parents are computer scientists and she credits them with spurring her interest.

A homeschool student with a unique approach to education, Caroline loves to learn and voraciously consumes free online resources. She had this to say: “I think that free, online learning is an amazing benefit to our society. With access to a computer and the internet, anyone, anywhere, can learn anything.”

Caroline discovered Google Code-in through her mother who had, in turn, discovered the contest through Google for Education. Caroline dug in and decided it was right up her alley. She loved that it embraced beginners with open arms and introduced new people to open source. Ultimately, she decided to work with MetaBrainz because, as a classically trained violinist, MusicBrainz piqued her interest. Their projects are primarily written in Perl and Python and, while Caroline was fluent in Java, it was too interesting to pass up.

As with most students, Caroline found collaboration to be a big part of the learning curve -- from GitHub to Git and IRC. Her mentors and other community contributors on IRC helped Caroline through the process and, looking back, she found that collaboration to be her favorite part of the whole experience. She loved that the mentors helped her to produce professional quality work rather than focusing on quantity.

Google Code-in gave Caroline a chance to learn about collaboration, Inkspace, icon design, web development and more. She has continued her work in open source and plans to apply for Google Summer of Code.

The last student we’re highlighting today is Vale Tolpegin, a student from the US who worked on the Haiku project, an open source operating system for personal computers. He also participated in Google Code-in 2014 but didn’t feel his skills were sharp enough to attack the more challenging tasks, like the ones he tackled this time around for Haiku.

Vale took on a wide range of tasks from documentation to application development, his favorite being the creation of the Haiku Hardware Repository. The repository is a Django website that lets people search and share hardware tests to determine if a given machine will work with Haiku.

He ran into a sticky issue early on, spending nearly a week finding a race condition within an application maintained by Haiku. Vale found it frustrating, but his mentors helped him see it through to the end. That wasn’t the only big challenge he ran into and, ultimately, bested: he spent another week debugging a Remote Desktop Application, software which had a very large code base.

Despite the two time consuming challenges, Vale managed to accomplish a lot more during the contest, including building a graph plotter and fixing bugs in the Haiku package manager. Vale had this to say:

“After finishing GCI, I have continued to work with Haiku and the experiences I have gained will continue to have an impact on me for years to come. Participating in GCI has truly been a life-­changing experience!”

Thank you to Imran, Caroline and Vale for their contributions to open source and for sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned, we’ve got two more posts coming in this series!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
]]> Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the second installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first post in the series.

This week we profile three more grand prize winners from Google Code-in 2015. These students came from all around the world to celebrate with us in June after successfully completing 692 tasks that resulted in significant contributions to the participating open source projects.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors were treated to a cruise around San Francisco Bay.

Students were paired with mentors who guided them as they learned both new technologies and how to collaborate on real-world projects. While most students had some programming experience, many were new to open source. In the end, they learned new skills, connected with open source communities and many will continue to contribute to open source projects.

We’re proud of all of the participants and grateful to the mentors who helped them. We invited the contest winners to write about their experience and many took us up on the offer. Here are their stories:

First up today is Imran Tatriev, a student from Kazakhstan who decided to work on the KDE project because loved their philosophy and had experience with C++ and Qt. He was a finalist in Google Code-in 2014 when he worked with the OpenMRS project.

Imran’s work on KDE included contributing to projects such as KDevelop, Marble and GCompris. His biggest challenge was working on the KDevelop IDE’s debugger where he was tasked with highlighting crashed threads. Highlighting the crashed thread was trivial, finding the thread that had crashed was not. It took him five days to solve that problem and he credits his mentor with helping him to work through it.

In the end, Imran learned a lot about regular expressions, the architecture of large software projects, C++ and unit testing. What did he like most about his Google Code-in experience? Imran writes: “The most valuable moments were meeting wonderful and smart people.” He plans to continue working with KDE and apply for Google Summer of Code.

Next is Caroline Gschwend, a student from the US who worked on the MetaBrainz project. Both of her parents are computer scientists and she credits them with spurring her interest.

A homeschool student with a unique approach to education, Caroline loves to learn and voraciously consumes free online resources. She had this to say: “I think that free, online learning is an amazing benefit to our society. With access to a computer and the internet, anyone, anywhere, can learn anything.”

Caroline discovered Google Code-in through her mother who had, in turn, discovered the contest through Google for Education. Caroline dug in and decided it was right up her alley. She loved that it embraced beginners with open arms and introduced new people to open source. Ultimately, she decided to work with MetaBrainz because, as a classically trained violinist, MusicBrainz piqued her interest. Their projects are primarily written in Perl and Python and, while Caroline was fluent in Java, it was too interesting to pass up.

As with most students, Caroline found collaboration to be a big part of the learning curve -- from GitHub to Git and IRC. Her mentors and other community contributors on IRC helped Caroline through the process and, looking back, she found that collaboration to be her favorite part of the whole experience. She loved that the mentors helped her to produce professional quality work rather than focusing on quantity.

Google Code-in gave Caroline a chance to learn about collaboration, Inkspace, icon design, web development and more. She has continued her work in open source and plans to apply for Google Summer of Code.

The last student we’re highlighting today is Vale Tolpegin, a student from the US who worked on the Haiku project, an open source operating system for personal computers. He also participated in Google Code-in 2014 but didn’t feel his skills were sharp enough to attack the more challenging tasks, like the ones he tackled this time around for Haiku.

Vale took on a wide range of tasks from documentation to application development, his favorite being the creation of the Haiku Hardware Repository. The repository is a Django website that lets people search and share hardware tests to determine if a given machine will work with Haiku.

He ran into a sticky issue early on, spending nearly a week finding a race condition within an application maintained by Haiku. Vale found it frustrating, but his mentors helped him see it through to the end. That wasn’t the only big challenge he ran into and, ultimately, bested: he spent another week debugging a Remote Desktop Application, software which had a very large code base.

Despite the two time consuming challenges, Vale managed to accomplish a lot more during the contest, including building a graph plotter and fixing bugs in the Haiku package manager. Vale had this to say:

“After finishing GCI, I have continued to work with Haiku and the experiences I have gained will continue to have an impact on me for years to come. Participating in GCI has truly been a life-­changing experience!”

Thank you to Imran, Caroline and Vale for their contributions to open source and for sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned, we’ve got two more posts coming in this series!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-kde-metabrainz-and-haiku/feed/ 0 Stories from Google Code-in: FOSSASIA and Haiku https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-fossasia-and-haiku/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-fossasia-and-haiku/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2016 17:11:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=935cc12fee7ad475ae02dd2e92a7a87b Google Code-in is our annual contest to help pre-university students gain real-world computer science experience by taking on tasks of varying difficulty levels with the help of volunteer mentors. These tasks are created by open source projects so while learning, the students are contributing to the software many of us use on a daily basis.

The finalists and winners for our 2015/2016 season were announced in February and, in June, the grand prize winners joined us for four days of learning and celebration. Students and their guardians came from all around the world. One of my favorite things, as one of the Googler hosts, was seeing the light bulbs go on above parents’ heads as they came to understand open source and why it’s so important. These parents and guardians were even more proud of the students as they learned how much their teenager has contributed to the world through participating in Google Code-in.

We’ve invited contest winners and organizations to write about their experience and will be sharing their stories in a series of blog posts. This marks the first post in the series.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors

Let’s start with Jason Wong, a student from the US who worked with FOSSASIA. FOSSASIA supports open source developers in Asia through events and coding programs.

Jason got into computer science during middle school at a summer camp where he built a website describing the differences between Linux, OS X, and Windows.  He dove deeper into web development by learning PHP and JavaScript through YouTube videos. He enjoyed being able to build more complex and dynamic websites. Like many new developers, Jason became very confident but did not concern himself with important aspects of programming like testing.

He learned about Google Code-in when Stephanie Taylor, fellow open source program manager who manages the GCI program here at Google, gave a talk at his school. Jason dove right in picking FOSSASIA as the project he would contribute to.

FOSSASIA offered Jason a chance to learn a lot about development and open source. He worked on their event pages, integrated Loklak and added an RSS section to their website, gaining experience with version control, Docker, Pharo and Node.js in the process. Most importantly, Jason learned about collaboration. He had this to say:

“Collaboration is so important in the open source community as it allows everyone to come together to help the world. Google Code-in has persuaded me to contribute to open source in the future.”

Next up we have Hannah Pan, another US student. She chose to work on Haiku, an open source operating system built for personal computers, because it used the C/C++ language which she was already confident with.

Hannah got into computer science through a high school AP course and discovered Google Code-in through this blog (woohoo!). She decided to participate even though it had already been underway for two weeks. Aiming just to make the top 10 in order to have a chance at being a finalist (and earn a hoodie), Hannah finished as a grand prize winner! 

The learning curve was steep: *nix commands, build tools and GitHub all presented new challenges. She was surprised how much code she had to sift through sometimes just to isolate the cause of minor bugs.

Like all of the participants, Hannah found her mentors to be crucial in providing both technical guidance and moral support. She explained, “I was amazed at my mentors’ expertise, dedication, modesty, and high standards. They taught me to strive for excellence rather than settle for mediocrity.”

Among other things, Hannah added localization support to the Tipster app, fixed extractDebugInfo, and even wrote a how-to article relating to the work. Reflecting on her experience, Hannah wrote:

“On the technical side, not only have I learned a lot, but I have realized how much more I have yet to learn. In addition, it has taught me some important life skills that no doubt will benefit me in my future endeavors. I’d like to thank my mentors and other students who inspired me and pushed me to do my best.”

Thank you to Jason and Hannah both for contributing to open source and sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned as we continue this series in our next blog post!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
]]> Google Code-in is our annual contest to help pre-university students gain real-world computer science experience by taking on tasks of varying difficulty levels with the help of volunteer mentors. These tasks are created by open source projects so while learning, the students are contributing to the software many of us use on a daily basis.

The finalists and winners for our 2015/2016 season were announced in February and, in June, the grand prize winners joined us for four days of learning and celebration. Students and their guardians came from all around the world. One of my favorite things, as one of the Googler hosts, was seeing the light bulbs go on above parents’ heads as they came to understand open source and why it’s so important. These parents and guardians were even more proud of the students as they learned how much their teenager has contributed to the world through participating in Google Code-in.

We’ve invited contest winners and organizations to write about their experience and will be sharing their stories in a series of blog posts. This marks the first post in the series.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors

Let’s start with Jason Wong, a student from the US who worked with FOSSASIA. FOSSASIA supports open source developers in Asia through events and coding programs.

Jason got into computer science during middle school at a summer camp where he built a website describing the differences between Linux, OS X, and Windows.  He dove deeper into web development by learning PHP and JavaScript through YouTube videos. He enjoyed being able to build more complex and dynamic websites. Like many new developers, Jason became very confident but did not concern himself with important aspects of programming like testing.

He learned about Google Code-in when Stephanie Taylor, fellow open source program manager who manages the GCI program here at Google, gave a talk at his school. Jason dove right in picking FOSSASIA as the project he would contribute to.

FOSSASIA offered Jason a chance to learn a lot about development and open source. He worked on their event pages, integrated Loklak and added an RSS section to their website, gaining experience with version control, Docker, Pharo and Node.js in the process. Most importantly, Jason learned about collaboration. He had this to say:

“Collaboration is so important in the open source community as it allows everyone to come together to help the world. Google Code-in has persuaded me to contribute to open source in the future.”

Next up we have Hannah Pan, another US student. She chose to work on Haiku, an open source operating system built for personal computers, because it used the C/C++ language which she was already confident with.

Hannah got into computer science through a high school AP course and discovered Google Code-in through this blog (woohoo!). She decided to participate even though it had already been underway for two weeks. Aiming just to make the top 10 in order to have a chance at being a finalist (and earn a hoodie), Hannah finished as a grand prize winner! 

The learning curve was steep: *nix commands, build tools and GitHub all presented new challenges. She was surprised how much code she had to sift through sometimes just to isolate the cause of minor bugs.

Like all of the participants, Hannah found her mentors to be crucial in providing both technical guidance and moral support. She explained, “I was amazed at my mentors’ expertise, dedication, modesty, and high standards. They taught me to strive for excellence rather than settle for mediocrity.”

Among other things, Hannah added localization support to the Tipster app, fixed extractDebugInfo, and even wrote a how-to article relating to the work. Reflecting on her experience, Hannah wrote:

“On the technical side, not only have I learned a lot, but I have realized how much more I have yet to learn. In addition, it has taught me some important life skills that no doubt will benefit me in my future endeavors. I’d like to thank my mentors and other students who inspired me and pushed me to do my best.”

Thank you to Jason and Hannah both for contributing to open source and sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned as we continue this series in our next blog post!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/stories-from-google-code-in-fossasia-and-haiku/feed/ 0 The results are in for the 2016 Google Online Marketing Challenge! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/the-results-are-in-for-the-2016-google-online-marketing-challenge/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/the-results-are-in-for-the-2016-google-online-marketing-challenge/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2016 17:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=8f9514a7d467b81bdaad81b3642797f1 G+CoverPhoto.pngThe Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) provides a hands-on learning platform for students around the world to develop their online marketing skills and gain practical experience working with real businesses and non-profits to solve real problems and produce real results.

Every year Google gives thousands of student teams across the world an AdWords budget of US$250 to spend on a 3-week online marketing campaign for a business or non-profit of their choice. Students also have the option to create and manage a Google+ page for their client to help further boost their online presence and engage the community.


The teams that develop and communicate the most successful campaigns win awesome prizes, including a trip to Google, a donation to their non-profit partner, digital devices and more. This year over 500 professors and 10,000 students from more than 60 countries competed in the Challenge and we are happy to announce the results are in!


Check out the AdWords Business, Social Media Marketing and Social Impact Winners below and the full list of the 2016 Team Results can be found on the GOMC Past Challenges page.


AdWords Business Awards

Global Winners
  • The Global Winning team comes from the ESG UQAM - School of Management Sciences in Canada, under Professor Harold Boeck. The team of James Forbes, Nicolas Archambault-Doucet, Esme Fentener Levi and Thomas St-Amour worked with Alvéole, a company that helps people and organizations install and care for urban honeybee colonies.
Regional Winners
  • The Americas Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Lynn Radocha, Alexander Adley, Maianh Phan, John Thompson and Cari Ross worked with the Rockingham/Harrisonburg SPCA, a non-profit animal rescue shelter that provides care for all dogs, cats, and other small animals until they can be adopted into a safe, permanent home.
  • The Asia & Pacific Winner comes from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, under Professor Shilpa Sawant in India. The team of Aniruddha Pandhare, Devarsh Ganatra, Urvi Talaty, Dhananjay Thaker, Akash Pandey and Rini Antony worked with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan, a non-profit Trust that invests in various medical and social welfare initiatives to transform the lives of the poor and needy in the drought prone ‘Marathwada’ region of Maharashtra.
  • The Europe Winner comes from the University of Turku in Finland, under Professor Joni Salminen. The team of Elina Ojala, Miia Bergström, Paula Suominen and Emma Jalonen worked with ResQ, a recently founded company with a mission to help consumers “rescue” leftovers from restaurants and acquire quality meals at a cheap price, while restaurants profit from selling food that would have otherwise been wasted.
  • The Middle East & Africa Winner comes from Daystar University in Kenya, under Professor Maranga Moriasi. The team of Jeffrey Kanae, Moses Njeri Khatiebere, Evelyne Magaju, Sharone Awuori Tindi and Roselinda Were worked with Youth on the Move, a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower youth with epilepsy to build their skills, stand up for themselves and transform their desires into realistic plans and actions.

Google+ Social Media Marketing Awards

Global Winners
  • The Global Winner comes from the Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering in India under Professor Khushali Deulkar. The team of Rosanlal Behera, Niki Jain, Harsh Jain, Chandrasekhar Raman, Pratik Bhambhani and Aayushi Dholakia worked with Kossine, a Neebal initiative and coaching institute that specializes in teaching Computer Programming and Electronics courses to students.
Regional Winners
  • The Americas Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Matt Deters, Molly McDevitt, Caitlin Fikac, Natalie Krewin and Claudia Schnorbus worked with the Poricy Park Conservancy, a non-profit that preserves 250 acres of open space, prehistoric fossil beds, and the historic Murray Farmhouse for the surrounding community.
  • The Asia & Pacific Winner comes from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, under Professor Shilpa Sawant in India. The team of Aniruddha Pandhare, Devarsh Ganatra, Urvi Talaty, Dhananjay Thaker, Akash Pandey and Rini Antony worked with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan, a non-profit Trust that invests in various medical and social welfare initiatives to transform the lives of the poor and needy in the drought prone ‘Marathwada’ region of Maharashtra.
  • The Europe Winner comes from Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, under Professor Elena Vitkauskaitė. The team of Mantas Mitrauskas, Merita Simanavičiūtė, Agnė Raulinavičiūtė, Severina Sekrytė and Paulina Lazauskaitė worked with Dalinuosi.lt, an online sharing platform that promotes the protection of the environment and stimulates responsible usage by allowing people to lend their goods or borrow them from other consumers.
  • The Middle East & Africa Winner comes from the Institute of Management Technology, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, under Professor Ali Zalzala. The team of Pratiksha Kumar, Shikhar Ahuja and Rahul Jain worked with Community Tracks, a non-profit in California that has a global agenda to provide under-served communities with sustainable technology solutions and associated education services that enhance the quality of life.

AdWords Social Impact Awards

  • The 1st Place Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Emily Maynard, Jacob Shibley, Christine Provino, Jacob Brown and Amy Goffe worked with the Children's Science Center, a non-profit children’s science museum focused on hands-on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning and providing unique opportunities for children to explore, create and be inspired.
  • The 2nd Place Winner comes from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, under Professor Shilpa Sawant in India. The team of Aniruddha Pandhare, Devarsh Ganatra, Urvi Talaty, Dhananjay Thaker, Akash Pandey and Rini Antony worked with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan, a non-profit Trust that invests in various medical and social welfare initiatives to transform the lives of the poor and needy in the drought prone ‘Marathwada’ region of Maharashtra.
  • The 3rd Place Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Lynn Radocha, Alexander Adley, Maianh Phan, John Thompson and Cari Ross worked with the Rockingham/Harrisonburg SPCA, a non-profit animal rescue shelter that provides care for all dogs, cats, and other small animals until they can be adopted into a safe, permanent home.
Congratulations to the 2016 winners and a big round of applause for all teams that participated in the Google Online Marketing Challenge this year!

To learn more about the Google Online Marketing Challenge and to pre-register for next year’s competition, please watch the GOMC video and visit our website: www.google.com/onlinechallenge.]]> G+CoverPhoto.pngThe Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) provides a hands-on learning platform for students around the world to develop their online marketing skills and gain practical experience working with real businesses and non-profits to solve real problems and produce real results.

Every year Google gives thousands of student teams across the world an AdWords budget of US$250 to spend on a 3-week online marketing campaign for a business or non-profit of their choice. Students also have the option to create and manage a Google+ page for their client to help further boost their online presence and engage the community.


The teams that develop and communicate the most successful campaigns win awesome prizes, including a trip to Google, a donation to their non-profit partner, digital devices and more. This year over 500 professors and 10,000 students from more than 60 countries competed in the Challenge and we are happy to announce the results are in!


Check out the AdWords Business, Social Media Marketing and Social Impact Winners below and the full list of the 2016 Team Results can be found on the GOMC Past Challenges page.


AdWords Business Awards

Global Winners
  • The Global Winning team comes from the ESG UQAM - School of Management Sciences in Canada, under Professor Harold Boeck. The team of James Forbes, Nicolas Archambault-Doucet, Esme Fentener Levi and Thomas St-Amour worked with Alvéole, a company that helps people and organizations install and care for urban honeybee colonies.
Regional Winners
  • The Americas Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Lynn Radocha, Alexander Adley, Maianh Phan, John Thompson and Cari Ross worked with the Rockingham/Harrisonburg SPCA, a non-profit animal rescue shelter that provides care for all dogs, cats, and other small animals until they can be adopted into a safe, permanent home.
  • The Asia & Pacific Winner comes from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, under Professor Shilpa Sawant in India. The team of Aniruddha Pandhare, Devarsh Ganatra, Urvi Talaty, Dhananjay Thaker, Akash Pandey and Rini Antony worked with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan, a non-profit Trust that invests in various medical and social welfare initiatives to transform the lives of the poor and needy in the drought prone ‘Marathwada’ region of Maharashtra.
  • The Europe Winner comes from the University of Turku in Finland, under Professor Joni Salminen. The team of Elina Ojala, Miia Bergström, Paula Suominen and Emma Jalonen worked with ResQ, a recently founded company with a mission to help consumers “rescue” leftovers from restaurants and acquire quality meals at a cheap price, while restaurants profit from selling food that would have otherwise been wasted.
  • The Middle East & Africa Winner comes from Daystar University in Kenya, under Professor Maranga Moriasi. The team of Jeffrey Kanae, Moses Njeri Khatiebere, Evelyne Magaju, Sharone Awuori Tindi and Roselinda Were worked with Youth on the Move, a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower youth with epilepsy to build their skills, stand up for themselves and transform their desires into realistic plans and actions.

Google+ Social Media Marketing Awards

Global Winners
  • The Global Winner comes from the Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering in India under Professor Khushali Deulkar. The team of Rosanlal Behera, Niki Jain, Harsh Jain, Chandrasekhar Raman, Pratik Bhambhani and Aayushi Dholakia worked with Kossine, a Neebal initiative and coaching institute that specializes in teaching Computer Programming and Electronics courses to students.
Regional Winners
  • The Americas Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Matt Deters, Molly McDevitt, Caitlin Fikac, Natalie Krewin and Claudia Schnorbus worked with the Poricy Park Conservancy, a non-profit that preserves 250 acres of open space, prehistoric fossil beds, and the historic Murray Farmhouse for the surrounding community.
  • The Asia & Pacific Winner comes from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, under Professor Shilpa Sawant in India. The team of Aniruddha Pandhare, Devarsh Ganatra, Urvi Talaty, Dhananjay Thaker, Akash Pandey and Rini Antony worked with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan, a non-profit Trust that invests in various medical and social welfare initiatives to transform the lives of the poor and needy in the drought prone ‘Marathwada’ region of Maharashtra.
  • The Europe Winner comes from Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, under Professor Elena Vitkauskaitė. The team of Mantas Mitrauskas, Merita Simanavičiūtė, Agnė Raulinavičiūtė, Severina Sekrytė and Paulina Lazauskaitė worked with Dalinuosi.lt, an online sharing platform that promotes the protection of the environment and stimulates responsible usage by allowing people to lend their goods or borrow them from other consumers.
  • The Middle East & Africa Winner comes from the Institute of Management Technology, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, under Professor Ali Zalzala. The team of Pratiksha Kumar, Shikhar Ahuja and Rahul Jain worked with Community Tracks, a non-profit in California that has a global agenda to provide under-served communities with sustainable technology solutions and associated education services that enhance the quality of life.

AdWords Social Impact Awards

  • The 1st Place Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Emily Maynard, Jacob Shibley, Christine Provino, Jacob Brown and Amy Goffe worked with the Children's Science Center, a non-profit children’s science museum focused on hands-on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning and providing unique opportunities for children to explore, create and be inspired.
  • The 2nd Place Winner comes from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, under Professor Shilpa Sawant in India. The team of Aniruddha Pandhare, Devarsh Ganatra, Urvi Talaty, Dhananjay Thaker, Akash Pandey and Rini Antony worked with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan, a non-profit Trust that invests in various medical and social welfare initiatives to transform the lives of the poor and needy in the drought prone ‘Marathwada’ region of Maharashtra.
  • The 3rd Place Winner comes from James Madison University in the United States, under Professor Theresa B. Clarke. The team of Lynn Radocha, Alexander Adley, Maianh Phan, John Thompson and Cari Ross worked with the Rockingham/Harrisonburg SPCA, a non-profit animal rescue shelter that provides care for all dogs, cats, and other small animals until they can be adopted into a safe, permanent home.
Congratulations to the 2016 winners and a big round of applause for all teams that participated in the Google Online Marketing Challenge this year!

To learn more about the Google Online Marketing Challenge and to pre-register for next year’s competition, please watch the GOMC video and visit our website: www.google.com/onlinechallenge.]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/the-results-are-in-for-the-2016-google-online-marketing-challenge/feed/ 0 From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1) https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-google-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-1/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-google-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-1/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2016 21:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=5762b174ab65220c515f5b6afdbdb3e7 This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich
]]> This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich
]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/from-google-summer-of-code-to-game-of-thrones-on-the-back-of-a-javascript-dragon-part-1/feed/ 0 Winner Spotlight: “Pay it Forward” Contest Winners Visit Google https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/winner-spotlight-pay-it-forward-contest-winners-visit-google/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/winner-spotlight-pay-it-forward-contest-winners-visit-google/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2016 21:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=06ae894c3d2e6f636f8b18ea8beca761 In honor of Black History Month, we launched our third annual “Pay It Forward” contest to find and recognize undergraduate and MBA students positively impacting their local Black communities. After reviewing an incredible range of submissions from undergraduates and business school students, we’re pleased to announce our winners:

Undergraduate winners:
  • Ariana Brazier (2013 BOLD Immersion participant) is the former President of the Spelman College section of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). This summer, Ariana will be conducting research on homelessness before starting a Ph.D. program at the University of Pittsburgh.
  • Rachel McKenzie is the former Vice President of the Spelman College section of NCNW. This summer, Rachel will be joining Teach for America.

MBA winners:
  • Stephen Worthy is the former co-President of Detroit Revitalization & Business Initiative (Detroit R&B) at the Ross School of Business. This summer, Steve will begin working with J.P. Morgan in New York with hopes of returning to Detroit to continue his commitment to his hometown.
  • Benjamin Stickel is the former co-President of Detroit R&B. He will be returning to Detroit to continue his impact within his community while working at the Boston Consulting Group.

Both teams were awarded an all-expense paid trip to Google’s Headquarters and here’s a photo recap of their experience:

  1. They had a front row seat to experience Google’s campus and culture.
IMG_0312.JPG

  1. They connected with Googlers through coffee chats, resume workshops with Google recruiters and as they walked around campus.
IMG_0493.JPG

  1. They had an inside look at Google’s products.
“It was really cool to see that innovative side of Google that you always hear about” commented Ben Stickel (pictured far left) after an inside look at Google Cardboard virtual reality. IMG_0335.JPG

  1. They presented their work to Googlers.
Pictured below: Steve Worthy and Benjamin Stickel speaking about their work with the Detroit Revitalization & Business Initiative. Together, they pioneered Minds of Business (MoB), a mentorship program that mobilizes MBAs to serve as mentors to Detroit youth. To date, they have partnered with two Detroit public schools and covered topics such as  Accounting, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing.
IMG_0408.JPG

  1. They inspired Googlers to step out of their comfort zones and continue striving to be agents of change in their communities.
Pictured below: Ariana and Rachel leading an ice-breaker used by the Spelman College section of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Ariana and Rachel, during their tenure as President and Vice President, respectively, have placed great emphasis on their general body meetings because of the opportunities that they provide for “members to fellowship and empower themselves through constructive and reflective activities.”  
Join us in congratulating NCNW, R&B and all the incredible student organizations that entered the Pay it Forward contest. Please consider entering the contest next February!

]]> In honor of Black History Month, we launched our third annual “Pay It Forward” contest to find and recognize undergraduate and MBA students positively impacting their local Black communities. After reviewing an incredible range of submissions from undergraduates and business school students, we’re pleased to announce our winners:

Undergraduate winners:
  • Ariana Brazier (2013 BOLD Immersion participant) is the former President of the Spelman College section of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). This summer, Ariana will be conducting research on homelessness before starting a Ph.D. program at the University of Pittsburgh.
  • Rachel McKenzie is the former Vice President of the Spelman College section of NCNW. This summer, Rachel will be joining Teach for America.

MBA winners:
  • Stephen Worthy is the former co-President of Detroit Revitalization & Business Initiative (Detroit R&B) at the Ross School of Business. This summer, Steve will begin working with J.P. Morgan in New York with hopes of returning to Detroit to continue his commitment to his hometown.
  • Benjamin Stickel is the former co-President of Detroit R&B. He will be returning to Detroit to continue his impact within his community while working at the Boston Consulting Group.

Both teams were awarded an all-expense paid trip to Google’s Headquarters and here’s a photo recap of their experience:

  1. They had a front row seat to experience Google’s campus and culture.
IMG_0312.JPG

  1. They connected with Googlers through coffee chats, resume workshops with Google recruiters and as they walked around campus.
IMG_0493.JPG

  1. They had an inside look at Google’s products.
“It was really cool to see that innovative side of Google that you always hear about” commented Ben Stickel (pictured far left) after an inside look at Google Cardboard virtual reality. IMG_0335.JPG

  1. They presented their work to Googlers.
Pictured below: Steve Worthy and Benjamin Stickel speaking about their work with the Detroit Revitalization & Business Initiative. Together, they pioneered Minds of Business (MoB), a mentorship program that mobilizes MBAs to serve as mentors to Detroit youth. To date, they have partnered with two Detroit public schools and covered topics such as  Accounting, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing.
IMG_0408.JPG

  1. They inspired Googlers to step out of their comfort zones and continue striving to be agents of change in their communities.
Pictured below: Ariana and Rachel leading an ice-breaker used by the Spelman College section of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Ariana and Rachel, during their tenure as President and Vice President, respectively, have placed great emphasis on their general body meetings because of the opportunities that they provide for “members to fellowship and empower themselves through constructive and reflective activities.”  
Join us in congratulating NCNW, R&B and all the incredible student organizations that entered the Pay it Forward contest. Please consider entering the contest next February!

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/winner-spotlight-pay-it-forward-contest-winners-visit-google/feed/ 0 We have your ticket to travel back in time to Google Games 2016! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-have-your-ticket-to-travel-back-in-time-to-google-games-2016/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-have-your-ticket-to-travel-back-in-time-to-google-games-2016/#comments Thu, 07 Jul 2016 17:04:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=ccabf45b689019b8e4b2e8c6ae3c9a1c We just wrapped up five weeks of epic adventure during Google Games, and this is your golden ticket to experience all the fun!  Google Games is an annual event that allows us to bring Google’s culture, a lot of entertainment, and some friendly competition to computer science students across North America.  This year, the games were hosted in 14 different cities, and we were introduced to nearly 2,000 challenge-seeking undergraduate students from 60 different universities.  
GoogleGames1.jpg
From the patio on Google’s campus in Sunnyvale to a rooftop in Chicago, there were 17 events in 14 different cities across North America.


Participants, encouraged to dress up in costume, encountered different challenges including Trivia, Building, Puzzles, Word Association and Coding.  We awarded prizes to the top three teams at each location who had the most points at the end of the day.  The Spirit Award was presented to the teams with a contagious energy or who got creative with this year’s theme - time travel!  

GoogleGames2016_3.jpg
Teams went head to head competing in five different challenge categories, and the winners were able to take home some well deserved Google SWAG.



Team “Liveware Problem” in Waterloo was the only team to solve every single coding question - 18 problems in 75 minutes.  In Cambridge, team “Benevolent Bodacious Barbarians Plus Plus” finished the puzzle challenge with a top score across all locations.  A huge congratulations to all the teams who were crowned the winners at each site.

  • Giant Hand from the University of Texas at Austin
  • ); DROP TABLE teams; -- from Princeton University
  • Liveware Problem from the University Of Waterloo
  • We're Bad At This from Carnegie Mellon University
  • UNO CS Squad from the University Of New Orleans
  • Thyme Lords from New York University
  • Volcano Volcanoes from the University Of Washington, Seattle
  • Chrono Crew from the University Of Maryland College Park
  • Shuai's Guys from Northwestern University Illinois
  • Jumping Jalapeños from Georgia Institute Of Technology
  • nibbles ᕕ( ՞ ᗜ ՞ )ᕗ from Stanford University
  • EPOCH FAIL from the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT)
  • Team Avocado from San Jose State University
  • Tyrannosaurus Rekt from WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute
  • Doctor Poo from the California Institute Of Technology
  • Ultimate Norf from Harvey Mudd College
  • Team a4c1bed85s0365c from the University Of British Columbia

GoogleGames3.jpg
The Building challenge at Google Games involved some creative thinking and many straws.  



Add Google Students to your circles on Google+ to learn more about next year’s competition.  We hope to see you there and uncover your passion for computer science. ]]> We just wrapped up five weeks of epic adventure during Google Games, and this is your golden ticket to experience all the fun!  Google Games is an annual event that allows us to bring Google’s culture, a lot of entertainment, and some friendly competition to computer science students across North America.  This year, the games were hosted in 14 different cities, and we were introduced to nearly 2,000 challenge-seeking undergraduate students from 60 different universities.  
GoogleGames1.jpg
From the patio on Google’s campus in Sunnyvale to a rooftop in Chicago, there were 17 events in 14 different cities across North America.


Participants, encouraged to dress up in costume, encountered different challenges including Trivia, Building, Puzzles, Word Association and Coding.  We awarded prizes to the top three teams at each location who had the most points at the end of the day.  The Spirit Award was presented to the teams with a contagious energy or who got creative with this year’s theme - time travel!  

GoogleGames2016_3.jpg
Teams went head to head competing in five different challenge categories, and the winners were able to take home some well deserved Google SWAG.



Team “Liveware Problem” in Waterloo was the only team to solve every single coding question - 18 problems in 75 minutes.  In Cambridge, team “Benevolent Bodacious Barbarians Plus Plus” finished the puzzle challenge with a top score across all locations.  A huge congratulations to all the teams who were crowned the winners at each site.

  • Giant Hand from the University of Texas at Austin
  • ); DROP TABLE teams; -- from Princeton University
  • Liveware Problem from the University Of Waterloo
  • We're Bad At This from Carnegie Mellon University
  • UNO CS Squad from the University Of New Orleans
  • Thyme Lords from New York University
  • Volcano Volcanoes from the University Of Washington, Seattle
  • Chrono Crew from the University Of Maryland College Park
  • Shuai's Guys from Northwestern University Illinois
  • Jumping Jalapeños from Georgia Institute Of Technology
  • nibbles ᕕ( ՞ ᗜ ՞ )ᕗ from Stanford University
  • EPOCH FAIL from the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT)
  • Team Avocado from San Jose State University
  • Tyrannosaurus Rekt from WPI Worcester Polytechnic Institute
  • Doctor Poo from the California Institute Of Technology
  • Ultimate Norf from Harvey Mudd College
  • Team a4c1bed85s0365c from the University Of British Columbia

GoogleGames3.jpg
The Building challenge at Google Games involved some creative thinking and many straws.  



Add Google Students to your circles on Google+ to learn more about next year’s competition.  We hope to see you there and uncover your passion for computer science. ]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-have-your-ticket-to-travel-back-in-time-to-google-games-2016/feed/ 0 Congratulations to the recipients of the 2016 Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/congratulations-to-the-recipients-of-the-2016-google-europe-scholarship-for-students-with-disabilities/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/congratulations-to-the-recipients-of-the-2016-google-europe-scholarship-for-students-with-disabilities/#comments Mon, 20 Jun 2016 15:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=2fe7caa7a6cff60df4559d7acf1a1b05
New google logo.png

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to advancing computing and technology, we are pleased to provide scholarships to encourage students to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders. In partnership with EmployAbility, we are excited to announce this year’s recipients of The Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities.
Please join us in congratulating the following recipients, along with the universities they attend:
  • Alyssa Milburn, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Tim Dettmers, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
  • Cristina Isabel Font, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
  • Massimo Giordano, University of Trento, Italy
  • Hannah Evan, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
  • Jakub Tomek, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
  • Jens Heuschkel, TU Darmstadt, Germany
  • Dmitri Katz, Open University, Israel
  • Trung Hieu Nguyen, Aalto University, Finland
Each scholar will receive 7,000 Euros to support their studies for the 2016/2017 academic year. All scholars have been selected based on their passion for Computer Science, academic achievement, leadership, and technical accomplishments.

Applications for the 2017 Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities will open in October. Follow our updates on this blog for information about when applications will open.

employability-logo.png







Posted by Maya Tudor, EMEA Diversity Scholarships Program Manager
]]>
New google logo.png

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to advancing computing and technology, we are pleased to provide scholarships to encourage students to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders. In partnership with EmployAbility, we are excited to announce this year’s recipients of The Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities.
Please join us in congratulating the following recipients, along with the universities they attend:
  • Alyssa Milburn, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Tim Dettmers, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
  • Cristina Isabel Font, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
  • Massimo Giordano, University of Trento, Italy
  • Hannah Evan, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
  • Jakub Tomek, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
  • Jens Heuschkel, TU Darmstadt, Germany
  • Dmitri Katz, Open University, Israel
  • Trung Hieu Nguyen, Aalto University, Finland
Each scholar will receive 7,000 Euros to support their studies for the 2016/2017 academic year. All scholars have been selected based on their passion for Computer Science, academic achievement, leadership, and technical accomplishments.

Applications for the 2017 Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities will open in October. Follow our updates on this blog for information about when applications will open.

employability-logo.png







Posted by Maya Tudor, EMEA Diversity Scholarships Program Manager
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/congratulations-to-the-recipients-of-the-2016-google-europe-scholarship-for-students-with-disabilities/feed/ 0 Presenting our 2016 Google scholarship recipients! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/presenting-our-2016-google-scholarship-recipients/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/presenting-our-2016-google-scholarship-recipients/#comments Thu, 16 Jun 2016 22:55:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=836f315145eb44a7d3505b3aaaa937f6

Here at Google, we strive to create meaningful connections with rising computer science talent by creating programs that engage students from around the world. While these individuals come from  different backgrounds and experiences, many have faced the challenge of being underrepresented in the tech industry. We’re working to change that.

As part of our initiatives focused on expanding diversity, Google offers scholarships that support and encourage underrepresented students to pursue careers in computer science and become part of the next generation of tech leaders. We recently selected recipients from the following scholarship programs:


We’re excited to announce the 2016 recipients of these scholarships, and congratulate them for their hard work and dedication. These students will join a community of Google scholars who are actively changing the diversity status quo in the tech industry. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for these exceptional students!

]]>

Here at Google, we strive to create meaningful connections with rising computer science talent by creating programs that engage students from around the world. While these individuals come from  different backgrounds and experiences, many have faced the challenge of being underrepresented in the tech industry. We’re working to change that.

As part of our initiatives focused on expanding diversity, Google offers scholarships that support and encourage underrepresented students to pursue careers in computer science and become part of the next generation of tech leaders. We recently selected recipients from the following scholarship programs:


We’re excited to announce the 2016 recipients of these scholarships, and congratulate them for their hard work and dedication. These students will join a community of Google scholars who are actively changing the diversity status quo in the tech industry. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for these exceptional students!

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/presenting-our-2016-google-scholarship-recipients/feed/ 0 Writing the best business report for the AdMob Student App Challenge https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/writing-the-best-business-report-for-the-admob-student-app-challenge/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/writing-the-best-business-report-for-the-admob-student-app-challenge/#comments Thu, 16 Jun 2016 16:23:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=22b48435e80deb67d98f4fe748d53a2b

With less than two weeks left in the AdMob Student App Challenge, you should now be working on your business reports. In order to qualify, your team must submit a business report along with your app so please review the guidelines. Here are some tips to help you write your business report:

  • The presentation and layout are easy - just follow the template on the AdMob website, and provide logical and cohesive explanations on each step of your decision-making process.
  • Give examples along the way. This does not necessarily mean flashy and colorful graphics, but a clear marketing strategy and an examples of your app’s performance will go a long way with the panel.
  • Don’t worry about having the report translated to English. Submit the business report in the language you are most comfortable with.  
  • It’s important to make sure your business report demonstrates a sound strategy behind the choices made when integrating AdMob into the app.
  • With your marketing strategy, talk about how you have already marketed your app, and what you’re doing to get the word out about your app and to maximize downloads.

While time is running short, continue to promote your app, monitor feedback, and get your business report wrapped up. The submission deadline is June 28, 2016 by 5:00PM PST, and this includes both your mobile app and business report. As always, follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter for updates and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for any last-minute posts.

Posted by Jeff Miner
AdMob Student App Challenge Team]]>

With less than two weeks left in the AdMob Student App Challenge, you should now be working on your business reports. In order to qualify, your team must submit a business report along with your app so please review the guidelines. Here are some tips to help you write your business report:

  • The presentation and layout are easy - just follow the template on the AdMob website, and provide logical and cohesive explanations on each step of your decision-making process.
  • Give examples along the way. This does not necessarily mean flashy and colorful graphics, but a clear marketing strategy and an examples of your app’s performance will go a long way with the panel.
  • Don’t worry about having the report translated to English. Submit the business report in the language you are most comfortable with.  
  • It’s important to make sure your business report demonstrates a sound strategy behind the choices made when integrating AdMob into the app.
  • With your marketing strategy, talk about how you have already marketed your app, and what you’re doing to get the word out about your app and to maximize downloads.

While time is running short, continue to promote your app, monitor feedback, and get your business report wrapped up. The submission deadline is June 28, 2016 by 5:00PM PST, and this includes both your mobile app and business report. As always, follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter for updates and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for any last-minute posts.

Posted by Jeff Miner
AdMob Student App Challenge Team]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/writing-the-best-business-report-for-the-admob-student-app-challenge/feed/ 0 Looking to the last month of the AdMob Student App Challenge https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/looking-to-the-last-month-of-the-admob-student-app-challenge/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/looking-to-the-last-month-of-the-admob-student-app-challenge/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2016 22:45:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=3504e6e338853f0738e65cd9d25c9dc7
There is now a month left before the final submission date for the AdMob Student App Challenge. At this point in the contest, your team should have completed the design of your app, and it should be live on  the Google Play Store. For the remainder of the contest, we recommend that your team focus on the following:

  • Monitor user feedback so that you can make improvements as the app gets the feedback. Your app should be high quality, and part of that is improving it based on user suggestions.

  • Promote your app. Think about creative ways to do it. Next week, look for a post on promotional suggestions that are simple and effective.

  • Now is the time to start readying your business report, which is due on June 28, 2016 by 5:00PM PST through this link. The Challenge website already has a recommended template on it, and we will be sending out some pointers on having the best possible project soon.
    • Remember, your project will be reviewed by a panel of app experts from Google, so your business report will need to be thorough and of professional-level quality.

Continue to follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter for updates on the last month of the Challenge and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for any last-minute posts.

Posted by Jeff Miner
AdMob Student App Challenge Team]]>
There is now a month left before the final submission date for the AdMob Student App Challenge. At this point in the contest, your team should have completed the design of your app, and it should be live on  the Google Play Store. For the remainder of the contest, we recommend that your team focus on the following:

  • Monitor user feedback so that you can make improvements as the app gets the feedback. Your app should be high quality, and part of that is improving it based on user suggestions.

  • Promote your app. Think about creative ways to do it. Next week, look for a post on promotional suggestions that are simple and effective.

  • Now is the time to start readying your business report, which is due on June 28, 2016 by 5:00PM PST through this link. The Challenge website already has a recommended template on it, and we will be sending out some pointers on having the best possible project soon.
    • Remember, your project will be reviewed by a panel of app experts from Google, so your business report will need to be thorough and of professional-level quality.

Continue to follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter for updates on the last month of the Challenge and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for any last-minute posts.

Posted by Jeff Miner
AdMob Student App Challenge Team]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/looking-to-the-last-month-of-the-admob-student-app-challenge/feed/ 0 Google Travel Grant Application: 2016 Grace Hopper Conference ***UPDATE*** https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-travel-grant-application-2016-grace-hopper-conference/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-travel-grant-application-2016-grace-hopper-conference/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2016 22:35:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=8d7eceed7cde035250600532408bb790

***UPDATE***
The deadline has been extended to July 17, 2016

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to increase the number of women in technology, we are excited to offer travel grants to the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference taking place in Houston, Texas from October 19 - 21, 2016. Once again, this year’s conference will offer incredible opportunities for mentoring, networking and career development.


University students and industry professionals in the US and Canada who are excelling in technology and passionate about supporting women in tech can apply for a travel grant to attend the 2016 Grace Hopper conference.


Sponsorship includes:
  • Conference registration
  • Round trip flight to Houston, TX (from within the US or Canada)
  • $75 USD reimbursement for miscellaneous travel costs  
  • Arranged hotel accommodations from October 18-22
  • A fun event with your travel grant recipients on one of the evenings of the conference!


Please apply here by Sunday, July 17, 2016. The Grace Hopper Travel Sponsorship winners will be announced by July 27th.

For questions, please email ghctravelgrant@google.com.]]>

***UPDATE***
The deadline has been extended to July 17, 2016

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to increase the number of women in technology, we are excited to offer travel grants to the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference taking place in Houston, Texas from October 19 - 21, 2016. Once again, this year’s conference will offer incredible opportunities for mentoring, networking and career development.


University students and industry professionals in the US and Canada who are excelling in technology and passionate about supporting women in tech can apply for a travel grant to attend the 2016 Grace Hopper conference.


Sponsorship includes:
  • Conference registration
  • Round trip flight to Houston, TX (from within the US or Canada)
  • $75 USD reimbursement for miscellaneous travel costs  
  • Arranged hotel accommodations from October 18-22
  • A fun event with your travel grant recipients on one of the evenings of the conference!


Please apply here by Sunday, July 17, 2016. The Grace Hopper Travel Sponsorship winners will be announced by July 27th.

For questions, please email ghctravelgrant@google.com.]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-travel-grant-application-2016-grace-hopper-conference/feed/ 0 Why Math Majors Came to Google to Learn About Careers in Software Engineering https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/why-math-majors-came-to-google-to-learn-about-careers-in-software-engineering/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/why-math-majors-came-to-google-to-learn-about-careers-in-software-engineering/#comments Wed, 13 Apr 2016 15:36:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=da009e217ae49f7c07b35181b953081c Did you know that you don’t have to be a computer science major to be a software engineer at Google? It’s true! Just a few weeks ago, Google hosted its first-ever Math Summit in the New York City office to encourage students majoring in subjects other than computer science that they, too, can -- and should! -- apply for software engineering internships and full-time roles at Google. Students from 17 colleges came to Google for a day of technical talks, a panel discussion featuring Googlers with math backgrounds, an interview workshop and networking. If you’re not studying computer science, but are interested in building technology that makes a meaningful impact on the lives of people all across the world, then read on to learn what you’ll need to know.

IMG_4221 (1).jpg
A panel at Google’s first-ever Math Summit, held in New York City.


I don’t have to be a CS major to work at Google?
We want to take this opportunity to do a little myth-busting: You *do not* have to be a CS major to have a career as a software engineer here at Google. Studying physics? Electrical engineering? Theoretical math? We have Googlers from all of these backgrounds! You just have to have the CS fundamentals, which you’ll need in order to do well in the technical interviews (more on this later), and the passion to work in teams to solve some of technology’s toughest questions. If you can develop your coding skills, then software engineering might just be your next adventure.


What do I need to know?
You might be thinking, “But I’m so behind! How will I learn everything I need to know for interviews before I graduate?” We have good news: you don’t have to know everything. When you’re preparing for technical interviews, it’s most important to have a firm understanding of data structures and algorithms, which is typically the next course taken after the Intro to Programming course offered by many colleges and universities. If you’re still in school, take advantage of the courses offered there. And be sure sure to check out our Technical Development Guide (g.co/techdevguide).


What are interviewers looking for?
Interviewers will want to see that you are able to write functional code in at least one language really well (e.g., Java, Python, C++, etc.). Make it your priority to know the common constructs and idioms in your language of choice. Once you have that down, ask yourself if you could explain the real world performance of the code you write. Do you know the run time? Can you think of how you’d change your code if you had to make certain trade-offs? Have you thought about scalability? What about different edge cases? Make it a habit of asking yourself these questions and testing your code, and you’ll be in great shape.


That’s it?
Mostly, yes! The next steps are to practice, practice, and practice. Buddy up with a friend and practice writing code on white boards. Talk out loud as you go through each problem to simulate the interview. Remember, it's okay to admit what you do not know. You won’t be penalized for this! Interviewers have been in your position before, and they will tell you that most of what they do now was learned on the job -- not from textbooks or computer science courses.


Get in touch with us!
Interested in learning more? Let us know here! And check out google.com/students for all internship and full-time opportunities at Google.


We hope to hear from you!
Alec & Grace, from the University Programs team


IMG_4207.jpg

Alec taking selfies while waiting for students to arrive at the Math Summit.

]]> Did you know that you don’t have to be a computer science major to be a software engineer at Google? It’s true! Just a few weeks ago, Google hosted its first-ever Math Summit in the New York City office to encourage students majoring in subjects other than computer science that they, too, can -- and should! -- apply for software engineering internships and full-time roles at Google. Students from 17 colleges came to Google for a day of technical talks, a panel discussion featuring Googlers with math backgrounds, an interview workshop and networking. If you’re not studying computer science, but are interested in building technology that makes a meaningful impact on the lives of people all across the world, then read on to learn what you’ll need to know.

IMG_4221 (1).jpg
A panel at Google’s first-ever Math Summit, held in New York City.


I don’t have to be a CS major to work at Google?
We want to take this opportunity to do a little myth-busting: You *do not* have to be a CS major to have a career as a software engineer here at Google. Studying physics? Electrical engineering? Theoretical math? We have Googlers from all of these backgrounds! You just have to have the CS fundamentals, which you’ll need in order to do well in the technical interviews (more on this later), and the passion to work in teams to solve some of technology’s toughest questions. If you can develop your coding skills, then software engineering might just be your next adventure.


What do I need to know?
You might be thinking, “But I’m so behind! How will I learn everything I need to know for interviews before I graduate?” We have good news: you don’t have to know everything. When you’re preparing for technical interviews, it’s most important to have a firm understanding of data structures and algorithms, which is typically the next course taken after the Intro to Programming course offered by many colleges and universities. If you’re still in school, take advantage of the courses offered there. And be sure sure to check out our Technical Development Guide (g.co/techdevguide).


What are interviewers looking for?
Interviewers will want to see that you are able to write functional code in at least one language really well (e.g., Java, Python, C++, etc.). Make it your priority to know the common constructs and idioms in your language of choice. Once you have that down, ask yourself if you could explain the real world performance of the code you write. Do you know the run time? Can you think of how you’d change your code if you had to make certain trade-offs? Have you thought about scalability? What about different edge cases? Make it a habit of asking yourself these questions and testing your code, and you’ll be in great shape.


That’s it?
Mostly, yes! The next steps are to practice, practice, and practice. Buddy up with a friend and practice writing code on white boards. Talk out loud as you go through each problem to simulate the interview. Remember, it's okay to admit what you do not know. You won’t be penalized for this! Interviewers have been in your position before, and they will tell you that most of what they do now was learned on the job -- not from textbooks or computer science courses.


Get in touch with us!
Interested in learning more? Let us know here! And check out google.com/students for all internship and full-time opportunities at Google.


We hope to hear from you!
Alec & Grace, from the University Programs team


IMG_4207.jpg

Alec taking selfies while waiting for students to arrive at the Math Summit.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/why-math-majors-came-to-google-to-learn-about-careers-in-software-engineering/feed/ 0 From drones to satellites — developers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa compete in Hash Code 2016 https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/from-drones-to-satellites-developers-across-europe-the-middle-east-and-africa-compete-in-hash-code-2016/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/from-drones-to-satellites-developers-across-europe-the-middle-east-and-africa-compete-in-hash-code-2016/#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2016 17:38:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=d1f6f242003ccf2ef9c87416dbf89b88 On a Thursday evening in February, more than 17,000 developers waited in anticipation to find out this year’s challenge for the Online Qualification Round of Hash Code. The live stream announcement quickly revealed the theme — drone deliveries — and within a few minutes teams were immersed in reviewing the problem statement. The four hour countdown began.
hashcode2016_1000px.png
In case you missed it, Hash Code is a team-based programming competition for students and professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. What started as a competition for 200 participants in France, has grown in just three years to reach thousands of developers across multiple continents. What’s unique is that rather than solving a series of algorithmic tasks, teams are given one problem to solve that’s been built by engineers at Google and inspired from a real-life problem. Teams have the chance to optimize and submit their solution as many times as they’d like in order to improve their score. Past year’s challenges have included optimizing the layout of a data center or the route of a Project Loon balloon.
The competition takes place over two stages: an Online Qualification Round and a Final Round. During this year’s Online Qualification Round, participants optimized drone delivery schedules. Teams could compete from wherever they’d like, including joining one of our 300+ hubs. Hubs are organized by participants as a way for teams in the same university or city to meetup and compete side-by-side.
160211Hashcode100 (1).jpg
Students at a hub in Andela, Kenya

A month later, the top 52 teams (representing 22 different countries!) gathered at the Google Paris office to tackle the Final Round problem, which involved optimizing the operations of a set of Terra Bella satellites.
Google Hash Code 2016 - 106.jpg
Team Saar-Land was one of five teams whose members came from different countries, in their case Germany and Switzerland.

Teams were given six hours to come up with their best solution. The first place team was YMTeam from Belarus, followed closely behind by Ababahalamaha from Moscow and Die Bergbokbende from South Africa.
Google Hash Code 2016 - 172.jpg
Congratulations to YMTeam for winning Hash Code 2016.

Congratulations to everyone who participated! If you’d like to receive a notification when registration opens up for Hash Code 2017, fill out this form.
Google Hash Code 2016 - 140 (1).jpg
52 teams from 22 countries met at Google Paris
to compete in the Final Round of Hash Code 2016


Written by Jessica Safir, University Programs]]> On a Thursday evening in February, more than 17,000 developers waited in anticipation to find out this year’s challenge for the Online Qualification Round of Hash Code. The live stream announcement quickly revealed the theme — drone deliveries — and within a few minutes teams were immersed in reviewing the problem statement. The four hour countdown began.
hashcode2016_1000px.png
In case you missed it, Hash Code is a team-based programming competition for students and professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. What started as a competition for 200 participants in France, has grown in just three years to reach thousands of developers across multiple continents. What’s unique is that rather than solving a series of algorithmic tasks, teams are given one problem to solve that’s been built by engineers at Google and inspired from a real-life problem. Teams have the chance to optimize and submit their solution as many times as they’d like in order to improve their score. Past year’s challenges have included optimizing the layout of a data center or the route of a Project Loon balloon.
The competition takes place over two stages: an Online Qualification Round and a Final Round. During this year’s Online Qualification Round, participants optimized drone delivery schedules. Teams could compete from wherever they’d like, including joining one of our 300+ hubs. Hubs are organized by participants as a way for teams in the same university or city to meetup and compete side-by-side.
160211Hashcode100 (1).jpg
Students at a hub in Andela, Kenya

A month later, the top 52 teams (representing 22 different countries!) gathered at the Google Paris office to tackle the Final Round problem, which involved optimizing the operations of a set of Terra Bella satellites.
Google Hash Code 2016 - 106.jpg
Team Saar-Land was one of five teams whose members came from different countries, in their case Germany and Switzerland.

Teams were given six hours to come up with their best solution. The first place team was YMTeam from Belarus, followed closely behind by Ababahalamaha from Moscow and Die Bergbokbende from South Africa.
Google Hash Code 2016 - 172.jpg
Congratulations to YMTeam for winning Hash Code 2016.

Congratulations to everyone who participated! If you’d like to receive a notification when registration opens up for Hash Code 2017, fill out this form.
Google Hash Code 2016 - 140 (1).jpg
52 teams from 22 countries met at Google Paris
to compete in the Final Round of Hash Code 2016


Written by Jessica Safir, University Programs]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/from-drones-to-satellites-developers-across-europe-the-middle-east-and-africa-compete-in-hash-code-2016/feed/ 0 Teaching kids to program in their native language https://googledata.org/google-open-source/teaching-kids-to-program-in-their-native-language/ https://googledata.org/google-open-source/teaching-kids-to-program-in-their-native-language/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2016 18:00:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=184b5390c0c1c925654a40e7e63e03fb
Today we introduce two programs to help kids program in their native language — clojure-turtle and clj-thamil. Both are written in Clojure, a dialect of Lisp that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. What makes Clojure unique is its simple design which can help make the path for kids to learn programming easier.

clojure-turtle: a bridge between logo beginners and lisp experts

For some beginners, the Clojure learning curve has been steep in the area of functions and functional programming. Many students learning to program prefer to start instead with Logo, a dialect of Lisp that is used in Scratch and teaching efforts such as code.org. We designed clojure-turtle with this in mind.

The clojure-turtle project was created to bridge the gap between the people using Lisp at opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s for those learning to program for the first time and those with “real-world concerns” who write macros. The project implements Logo in Clojure, and remains faithful to the basics of Logo —(forward 10),  (right 90), etc.  But the door is left open for you to blur the lines of Logo/Clojure, beginner/FP, etc.:

(defn square-by-length
 [side-length]
 (repeat 4 (all (forward side-length) (right 90))))

(defn mirrored [f]
 (fn [& args]
   (repeat 2 (all (apply f args) (right 180)))))

(def lengths [40 50 60])
(map (mirrored square-by-length) lengths)
clojure-turtle2.png
One place where the Logo in Clojure approach of clojure-turtle has already proven successful is in ClojureBridge, a workshop for beginners aimed at increasing the number of people from underrepresented minority groups within the Clojure community. The section on teaching functions had been challenging for students previously, but students now learning through the Logo-based approach move past it with ease onto higher level concepts.

clj-thamil: programming in your native language

When I originally set out to create a library for processing for the Thamil language, I stumbled upon the realization that I could also program in the Thamil language. Functions are first-class data, which can be assigned to new names. But macros are what enable me to “translate” the rest of Clojure from English to Thamil, doing so in the form of a library, without having to modify the compiler, and in a manner that is generic for any language to use. Now, a function to pluralize a word in Thamil can be itself written in Thamil. In my Clojure/West talk on clj-thamil, I talked about the potential impact on increasing diversity among programmers, especially when we consider the number of people globally who do not have access to a (good) English education that is an implicit prerequisite for learning to program.

Putting the two together: learning Logo in your native language

The approach of clj-thamil is flexible and powerful enough that we can “translate” any code, not just the core of Clojure. So why not translate clojure-turtle in less than 30 lines of code? Here is a video demonstrating the use of Logo in the Thamil language:


The simple concepts of Logo soften the learning curve for programming and can make it fun for all ages! The simplicity of Clojure gives it a power that you can use to shape the program to your will — students can write all their code in a non-English language if they want. The combination of simple concepts can make it  possible to teach programming to kids around the world who do not speak English. I hope that clojure-turtle and clj-thamil can be used to improve literacy and diversity for students learning to code.

Visit the clojure-turtle Github page and the clj-thamil Github page to learn more, sign up for the mailing lists and contribute patches for features.

By Elango Cheran, Software Engineering

]]>
Today we introduce two programs to help kids program in their native language — clojure-turtle and clj-thamil. Both are written in Clojure, a dialect of Lisp that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. What makes Clojure unique is its simple design which can help make the path for kids to learn programming easier.

clojure-turtle: a bridge between logo beginners and lisp experts

For some beginners, the Clojure learning curve has been steep in the area of functions and functional programming. Many students learning to program prefer to start instead with Logo, a dialect of Lisp that is used in Scratch and teaching efforts such as code.org. We designed clojure-turtle with this in mind.

The clojure-turtle project was created to bridge the gap between the people using Lisp at opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s for those learning to program for the first time and those with “real-world concerns” who write macros. The project implements Logo in Clojure, and remains faithful to the basics of Logo —(forward 10),  (right 90), etc.  But the door is left open for you to blur the lines of Logo/Clojure, beginner/FP, etc.:

(defn square-by-length
 [side-length]
 (repeat 4 (all (forward side-length) (right 90))))

(defn mirrored [f]
 (fn [& args]
   (repeat 2 (all (apply f args) (right 180)))))

(def lengths [40 50 60])
(map (mirrored square-by-length) lengths)
clojure-turtle2.png
One place where the Logo in Clojure approach of clojure-turtle has already proven successful is in ClojureBridge, a workshop for beginners aimed at increasing the number of people from underrepresented minority groups within the Clojure community. The section on teaching functions had been challenging for students previously, but students now learning through the Logo-based approach move past it with ease onto higher level concepts.

clj-thamil: programming in your native language

When I originally set out to create a library for processing for the Thamil language, I stumbled upon the realization that I could also program in the Thamil language. Functions are first-class data, which can be assigned to new names. But macros are what enable me to “translate” the rest of Clojure from English to Thamil, doing so in the form of a library, without having to modify the compiler, and in a manner that is generic for any language to use. Now, a function to pluralize a word in Thamil can be itself written in Thamil. In my Clojure/West talk on clj-thamil, I talked about the potential impact on increasing diversity among programmers, especially when we consider the number of people globally who do not have access to a (good) English education that is an implicit prerequisite for learning to program.

Putting the two together: learning Logo in your native language

The approach of clj-thamil is flexible and powerful enough that we can “translate” any code, not just the core of Clojure. So why not translate clojure-turtle in less than 30 lines of code? Here is a video demonstrating the use of Logo in the Thamil language:


The simple concepts of Logo soften the learning curve for programming and can make it fun for all ages! The simplicity of Clojure gives it a power that you can use to shape the program to your will — students can write all their code in a non-English language if they want. The combination of simple concepts can make it  possible to teach programming to kids around the world who do not speak English. I hope that clojure-turtle and clj-thamil can be used to improve literacy and diversity for students learning to code.

Visit the clojure-turtle Github page and the clj-thamil Github page to learn more, sign up for the mailing lists and contribute patches for features.

By Elango Cheran, Software Engineering

]]> https://googledata.org/google-open-source/teaching-kids-to-program-in-their-native-language/feed/ 0 My Journey with Google: Marcell https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/my-journey-with-google-marcell/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/my-journey-with-google-marcell/#comments Mon, 29 Feb 2016 15:54:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=1d3bac47cc5f298790f47a484db73dd4
There are many ways to start your journey with Google. As a university student, two great ways are AdCamp and BOLD Immersion (apply by March 1st 2016!). Take a look at Marcell’s journey with Google.
My journey with Google began as an AdCamper (a.k.a. Google AdCamp participant). This is my story: I was doing a Master’s degree in Business Development and I was looking for career opportunities that would allow me to pursue my passion in marketing and advertising. I heard about AdCamp, so I went ahead and sent in my application (not really expecting to get a spot on the program).

As part of the AdCamp application process, I submitted a sales pitch about Google’s advertising platform (AdWords) for a fictitious SMB organization. The pitch gave me an opportunity to really shine (later I learned that consultative pitching is something Googlers do regularly within SMB Sales). The next thing I know, I’m an AdCamper, exploring the Google Office in Wroclaw, Poland, with many other students from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I can honestly say that the program was truly a unique and memorable part of my journey with Google.

Some of the greatest moments during my Adcamp experience were:
  • Getting culturally immersed: One of the coolest things about the program was the exposure we got to Google's company culture — from the one-of-a-kind workspaces, the awesome Googlers we met along the way, to trying out the great food! 
  • Learning about life in the SMB team: I learned a lot about what they do in the SMB Sales and Global Customer Experience teams’ and found out how they operate in the digital advertising landscape, through sessions on YouTube as an ad platform, and talked about the importance of mobile in today’s marketing strategy. 
  • Finding out about career opportunities: We had a whole day to learn about Google’s recruitment processes, get help with our CV’s and take part in a mock interview with a recruiter. This really helped me better understand how I could potentially become a future Googler. 
My journey continued even after the program ended…

After taking part in AdCamp, I went back to my studies and finished my degree. Having had this Google experience, I was ready to interview for a full-time role on the SMB Sales team — and it was a success!

It’s now already been more than a year since I first stepped into Google Dublin as an Associate Account Strategist for the Hungarian market, and i’ve had a lot of fun along the way. If I had to describe our team’s vision in one sentence, I’d say: that our focus is on diversity, creativity and love for our customers whilst trying to help SMBs grow and achieve their business goals, by empowering them to become Micro-Multinationals through Google’s advertising solutions.
My highlights as a strategist to-date were:
  • Helping businesses grow: I’m responsible for a portfolio of clients. In many cases, they heavily rely on my expertise to run their whole online business strategy. This is both fascinating and challenging! 
  • Developing professionally: Being curious and learning fast is so important. This is why I attend a lot of in-house trainings and look for ways to think outside-of-the-box. 
  • Taking on new projects: I’ve also worked on projects outside of my team, such as facilitating a Negotiation Course with Googlers. During this year’s AdCamp program, I was also able to share my knowledge and experiences with participating ‘AdCampers’ — when only a year prior I was an ‘AdCamper’ myself! 
Find out even more about AdCamp EMEA and apply here (Apply by March 1st 2016)!
]]>
There are many ways to start your journey with Google. As a university student, two great ways are AdCamp and BOLD Immersion (apply by March 1st 2016!). Take a look at Marcell’s journey with Google.
My journey with Google began as an AdCamper (a.k.a. Google AdCamp participant). This is my story: I was doing a Master’s degree in Business Development and I was looking for career opportunities that would allow me to pursue my passion in marketing and advertising. I heard about AdCamp, so I went ahead and sent in my application (not really expecting to get a spot on the program).

As part of the AdCamp application process, I submitted a sales pitch about Google’s advertising platform (AdWords) for a fictitious SMB organization. The pitch gave me an opportunity to really shine (later I learned that consultative pitching is something Googlers do regularly within SMB Sales). The next thing I know, I’m an AdCamper, exploring the Google Office in Wroclaw, Poland, with many other students from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I can honestly say that the program was truly a unique and memorable part of my journey with Google.

Some of the greatest moments during my Adcamp experience were:
  • Getting culturally immersed: One of the coolest things about the program was the exposure we got to Google's company culture — from the one-of-a-kind workspaces, the awesome Googlers we met along the way, to trying out the great food! 
  • Learning about life in the SMB team: I learned a lot about what they do in the SMB Sales and Global Customer Experience teams’ and found out how they operate in the digital advertising landscape, through sessions on YouTube as an ad platform, and talked about the importance of mobile in today’s marketing strategy. 
  • Finding out about career opportunities: We had a whole day to learn about Google’s recruitment processes, get help with our CV’s and take part in a mock interview with a recruiter. This really helped me better understand how I could potentially become a future Googler. 
My journey continued even after the program ended…

After taking part in AdCamp, I went back to my studies and finished my degree. Having had this Google experience, I was ready to interview for a full-time role on the SMB Sales team — and it was a success!

It’s now already been more than a year since I first stepped into Google Dublin as an Associate Account Strategist for the Hungarian market, and i’ve had a lot of fun along the way. If I had to describe our team’s vision in one sentence, I’d say: that our focus is on diversity, creativity and love for our customers whilst trying to help SMBs grow and achieve their business goals, by empowering them to become Micro-Multinationals through Google’s advertising solutions.
My highlights as a strategist to-date were:
  • Helping businesses grow: I’m responsible for a portfolio of clients. In many cases, they heavily rely on my expertise to run their whole online business strategy. This is both fascinating and challenging! 
  • Developing professionally: Being curious and learning fast is so important. This is why I attend a lot of in-house trainings and look for ways to think outside-of-the-box. 
  • Taking on new projects: I’ve also worked on projects outside of my team, such as facilitating a Negotiation Course with Googlers. During this year’s AdCamp program, I was also able to share my knowledge and experiences with participating ‘AdCampers’ — when only a year prior I was an ‘AdCamper’ myself! 
Find out even more about AdCamp EMEA and apply here (Apply by March 1st 2016)!
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/my-journey-with-google-marcell/feed/ 0 My Journey With Google: Kalina https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/my-journey-with-google/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/my-journey-with-google/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2016 17:49:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=51e38c53538ea2a406695ab72a4e6a4a There are many ways to start your journey with Google. As a university student, two great ways are BOLD Immersion and AdCamp (apply by March 1st 2016!). Take a look at Kalina’s journey with Google.

My journey with Google started one late, summer night as I was randomly browsing for the meaning of life. Let me decipher that -- I was looking for ways to make practical sense of my degree in Technology and Innovation Management. Naturally, I ended up looking for opportunities on the Google Careers website and stumbled upon the BOLD Immersion Program. The good news: I loved the description; the bad news: the deadline was in two hours. Fortunately, I managed to submit my application just in time and I was accepted to participate in the program.
bold.jpg


Some of the greatest moments during my BOLD Immersion experience were:

  • Learning about Google’s culture and business: The program fully immersed me into Google’s world famous culture and gave me the chance to learn what Google’s core business is all about. It also gave me the opportunity to witness the type of professional opportunities open to me as a young professional. 
  • Exploring the art of pitching: We all had the chance to do a Sales Pitch simulation that involved a lot of creativity (some groups included audio visual and stage performance in their pitch, which I found later on as a full-time Googler is not the most effective way to pitch to clients).
  • Making friends!: I made many new close friends with university students from across Europe, The Middle East and Africa, whom I continue to stay in touch with today.


And the highlights continued even after the program ended…

  • Mentorship Participation: After flying home, I was assigned the ultimate Google mentor, Olga. I am very grateful for all the time she took to help me develop my skills and prepare me for the actual interview process. Her great advice helped me through the recruitment process and also gave me insights into the work of a salesperson, managing relationships and expectations in the workplace. This was an invaluable source of knowledge for me! 

1st days.jpg
Then, in September 2014 I was converted from a ‘BOLDer’ to a ‘Noogler’. There were a lot of Nooglers who joined at the same time as me. We all went through an intense one-month training program prior to joining our teams.


Following the training, I launched my Google career as an Associate Account Strategist on the SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) Sales team for the Bulgarian market. As part of my core role, I have organized three big educational client events in Bulgaria and five design thinking workshops. I have also trained another member of my team, who arrived in mid-2015. I’m excited to be working on the “The Startup Meetups” project, launched by Google for Entrepreneurs, with their branding and design. The mission of “The Startup Meetups” is to engage with and empower Irish entrepreneurs by offering 1:1 mentoring sessions with a Google product expert. It’s great being part of a project with such a positive impact, helping startup businesses grow.

Outside of work hours, there are also loads of social activities at Google. This year, I’m acting as the main female lead in the adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde, hosted internally.

]]> There are many ways to start your journey with Google. As a university student, two great ways are BOLD Immersion and AdCamp (apply by March 1st 2016!). Take a look at Kalina’s journey with Google.

My journey with Google started one late, summer night as I was randomly browsing for the meaning of life. Let me decipher that -- I was looking for ways to make practical sense of my degree in Technology and Innovation Management. Naturally, I ended up looking for opportunities on the Google Careers website and stumbled upon the BOLD Immersion Program. The good news: I loved the description; the bad news: the deadline was in two hours. Fortunately, I managed to submit my application just in time and I was accepted to participate in the program.
bold.jpg


Some of the greatest moments during my BOLD Immersion experience were:

  • Learning about Google’s culture and business: The program fully immersed me into Google’s world famous culture and gave me the chance to learn what Google’s core business is all about. It also gave me the opportunity to witness the type of professional opportunities open to me as a young professional. 
  • Exploring the art of pitching: We all had the chance to do a Sales Pitch simulation that involved a lot of creativity (some groups included audio visual and stage performance in their pitch, which I found later on as a full-time Googler is not the most effective way to pitch to clients).
  • Making friends!: I made many new close friends with university students from across Europe, The Middle East and Africa, whom I continue to stay in touch with today.


And the highlights continued even after the program ended…

  • Mentorship Participation: After flying home, I was assigned the ultimate Google mentor, Olga. I am very grateful for all the time she took to help me develop my skills and prepare me for the actual interview process. Her great advice helped me through the recruitment process and also gave me insights into the work of a salesperson, managing relationships and expectations in the workplace. This was an invaluable source of knowledge for me! 

1st days.jpg
Then, in September 2014 I was converted from a ‘BOLDer’ to a ‘Noogler’. There were a lot of Nooglers who joined at the same time as me. We all went through an intense one-month training program prior to joining our teams.


Following the training, I launched my Google career as an Associate Account Strategist on the SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business) Sales team for the Bulgarian market. As part of my core role, I have organized three big educational client events in Bulgaria and five design thinking workshops. I have also trained another member of my team, who arrived in mid-2015. I’m excited to be working on the “The Startup Meetups” project, launched by Google for Entrepreneurs, with their branding and design. The mission of “The Startup Meetups” is to engage with and empower Irish entrepreneurs by offering 1:1 mentoring sessions with a Google product expert. It’s great being part of a project with such a positive impact, helping startup businesses grow.

Outside of work hours, there are also loads of social activities at Google. This year, I’m acting as the main female lead in the adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde, hosted internally.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/my-journey-with-google/feed/ 0 Google Science Fair 2016: #howcanwe make things better with science? https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-science-fair-2016-howcanwe-make-things-better-with-science-3/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-science-fair-2016-howcanwe-make-things-better-with-science-3/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2016 18:33:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=ed93694485aae8a663f33509c4cdad23
(Cross-posted on the Official Google blog.)
The 2016 Google Science Fair opens for submissions today. Together with LEGO Education, National Geographic, Scientific American and Virgin Galactic, we’re inviting all young explorers and innovators to make something better through science and engineering. To learn more about the competition, how to enter, prize details and more, visit the site, and follow along on Google+ and Twitter. 

In this post, 2015 Grand Prize winner, Olivia Hallisey, joins us to reflect back on her own experience with Google Science Fair. 

I remember the day I first heard about the Google Science Fair last year. I was sitting in my 10th grade science class when my teacher asked us: “What will you try?” I loved the invitation—and the challenge—that the Google Science Fair offered. It was a chance to use science to do something that could really make a difference in the world.

I had always been curious and interested in science, and knew I wanted to submit a project, but didn’t really know exactly where to begin. I asked my teacher for his advice on selecting a research topic. He encouraged me to choose something that I felt passionate about, or something that outraged me, and told me to look at the world around me for inspiration. So I did. At that time, the Ebola crisis was all over the news. It was a devastating situation and I wanted to help be a part of the solution. I had found my project.

With the outbreak spreading so quickly, I decided that I wanted to find a way to diagnose the virus earlier so that treatment could be delivered as quickly as possible to those who were affected. I read online about silk’s amazing storage and stabilizing properties, and wondered if I could use silk to transport antibodies that could test for the virus. After many failed attempts (and cutting up lots of cocoons) I finally succeeded in creating a temperature-independent, portable, and inexpensive diagnostic test that could detect the Ebola virus in under 30 minutes. I was really excited that my research could help contribute to saving lives, and I was proud to be selected as the Grand Prize winner a few months later.

As the 2016 Google Science Fair launches today, I wanted to share a few tips from my own experience: First, as my teacher once guided me to do, look at the world around you for ideas. If you’re stuck, try the Make Better Generator to find something that excites or inspires you. Second, find a mentor who’s interested in the same things as you. There are a lot of helpful ideas on the GSF site to get you started. And finally, don’t get discouraged—often what first appears like failure can teach you so much more.

I urge other teenagers like me to take this opportunity to find a way to make the world around them better. Every one of us, no matter our age or background, can make a difference—and as young people, we’re not always so afraid to try things that adults think will fail. But change doesn’t happen overnight, and it often starts with a question. So look at the world around you and challenge yourself to make something better.
Science isn’t just a subject—it’s a way to make things better. So I hope you’ll join the conversation and enter the Google Science Fair this year. Our world is waiting to see what you come up with! 
]]>
(Cross-posted on the Official Google blog.)
The 2016 Google Science Fair opens for submissions today. Together with LEGO Education, National Geographic, Scientific American and Virgin Galactic, we’re inviting all young explorers and innovators to make something better through science and engineering. To learn more about the competition, how to enter, prize details and more, visit the site, and follow along on Google+ and Twitter. 

In this post, 2015 Grand Prize winner, Olivia Hallisey, joins us to reflect back on her own experience with Google Science Fair. 

I remember the day I first heard about the Google Science Fair last year. I was sitting in my 10th grade science class when my teacher asked us: “What will you try?” I loved the invitation—and the challenge—that the Google Science Fair offered. It was a chance to use science to do something that could really make a difference in the world.

I had always been curious and interested in science, and knew I wanted to submit a project, but didn’t really know exactly where to begin. I asked my teacher for his advice on selecting a research topic. He encouraged me to choose something that I felt passionate about, or something that outraged me, and told me to look at the world around me for inspiration. So I did. At that time, the Ebola crisis was all over the news. It was a devastating situation and I wanted to help be a part of the solution. I had found my project.

With the outbreak spreading so quickly, I decided that I wanted to find a way to diagnose the virus earlier so that treatment could be delivered as quickly as possible to those who were affected. I read online about silk’s amazing storage and stabilizing properties, and wondered if I could use silk to transport antibodies that could test for the virus. After many failed attempts (and cutting up lots of cocoons) I finally succeeded in creating a temperature-independent, portable, and inexpensive diagnostic test that could detect the Ebola virus in under 30 minutes. I was really excited that my research could help contribute to saving lives, and I was proud to be selected as the Grand Prize winner a few months later.

As the 2016 Google Science Fair launches today, I wanted to share a few tips from my own experience: First, as my teacher once guided me to do, look at the world around you for ideas. If you’re stuck, try the Make Better Generator to find something that excites or inspires you. Second, find a mentor who’s interested in the same things as you. There are a lot of helpful ideas on the GSF site to get you started. And finally, don’t get discouraged—often what first appears like failure can teach you so much more.

I urge other teenagers like me to take this opportunity to find a way to make the world around them better. Every one of us, no matter our age or background, can make a difference—and as young people, we’re not always so afraid to try things that adults think will fail. But change doesn’t happen overnight, and it often starts with a question. So look at the world around you and challenge yourself to make something better.
Science isn’t just a subject—it’s a way to make things better. So I hope you’ll join the conversation and enter the Google Science Fair this year. Our world is waiting to see what you come up with! 
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-science-fair-2016-howcanwe-make-things-better-with-science-3/feed/ 0 Contest Spotlight: ‘Paying It Forward’ in honor of Black History Month https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/contest-spotlight-paying-it-forward-in-honor-of-black-history-month-2/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/contest-spotlight-paying-it-forward-in-honor-of-black-history-month-2/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2016 19:21:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=e84043ccfcfd61ebcebc408722ee7747 BGN_Friday Group 01.jpg

Are you a social change agent in your community or know someone who is?


If so, we invite you to join Google’s third annual “Pay It Forward” Contest.


At Google, we value diversity and inclusion, and we support individuals who do the same. Our Staffing Programs team is celebrating diversity and honoring Black History Month by inviting student organizations to showcase how they have positively impacted the Black community. We’re seeking US-based student organizations recognized and approved by their college, university, or business school that have organized service or philanthropic support for their community to share the impact they are making. Examples include volunteering at an after school program, fundraising for an initiative or starting a community project.


Last year, we showcased Elizabeth Davis, Robin McKinnie, Maurita Ament and Michael Tubbs who collectively are advancing the lives of hundreds of people across the country through their social impact work.


The deadline to enter the contest is February 29, 2016, at 11:59 pm PST. Submissions will be judged by a team of Googlers, who will be assessing the innovation, scale and the short- and long-term effects of your impact. Winning organizations will have the opportunity to present their work at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, and have their work showcased on the Google Student Blog.


To both enter the competition and get more info, visit our 2016 Black History Month website.


We look forward to seeing your submission!
THe Google Staffing Programs team ]]> BGN_Friday Group 01.jpg

Are you a social change agent in your community or know someone who is?


If so, we invite you to join Google’s third annual “Pay It Forward” Contest.


At Google, we value diversity and inclusion, and we support individuals who do the same. Our Staffing Programs team is celebrating diversity and honoring Black History Month by inviting student organizations to showcase how they have positively impacted the Black community. We’re seeking US-based student organizations recognized and approved by their college, university, or business school that have organized service or philanthropic support for their community to share the impact they are making. Examples include volunteering at an after school program, fundraising for an initiative or starting a community project.


Last year, we showcased Elizabeth Davis, Robin McKinnie, Maurita Ament and Michael Tubbs who collectively are advancing the lives of hundreds of people across the country through their social impact work.


The deadline to enter the contest is February 29, 2016, at 11:59 pm PST. Submissions will be judged by a team of Googlers, who will be assessing the innovation, scale and the short- and long-term effects of your impact. Winning organizations will have the opportunity to present their work at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, and have their work showcased on the Google Student Blog.


To both enter the competition and get more info, visit our 2016 Black History Month website.


We look forward to seeing your submission!
THe Google Staffing Programs team ]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/contest-spotlight-paying-it-forward-in-honor-of-black-history-month-2/feed/ 0 Managing your time effectively in the #AdMobSAC16 https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/managing-your-time-effectively-in-the-admobsac16/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/managing-your-time-effectively-in-the-admobsac16/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2016 21:10:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=2bc1f1e51077c8480165617217d61b07 Here are some pointers for managing your time as your team gets started  in the #AdMobSAC16.
  • January to February:
    • Organize your team; if you haven’t found a team, utilize Collabfinder to ensure you find the best team possible.
    • Assign tasks and deliverables for people according to their strengths.
    • Brainstorm your ideas for your app.
    • Put together your strategy for project completion.

Tip: This is also a good time to familiarize yourself with the AdMob app policy, which can be found in the AdMob Help Center.

  • March: As springtime approaches, your team should be in the heart of building the application. Focus on:
    • Design work and developing the basic elements of the app.
    • Aim to have a working prototype by the end of the month.
    • Don’t forget to integrate AdMob ads into your app. This is a key requirement.
    • Open it up for testing among a small group of trusted developers who are willing to provide detailed feedback.
    • Start thinking your app’s promotional strategy.

Tip: A large portion of #AdMobSAC16 is scored on the success of your app (such as the number of downloads and ratings - check the judging criteria for the full details) - you will need to give yourself enough time to put effort into promoting your app.

  • April:
    • Complete final testing and make refinements based on user feedback. Your app should be high quality, and part of that is responding to user suggestions.
    • Release your app on an app store and start promoting it.
    • Remember to submit your app and AdMob account ID to AdMob so we know you’ve built it.

  • May to June:
    • Continue promoting your app. Think about creative ways to do it.
    • Now will be the time to start readying your business report, which is due on June 28, 2016 by 5:00PM PST. The Challenge website already has a recommended template on it.
    • Remember, your project will be reviewed by a panel of app experts from Google, so your business report will need to be thorough and of professional-level quality.

Be sure to visit the AdMob website to register. Follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge.


Posted by Jeff Miner

AdMob Student App Challenge Team

]]> Here are some pointers for managing your time as your team gets started  in the #AdMobSAC16.
  • January to February:
    • Organize your team; if you haven’t found a team, utilize Collabfinder to ensure you find the best team possible.
    • Assign tasks and deliverables for people according to their strengths.
    • Brainstorm your ideas for your app.
    • Put together your strategy for project completion.

Tip: This is also a good time to familiarize yourself with the AdMob app policy, which can be found in the AdMob Help Center.

  • March: As springtime approaches, your team should be in the heart of building the application. Focus on:
    • Design work and developing the basic elements of the app.
    • Aim to have a working prototype by the end of the month.
    • Don’t forget to integrate AdMob ads into your app. This is a key requirement.
    • Open it up for testing among a small group of trusted developers who are willing to provide detailed feedback.
    • Start thinking your app’s promotional strategy.

Tip: A large portion of #AdMobSAC16 is scored on the success of your app (such as the number of downloads and ratings - check the judging criteria for the full details) - you will need to give yourself enough time to put effort into promoting your app.

  • April:
    • Complete final testing and make refinements based on user feedback. Your app should be high quality, and part of that is responding to user suggestions.
    • Release your app on an app store and start promoting it.
    • Remember to submit your app and AdMob account ID to AdMob so we know you’ve built it.

  • May to June:
    • Continue promoting your app. Think about creative ways to do it.
    • Now will be the time to start readying your business report, which is due on June 28, 2016 by 5:00PM PST. The Challenge website already has a recommended template on it.
    • Remember, your project will be reviewed by a panel of app experts from Google, so your business report will need to be thorough and of professional-level quality.

Be sure to visit the AdMob website to register. Follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge.


Posted by Jeff Miner

AdMob Student App Challenge Team

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/managing-your-time-effectively-in-the-admobsac16/feed/ 0 We are excited to announce that Professor and Student Registrations for the 2016 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC 2016) are now open. https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-are-excited-to-announce-that-professor-and-student-registrations-for-the-2016-google-online-marketing-challenge-gomc-2016-are-now-open/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-are-excited-to-announce-that-professor-and-student-registrations-for-the-2016-google-online-marketing-challenge-gomc-2016-are-now-open/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:14:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=c4bde80ca2930d1e1ee3d0081c1bd06b The Google Online Marketing Challenge, now in its ninth year, is an annual global online marketing competition for students from higher education institutions around the world. Student teams develop and run an online advertising campaign using Google AdWords and/or Google+ for a real business or non-profit organization of their choice, using a US $250 budget provided by Google. An independent GOMC Panel of Academics, along with our own team, review the campaigns and select winning teams based on the success of their campaign and the quality of their competition reports.
Why GOMC?
  • GOMC provides a unique, hands-on learning experience by integrating a real-world business partner and budget into the classroom.
  • Students get a chance to support their local community by working with a non-profit, and the opportunity to win donations from a total pool of US $30,000.
  • GOMC enables professors to provide their students with an engaging and innovative in-class experience, which provides real-world impact and grading material.
  • Great prizes for global and regional winners of the challenge, including trips to Google offices, digital devices and more.

To learn about the impact of the GOMC, check out this video.

What’s next?
In order for a student team to participate in the competition, they need to have their professor register first. Professors can register from January 26th until April 6th, 2016, and students can register from January 26th until April 20th, 2016.

For more information, please visit www.google.com/onlinechallenge. To stay informed about GOMC, add our Google+ Page to your circles: google.com/+googleonlinemarketingchallenge.

Here’s your chance to make a global impact!

The Google Online Marketing Challenge Team
]]> The Google Online Marketing Challenge, now in its ninth year, is an annual global online marketing competition for students from higher education institutions around the world. Student teams develop and run an online advertising campaign using Google AdWords and/or Google+ for a real business or non-profit organization of their choice, using a US $250 budget provided by Google. An independent GOMC Panel of Academics, along with our own team, review the campaigns and select winning teams based on the success of their campaign and the quality of their competition reports.
Why GOMC?
  • GOMC provides a unique, hands-on learning experience by integrating a real-world business partner and budget into the classroom.
  • Students get a chance to support their local community by working with a non-profit, and the opportunity to win donations from a total pool of US $30,000.
  • GOMC enables professors to provide their students with an engaging and innovative in-class experience, which provides real-world impact and grading material.
  • Great prizes for global and regional winners of the challenge, including trips to Google offices, digital devices and more.

To learn about the impact of the GOMC, check out this video.

What’s next?
In order for a student team to participate in the competition, they need to have their professor register first. Professors can register from January 26th until April 6th, 2016, and students can register from January 26th until April 20th, 2016.

For more information, please visit www.google.com/onlinechallenge. To stay informed about GOMC, add our Google+ Page to your circles: google.com/+googleonlinemarketingchallenge.

Here’s your chance to make a global impact!

The Google Online Marketing Challenge Team
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-are-excited-to-announce-that-professor-and-student-registrations-for-the-2016-google-online-marketing-challenge-gomc-2016-are-now-open/feed/ 0 Not your average app building competition: The AdMob Student App Challenge https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/not-your-average-app-building-competition-the-admob-student-app-challenge/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/not-your-average-app-building-competition-the-admob-student-app-challenge/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2016 18:32:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=869c30f3f97c198399ab78490da19f5f

Did you know that there are more mobile devices than people? In 2014, there were 7.4BN* devices and an estimated 7.2 billion people. Mobile is quickly becoming the most popular way to get online, even exceeding the time spent on desktop computers.** This has contributed greatly to the growth of the app ecosystem, with consumers spending on average 37 hours a month*** on mobile apps. As apps are becoming more prominent in our everyday lives, it’s more important now than ever to learn app development.


That’s why we’re launching the second AdMob Student App Challenge, an app building competition open to students around the world. If you’re a student who loves to code or has a great idea for a mobile app, this is your chance to build an app, learn how to make money from it, and win awesome prizes. The prizes will include a week-long trip to San Francisco and a visit to the Googleplex.



To win the challenge, you’ll need to build a great app (either Android or iOS) and create a sound business plan that shows how you managed the project, gained users, and leveraged AdMob to make money. The contest will be judged by a panel of app industry leaders. To learn more the judges, visit here.

The winning team will receive:

  • An all expenses paid, week-long trip to San Francisco, including a visit to the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA
  • A featured spot on the Google Play Store
  • A promotional video starring you and your app
  • A healthy amount of Google schwag, including a new Google device

Last year’s global winner was Phani Gaddipati, who created Stacks Flashcards, an app that lets people create electronic flashcards on any subject, quiz themselves and analyze their performance. Check out his video to learn more.

In addition to one overall winner, the finalist from each of the four global regions (North America, Latin America, Europe Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific) will receive Google devices and see their app featured on the AdMob website.

The challenge starts today, and you’ll have until June 28, 2016 to build your winning app. Be sure to visit the AdMob website to learn more and register. Follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge. .

Best of luck -- we can’t wait to see what you build!

Posted by Henry Wang
Product Marketing, AdMob



*Cisco, Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2014–2019 White Paper, February 2015 **eMarketer, US Time Spent with Media, October 2014 ***Nielsen, Smartphones: So Many Apps, So Much Time, July 2014


]]>

Did you know that there are more mobile devices than people? In 2014, there were 7.4BN* devices and an estimated 7.2 billion people. Mobile is quickly becoming the most popular way to get online, even exceeding the time spent on desktop computers.** This has contributed greatly to the growth of the app ecosystem, with consumers spending on average 37 hours a month*** on mobile apps. As apps are becoming more prominent in our everyday lives, it’s more important now than ever to learn app development.


That’s why we’re launching the second AdMob Student App Challenge, an app building competition open to students around the world. If you’re a student who loves to code or has a great idea for a mobile app, this is your chance to build an app, learn how to make money from it, and win awesome prizes. The prizes will include a week-long trip to San Francisco and a visit to the Googleplex.



To win the challenge, you’ll need to build a great app (either Android or iOS) and create a sound business plan that shows how you managed the project, gained users, and leveraged AdMob to make money. The contest will be judged by a panel of app industry leaders. To learn more the judges, visit here.

The winning team will receive:

  • An all expenses paid, week-long trip to San Francisco, including a visit to the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA
  • A featured spot on the Google Play Store
  • A promotional video starring you and your app
  • A healthy amount of Google schwag, including a new Google device

Last year’s global winner was Phani Gaddipati, who created Stacks Flashcards, an app that lets people create electronic flashcards on any subject, quiz themselves and analyze their performance. Check out his video to learn more.

In addition to one overall winner, the finalist from each of the four global regions (North America, Latin America, Europe Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific) will receive Google devices and see their app featured on the AdMob website.

The challenge starts today, and you’ll have until June 28, 2016 to build your winning app. Be sure to visit the AdMob website to learn more and register. Follow us on AdMob G+ and Twitter and keep an update on #AdMobSAC16 too, for regular updates on the challenge. .

Best of luck -- we can’t wait to see what you build!

Posted by Henry Wang
Product Marketing, AdMob



*Cisco, Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2014–2019 White Paper, February 2015 **eMarketer, US Time Spent with Media, October 2014 ***Nielsen, Smartphones: So Many Apps, So Much Time, July 2014


]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/not-your-average-app-building-competition-the-admob-student-app-challenge/feed/ 0 Applications are now open for Google’s 2016 Computer Science Summer Institute and 2016 Generation Google Scholarship! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-are-now-open-for-googles-2016-computer-science-summer-institute-and-2016/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-are-now-open-for-googles-2016-computer-science-summer-institute-and-2016/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2016 22:38:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=aacd8285f2cd0ff027f615b5068442e0 We are now accepting applications for the 2016 Computer Science Summer Institute, as well as the 2016 Generation Google Scholarship. Learn more about both programs below and apply today!



What
The Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) is a three-week introduction to computer science for graduating high school seniors with a passion for technology. Students will learn programming fundamentals directly from Google engineers, get an inside look at some of Google's most exciting, emerging technologies, and even design and develop their very own application with fellow participants.


The Generation Google Scholarship helps aspiring computer scientists from underrepresented groups excel in technology and become leaders in the field. Selected students will receive 10,000 USD (for those studying in the US) or 5,000 CAD (for those studying in Canada) for the 2016-2017 school year. As part of the scholarship, current high school seniors who are entering their first year of university in Fall 2016 will be required to attend CSSI in the summer of 2016.


Where & When
We offer two types of sessions at CSSI: day-camp and residential. Our day camps will take place in Chicago, IL, Mountain View, CA, and New York City, NY. Our residential camps will take place in Cambridge, MA and Seattle, WA. To learn more, please visit our website.


Who
We are looking for students eager to spend a few weeks immersed in the Google life -- tackling interesting technical problems, working collaboratively and having fun. The program is committed to addressing diversity in the field of computer science and is open to all qualified high school seniors who intend to major in computer science at a four year university in the US or Canada.


Why
Google is committed to increasing the enrollment and retention of students in the field of computer science. These programs offer an intensive, interactive and fun experience that seeks to inspire the tech leaders and innovators of tomorrow. We want students to leave empowered, heading into their first year of college armed with technical skills and a unique learning experience that can only be found at Google. We aim to expose selected students to key programming concepts while enabling them to tackle the challenging problems in CS by creating a safe, comfortable environment to learn, play, break, and build.


Apply
Visit our Google for Education website for more information and to apply. The application deadline is March 3, 2016. Final decisions will be announced in early May.


Questions?


]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-are-now-open-for-googles-2016-computer-science-summer-institute-and-2016/feed/ 0 Celebrating Android app creators https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/celebrating-android-app-creators/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/celebrating-android-app-creators/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2015 15:08:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=6a8f75bd94add648352317137523d94e Ever wonder what makes an app great? After completing Udacity's Developing Android Apps course, these students created winning apps as voted on by their peers and Google engineers. Check out their work below and consider creating your own Android app today!
Ravi explains his app to Google engineers.
App Award: “Most Creative”
App:  Mozart's Masterpiece
Creator: Ravi Srinivasan (junior at Virginia Tech)
Background: The idea of the “Mozart’s Masterpiece” app came from Ravi’s love of piano playing (he’s played since he was six!). He wanted to create something that combined his interest in music and programming. The app is comprised of a mini keyboard where users can play a tune and see if the app can guess the song. Ravi said, “There are apps out there that teach users how to play, but I wanted to create an app that was a game for pianists.”
Challenges: Ravi shared that it was difficult to decide what the UI would look like and noted that the sound detection was also no easy feat.

Here we have Dhruv and Brennan.
App Award: “Engineer's’ Choice”
App:  IVO
Creators: Brennan McConnell (junior at University of Colorado Boulder) and Dhruv Diddi (junior at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
Background: Dhruv told us, “Brennan came up with the idea of having an app which locks social media to a geographic location and I was instantly interested in working on it. We took a few days to come up with a draft for the application (UI, methods to implement, frameworks to use) and settled on the name IVO (an appropriate acronym for "In Vicinity Of").”  IVO is a social media app that allows users to post a message or picture in a given location using geocaching. Users in the future can look up the the location and see past photos and messages about the area. The social aspect comes from a feature that lets the users like and comment on the posts.
Challenges: Aside from the technical skills required for making such a complex app, such as learning Java, developing a greater understanding of Android’s framework, and working with different APIs, the team also had to think about scaling the app to thousands of users.

Francesca, Christina, Jonah, and Daisy show that their app can be used across devices.
App Award: “People's Favorite”
App:  Glance
Creators:  Jonah Sterling (sophomore at University of Kentucky), Francesca Bueti (sophomore at Stevens Institute of Technology), Daisy Zhang (sophomore at Vanderbilt University), and Christina Tobias (sophomore at Syracuse University)
Background: This team created an app, Glance, that connects all of a user’s social media accounts together and uses intricate algorithms to analyze what posts are most meaningful and relevant to the user. Christina said, “We thought that with everyone’s busy lives, we could help take out some of the clutter from their social media by finding who their top friends for each social media platform are and combining all these posts into one feed.“ Moreover, in an effort to make the app even more user-friendly, the app can be used across all devices.
Challenges: The team agreed that developing new technical skills, like learning the fundamentals of creating an Android app, was the biggest takeaway for them. But most importantly, they gained a better understanding of what it’s like to collaborate on code. According to Daisy, “This was also my first time working in a team remotely, so I learned a lot about keeping up with everyone and making sure everyone was doing their part. I also learned that you don’t write the cleanest code at 3 in the morning, but you are super productive at that hour.”

Check out the app winners! Left to right: Dhruv, Brennan, Ravi, Christina, Daisy, Francesca, and Jonah.
Congratulations to these winners! We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.


To learn more about ways to boost your computer science skills, visit the Google Student Programs website.
]]> Ever wonder what makes an app great? After completing Udacity's Developing Android Apps course, these students created winning apps as voted on by their peers and Google engineers. Check out their work below and consider creating your own Android app today!
Ravi explains his app to Google engineers.
App Award: “Most Creative”
App:  Mozart's Masterpiece
Creator: Ravi Srinivasan (junior at Virginia Tech)
Background: The idea of the “Mozart’s Masterpiece” app came from Ravi’s love of piano playing (he’s played since he was six!). He wanted to create something that combined his interest in music and programming. The app is comprised of a mini keyboard where users can play a tune and see if the app can guess the song. Ravi said, “There are apps out there that teach users how to play, but I wanted to create an app that was a game for pianists.”
Challenges: Ravi shared that it was difficult to decide what the UI would look like and noted that the sound detection was also no easy feat.

Here we have Dhruv and Brennan.
App Award: “Engineer's’ Choice”
App:  IVO
Creators: Brennan McConnell (junior at University of Colorado Boulder) and Dhruv Diddi (junior at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
Background: Dhruv told us, “Brennan came up with the idea of having an app which locks social media to a geographic location and I was instantly interested in working on it. We took a few days to come up with a draft for the application (UI, methods to implement, frameworks to use) and settled on the name IVO (an appropriate acronym for "In Vicinity Of").”  IVO is a social media app that allows users to post a message or picture in a given location using geocaching. Users in the future can look up the the location and see past photos and messages about the area. The social aspect comes from a feature that lets the users like and comment on the posts.
Challenges: Aside from the technical skills required for making such a complex app, such as learning Java, developing a greater understanding of Android’s framework, and working with different APIs, the team also had to think about scaling the app to thousands of users.

Francesca, Christina, Jonah, and Daisy show that their app can be used across devices.
App Award: “People's Favorite”
App:  Glance
Creators:  Jonah Sterling (sophomore at University of Kentucky), Francesca Bueti (sophomore at Stevens Institute of Technology), Daisy Zhang (sophomore at Vanderbilt University), and Christina Tobias (sophomore at Syracuse University)
Background: This team created an app, Glance, that connects all of a user’s social media accounts together and uses intricate algorithms to analyze what posts are most meaningful and relevant to the user. Christina said, “We thought that with everyone’s busy lives, we could help take out some of the clutter from their social media by finding who their top friends for each social media platform are and combining all these posts into one feed.“ Moreover, in an effort to make the app even more user-friendly, the app can be used across all devices.
Challenges: The team agreed that developing new technical skills, like learning the fundamentals of creating an Android app, was the biggest takeaway for them. But most importantly, they gained a better understanding of what it’s like to collaborate on code. According to Daisy, “This was also my first time working in a team remotely, so I learned a lot about keeping up with everyone and making sure everyone was doing their part. I also learned that you don’t write the cleanest code at 3 in the morning, but you are super productive at that hour.”

Check out the app winners! Left to right: Dhruv, Brennan, Ravi, Christina, Daisy, Francesca, and Jonah.
Congratulations to these winners! We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.


To learn more about ways to boost your computer science skills, visit the Google Student Programs website.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/celebrating-android-app-creators/feed/ 0 Hash Code signups open for students and professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/hash-code-signups-open-for-students-and-professionals-across-europe-the-middle-east-and-africa/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/hash-code-signups-open-for-students-and-professionals-across-europe-the-middle-east-and-africa/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2015 17:58:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=ceef4de3bb1c80a23d0650c70f56d600 Think you could come up with a way to optimize Internet coverage for Project Loon balloons? Or how about routing Google Street View cars through a busy city?





Step into the shoes of a Google engineer and tackle similar challenges during Hash Code, a team-based programming competition for students and professionals (18+) across Europe, the Middle East and Africa organized by Google. You pick your team and programming language, we pick a real-life engineering problem to solve. Are you up for the challenge?


The competition is divided into two stages:
  • an Online Qualification Round on 11th February at 18:30 CET
For this round, your team can participate from wherever you’d like, including one of our Hash Code hubs. Hubs allow for teams in the same location (eg. city or university) to compete side-by-side in a more fun and exciting environment.
  • a Final Round on 19th March
Top scoring teams from the Online Qualification Round will be invited to Google Paris to compete in the Final Round of the competition.


Learn more and sign up today at g.co/hashcode!
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs
]]> Think you could come up with a way to optimize Internet coverage for Project Loon balloons? Or how about routing Google Street View cars through a busy city?





Step into the shoes of a Google engineer and tackle similar challenges during Hash Code, a team-based programming competition for students and professionals (18+) across Europe, the Middle East and Africa organized by Google. You pick your team and programming language, we pick a real-life engineering problem to solve. Are you up for the challenge?


The competition is divided into two stages:
  • an Online Qualification Round on 11th February at 18:30 CET
For this round, your team can participate from wherever you’d like, including one of our Hash Code hubs. Hubs allow for teams in the same location (eg. city or university) to compete side-by-side in a more fun and exciting environment.
  • a Final Round on 19th March
Top scoring teams from the Online Qualification Round will be invited to Google Paris to compete in the Final Round of the competition.


Learn more and sign up today at g.co/hashcode!
Posted by Jessica Safir, University Programs
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/hash-code-signups-open-for-students-and-professionals-across-europe-the-middle-east-and-africa/feed/ 0 EMEA 2015 Android Camp: A reflection https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/emea-2015-android-camp-a-reflection/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/emea-2015-android-camp-a-reflection/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:09:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=fb27719d01d6a3df925e3ec789e89514 In early August, 23 students from 20 universities had the opportunity to attend the fourth annual Google European Android Camp in London. Students who arrived from 14 different countries were invited to a jam-packed week of Android learning and development, career panels, tech talks, social activities as well as a 24-hour Hackathon. The goal of the event, held in the Google office, was to give students a chance to learn, practice and have fun while developing applications for the Android operating system with the support of Google engineers. The theme for the week was Create the Good in Your Community, with the winning team designing an app ‘Red Paw’ to help notify animal shelters about strays and ensure they are re-homed.

We asked the winning team to tell us about their experience at Android Camp - congratulations once again!
Left to right: Carolina Sartorius, Lund University, MSc in Computer Science and Engineering
Maria Priisalu/ Lund University, MSc in Computer Science
Damask Talary-Brown, University of Bath, BSc in Computer Science
Lavinia Mariana Damian, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, BSc in Computer Science
Marija Čivović, University of Belgrade, BSc in Computer hardware and Informatics.

What was the highlight of Android Camp for you?
Lavinia: For me, the highlight of Android camp was the Hackathon and especially our final presentation when every team got to showcase their app. It was inspiring to see the progress everyone made in 1 week and all of those ideas coming to life in just 24 hours of coding.
Marija: When you had such an amazing week, it's not fair to have to choose the best part of it. But let's say Scavenger Hunt - an amazing sightseeing adventure with the girls from my team that I met the night before.
Carolina: The highlight of the Camp was to meet the other campers. It was very inspiring to meet so many talented, enthusiastic and driven people.
Damask: For me, the last few hours of the hackathon were the highlight because they were the culmination of all the learning and designing we’d been doing throughout the week. There was definitely an overwhelming sense of pride and mutual respect (and exhaustion!) amongst us as the 24 hours drew to a close, and it was a fantastic feeling.

Do you think Android Camp helped you build or develop any skills?
Maria: Although I had some previous knowledge in Android programming, Camp taught me a lot of specific details about Android that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
Damask: I didn’t have any experience with the Android SDK before Camp, so it really was a crash course in that respect. The sheer amount of content we managed to fit in was crazy; from networking and database integration to interface design.
Carolina: Aside from developing my Android skills, I also developed skills such as pitching, gaining confidence and be able to collaborate with different people.
Lavinia: Of course!, I knew nothing about Android programming before attending this camp so I'm still amazed at how I managed together with my team to finish an app from scratch. I think the whole context of the camp helped me with the way I focus and organize my time. I improved both my attention span and my team working skills.

What was your favorite session?
Lavinia: I enjoyed the material design class the most and I found it to be really interesting. Of the other activities, the "Engineer Panel" was my favorite. I loved how the participants were so willing to share their experiences at Google with us and give us so much advice advice as our seniors in the industry. It was really inspiring!
Damask: I loved the UX session, because the use case and persona design we did helped us design meaningful interactions between our app and its typical users. The personas we created also ended up playing a starring role in our final presentation, which humanised the problem we were trying to solve and gave us the opportunity to have some fun with it.
Marija: My favorite session was the Firebase: Server Session. We had so much fun with trying to build  a chat app. I also got to learn a lot about data storage.
Carolina: My favorite session was the Google Card Game night ‘Launch and Iterate.’ It was a fun challenge to get four people with strong will to collaborate and try to win.

How do you think Android Camp will help you further your academic career?
Maria: It has given me more confidence in my technical problem solving skills and programming.
Damask: Android Camp has cemented my interest in UX and Interaction Design, which will almost certainly impact my dissertation and final year choices.
Marija: I hope I can take a Mobile programming class, specifically because the Camp gave me an excellent base of knowledge that will help me excel.
Carolina: Android Camp gave me a self-confidence boost. The ability to believe in yourself is a important factor in academic success.

What are your next steps?
Damask: I’m on a year in industry right now, so my plan is to hopefully secure an internship doing something cool for next summer before I head back to university to start my final year. In my free time, I definitely have a few app ideas I can start working on!
Marija: I'm introducing the app we made to people, So far,I’ve received good feedback :). Camp definitely gave me a new perspective.
Carolina: My next steps are to finish my degree and decide what I want to do for a living.
Lavinia:  For now, I have 1 year left of my Master studies and after that I'm planning to apply for a University Graduate position at Google. Also, I'm thinking of working more on our app from Android Camp. I would love to see the Red Paw app released one day and be used by millions of people.
Maria: I will finish my Master of Computer Science and Engineering at Lund.


Read more student testimonials in our ‘ Android Camp Diary’ G+ series. For more information on opportunities at Google, please visit Google Students. For more updates, please stay tuned on the Google Students Blog.
]]> In early August, 23 students from 20 universities had the opportunity to attend the fourth annual Google European Android Camp in London. Students who arrived from 14 different countries were invited to a jam-packed week of Android learning and development, career panels, tech talks, social activities as well as a 24-hour Hackathon. The goal of the event, held in the Google office, was to give students a chance to learn, practice and have fun while developing applications for the Android operating system with the support of Google engineers. The theme for the week was Create the Good in Your Community, with the winning team designing an app ‘Red Paw’ to help notify animal shelters about strays and ensure they are re-homed.

We asked the winning team to tell us about their experience at Android Camp - congratulations once again!
Left to right: Carolina Sartorius, Lund University, MSc in Computer Science and Engineering
Maria Priisalu/ Lund University, MSc in Computer Science
Damask Talary-Brown, University of Bath, BSc in Computer Science
Lavinia Mariana Damian, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, BSc in Computer Science
Marija Čivović, University of Belgrade, BSc in Computer hardware and Informatics.

What was the highlight of Android Camp for you?
Lavinia: For me, the highlight of Android camp was the Hackathon and especially our final presentation when every team got to showcase their app. It was inspiring to see the progress everyone made in 1 week and all of those ideas coming to life in just 24 hours of coding.
Marija: When you had such an amazing week, it's not fair to have to choose the best part of it. But let's say Scavenger Hunt - an amazing sightseeing adventure with the girls from my team that I met the night before.
Carolina: The highlight of the Camp was to meet the other campers. It was very inspiring to meet so many talented, enthusiastic and driven people.
Damask: For me, the last few hours of the hackathon were the highlight because they were the culmination of all the learning and designing we’d been doing throughout the week. There was definitely an overwhelming sense of pride and mutual respect (and exhaustion!) amongst us as the 24 hours drew to a close, and it was a fantastic feeling.

Do you think Android Camp helped you build or develop any skills?
Maria: Although I had some previous knowledge in Android programming, Camp taught me a lot of specific details about Android that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
Damask: I didn’t have any experience with the Android SDK before Camp, so it really was a crash course in that respect. The sheer amount of content we managed to fit in was crazy; from networking and database integration to interface design.
Carolina: Aside from developing my Android skills, I also developed skills such as pitching, gaining confidence and be able to collaborate with different people.
Lavinia: Of course!, I knew nothing about Android programming before attending this camp so I'm still amazed at how I managed together with my team to finish an app from scratch. I think the whole context of the camp helped me with the way I focus and organize my time. I improved both my attention span and my team working skills.

What was your favorite session?
Lavinia: I enjoyed the material design class the most and I found it to be really interesting. Of the other activities, the "Engineer Panel" was my favorite. I loved how the participants were so willing to share their experiences at Google with us and give us so much advice advice as our seniors in the industry. It was really inspiring!
Damask: I loved the UX session, because the use case and persona design we did helped us design meaningful interactions between our app and its typical users. The personas we created also ended up playing a starring role in our final presentation, which humanised the problem we were trying to solve and gave us the opportunity to have some fun with it.
Marija: My favorite session was the Firebase: Server Session. We had so much fun with trying to build  a chat app. I also got to learn a lot about data storage.
Carolina: My favorite session was the Google Card Game night ‘Launch and Iterate.’ It was a fun challenge to get four people with strong will to collaborate and try to win.

How do you think Android Camp will help you further your academic career?
Maria: It has given me more confidence in my technical problem solving skills and programming.
Damask: Android Camp has cemented my interest in UX and Interaction Design, which will almost certainly impact my dissertation and final year choices.
Marija: I hope I can take a Mobile programming class, specifically because the Camp gave me an excellent base of knowledge that will help me excel.
Carolina: Android Camp gave me a self-confidence boost. The ability to believe in yourself is a important factor in academic success.

What are your next steps?
Damask: I’m on a year in industry right now, so my plan is to hopefully secure an internship doing something cool for next summer before I head back to university to start my final year. In my free time, I definitely have a few app ideas I can start working on!
Marija: I'm introducing the app we made to people, So far,I’ve received good feedback :). Camp definitely gave me a new perspective.
Carolina: My next steps are to finish my degree and decide what I want to do for a living.
Lavinia:  For now, I have 1 year left of my Master studies and after that I'm planning to apply for a University Graduate position at Google. Also, I'm thinking of working more on our app from Android Camp. I would love to see the Red Paw app released one day and be used by millions of people.
Maria: I will finish my Master of Computer Science and Engineering at Lund.


Read more student testimonials in our ‘ Android Camp Diary’ G+ series. For more information on opportunities at Google, please visit Google Students. For more updates, please stay tuned on the Google Students Blog.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/emea-2015-android-camp-a-reflection/feed/ 0 The search for Ireland’s coders of tomorrow begins https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/the-search-for-irelands-coders-of-tomorrow-begins/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/the-search-for-irelands-coders-of-tomorrow-begins/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2015 16:59:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=383a98edba3426f14cdb0d89c7bd7faf
Google is once again searching for Ireland’s coders and computer scientists of tomorrow, with the return of the Call to Code competition. Call to Code (www.calltocode.ie) is one way we’re aiming to help get younger generations interested in Computer Science. We want to inspire Irish teenagers to experience the power of code and to develop the skills needed for future careers in the tech industry, as well as many other diverse fields such as music, crime scene investigation, fashion, farming, government, design, medicine or film, to name a few.
logo-octopus.png
Who can take part?
The competition is open to all post-primary students in Ireland, aged 13-18. Students will participate in weekly practice challenges to learn the basics of coding and develop computational thinking skills. They’ll then have the opportunity to compete in an online contest, which includes logic puzzles and programming tasks suited for all levels, but qualifying will more than likely require some programming skill so get practising early!

How does it work?
The first phase of Call to Code is entirely online, and if you are an eligible student, we want you to participate! Once you have signed up through a teacher or individually, you will be able to look through resources to learn the basics of coding, sharpen your logical thinking skills, and get ready to compete in Round 1 of the competition on 25th November. With teacher support, you can develop your computer science skills during class, you can get a group together to create lunchtime Call to Code clubs, or you can practice on your own at home--anything goes! Then, on 25th November, participants will login anytime during the 24 hour period to solve logic puzzles and coding challenges set by Google engineers. On 9th December, 20 finalists from each cycle will take part in a nail-biting code-off at Google’s Dublin HQ for the chance to win some great prizes.  

How do I sign up?
Teachers are asked to get involved, register their school and sign their students up to participate. Teachers play a vital role in computer science education, and Call to Code is designed to support them in their efforts to inspire and educate our next generation of technologists.

Teachers can register a school and sign students up at www.calltocode.ie before 12:00pm on 23rd November. Students then access the resources, from beginner to advanced level, provided on the Call to Code website to practice and develop their coding skills. These resources can also be used by teachers looking to introduce their students to code.

We’re looking forward to seeing more teenagers in Ireland embrace the power of coding and equip themselves with the knowledge and skills to pursue exciting and diverse careers.
- Posted by Erin Mindell Cannon, Education Program Manager
]]>
Google is once again searching for Ireland’s coders and computer scientists of tomorrow, with the return of the Call to Code competition. Call to Code (www.calltocode.ie) is one way we’re aiming to help get younger generations interested in Computer Science. We want to inspire Irish teenagers to experience the power of code and to develop the skills needed for future careers in the tech industry, as well as many other diverse fields such as music, crime scene investigation, fashion, farming, government, design, medicine or film, to name a few.
logo-octopus.png
Who can take part?
The competition is open to all post-primary students in Ireland, aged 13-18. Students will participate in weekly practice challenges to learn the basics of coding and develop computational thinking skills. They’ll then have the opportunity to compete in an online contest, which includes logic puzzles and programming tasks suited for all levels, but qualifying will more than likely require some programming skill so get practising early!

How does it work?
The first phase of Call to Code is entirely online, and if you are an eligible student, we want you to participate! Once you have signed up through a teacher or individually, you will be able to look through resources to learn the basics of coding, sharpen your logical thinking skills, and get ready to compete in Round 1 of the competition on 25th November. With teacher support, you can develop your computer science skills during class, you can get a group together to create lunchtime Call to Code clubs, or you can practice on your own at home--anything goes! Then, on 25th November, participants will login anytime during the 24 hour period to solve logic puzzles and coding challenges set by Google engineers. On 9th December, 20 finalists from each cycle will take part in a nail-biting code-off at Google’s Dublin HQ for the chance to win some great prizes.  

How do I sign up?
Teachers are asked to get involved, register their school and sign their students up to participate. Teachers play a vital role in computer science education, and Call to Code is designed to support them in their efforts to inspire and educate our next generation of technologists.

Teachers can register a school and sign students up at www.calltocode.ie before 12:00pm on 23rd November. Students then access the resources, from beginner to advanced level, provided on the Call to Code website to practice and develop their coding skills. These resources can also be used by teachers looking to introduce their students to code.

We’re looking forward to seeing more teenagers in Ireland embrace the power of coding and equip themselves with the knowledge and skills to pursue exciting and diverse careers.
- Posted by Erin Mindell Cannon, Education Program Manager
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/the-search-for-irelands-coders-of-tomorrow-begins/feed/ 0 WE ARE… transforming the face of technology https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-are-transforming-the-face-of-technology/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-are-transforming-the-face-of-technology/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2015 12:05:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=382964c0ca39f7b00ecd93674cf28d31 A single image cannot capture women in computing. Rather, it's a mosaic of different images coming together that can capture the power of our community. This year at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, we created a collaborative photo installation in celebration of women in tech everywhere.
Technology has the potential to change lives, and together we can create more ways for everyone to participate.

If you’re at #GHC15, add your portrait to the installation on Level 3 at the Skybridge. For those who aren’t here in Houston, check out #facesintech and be sure to join in.

]]> A single image cannot capture women in computing. Rather, it's a mosaic of different images coming together that can capture the power of our community. This year at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, we created a collaborative photo installation in celebration of women in tech everywhere.
Technology has the potential to change lives, and together we can create more ways for everyone to participate.

If you’re at #GHC15, add your portrait to the installation on Level 3 at the Skybridge. For those who aren’t here in Houston, check out #facesintech and be sure to join in.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/we-are-transforming-the-face-of-technology/feed/ 0 Google @ the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: We hear you https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-we-hear-you/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-we-hear-you/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2015 01:56:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=68c9ba3901c95e7598c68ec2c30d1189 We recognize that our tweet yesterday may have come across as out of touch. We've had Googlers at GHC for the past 11 years—and in fact, more than 1,000 Googlers are attending the 2015 event. Our goal is to celebrate women in computing and technology. We had hoped to add to the dialogue this week by shining a spotlight on the community of people making the tech industry a more inclusive place for women. However good our intentions may have been, we got this one wrong.
Please don't let our mistake take attention away from the work being done by incredible women in technology like Googlers Rachel, Roshni, Daniela and Michal.
]]> We recognize that our tweet yesterday may have come across as out of touch. We've had Googlers at GHC for the past 11 years—and in fact, more than 1,000 Googlers are attending the 2015 event. Our goal is to celebrate women in computing and technology. We had hoped to add to the dialogue this week by shining a spotlight on the community of people making the tech industry a more inclusive place for women. However good our intentions may have been, we got this one wrong.
Please don't let our mistake take attention away from the work being done by incredible women in technology like Googlers Rachel, Roshni, Daniela and Michal.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/google-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-we-hear-you/feed/ 0 Googlers @ the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: Daniela & Michal https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-daniela-michal/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-daniela-michal/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2015 21:21:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=5bc20baff8ce886ad2b05164109216ec Leading up to GHC, we’ve heard from Googlers about what they’re most looking forward to celebrating while in Houston. Today at #GHC15, two Googlers are being celebrated for their dedication to building the next generation of female computer scientists.
IMG_4980.JPG
Meet Daniela and Michal: Daniela and Michal were the first two female software engineers at Google’s research and development center in Tel Aviv, Israel. Together, in addition to their primary work as software engineers, they’re answering the question, “How can we inspire more young women to enter computer science and help bridge the gender gap?” Daniela leads a team of engineers in Tel Aviv working on software powering the Google network. Michal recently relocated to Mountain View, California where she leads a team of engineers working on Android Play. Today they’re being recognized with this year’s Social Impact ABIE Award.

Daniela and Michal, congratulations on your award! Can you tell us more about how Mind the Gap started?

Michal: Neither one of us had knowledge of what computer science was before taking a programming course after high school. We both realized how impactful early exposure could have been for us and we wanted to help female students get an early start. The perception of CS needs to change in order for these future computer scientists to even be interested in the first place.

Daniela: We started our work with Mind the Gap as a 20% project here at Google (ie. something we worked on outside of our day-to-day responsibilities). Thanks to the support of global Googlers, who continue to impress us with their passion and commitment to diversity, we have been able to scale this year-over-year by reaching out to more students.

At its core, your program exposes young women to mentors. Who have your role models been in your technical careers?

Daniela & Michal: Over the years we were exposed to world-famous leaders in the industry such as Susan Wojcicki, Jen Fitzpatrick, Megan Smith, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, who became role models to nearly every woman in tech. In addition, we have been lucky to meet strong female engineers at Google who have become personal friends, mentors and inspirations.

Mind the Gap started in 2008 and has grown exponentially in seven years. Seven years from now, what do you want this program to be known for?

Daniela & Michal: We’re proud that Mind the Gap has reached over 10,000 girls across Israel, Japan, Poland, Brazil and North America. And we are constantly scaling our program to maximize our impact. The addition of student ambassadors has allowed us to reach even more girls in our efforts. The student ambassador model also gives girls the opportunity to practice critical leadership skills with their peers. While we are thrilled that 40% of our annual conference’s participants have chosen to pursue CS classes in high school, we hope to increase the reach of the program ten-fold in the next seven years.

We’re looking forward to celebrating you when you receive your award here at GHC this evening. What has been a highlight of the GHC celebration for you this year?

Daniela: I have never been surrounded by so many technical women. Being around the 13,000 attendees at GHC this year is absolutely one of the most incredible experiences.

Michal: Seeing so many people, both men and women, who understand the importance of diversity and want to do something about it. This is now a global issue, it’s not a “women’s problem” anymore; diversity is key for getting the next generation of technology talent.

If you’re here in Houston, join us today, Thursday, Oct 15 at 5:30pm CT in Halls D-E Level 1 to see Daniela and Michal accept their award.

]]> Leading up to GHC, we’ve heard from Googlers about what they’re most looking forward to celebrating while in Houston. Today at #GHC15, two Googlers are being celebrated for their dedication to building the next generation of female computer scientists.
IMG_4980.JPG
Meet Daniela and Michal: Daniela and Michal were the first two female software engineers at Google’s research and development center in Tel Aviv, Israel. Together, in addition to their primary work as software engineers, they’re answering the question, “How can we inspire more young women to enter computer science and help bridge the gender gap?” Daniela leads a team of engineers in Tel Aviv working on software powering the Google network. Michal recently relocated to Mountain View, California where she leads a team of engineers working on Android Play. Today they’re being recognized with this year’s Social Impact ABIE Award.

Daniela and Michal, congratulations on your award! Can you tell us more about how Mind the Gap started?

Michal: Neither one of us had knowledge of what computer science was before taking a programming course after high school. We both realized how impactful early exposure could have been for us and we wanted to help female students get an early start. The perception of CS needs to change in order for these future computer scientists to even be interested in the first place.

Daniela: We started our work with Mind the Gap as a 20% project here at Google (ie. something we worked on outside of our day-to-day responsibilities). Thanks to the support of global Googlers, who continue to impress us with their passion and commitment to diversity, we have been able to scale this year-over-year by reaching out to more students.

At its core, your program exposes young women to mentors. Who have your role models been in your technical careers?

Daniela & Michal: Over the years we were exposed to world-famous leaders in the industry such as Susan Wojcicki, Jen Fitzpatrick, Megan Smith, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, who became role models to nearly every woman in tech. In addition, we have been lucky to meet strong female engineers at Google who have become personal friends, mentors and inspirations.

Mind the Gap started in 2008 and has grown exponentially in seven years. Seven years from now, what do you want this program to be known for?

Daniela & Michal: We’re proud that Mind the Gap has reached over 10,000 girls across Israel, Japan, Poland, Brazil and North America. And we are constantly scaling our program to maximize our impact. The addition of student ambassadors has allowed us to reach even more girls in our efforts. The student ambassador model also gives girls the opportunity to practice critical leadership skills with their peers. While we are thrilled that 40% of our annual conference’s participants have chosen to pursue CS classes in high school, we hope to increase the reach of the program ten-fold in the next seven years.

We’re looking forward to celebrating you when you receive your award here at GHC this evening. What has been a highlight of the GHC celebration for you this year?

Daniela: I have never been surrounded by so many technical women. Being around the 13,000 attendees at GHC this year is absolutely one of the most incredible experiences.

Michal: Seeing so many people, both men and women, who understand the importance of diversity and want to do something about it. This is now a global issue, it’s not a “women’s problem” anymore; diversity is key for getting the next generation of technology talent.

If you’re here in Houston, join us today, Thursday, Oct 15 at 5:30pm CT in Halls D-E Level 1 to see Daniela and Michal accept their award.

]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-daniela-michal/feed/ 0 Googlers @ the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: Yossi https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-yossi/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-yossi/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2015 16:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=98a0c547b9cfa75e7c949d00c1c93f29 We’re excited to share the story of another Googler who represents one of the many faces in tech and is attending #GHC15 today. Yossi is the third Googler in our series of GHC attendees who are passionate about supporting women in tech, and in his role as a senior leader, we hope this spotlight encourages other men to be supportive and participate in these conversations. Be sure to also check out our two other Googlers: Rachel and Roshni.

Meet Yossi. Yossi is a VP of Engineering and Head of the Israel Engineering Center here at Google. He’s been a Googler for nine years and is currently working to answer the question, “How can we drive innovation and continue to evolve Search to help people in their everyday lives?” He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife Shavit; they have a daughter, Lian, and two sons, Or and Michael -- all who are entrepreneurs in their own fields. This is his second time attending the Grace Hopper Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).
Yossi, this will be your second time attending GHC -- why is celebrating women in tech so important to you?

One of our biggest misses as an industry is not having equal representation of women (and other underrepresented groups for this matter) in tech. Having more women in tech is not only the right thing to do from a social perspective, but it is also critical from a technological and business perspective. Their inclusion will lead to greater social development and greater innovation.

What about GHC 2015 are you most looking forward to?

The opportunity to learn more about issues impacting women in technology, to have conversations with many others who care, and to celebrate women in tech with thousands of engineers and industry leaders.

How do you celebrate women in tech in your daily work?  

Encouraging women in tech has always been important to me and my team and we have a number of Googlers working on these initiatives. Mind the Gap, a program initiated by Daniela and Michal on my team, and which I’m personally involved with, encourages high school girls to select computer science and math in their high school studies. It is now impacting thousands of girls worldwide and is actually being recognized at GHC this year. Another program we’re working on is Campus for Moms, a baby-friendly startup school for moms (and dads). This program was created within Campus Tel Aviv, by Tal from Google and an Israeli entrepreneur, Hilla Ovil-Brenner, and is now reaching men and women globally. And I’m also inspired by the amazing talent we are seeing through the Google Anita Borg Scholarship Program, of which I’m honored to be one of the executive sponsors. I’m excited about the impact these programs are having on women in tech and on the tech industry in general.

What is your favorite part about working at Google?

The opportunity to make positive impact at scale, and working with amazing people who share the same passion.

If you’re attending GHC, come visit our Googlers @ Booth 221! And even if you’re not, join in the celebration of women in tech by following us @lifeatgoogle. #GoogleGHC15]]> We’re excited to share the story of another Googler who represents one of the many faces in tech and is attending #GHC15 today. Yossi is the third Googler in our series of GHC attendees who are passionate about supporting women in tech, and in his role as a senior leader, we hope this spotlight encourages other men to be supportive and participate in these conversations. Be sure to also check out our two other Googlers: Rachel and Roshni.

Meet Yossi. Yossi is a VP of Engineering and Head of the Israel Engineering Center here at Google. He’s been a Googler for nine years and is currently working to answer the question, “How can we drive innovation and continue to evolve Search to help people in their everyday lives?” He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife Shavit; they have a daughter, Lian, and two sons, Or and Michael -- all who are entrepreneurs in their own fields. This is his second time attending the Grace Hopper Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).
Yossi, this will be your second time attending GHC -- why is celebrating women in tech so important to you?

One of our biggest misses as an industry is not having equal representation of women (and other underrepresented groups for this matter) in tech. Having more women in tech is not only the right thing to do from a social perspective, but it is also critical from a technological and business perspective. Their inclusion will lead to greater social development and greater innovation.

What about GHC 2015 are you most looking forward to?

The opportunity to learn more about issues impacting women in technology, to have conversations with many others who care, and to celebrate women in tech with thousands of engineers and industry leaders.

How do you celebrate women in tech in your daily work?  

Encouraging women in tech has always been important to me and my team and we have a number of Googlers working on these initiatives. Mind the Gap, a program initiated by Daniela and Michal on my team, and which I’m personally involved with, encourages high school girls to select computer science and math in their high school studies. It is now impacting thousands of girls worldwide and is actually being recognized at GHC this year. Another program we’re working on is Campus for Moms, a baby-friendly startup school for moms (and dads). This program was created within Campus Tel Aviv, by Tal from Google and an Israeli entrepreneur, Hilla Ovil-Brenner, and is now reaching men and women globally. And I’m also inspired by the amazing talent we are seeing through the Google Anita Borg Scholarship Program, of which I’m honored to be one of the executive sponsors. I’m excited about the impact these programs are having on women in tech and on the tech industry in general.

What is your favorite part about working at Google?

The opportunity to make positive impact at scale, and working with amazing people who share the same passion.

If you’re attending GHC, come visit our Googlers @ Booth 221! And even if you’re not, join in the celebration of women in tech by following us @lifeatgoogle. #GoogleGHC15]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-yossi/feed/ 0 Googlers @ the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: Roshni https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-roshni/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-roshni/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2015 15:34:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=02990f097607756a0ea429790ee363b5 #GHC15 is almost here! We’re continuing to celebrate women and the many faces in tech with another Googler story.
Meet Roshni. Roshni is a software engineer working on the Google Identity Platform. At our Google headquarters in Mountain View, she’s currently working with her team to answer the question, “How can Google help developers build easy sign-in experiences so that users can reduce the number of passwords on the internet and access their data securely across devices?” She leads an orientation class for new Googlers -- or “Nooglers” as we prefer to call them -- and still finds the time to help grow community gardens. This will be her fourth time attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).


Roshni, what’s been your favorite part about attending GHC in the past?
I love to inspire and to be inspired as I continue to grow in my career in computer science. Each year GHC has enabled me to develop and try something new.
When I first attended GHC as a graduating student, I was taught to negotiate my starting offers. Then I learned what it’s like from the other side, where I had the opportunity to speak with smart young women who were exploring starting a career in computer science. I was able to assure them they were not only good enough to be software engineers, but that Google was actually looking for people like them to help build technology that would have meaningful impact on a lot of people. It was in that moment, talking to other women about why they belonged in the industry and at Google, that really made me feel more like I belonged too.
The following year I was on a Systers community panel for the newly created Indian Women in Computing community where I learned how I could help to build communities. And this year I’ll be talking about my work at a panel and a workshop, which allows me to help bring more women to the field of Identity.

GHC has given me the confidence I need to volunteer my time to engage more women in tech across three different levels: the middle/high schoolers who aren’t here yet, the undergraduates who may be deciding if they want to be here, and the industry folks who should stay.
What are you most looking forward to at GHC this year?
Shameless plug... my first workshop! On a more serious note, I’m very excited to listen to Megan Smith again. She’s a very inspirational speaker!
For those attending GHC for the first time, do you have any advice to share?

Wear comfy shoes! And, more seriously, don’t be overwhelmed by everything that’s happening in parallel. Everything will be interesting, but choose the session that’s right for you in your current role.
What about for those who might be considering a career in computer science at Google? Can you share what it is you like most about being a Googler?
The awesome people I get to work with and learn from every day! And the fact that Google provides me with so many ways to give back. For someone whose first GHC experience was sponsored by Google, I’m always grateful for all the opportunities to give back -- from candidate coaching, to organizing Systers meetups at Google, and beyond.
If you’re interested in checking out Roshni’s workshop, join us on Friday, 10/16 @ 2:30pm in the General Assembly, Theatre B Level 3. You can also find her on a panel on Thursday, 10/15 @ 10:30am in the General Assembly Theatre C Level 3.

Be sure to stop by Booth 221 to meet even more Googlers. Hope to see you there!  #GoogleGHC15]]> #GHC15 is almost here! We’re continuing to celebrate women and the many faces in tech with another Googler story.
Meet Roshni. Roshni is a software engineer working on the Google Identity Platform. At our Google headquarters in Mountain View, she’s currently working with her team to answer the question, “How can Google help developers build easy sign-in experiences so that users can reduce the number of passwords on the internet and access their data securely across devices?” She leads an orientation class for new Googlers -- or “Nooglers” as we prefer to call them -- and still finds the time to help grow community gardens. This will be her fourth time attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).


Roshni, what’s been your favorite part about attending GHC in the past?
I love to inspire and to be inspired as I continue to grow in my career in computer science. Each year GHC has enabled me to develop and try something new.
When I first attended GHC as a graduating student, I was taught to negotiate my starting offers. Then I learned what it’s like from the other side, where I had the opportunity to speak with smart young women who were exploring starting a career in computer science. I was able to assure them they were not only good enough to be software engineers, but that Google was actually looking for people like them to help build technology that would have meaningful impact on a lot of people. It was in that moment, talking to other women about why they belonged in the industry and at Google, that really made me feel more like I belonged too.
The following year I was on a Systers community panel for the newly created Indian Women in Computing community where I learned how I could help to build communities. And this year I’ll be talking about my work at a panel and a workshop, which allows me to help bring more women to the field of Identity.

GHC has given me the confidence I need to volunteer my time to engage more women in tech across three different levels: the middle/high schoolers who aren’t here yet, the undergraduates who may be deciding if they want to be here, and the industry folks who should stay.
What are you most looking forward to at GHC this year?
Shameless plug... my first workshop! On a more serious note, I’m very excited to listen to Megan Smith again. She’s a very inspirational speaker!
For those attending GHC for the first time, do you have any advice to share?

Wear comfy shoes! And, more seriously, don’t be overwhelmed by everything that’s happening in parallel. Everything will be interesting, but choose the session that’s right for you in your current role.
What about for those who might be considering a career in computer science at Google? Can you share what it is you like most about being a Googler?
The awesome people I get to work with and learn from every day! And the fact that Google provides me with so many ways to give back. For someone whose first GHC experience was sponsored by Google, I’m always grateful for all the opportunities to give back -- from candidate coaching, to organizing Systers meetups at Google, and beyond.
If you’re interested in checking out Roshni’s workshop, join us on Friday, 10/16 @ 2:30pm in the General Assembly, Theatre B Level 3. You can also find her on a panel on Thursday, 10/15 @ 10:30am in the General Assembly Theatre C Level 3.

Be sure to stop by Booth 221 to meet even more Googlers. Hope to see you there!  #GoogleGHC15]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-roshni/feed/ 0 Applications now open for 2016 Google EMEA scholarships – Apply today! https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-now-open-for-2016-google-emea-scholarships-apply-today/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-now-open-for-2016-google-emea-scholarships-apply-today/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2015 17:55:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=72c649df3f4626c1a5032c8ac222a2c3 We are excited to announce two Google scholarship opportunities for university students in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Googler Divya Vishwanath.jpg

The Google EMEA Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing. The scholarship is open to current female undergraduate or graduate students who will be studying at a university in Europe, the Middle East or Africa for the 2016-2017 academic year.

The Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities aims to help dismantle barriers for students with disabilities as well as encourage them to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders in technology. The scholarship is open to current undergraduate or graduate students with disabilities who will be studying at a university in Europe for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Applicants should be enrolled in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related technical field and maintain a record of strong academic performance. Recipients of the scholarships will each receive a € 7,000 (or equivalent) award for the 2016-2017 academic year.

The deadline for both scholarships is Thursday, 31st December, 2015, 17:00 GMT. Apply today!

For more on Google’s scholarships, please visit www.google.com/students/scholarships.

Posted by Maya Tudor, Tech Student Development Programs
]]> We are excited to announce two Google scholarship opportunities for university students in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Googler Divya Vishwanath.jpg

The Google EMEA Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing. The scholarship is open to current female undergraduate or graduate students who will be studying at a university in Europe, the Middle East or Africa for the 2016-2017 academic year.

The Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities aims to help dismantle barriers for students with disabilities as well as encourage them to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders in technology. The scholarship is open to current undergraduate or graduate students with disabilities who will be studying at a university in Europe for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Applicants should be enrolled in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related technical field and maintain a record of strong academic performance. Recipients of the scholarships will each receive a € 7,000 (or equivalent) award for the 2016-2017 academic year.

The deadline for both scholarships is Thursday, 31st December, 2015, 17:00 GMT. Apply today!

For more on Google’s scholarships, please visit www.google.com/students/scholarships.

Posted by Maya Tudor, Tech Student Development Programs
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/applications-now-open-for-2016-google-emea-scholarships-apply-today/feed/ 0 Googlers @ the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: Rachel https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-rachel/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-rachel/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2015 16:30:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=7950604285930238fa723221c77b44fe Here at Google we’re excited to attend #GHC15 this week. To start the celebration early, we’re sharing stories about a few Googlers that represent some of the many faces in tech.
Meet Rachel. Rachel is a Product Manager at Google Seattle. She leads the Chrome Sync and Site Isolation efforts, working with her team to answer the questions, “How can Chrome help users get the most out of the web across multiple devices, and protect users against malicious websites?” She lives in Seattle with her wife, Jennifer, and little dog, Tesla -- both of whom she met on the internet. This will be her fourth time attending the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC).

DSC_0273 (1).jpg

Rachel, you’ve attend GHC three times throughout your career -- how has each experience impacted you?

When I attended GHC in ‘07 and ‘08, I made connections with other students and early career PMs. My friends from GHC became a broad, diverse professional network that was with me right from the start, and they have helped me seize opportunities to do the work I want to do. For example, when I was applying to Google in 2012, my roommate from GHC ‘08 edited my resume and introduced me to Googlers so that I could get more perspectives on open positions that matched my skills and interests.

When I attended GHC last year as a mid-career PM, my favorite experience was talking to a college junior who was majoring in Psychology and Computer Science (like I did) and planned to become a PM (like I am). She exclaimed, “OMG you are me, but in the future!” and that was a powerful moment for me because in my career there haven’t always been people around who are like me.

So my advice is talk to strangers! Senior people of all genders attend GHC because they care about technical women. They want to support you, so introduce yourself, ask questions, and ask for a business card before you walk away.

That’s great advice. Do you have any other tips to share?

I’m a big proponent of the 50/50 strategy for GHC -- 50% talks that interest you, 50% meeting people, mentoring, networking. The opportunity to get to know other Googlers and peers across the industry who all care about gender diversity is one of the most valuable things I’ve gotten out of the conference.

Give generously of your knowledge, especially if you have some industry or post-graduate experience. Share your story with those who want to follow in your footsteps.

Read twitter, and participate if you feel like it. Follow people who say interesting GHC-related things -- they'll keep saying interesting things after GHC too, and you’ll get to hear from a more diverse group of thinkers on industry topics.

Lastly, scout out quiet spaces where you can recharge your phone and chat with your neighbors. And leave room in your bag for the swag!

It seems clear that one of the best parts about attending GHC has been the people you’ve gotten to meet. In your view, what’s the best part about being a Googler?

Having the opportunity to try new things -- and being part of a culture that knows good ideas can come from anywhere.

If you’re attending GHC next week, look out for Rachel and stop by Booth 221 to meet even more Googlers! #GoogleGHC15
]]> Here at Google we’re excited to attend #GHC15 this week. To start the celebration early, we’re sharing stories about a few Googlers that represent some of the many faces in tech.
Meet Rachel. Rachel is a Product Manager at Google Seattle. She leads the Chrome Sync and Site Isolation efforts, working with her team to answer the questions, “How can Chrome help users get the most out of the web across multiple devices, and protect users against malicious websites?” She lives in Seattle with her wife, Jennifer, and little dog, Tesla -- both of whom she met on the internet. This will be her fourth time attending the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC).

DSC_0273 (1).jpg

Rachel, you’ve attend GHC three times throughout your career -- how has each experience impacted you?

When I attended GHC in ‘07 and ‘08, I made connections with other students and early career PMs. My friends from GHC became a broad, diverse professional network that was with me right from the start, and they have helped me seize opportunities to do the work I want to do. For example, when I was applying to Google in 2012, my roommate from GHC ‘08 edited my resume and introduced me to Googlers so that I could get more perspectives on open positions that matched my skills and interests.

When I attended GHC last year as a mid-career PM, my favorite experience was talking to a college junior who was majoring in Psychology and Computer Science (like I did) and planned to become a PM (like I am). She exclaimed, “OMG you are me, but in the future!” and that was a powerful moment for me because in my career there haven’t always been people around who are like me.

So my advice is talk to strangers! Senior people of all genders attend GHC because they care about technical women. They want to support you, so introduce yourself, ask questions, and ask for a business card before you walk away.

That’s great advice. Do you have any other tips to share?

I’m a big proponent of the 50/50 strategy for GHC -- 50% talks that interest you, 50% meeting people, mentoring, networking. The opportunity to get to know other Googlers and peers across the industry who all care about gender diversity is one of the most valuable things I’ve gotten out of the conference.

Give generously of your knowledge, especially if you have some industry or post-graduate experience. Share your story with those who want to follow in your footsteps.

Read twitter, and participate if you feel like it. Follow people who say interesting GHC-related things -- they'll keep saying interesting things after GHC too, and you’ll get to hear from a more diverse group of thinkers on industry topics.

Lastly, scout out quiet spaces where you can recharge your phone and chat with your neighbors. And leave room in your bag for the swag!

It seems clear that one of the best parts about attending GHC has been the people you’ve gotten to meet. In your view, what’s the best part about being a Googler?

Having the opportunity to try new things -- and being part of a culture that knows good ideas can come from anywhere.

If you’re attending GHC next week, look out for Rachel and stop by Booth 221 to meet even more Googlers! #GoogleGHC15
]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/googlers-the-grace-hopper-celebration-of-women-in-computing-rachel/feed/ 0 Intern Spotlights – Jeanie Pearson https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/intern-spotlights-jeanie-pearson/ https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/intern-spotlights-jeanie-pearson/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2015 21:31:00 +0000 https://googledata.org/?guid=3907baa8a87199224ef320bf7fa0640f Jeanie is a Portland, OR, native, who’s currently a sophomore studying computer science at MIT. She’s been programming since her freshman year of high school, and has loved it ever since. She’s also involved in the Society of Women Engineers in both the MIT chapter and the regional leadership. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing, as well as doing outreach projects to introduce girls to STEM fields.
What inspired you to apply to this internship? What about Google made you want to be an intern here?
Last summer, I participated in the Google Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI). I had always been interested in computer science at Google from hearing about all of the cool projects happening here, but after attending CSSI, I was sold. For three weeks, I learned about coding from Google engineers. I got to spend all of my time in the Google Cambridge office, and interact with interns and full-time employees. Everyone that I talked to was really friendly and passionate about what they were doing at Google, which made me really excited about the prospect of working here!
What was your path to Google like?
Before Google, I had two other internships. I worked at Rockwell Collins after my junior year of high school. I worked on Heads-Up Displays for pilots. This internship was a combination of engineering and CS, and it helped me decide that computer science was what I wanted to focus on, despite my interests in engineering. The summer after my senior year, I interned at Intel. I also attended CSSI.
What team are you on? What stands out to you about your co-workers?
I’m on the Search Actions team. We work on the Google Voice Search project. Anytime you say something like “OK Google, make a call” or “OK Google, play music,” you’re using a search action. All of my coworkers are extremely friendly and approachable! It is a fun and inviting team to work with. There are weekly team lunches, and we’re starting an “Actions Olympiad” where every two weeks, subsets of the team face off in a friendly competition. Aside from the fun, everyone is great about answering questions. You can tell that they all really care about the product and each of the team members.


Can you give us a high-level overview of your project? What part of the project do you find most interesting and why?
My project is creating a tool to help developers on teams outside of Search Actions easily create actions without having to know in depth about how our code works. Instead, they just have to specify the things that are unique to their action. Since I’m an Engineering Practicum intern, my podmate and I are working on this together. I’m more interested in backend, and my podmate is more interested in frontend, so we were able to split the project so that we both got parts that we enjoy doing! I’m happy about my half because I get to work directly with the Actions team’s code and gain a deeper understanding of how it works.
What’s your typical day like?
In a typical day, I come in to work around 9 and grab breakfast. I start working at my desk, which is right across from my podmate’s. I’ll talk with my hosts and other co-workers who are helping with my project. Around noon, I’ll grab lunch at one of the many (42!) cafes. (I have a goal of eating at all of the cafes this summer). I’ll eat with other interns or with my team. After lunch, I’ll probably have a meeting with my whole team, or a 1:1 with one of my hosts or my mentor. At the end of the workday, I usually take a dance class on Google campus or at a nearby studio. One of my hosts teaches a jazz class that I take every Wednesday, and she sometimes attends other classes with me! After dance, I’ll grab dinner and head home.
Has there been anything that has surprised you about working at Google?
I was surprised by how many different things you can get done on campus! Last summer, I got a small taste of that at the Cambridge office, but at the Mountain View office, you can really do almost everything here. I especially love all of the fitness options -there is a yoga class happening here 24/7. You can really tell that Google cares about their employees and values a strong work-life balance.


You work in the Mountain View office. Is there a particular place or room on campus that you really like?
I really like the ball pit! I’ve had a couple of fun times splashing around in it during my lunch breaks.
What’s something you’ve accomplished during your internship that you’re most proud of? Or something you’re looking forward to working on?
I’m looking forward to seeing my tool being used by real developers! The first iteration is very close to complete, and I’m excited to see how it is received.
Do you have any words of advice to aspiring Google interns?
I think the most important thing is to have confidence! Don’t let yourself get discouraged if you think that others are smarter or more experienced than you. This can prevent you from taking the opportunities that come to you, because you may assume that you’ll fail. You don’t have to be the smartest person to be successful, and confidence will definitely help. You should go after every opportunity that you have because even if all of them aren’t successful, just having the experience is a success in and of itself.
What does “being Googley” mean to you?
Being Googley means always doing the right thing. This goes hand-in-hand with the “don’t be evil” motto.

Posted by Ariana Palombo, Online Hiring & Insights Team]]> Jeanie is a Portland, OR, native, who’s currently a sophomore studying computer science at MIT. She’s been programming since her freshman year of high school, and has loved it ever since. She’s also involved in the Society of Women Engineers in both the MIT chapter and the regional leadership. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing, as well as doing outreach projects to introduce girls to STEM fields.
What inspired you to apply to this internship? What about Google made you want to be an intern here?
Last summer, I participated in the Google Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI). I had always been interested in computer science at Google from hearing about all of the cool projects happening here, but after attending CSSI, I was sold. For three weeks, I learned about coding from Google engineers. I got to spend all of my time in the Google Cambridge office, and interact with interns and full-time employees. Everyone that I talked to was really friendly and passionate about what they were doing at Google, which made me really excited about the prospect of working here!
What was your path to Google like?
Before Google, I had two other internships. I worked at Rockwell Collins after my junior year of high school. I worked on Heads-Up Displays for pilots. This internship was a combination of engineering and CS, and it helped me decide that computer science was what I wanted to focus on, despite my interests in engineering. The summer after my senior year, I interned at Intel. I also attended CSSI.
What team are you on? What stands out to you about your co-workers?
I’m on the Search Actions team. We work on the Google Voice Search project. Anytime you say something like “OK Google, make a call” or “OK Google, play music,” you’re using a search action. All of my coworkers are extremely friendly and approachable! It is a fun and inviting team to work with. There are weekly team lunches, and we’re starting an “Actions Olympiad” where every two weeks, subsets of the team face off in a friendly competition. Aside from the fun, everyone is great about answering questions. You can tell that they all really care about the product and each of the team members.


Can you give us a high-level overview of your project? What part of the project do you find most interesting and why?
My project is creating a tool to help developers on teams outside of Search Actions easily create actions without having to know in depth about how our code works. Instead, they just have to specify the things that are unique to their action. Since I’m an Engineering Practicum intern, my podmate and I are working on this together. I’m more interested in backend, and my podmate is more interested in frontend, so we were able to split the project so that we both got parts that we enjoy doing! I’m happy about my half because I get to work directly with the Actions team’s code and gain a deeper understanding of how it works.
What’s your typical day like?
In a typical day, I come in to work around 9 and grab breakfast. I start working at my desk, which is right across from my podmate’s. I’ll talk with my hosts and other co-workers who are helping with my project. Around noon, I’ll grab lunch at one of the many (42!) cafes. (I have a goal of eating at all of the cafes this summer). I’ll eat with other interns or with my team. After lunch, I’ll probably have a meeting with my whole team, or a 1:1 with one of my hosts or my mentor. At the end of the workday, I usually take a dance class on Google campus or at a nearby studio. One of my hosts teaches a jazz class that I take every Wednesday, and she sometimes attends other classes with me! After dance, I’ll grab dinner and head home.
Has there been anything that has surprised you about working at Google?
I was surprised by how many different things you can get done on campus! Last summer, I got a small taste of that at the Cambridge office, but at the Mountain View office, you can really do almost everything here. I especially love all of the fitness options -there is a yoga class happening here 24/7. You can really tell that Google cares about their employees and values a strong work-life balance.


You work in the Mountain View office. Is there a particular place or room on campus that you really like?
I really like the ball pit! I’ve had a couple of fun times splashing around in it during my lunch breaks.
What’s something you’ve accomplished during your internship that you’re most proud of? Or something you’re looking forward to working on?
I’m looking forward to seeing my tool being used by real developers! The first iteration is very close to complete, and I’m excited to see how it is received.
Do you have any words of advice to aspiring Google interns?
I think the most important thing is to have confidence! Don’t let yourself get discouraged if you think that others are smarter or more experienced than you. This can prevent you from taking the opportunities that come to you, because you may assume that you’ll fail. You don’t have to be the smartest person to be successful, and confidence will definitely help. You should go after every opportunity that you have because even if all of them aren’t successful, just having the experience is a success in and of itself.
What does “being Googley” mean to you?
Being Googley means always doing the right thing. This goes hand-in-hand with the “don’t be evil” motto.

Posted by Ariana Palombo, Online Hiring & Insights Team]]> https://googledata.org/google-student-blog/intern-spotlights-jeanie-pearson/feed/ 0