30 Eylül 2012 Pazar

Faculty Summit 2012: Online Education Panel

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On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education. Daphne Koller's presentation on "Education at Scale" describes how a talk about YouTube at the 2009 Google Faculty Summit was an early inspiration for her, as she was formulating her approach that led to the founding of Coursera. Koller started with the goal of allowing Stanford professors to have more time for meaningful interaction with their students, rather than just lecturing, and ended up with a model based on the flipped classroom, where students watch videos out of class, and then come together to discuss what they have learned. She then refined the flipped classroom to work when there is no classroom, when the interactions occur in online discussion forums rather than in person. She described some fascinating experiments that allow for more flexible types of questions (beyond multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank) by using peer grading of exercises.

In my talk, I describe how I arrived at a similar approach but starting with a different motivation: I wanted a textbook that was more interactive and engaging than a static paper-based book, so I too incorporated short videos and frequent interactions for the Intro to AI class I taught with Sebastian Thrun.

Finally, Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google+ gave a talk describing the goals of Google+. It is not to build the largest social network; rather it is to understand our users better, so that we can serve them better, while respecting their privacy, and keeping each of their conversations within the appropriate circle of friends. This allows people to have more meaningful conversations, within a limited context, and turns out to be very appropriate to education.

By bringing people together at events like the Faculty Summit, we hope to spark the conversations and ideas that will lead to the next breakthroughs, perhaps in online education, or perhaps in other fields. We'll find out a few years from now what ideas took root at this year's Summit.

Machine Learning Book for Students and Researchers

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Our machine learning book, The Foundations of Machine Learning, is now published! The book, with authors from both Google Research and academia, covers a large variety of fundamental machine learning topics in depth, including the theoretical basis of many learning algorithms and key aspects of their applications. The material presented takes its origin in a machine learning graduate course, "Foundations of Machine Learning", taught by Mehryar Mohri over the past seven years and has considerably benefited from comments and suggestions from students and colleagues at Google.

The book can serve as a textbook for both graduate students and advanced undergraduate students and a reference manual for researchers in machine learning, statistics, and many other related areas. It includes as a supplement introductory material to topics such as linear algebra and optimization and other useful conceptual tools, as well as a large number of exercises at the end of each chapter whose full solutions are provided online.



Better table search through Machine Learning and Knowledge

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The Web offers a trove of structured data in the form of tables. Organizing this collection of information and helping users find the most useful tables is a key mission of Table Search from Google Research. While we are still a long way away from the perfect table search, we made a few steps forward recently by revamping how we determine which tables are "good" (one that contains meaningful structured data) and which ones are "bad" (for example, a table that hold the layout of a Web page). In particular, we switched from a rule-based system to a machine learning classifier that can tease out subtleties from the table features and enables rapid quality improvement iterations. This new classifier is a support vector machine (SVM) that makes use of multiple kernel functions which are automatically combined and optimized using training examples. Several of these kernel combining techniques were in fact studied and developed within Google Research [1,2].

We are also able to achieve a better understanding of the tables by leveraging the Knowledge Graph. In particular, we improved our algorithms for identifying the context and topics of each table, the entities represented in the table and the properties they have. This knowledge not only helps our classifier make a better decision on the quality of the table, but also enables better matching of the table to the user query.

Finally, you will notice that we added an easy way for our users to import Web tables found through Table Search into their Google Drive account as Fusion Tables. Now that we can better identify good tables, the import feature enables our users to further explore the data. Once in Fusion Tables, the data can be visualized, updated, and accessed programmatically using the Fusion Tables API.

These enhancements are just the start. We are continually updating the quality of our Table Search and adding features to it.

Stay tuned for more from Boulos Harb, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Fei Wu, Cong Yu and the rest of the Structured Data Team.


[1] Algorithms for Learning Kernels Based on Centered Alignment
[2] Generalization Bounds for Learning Kernels

Google at UAI 2012

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The conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier venues for research related to probabilistic models and reasoning under uncertainty. This year's conference (the 28th) set several new records: the largest number of submissions (304 papers, last year 285), the largest number of participants (216, last year 191), the largest number of tutorials (4, last year 3), and the largest number of workshops (4, last year 1). We interpret this as a sign that the conference is growing, perhaps as part of the larger trend of increasing interest in machine learning and data analysis.

There were many interesting presentations. A couple of my favorites included:
  • "Video In Sentences Out," by Andrei Barbu et al. This demonstrated an impressive system that is able to create grammatically correct sentences describing the objects and actions occurring in a variety of different videos. 
  • "Exploiting Compositionality to Explore a Large Space of Model Structures," by Roger Grosse et al. This paper (which won the Best Student Paper Award) proposed a way to view many different latent variable models for matrix decomposition - including PCA, ICA, NMF, Co-Clustering, etc. - as special cases of a general grammar. The paper then showed ways to automatically select the right kind of model for a dataset by performing greedy search over grammar productions, combined with Bayesian inference for model fitting.

A strong theme this year was causality. In fact, we had an invited talk on the topic by Judea Pearl, winner of the 2011 Turing Award, in addition to a one-day workshop. Although causality is sometimes regarded as something of an academic curiosity, its relevance to important practical problems (e.g., to medicine, advertising, social policy, etc.) is becoming more clear. There is still a large gap between theory and practice when it comes to making causal predictions, but it was pleasing to see that researchers in the UAI community are making steady progress on this problem.

There were two presentations at UAI by Googlers. The first, "Latent Structured Ranking," by Jason Weston and John Blitzer, described an extension to a ranking model called Wsabie, that was published at ICML in 2011, and is widely used within Google. The Wsabie model embeds a pair of items (say a query and a document) into a low dimensional space, and uses distance in that space as a measure of semantic similarity. The UAI paper extends this to the setting where there are multiple candidate documents in response to a given query. In such a context, we can get improved performance by leveraging similarities between documents in the set.

The second paper by Googlers, "Hokusai - Sketching Streams in Real Time," was presented by Sergiy Matusevych, Alex Smola and Amr Ahmed. (Amr recently joined Google from Yahoo, and Alex is a visiting faculty member at Google.) This paper extends the Count-Min sketch method for storing approximate counts to the streaming context. This extension allows one to compute approximate counts of events (such as the number of visitors to a particular website) aggregated over different temporal extents. The method can also be extended to store approximate n-gram statistics in a very compact way.

In addition to these presentations, Google was involved in UAI in several other ways: I held a program co-chair position on the organizing committee, several of the referees and attendees work at Google, and Google provided some sponsorship for the conference.

Overall, this was a very successful conference, in an idyllic setting (Catalina Island, an hour off the coast of Los Angeles). We believe UAI and its techniques will grow in importance as various organizations -- including Google -- start combining structured, prior knowledge with raw, noisy unstructured data.

Users love simple and familiar designs – Why websites need to make a great first impression

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I’m sure you’ve experienced this at some point: You click on a link to a website, and after a quick glance you already know you’re not interested, so you click ‘back’ and head elsewhere. How did you make that snap judgment? Did you really read and process enough information to know that this website wasn’t what you were looking for? Or was it something more immediate?

We form first impressions of the people and things we encounter in our daily lives in an extraordinarily short timeframe. We know the first impression a website’s design creates is crucial in capturing users’ interest. In less than 50 milliseconds, users build an initial “gut feeling” that helps them decide whether they’ll stay or leave. This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more.

In our study we investigated how users' first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:

  1. Visual complexity -- how complex the visual design of a website looks 
  2. Prototypicality -- how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites

We presented screenshots of existing websites that varied in both of these factors -- visual complexity and prototypicality -- and asked users to rate their beauty.

The results show that both visual complexity and prototypicality play crucial roles in the process of forming an aesthetic judgment. It happens within incredibly short timeframes between 17 and 50 milliseconds. By comparison, the average blink of an eye takes 100 to 400 milliseconds.

And these two factors are interrelated: if the visual complexity of a website is high, users perceive it as less beautiful, even if the design is familiar. And if the design is unfamiliar -- i.e., the site has low prototypicality -- users judge it as uglier, even if it’s simple.
In other words, users strongly prefer website designs that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). That means if you’re designing a website, you’ll want to consider both factors. Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users’ first impression and damage their expectations. Recent research shows that negative product expectations lead to lower satisfaction in product interaction -- a downward spiral you’ll want to avoid. Go for simple and familiar if you want to appeal to your users’ sense of beauty.

29 Eylül 2012 Cumartesi

Download your YouTube Videos in their Original Resolution

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While there are quite a few software tools and apps available that let you download videos from YouTube for offline watching, you don’t really need them anymore if you are looking to download your own videos from the YouTube website. →

The easiest way to download an individual YouTube video click is through the Video Manager. Click the Edit button next to a video that you wish to download (see screenshot) and choose “Download MP4″ from the dropdown.

Download YouTube Videos

Download your YouTube Videos, legally

This method has been around for a while now but the one big limitation is that the quality of the downloaded videos isn’t the same as your original clips. Your 720p and 1080p HD video will be saved at 480p.

If this lone limitation has been keeping you from hosting any of your videos on YouTube, worry no more. You now have an option to download all your YouTube videos in their original resolution. Here’s how:

  1. Go to google.com/takeout and click the Create Archive button. Google will now create a zipped archived with all the videos that you have ever uploaded to YouTube.
  2. Once the archive says 100%, proceed to the Downloads tab to grab the actual files. If the archive is large, Google Takeout will split them into individual files of 2 GB each.

YouTube Download Links

The downside is that you have to download the entire archives – there’s no option to download individual video in high resolution.

That said, if you are planning to copy videos from YouTube to Vimeo or another video hosting service but don’t have access to the source video files, you’ll find this new option extremely handy.

HRelated reading: How to Embed YouTube in PowerPoint

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Download your YouTube Videos in their Original Resolution, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/09/2012 under YouTube, Internet.


NFC Enabled Business Cards from Moo

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NFC Business Cards

Moo, a UK based company that has become almost synonymous with business cards, are trying a new experiment.

They are putting an NFC chip inside their business cards that, for example, will make it easy for the recipient to transfer the contact information from the card to the phone’s address book provided his phone is also NFC enabled.

This isn’t the most practical uses case as it can be achieved through QR codes as well, which are more popular and even supported on lower-end devices, but the NFC cards offer a different advantage –  you can rewrite the cards even after the cards have been handed out and hence the information it transfers to the phone is never out of date.

This is just at an experimental stage and Moo will ship you a single NFC embedded business card for free along with your regular order. Moo will soon release an Android App that will allow you program what your business card does.

Can you think of any creative uses of having a NFC chip inside a business card?

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, NFC Enabled Business Cards from Moo, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/09/2012 under Business Card, Internet.


Use YouTube as an Endless Music Player

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Sometimes you just want to use YouTube like a radio, an endless music player running in the background that moves from one song to another while you work on other tasks. →

YouTube playlists are a popular option but YouTube does have some built-in tools as well, like YouTube Disco and YouTube Leanback, that let you watch an uninterrupted stream of music videos from your favorite artists and bands.

Unlimited YouTube Music

YouTube transformed into an online music radio

YouTube as a Music Radio

There’s a new YouTube mashup in town, available at appspot.com, that’s built around the same concept of “endless music” but offers a more pleasing and uncluttered UI. You search for your favorite song and the app will create an unending playlist of music video based on that song.

The app internally uses YouTube’s own Related API to find music videos similar to your base song but if the algorithms aren’t working right, you can always skip the song or switch to a different music playlist available on the right. Worth a bookmark.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Use YouTube as an Endless Music Player, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 27/09/2012 under YouTube, Internet.


Increase the Battery Life of your Wireless Mouse

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wireless mouse

Turn off your wireless mouse and keyboard manually to improve battery life

There’s a little on/off switch on the bottom of your wireless mouse that you can use to manually turn off the mice when its not in use. This may slightly extend the battery life of your mouse in case you aren’t having one of the newer mice models that automatically switch off when left idle for a long period. →

The problem is how do you remember that you have to turn off the wireless mouse (and the keyboard) when you are done for the day?

One option would be that you you use the built-in Windows Task Scheduler or the Group Policy Editor to display a reminder message on the screen every time you log off or shut down the computer. This is both geeky and requires too many steps.

Then there’s a simpler option as well. You can change the default “System Shutdown” and “System Logoff” sounds to a voice message that reminds you to turn off the mice before you are leave the computer. Here’s a sample sound (.wav file) created with Listen.

Open the Control Panel in Windows and search for Change System Sounds. Choose the “Exit Windows” event and browse for your .wav file to set it as the default sound for the event. Do the same for “Windows Logoff” event and you’ll never forget to turn off your wireless mouse and keyboard again.

Windows System Sounds

Increase the Battery Life of your Mouse

Speaking of battery life, here are some additional tips courtesy Logitech that may further push the battery life of your wireless mouse.

  1. Get a light-colored mouse pad. While your mice may work well on your black granite table or even transparent surfaces like glass, they are best avoided as they cause the tracking sensor in the mouse to use more power.
  2. Your wireless mouse ships with a nano receiver that is put into the USB port of your computer. Make sure the USB receiver and the mice are close to each other else use an USB extension cable for the receiver.
  3. For best results, replace both batteries at the same time and avoid mixing brands. Logitech suggests using alkaline batteries as non-alkaline batteries, such as NiMH or NiCd, operate at a lower voltage and may negatively impact the battery life of your mouse.
  4. Turn off the mouse manually when you are travelling. While the mice may go to sleep /standby mode when not being used, they’ll wake up when they move around inside your bag and this consumes battery power.

Related tip: Share One Mouse with Two Computers

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Increase the Battery Life of your Wireless Mouse, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 28/09/2012 under Mouse, Gadgets.


Apple Drops the “Most Powerful Mapping Service Ever” Claim

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Apple Maps

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has honestly admitted that Apple Maps isn’t as good as competing mapping services but the Apple website made a slightly contradictory claim. It said:

Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All of which may just make this app the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever.

Apple Maps may be beautiful for some regions (where they exist) but the other claim isn’t quite true. I was checking the Apple website this morning and looks like they have changed the wording and are no longer referring to Apple Maps as “the most powerful mapping service ever.” The website now reads:

Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All in a beautiful vector-based interface that scales and zooms with ease.

Apple executive spent around 8 minutes to demo the Apple Maps application at the WWDC conference, calling it a “worldwide effort,” but not once did they mention that the service had any limitations or problems.

The mapping service would not have become such a laughing stock worldwide had they set the right expectations in the first place. In case you haven’t seen it before, here’s the keynote video where Apple first showcased the Maps app in iOS 6.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5BQFn0wcE

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Apple Drops the “Most Powerful Mapping Service Ever” Claim, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 29/09/2012 under Apple, Internet.