By Andrea Held, Program Manager, Google University Relations

Last spring Google University Relations announced an open call for proposals for Google App Engine Research Awards. We invited academic researchers to use Google App Engine for research experiments and analysis, encouraging them to take advantage of the platform’s ability to manage heavy data loads and run large-scale applications. Submissions included proposals in various subject areas such as mathematics, computer vision, bioinformatics, climate and computer science. We selected seven projects and have awarded each $60,000 in Google App Engine credits recognizing their innovation and vision.

Today we would like to share a brief introduction of the winning projects and their Principal Investigators:

• K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor and Professor of Computer Science, California Institute of Technology
  Cloud-based Event Detection for Sense and Response: Develop a low-cost alternative to traditional seismic networks. The image below is taken from the Community Seismic Network map showing active clients and events in real time.



A dense network of seismic stations enables the Community Seismic Network to perform a finer-grained analysis of seismic events than possible with existing seismic networks.

• Lawrence Chung, Associate Professor, The University of Texas at Dallas
  Google App Engine: Software Benchmark and Google App Engine Simulation Forecaster: Develop a tool to estimate software performance and cost on Google App Engine.
• Julian Gough, Professor, University of Bristol, UK
  Personalised DNA Analysis: Develop a service that provides personal DNA analysis.
• Ramesh Raskar, PhD, MIT Media Lab; Dr. Erick Baptista Passos, IFPI (Federal Institute of Technology, Brazil)
  VisionBlocks: develop a tool that delivers computer vision to people everywhere. The image below shows a current prototype implementation of VisionBlocks.



Many algorithms are already included, and you'll be able create your own blocks as well.

• Norman Sadeh, Professor, Director of Mobile Commerce Lab, School of
  Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
  Mapping the Dynamics of a City & Nudging Twitter Users: uncovering local collective knowledge about the a city using social media.
• William Stein, Professor of Mathematics, University of Washington
  Sage: Creating a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Matlab, and Mathematica.
• Enrique Vivoni, Associate Professor, Hydrologic Science, Engineering & Sustainability, Arizona State University
  Cloud Computing-Based Visualization and Access of Global Climate Data Sets: provide scientific data on global climate trends.

Congratulations to the award winners! We are excited about the proposals’ creativity and innovation and look forward to learning about their discoveries. To read more about specific projects, go here.


Andrea Held is a Program Manager on the University Relations team at Google. She grew up in Germany and has lived in California for almost 30 years.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

I am proud to share the news that Google Summer of Code 2013 will be happening again this year.

This will be the 9th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past eight years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 100 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student who would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2013 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!


Written by Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Peter Lubbers, Program Manager, Google Chrome Developer Relations

We just launched our new Udacity HTML5 Game Development course (CS255). This course focuses on building a game in JavaScript and is taught by Colt McAnlis (Developer Advocate, Chrome Developer Relations), Peter Lubbers (Program Manager, Chrome Developer Relations), and Sean Bennett (Architect, Udacity). Yep, these guys:

This Thursday, February 14th at 10:30 a.m. PST we are hosting an introductory Google Developers Live session with special guest Sebastian Thrun (Udacity's CEO). In this session we will tell you all about the content of the course and and we will answer your questions live. Make sure you add this live event to your calendar and tune in on Thursday: http://goo.gl/ffs8s (you can ask and vote for your questions there, too).

We have a series of exciting initiatives that we are organizing in parallel. First, we’ll be running a study group for the first several weeks of the course. The study group will be hosted at Google’s San Francisco office, and Colt, Peter, and Sean will be there to answer any questions you might have and to help you out with the course material. If you don’t live around San Francisco, or can’t make it for whatever reason, don’t worry, because we’ll be livestreaming and recording these study groups.

In addition to the study group, Udacity is also organizing an exciting contest focused around the course. The goal of this contest is to build your own game using the knowledge and skills you've gained from the course. You can sign up for the course here and tune into GDL on Thursday to find out more about it.


Peter Lubbers is a Program Manager on the Chrome Developer Relations Team, spreading HTML5 and Open Web goodness. He is the founder of the San Francisco HTML5 User Group--the world's first and largest HTML5 meetup with over 6,000 members. Peter is the author of "Pro HTML5 Programming" (Apress) and, yes, his car's license plate is HTML5!

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

You’re reading a blog for developers, so chances are you’re probably pretty savvy about how things work online, and that includes safety and security. Of course, just because we know how to be secure doesn’t mean we always do what we should. And there are all our less-technical friends and family members who often turn to us for guidance. To help keep people secure online, we recently updated the site Good to Know: A guide to staying safe and secure online.

This site contains lots of common sense and advanced tips, such as how to secure your passwords, ways you can prevent identity theft, and a guide to technical terminology. Although Good to Know is designed to be useful to people from all backgrounds, even us tech folks can find some handy information there.

Speaking of safety, it turns out we can all can relax about Asteroid 2012 DA 14. According to NASA, the 45-meter object will get close to Earth, but no closer than about 17,000 miles. The space agency also says the asteroid won’t be visible to the naked eye, and will be hard to track even with telescopes. But the important thing is that we won’t have another Tunguska event.

Although it looks like we’re going to avoid an asteroid impact, nature continues to demonstrate enormous power that is sometimes destructive and awesome. A camera crew recently filmed an immense glacier calving, an event that lasted more than an hour. You can watch it from the comfort of your asteroid-safe home.


Safety is important, whether you’re on the Internet or looking out for asteroids. While we spend most of the week here telling you about Google developer topics, Fridaygram is set aside for science, technology, and other fun & generally nerdy topics.

By Nicolas Garnier, Developer Relations

When Google Drive launched, we also introduced the Google Drive SDK, which enables you to deeply integrate your apps into Drive. Using the Drive SDK, you can offer your users an experience similar to how Google Docs or Google Sheets interact with Drive. More than a hundred web apps now integrate with Google Drive in this way.

Today we are making several changes to Google Drive to help users more easily discover, connect and use these Drive-enabled apps.


Google Drive Create menu

The Google Drive Create menu now elevates Drive-connected apps to the same level as Google apps such as Docs and Sheets. This makes your Drive-connected apps easier to reach and more visible to Google Drive users.

New Google Drive Create menu

As you can see, we’ve made some space in the Create menu for your apps, which users can add by clicking on Connect more apps.


Browse and Connect Drive-enabled Apps

Google Drive users can now browse and connect Drive-enabled apps right from within Drive thanks to the new Connect apps to Drive dialog:

Connect some Google Drive-enabled web apps to your Drive

After installing an app, users can instantly start using your Drive app to create or open files directly from within Drive.

Opening a file in Google Drive with a connected app

If your app is already Google Drive-enabled and listed in the Chrome Web Store’s Drive collection, you don’t have to do anything new to take advantage of these new features. We will automatically pull all the information from your existing Chrome Web Store listing.

If your web app is not yet Google Drive-enabled, check out how you can integrate with the create-new and the open-with actions and then get your Drive-enabled app listed in the new Connect apps to Drive dialog.


Nicolas Garnier joined Google’s Developer Relations in 2008 and lives in Zurich. He is a Developer Advocate for Google Drive and Google Apps. Nicolas is also the lead engineer for the OAuth 2.0 Playground.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Max Heinritz, Associate Product Magician (Manager)

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

Today we unveiled "Find Your Way To Oz", a new Chrome Experiment inspired by the upcoming feature film Oz The Great and Powerful. Developed by UNIT9, this experiment brings together Disney’s unique storytelling tradition and the power of the web platform, allowing users to interact with the web in a completely new way.



The desktop version of "Find Your Way To Oz" uses many of the open web’s more advanced features:

• Immersive Graphics: The experiment uses WebGL for the main 3D environment, CSS3 features such as CSS Transitions for various visual embellishments, and GLSL shaders for the tornado’s ominous look and feel.


• Rich Audio: As the user explores the experiment, the 3D sound dynamically adapts thanks to the Web Audio API. The same API powers the experiment’s music composing section.


• Camera-based interactions: Through WebRTC’s getUserMedia API, users can become circus characters or record their own mini-movies.

The experiment’s mobile web version also uses cutting-edge web technologies. These include graphics features such as accelerated 3D transforms and sprite sheets as well as mobile hardware features like camera, multi-touch, gyroscope and accelerometer. Together they create an experience that can normally only be found in native apps.

To learn more about how this experiment was built, read our technical case study and join us for a Google Developers Live event on February 11th at 11 a.m. GMT where we’ll be talking to the team behind the project. Alternatively, use Chrome’s developer tools to see how the experiment works on your own, perhaps finding in the process your own path to the yellow brick road.


Max Heinritz is an Associate Product Manager on the Chrome Web Platform team. He's helping the web reach its potential to become the universal application platform. On the weekends you can find him exploring the Northern California wilderness.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs Office

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

We are thrilled to announce the 20 grand prize winners of Google Code-in 2012, a contest designed to introduce teenagers to the world of open source software development. Congratulations to all 334 students from 36 countries who participated in the contest, completing 1,925 tasks.

Each of the 10 open source mentoring organizations that worked with the students during the contest chose 2 students to be their organization’s grand prize winners based on the students’ comprehensive body of work during the seven week contest period.

Students are listed alphabetically (by first name) with their country and the organization that they worked with during Google Code-in 2012.

Agustín Zubiaga, Uruguay - Sugar Labs
Akshay S Kashyap, India - BRL-CAD
Aleksandar Ivanov, Bulgaria - RTEMS
Aneesh Dogra, India - Sugar Labs
Aviral Dasgupta, India - Sahana Software Foundation
Cezar El-Nazli, Romania - BRL-CAD
Conor Flynn, Ireland - Apertium
Drew Gottlieb, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Illya Kovalevskyy, Ukraine - KDE
Liezl Puzon, United States - Sahana Software Foundation
Mathew Kallada, Canada - RTEMS
Matthew Bauer, United States - The NetBSD Project
Mingzhe Wang, China - The NetBSD Project
Mohammed Nafees, India - KDE
Nicolás Satragno, Argentina - The Fedora Project
Przemysław Buczkowski, Poland - Haiku
Qasim Iqbal, Canada - Apertium
Samuel Kim, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Vladimir Angelov, Bulgaria - Haiku
Ze Yue Wu, Australia - The Fedora Project

Congratulations Google Code-in 2012 Grand Prize Winners!

These 20 pre-university students completed an impressive 576 tasks ranging from annotating face recognition for disaster response efforts to creating videos and screencasts to teach others about the organization’s software to writing scripts to develop MySQL tables. In late April, the grand prize winners will be flown to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA along with a parent or legal guardian for a four night visit.  During the trip the students will have the opportunity to participate in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers, have a full day of fun exploring San Francisco, and make new friends also interested in open source development.

A couple of quotes from the mentors that worked with this year’s Google Code-in students:

'They're surprisingly motivated, excited to contribute, genuinely interested, and productive to boot. Initial estimates indicate we may get years worth of work done and one student has already earned commit status, two others are getting close.'  -- Sean Morrison, BRL-CAD Organization Administrator and Mentor, two weeks after the start of the contest 

‘One of my favorite quotes, one you probably have seen before, from a student: "this is my first patch to an open source project"’ -- Walter Bender, Sugar Labs Organization Administrator and Mentor

And that is what this contest is all about, introducing students to the many ways that they can contribute to open source software development. An enormous thank you to all of the students, IT teachers, parents, mentors and organization administrators who made the Google Code-in 2012 a success!

Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Ashleigh Rentz, Editor Emerita

By Ashleigh Rentz, Google Developers Blog Editor Emerita

It’s hard to overlook: flu season is upon us with a vengeance this winter, particularly in the United States and Japan. Once again, Google.org’s Flu Trends tabulates the numbers that paint the map deep red and puts the historical data at your fingertips to prove that yes, this is worse than you remember it being last year. Take care of your health, drink lots of fluids, and consider taking a holiday to the southern hemisphere for some sweet summer days if you aren’t sick... The Australian waterfront is a beautiful shade of light green on the flu map.

If Australia isn’t far enough away from the germs and viruses (does anyone still use “virii” for the plural?), how about an excursion into near-earth orbit or beyond? Although NASA isn’t doing any human spaceflights at present, the agency is planning for the future by taking a second look at the past. Engineers of a new generation are test-firing a 40 year old engine built for the Saturn V rockets used during the Apollo missions. It’s part of the early planning for future heavy-lift rockets.

We hope you’re feeling well, but if you’re sick at home this weekend, spend some time recuperating in front of the TV with the Computer History Museum channel on YouTube. Our down-the-street neighbours often invite Silicon Valley luminaries to speak about their work and their lives. Among them, our own Eric Schmidt was there last November to tell a few stories of Google’s early days and give some insight into where the web is taking us. Get well soon!

Each week, Fridaygram nurses you back to health with a dose of data and fun for your weekend enjoyment. Fridaygram is not a doctor, please consult actual medical professionals if you are ill. Ashleigh is our blog’s Editor Emerita and fills in when Scott takes some well-deserved time off. (No, he’s not out sick today.)

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

To build the future of technology, we need people from every community to join in, which is why we have programs like Women Techmakers. To help get more girls interested in technology careers, Women Techmakers and the Computer Science on Air programs have started a series of hangouts with women engineers at Google.



We think it’s cool and incredibly powerful for kids who are interested in a career in tech to get to look at a video of professionals and say "Hey, that looks like me!".

Once you start working in science and technology, you never know where it will lead you, from the far reaches of the galaxy to the bare ground. For example, a new study demonstrates, incredibly, that some insects use the stars for navigation. As a part of this study, scientists placed dung beetles in a darkened planetarium, and found the creatures were no longer able to move in a steady, straight line. But when the researchers turned on the Milky Way display in the planetarium, the beetles could crawl along in direct paths. Cosmic.

As you ponder the meaning of insects using astral navigation this weekend, hook the laptop up to your TV and tune in to Google Developers Live on Sunday evening. Lay back on the sofa and check out live demos from the LA Video Hackathon to see what other developers are doing with YouTube and Google TV, and join in by posting comments tagged with #ythackla. (Of course, if you already have Google TV, you won’t need to get up from the sofa to turn off a screensaver.)


We publish a Fridaygram each week with all sorts of cool, fun, and downright nerdy stuff. We like our Fridaygrams to range wide, like all the way from Women Techmakers to starry-eyed beetles.

Fridaygrammy hat tips to Ashleigh Rentz and Phoebe Peronto for their contributions to today’s post.

By Ryan Boyd, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform

The Google Cloud Platform team has joined up with the folks at Twilio, Splunk, ESPN, Cloudant, and others to host a Sports Hack Day at the HUB in Seattle during Super Bowl weekend. Even better, we’ve extended the length of a "day" to 48 hours! That’s 48 hours for hacking on fun sports data and using APIs and technologies like Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, and Google Compute Engine for sports-themed projects.

Join us February 1st through 3rd for great hacking, food, prizes, fun, and a group viewing of the game. We’ll be hosting a workshop on the Google Cloud Platform and will also have people around the event to help out as you build your awesome apps!

You can find more info on sportshackday.com.


Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on making developers successful building on the Google Cloud Platform. He previously worked on the Google Apps ISV ecosystem, and recently published his first book "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0" with O'Reilly.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor