Sunday, May 22, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Rededicating the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial

Posted: 22 May 2011 05:05 AM PDT

Google News Blog: Rededicating the Newseum's Journalists Memorial

Posted by Sean Carlson, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Outside 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the front pages of newspapers from all 50 U.S. states mark the entrance to the Newseum. Inside the lobby, a gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs confronts visitors with moments of triumph and tragedy captured on camera. The museum's corridors display exhibit after exhibit highlighting the role of journalism and journalists throughout history.

One of the Newseum's most moving tributes is its Journalists Memorial, a wall of glass paneling imprinted with the names of more than 2,000 people around the world who have died while reporting the news. Nearby kiosks narrate their stories, an online database enables anybody with Internet access to learn more, and our new YouTube channel further remembers these fallen journalists through video.

Earlier this week, Krishna Bharat, founder and head of Google News, spoke at the memorial's annual rededication ceremony. As you can watch in the video below, he began by reflecting on what motivated those being honored "to walk a path that was not paved with gold, but with danger."

Over the course of his address, Krishna discussed the importance of a free press to society and of high-quality content to the web, observed the rising number of online journalists and bloggers coming under attack, and recounted incidents reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists. On a personal level, he also shared his memories as a boy in India and the influence of his grandfather in inspiring his appreciation for news.

"The journalists we remember and honor today chose lives that were full of meaning and purpose," he concluded. "Let their stories not be forgotten. Let us repeat them. Let us re-tweet them. And let us print them on our pages so the world knows that silencing a journalist simply does not pay."

To their families, friends, and colleagues, we extend our sympathy and respect.

URL: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/rededicating-newseums-journalists.html

[G] Google Summer of Code: Where are the students?

Posted: 21 May 2011 02:57 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Google Summer of Code: Where are the students?

Google Summer of Code is truly a global program. For this year's program we received 5,651 applications from 3,731 students in 97 countries.

We accepted 1,115 students from 68 countries. The ten countries with the highest number of accepted students are represented in the pie chart below.



This year we are excited to have students from 6 countries that haven't previously been represented in Google Summer of Code: Cambodia, Georgia, Guatemala, Kyrgyz Republic, Rwanda and Uruguay.

Students are enrolled in 698 universities from around the globe.

Currently the students are in the community bonding period where they familiarize themselves with their projects, mentors and communities, before beginning the coding period on Monday, May 23rd.

Please visit our program site and timeline for more information.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-summer-of-code-where-are.html

[G] Camaraderie and Paella for Google Summer of Code Mentors

Posted: 21 May 2011 02:57 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Camaraderie and Paella for Google Summer of Code Mentors

Early last week, 41 mentors for this year's Google Summer of Code program gathered at a restaurant in downtown San Francisco for a meet-and-greet dinner. As this is still the community bonding period for this year's accepted Google Summer of Code students, we thought it would be fun for the mentors to have a chance to bond with each other prior to the start of student coding on Monday, May 23rd.



The dinner brought together both new and experienced mentors from 29 of this year's organizations to chat about their expectations for the program and their students. The casual meetup was also an opportunity for the mentors to share their questions and concerns with one another and to share advice on successfully fulfilling their roles as mentors.

Many mentors were in town for Google I/O, Google's largest annual developer conference, that took place Tuesday and Wednesday, just a few blocks from the restaurant. A casual dinner of paella and other goodies was an entertaining way to meet others from all around the world who are actively involved in the open source community.

For more information on the Google Summer of Code program visit our homepage.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/05/camaraderie-and-paella-for-google.html

[G] Google at ACL 2011

Posted: 21 May 2011 12:58 PM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Google at ACL 2011

Posted by Ryan McDonald and Fernando Pereira, Research Team

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is one of the premier conferences for language and text technologies. Many employees at Google have strong roots in the community of researchers that attend this meeting, including many of our researchers working on machine translation and speech.

At this years conference, Google is particularly well represented. The General Chair is Dekang Lin and a few Googlers are serving as technical Area Chairs (in addition to the plethora of Googlers that reviewed papers for the conference). Google is also a Platinum Sponsor of ACL this year.

Research advances at Google can be seen throughout the conference's technical content. Below is a complete list of Googler-authored or co-authored papers in the main conference. We want to give special emphasis to this year's best paper award, given to "Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections" by CMU graduate student and Google intern Dipanjan Das and his internship advisor Slav Petrov. ACL is an extremely selective conference and this award speaks volumes to the importance of syntactic analysis and using bilingual corpora to project syntactic resources from resource rich languages (like English) to other languages. Congratulations Dipanjan and Slav!

Googlers are also involved in two of this year's tutorials. Marius Pasca will present "Web Search Queries as a Corpus" and Kuzman Ganchev and his colleagues will teach about "Rich Prior Knowledge in Learning for Natural Language Processing". Finally, Katja Filippova and her colleagues are running a workshop on "Monolingual Text-to-Text Generation".

ACL will take place this year in Portland from June 19th to June 24th.

Papers by Googlers (a * indicates a paper that will be linked to after the conference):

Ranking Class Labels Using Query Sessions*
Marius Pasca

Fine-Grained Class Label Markup of Search Queries*
Joseph Reisinger and Marius Pasca

Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections
Dipanjan Das and Slav Petrov

Large-Scale Cross-Document Coreference Using Distributed Inference and Hierarchical Models
Sameer Singh, Amarnag Subramanya, Fernando Pereira and Andrew McCallum

Piggyback: Using Search Engines for Robust Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition
Stefan Rüd, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Jens Müller and Hinrich Schütze

Beam-Width Prediction for Efficient Context-Free Parsing
Nathan Bodenstab, Aaron Dunlop, Keith Hall and Brian Roark

Language-independent compound splitting with morphological operations
Klaus Macherey, Andrew Dai, David Talbot, Ashok Popat and Franz Och

Model-Based Aligner Combination Using Dual Decomposition
John DeNero and Klaus Macherey

Binarized Forest to String Translation
Hao Zhang, Licheng Fang, Peng Xu and Xiaoyun Wu

Semi-supervised Latent Variable Models for Fine-grained Sentiment Analysis
Oscar Tackstrom and Ryan McDonald
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-at-acl-2011.html
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