Posted by Erica Hanson, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs
Recently young developers in Saudi Arabia from Google Developer Student Clubs, a program of university based community groups for students interested in Google technologies, came together to help local small businesses. As more companies across the globe rely on online sales, these students noticed that many of their favorite local stores did not have a presence on the web.
So to help these local shops compete, these up-and-coming developers went into the community and began running workshops to teach local store owners the basics of building a website. Inspired by Google’s fundamentals of digital marketing course, these learning sessions focused on giving small business owners basic front-end skills, while introducing them to easy to use coding tools.
Image of Chrome Devtools
The first goal of these student-run workshops was to teach local store owners the basics of building web interfaces. In particular, they focused on websites that made it easy for customers to make purchases. To do this, the students first taught store owners the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS code. Then, they showed them how to deploy Chrome DevTools, a collection of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser that allows programmers to inspect and edit HTML, CSS, and JS code to optimize user experience.
Next, the students challenged participants to put their knowledge to use by creating demos of their businesses' new websites. The young developers again used Chrome DevTools to highlight the best practices for testing the demo sites on different devices and screen sizes.
Image of demo created and maintained in workshop.
With the basics of HTML, CSS, JS code, and Chrome DevTools covered, the students also wanted to give the store owners tools to help maintain their new websites. To do this, they introduced the small businesses to three toolkits:
With these basic coding skills, access to intuitive toolkits, and completed website demos, the local businesses owners now had everything they needed to launch their sites to the public - all thanks to a few dedicated students.
All over the world, students are coming together to learn programming and make a difference in their community as members of local Google Developer Student Clubs. Learn more on how to get involved in projects like this one, here.
Posted by Joe Hicks, Yun Peng, Olek Wojnar
Olek Wojnar, Debian Developer, reached out to the Bazel team about packaging and distributing Bazel on Debian (and other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) in service of delivering Tensorflow Machine Learning functionality for COVID-19 researchers:
“I'm working with the Debian Med team right now to get some much-needed software packaged and available for users in the medical community to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. At least one of the packages we desperately need requires Bazel to build. Clearly this is an unusual and very critical situation. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that lives may literally depend on us getting better tools to the medical professionals out there, and quickly. The entire international community would be extraordinarily grateful if @google and the @bazelbuild team could prioritize helping with this!”
The Bazel team jumped in to help Olek and the COVID-19 research community. Yun Peng, Software Engineer at Google with Olek Wojnar led the team of Bazel and Debian volunteers to move the project forward. The joint effort between Debian and Google has produced some great results, including packaging the Bazel bootstrap variant in 6 months time (Debian 11 -- released in Late 2021; Ubuntu 21.04 -- 22 April 2021). Bazel is now available as an easy to install package distributed on Debian and Ubuntu. The extended Google team continues to work with Debian towards the next step of packaging and distributing Tensorflow on Debian and other Linux distributions.
In addition to Yun and Olek, other contributors to this project include Michael R. Crusoe of Debian, Joe Hicks, John Field, Philipp Wollermann, and Tobias Werth of Google.
Posted by Kübra Zengin, GDG North America Regional Lead
Image of participants in a recent Elevate workshop.
The North America Developer Ecosystem team recently hosted Elevate for Google Developer Groups organizers and Women Techmakers Ambassadors in US & Canada. The three-month professional development program met every Wednesday via Google Meet to help tech professionals upskill themselves with workshops on leadership, communication, thinking, and teamwork.
The first cohort of the seminar-style program recently came to a close, with 40+ Google Developer Groups organizers and Women Techmakers Ambassadors participating. Additionally, 18 guest speakers - 89% of whom were underrepresented genders - hosted specialized learning sessions over three months of events.
Elevate is just one example of the specialized applied skills training available to the Google Developer Groups community. As we look ahead to offering Elevate again in 2021, we wanted to share with you some of the key takeaways from the first installment of the program.
What the graduates had to say
From landing new roles at companies like Twitter and Accenture, to negotiating salary raises, the 40 graduates of Elevate have seen many successes. Here’s what a few of them had to say:
Whether it’s finding new jobs or moving to new countries, Elevate’s graduates have used their new skills to guide their careers towards their passions. Check out a few of the program’s key lessons below:
Bringing your best self to the table
One major focus of the program was to help community leaders develop their own professional identity and confidence by learning communication techniques that would help them stand out and define themselves in the workplace.
Entire learning sessions were dedicated to specific value-adding topics, including:
Along with other sessions on growth mindsets, problem solving, and more, attendees gained a deeper understanding of the best ways to present themselves, their ideas, and their worth in a professional setting - an essential ability that many feel has already helped them navigate job markets with more precision.
A team that feels valued brings value
The advice above, offered by a guest speaker during a teambuilding session, was one of the quotes that resonated with participants the most during the program. The emphasis on how coworkers think of each other and the best ways to build a culture of ownership over a team’s wins and losses embodies the key learnings central to Elevate’s mission.
The program further emphasized this message with learning sessions on:
With these trainings, paired with others on growth mindsets and decision making, Elevate’s participants were able to start analyzing the effectiveness of different work environments on productivity. Through breakout sessions, they quickly realized that the more secure and supported an employee feels, the more willing they are to go the extra mile for their team. Equipped with this new knowledge base, many participants have already started bringing these key takeaways to their own workplaces in an effort to build more inclusive and productive cultures.
Whether it’s finding a new role or improving your applied skills, we can’t wait to see how Google Developer programs can help members achieve their professional goals.
For similar opportunities, find out how to join a Google Developer Group near you, here. And register for upcoming applied skills trainings on the Elevate website, here.
Created by the United Nations in 2015 to be achieved by 2030, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by all 193 United Nations Member States aim to end poverty, ensure prosperity, and protect the planet.
Last year brought many challenges, but it also brought a greater spirit around helping each other and giving back to our communities. With that in mind, we invite students around the world to join the Google Developer Student Clubs 2021 Solution Challenge!
If you’re new to the Solution Challenge, it is an annual competition that invites university students to develop solutions for real world problems using one or more Google products or platforms.
This year, see how you can use Android, TensorFlow, Google Cloud, Flutter, or any of your favorite Google technologies to promote employment for all, economic growth, and climate action, by building a solution for one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Participants will receive specialized prizes at different stages:
There are four main steps to joining the Solution Challenge and getting started on your project:
Google will provide Solution Challenge participants with various resources to help students build strong projects for their contest submission.
Once all the projects are submitted after the March 31st deadline, judges will evaluate and score each submission from around the world using the criteria listed on the website. From there, winning solutions will be announced in three rounds.
Round 1 (May): The Top 50 teams will be announced.
Round 2 (July): After the top 50 teams submit their new and improved solutions, 10 finalists will be announced.
Round 3 (August): In the finale, the top 3 grand prize winners will be announced live on YouTube during the 2021 Solution Challenge Demo Day.
With a passion for building a better world, savvy coding skills, and a little help from Google technology, we can’t wait to see the solutions students create.
Learn more and sign up for the 2021 Solution Challenge, here.
Posted by Jennifer Kohl, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Groups
Irem presenting at a Google Developer Group event
We recently caught up with Irem Komurcu, a TensorFlow developer and researcher at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. Irem has been a long-serving member of Google Developer Groups (GDG) Düzce and also serves as a Women Techmakers (WTM) ambassador. Her work with TensorFlow has received several accolades, including being named a Hamdi Ulukaya Girişimi fellow. As one one of twenty-four young entrepreneurs selected, she was flown to New York City last year to learn more about business and receive professional development.
With all this experience to share, we wanted you to hear how she approaches pursuing a career in tech, hones her TensorFlow skills with the GDG community, and thinks about how upcoming programmers can best position themselves for success. Check out the full interview below for more.
I first became interested in tech when I was in high school and went on to study computer engineering. At university, I had an eye-opening experience when I traveled from Turkey to the Google Developer Day event in India. It was here where I observed various code languages, products, and projects that were new to me.
In particular, I saw TensorFlow in action for the first time. Watching the powerful machine learning tool truly sparked my interest in deep learning and project development.
I have studied many different aspects of Tensorflow and ML. My first work was on voice recognition and deep learning. However, I am now working as a computer vision researcher conducting various segmentation, object detection, and classification processes with Tensorflow. In my free time, I write various articles about best practices and strategies to leverage TensorFlow in ML.
I kicked off my studies on deep learning on tensorflow.org. It’s a basic first step, but a powerful one. There were so many blogs, codes, examples, and tutorials for me to dive into. Both the Google Developer Group and TensorFlow communities also offered chances to bounce questions and ideas off other developers as I learned.
Between these technical resources and the person-to-person support, I was lucky to start working with the GDG community while also taking the first steps of my career. There were so many opportunities to meet people and grow all around.
I love being in a large community with technology-oriented people. GDG is a network of professionals who support each other, and that enables people to develop. I am continuously sharing my knowledge with other programmers as they simultaneously mentor me. The chance for us to collaborate together is truly fulfilling.
The number of women supported in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is low in Turkey. To address this, I partner with Women Techmakers (WTM) to give educational talks on TensorFlow and machine learning to women who want to learn how to code in my country. So many women are interested in ML, but just need a friendly, familiar face to help them get started. With WTM, I’ve already given over 30 talks to women in STEM.
Keep researching new things. Read everything you can get your eyes on. Technology has been developing rapidly, and it is necessary to make sure your mind can keep up with the pace. That’s why I recommend communities like GDG that help make sure you’re up to date on the newest trends and learnings.
Want to work with other developers like Irem? Then find the right Google Developer Developer Group for you, here.
Posted by Patricia Correa - Director, Global Developer Marketing
Editor's note: Last night, on the eve of the Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, a Black man, João Alberto Silveira Freitas, died after being beaten at a supermarket in Porto Alegre, in the south of the country. We would like to express our sentiments to the Black community in Brazil.
Today is Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, a country where over 55% of the population identifies as Black. To commemorate, we are showcasing local developers who create apps, games and websites. Watch this video to hear about their journeys, tips and passions.
Meet the founders & developers
Vitor Eleotério, Software Engineer at iFood, a popular food delivery app in Brazil. As much as he liked technology, his colleagues used to mock and discourage him. Vitor heard many times that he would be a great security man as he is tall and strong. People kept saying that IT was only for rich people. With his passion and hard work, he proved them all wrong. Now, he wants to motivate others to also follow their dreams.
Priscila Aparecida Ferreira Theodoro, Software Engineer at Centauro, a large sports goods retailer in Brazil. Her first contact with technology happened while working at an organization that teaches programming. At 38 years old, Priscila decided to completely change careers and learn how to code. She now teaches programming to women, mentors youths, and is involved in a podcast project for women developers.
Marcos Pablo, Co-founder & CTO at G4IT Solutions, a platform that helps companies to manage and automate the work schedules of off-site teams. It was his mother who encouraged him to enter the tech world when he was in high school. By the time he was 19 years old, he was already managing a small tech company.
Iago Silva Dos Santos, Co-founder & CEO of Trazfavela Delivery, a platform for deliveries to and from favelas. He wanted to help his community, including drivers, retailers and people who wanted easier access to goods. TrazFavela is one of the first companies to receive investment from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund in Brazil.
Tiago Santos, Founder & CEO of Husky, an app for Brazilian professionals to receive international payments. As a software developer working with international clients, Tiago had experienced first hand how difficult it was to get payments from abroad. With his friend Mauricio Carvalho he created the app so professionals can focus on their careers instead of wasting time with bureaucratic tasks.
Ronaldo Valentino da Cruz, Co-founder & CEO of Oktagon, a games studio that produces indie titles and games for clients. He learned how to program when he was 14 and started working with game development in 2002 at the Universidade Federal Tecnológica do Paraná. So far, the company has launched well-received mid-core titles and worked with publishers and clients all over the world.
Nohoa Arcanjo Allgayer, Co-founder & CMO of Creators.LLC, a network that connects creative talent with potential clients. For Nohoa, it was not an easy decision to quit her previous comfortable corporate job to set up this startup. Now she is proud of the risk she took, as it opened up a world of opportunity and endless learning. She took part in the Google for Startups Residency Program. Creators.LLC was one of the first startups to receive capital from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund in Brazil.
Samuel Matias, Software Engineer at iFood. He became a developer in 2015 and is very active in the Flutter community. He frequently shares his learnings through online articles and talks.
Aline Bezzoco, Founder & Developer of Ta tudo bem? - a suicide prevention app . She feels that the best thing about technology is being able to create solutions to help people. Her app aids those struggling with mental health problems to feel calmer, less anxious and ask for help.
Egio Arruda Junior, Co-founder & CEO of EasyCrédito, a platform that facilitates loans. The main focus is to help those who don’t even have bank accounts. Egio is passionate about innovation and is always looking to create something new. He took part in two Google for Startups programs - Residency and Accelerator.
Márcio Dos Santos, Co-founder & CTO at Facio, a platform that provides loans and financial education to employees in Brazil. Amongst his family and friends, there was no one who had completed a higher education degree. He decided to study Computer Science because he was a video game fan. At University, a professor selected him to do an internship in the United States. Currently based in Seattle, USA, Márcio likes to be approached for advice by those at the beginning of their careers.
Danielle Monteiro, Data Engineer & Founder of Dani.Academy, an educational platform with free and paid courses about data, architecture, NoSQL and infrastructure. She was the first member of her family to start and finish college. She has now won many awards in and outside Brazil, and is a Google for Startups Mentor. Dani is passionate about giving back to society by sharing her knowledge through her blog, lectures, courses and articles.
---
These are just some of the stories that show that the tech world is not for a few but for everyone. Together we can create change and see more Black people finding opportunities in tech. Celebrate these stories by sharing the video on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook & LinkedIn.
Posted by Gabriel Rubinsky, Senior Product Manager
Today, we’re excited to announce the Device Access Console is available.
The Device Access program lets individuals and qualified partners securely access and control Nest products with their apps and solutions.
At the heart of the Device Access program is the Smart Device Management API. Since we announced the program, Alarm.com, Control4, DISH, OhmConnect, NRG Energy, and Vivint Smart Home have successfully completed the Early Access Program (EAP) with Nest thermostat, camera, or doorbell traits. In the coming months, we expect additional devices to be supported and more smart home partners to launch their new integrations as well.
Enhanced privacy and security
The Device Access program is built on a foundation of privacy and security. The program requires partner submission of qualified use cases and completion of a security assessment before being allowed to utilize the Smart Device Management API for commercial use. The program process gives our users the confidence that commercial partners offering integrated Nest solutions have data protections and safeguards in place that meet our privacy and security standards.
Nest device access and control
The Device Access program currently allows qualified partners to integrate directly with Nest devices, enable control of thermostats, access and view camera feeds, and receive doorbell notifications with images. All qualified partner solutions and services will require end-user consent before being able to access, control, and manage Nest devices as part of their service offerings, either through a partner client app or service platform. Ultimately, this gives users more choice in how to control their home and their own generated data.
If you’re a developer or a Nest user interested in the Device Access program or access to the sandbox development environment,* you can find more information on our Device Access site.
The Device Access program allows trusted partners to offer access, management, and control of Nest devices within the partner’s app, solution, and ecosystem. It allows developers to test all API traits in the sandbox environment, before moving forward with commercial integration. Learn more
For individual smart home developer enthusiasts, you can register to access the sandbox development environment, allowing you to directly control your own Nest devices through your private integrations and automations. Learn more
We’re doing the work to make Nest devices more secure and protect user privacy long into the future. This means expanding privacy and data security programs, and delivering flexibility for our customers to use thousands of products from partners to create a connected, helpful home.
Posted by The Coral Team
Moving into the fall, the Coral platform continues to grow with the release of the M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU. Its first application is in Google’s Series One room kits where it helps to remove interruptions and makes the audio clearer for better video meetings. To help even more folks build products with Coral intelligence, we’re dropping the prices on several of our products. And for those folks that are looking to level up their at home video production, we’re sharing a demo of a pose based AI director to make multi-camera video easier to make.
Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU
The newest addition to our product family brings two Edge TPU co-processors to systems in an M.2 E-key form factor. While the design requires a dual bus PCIe M.2 slot, it brings enhanced ML performance (8 TOPS) to tasks such as running two models in parallel or pipelining one large model across both Edge TPUs.
The ability to scale across multiple edge accelerators isn’t limited to only two Edge TPUs. As edge computing expands to local data centers, cell towers, and gateways, multi-Edge TPU configurations will be required to help process increasingly sophisticated ML models. Coral allows the use of a single toolchain to create models for one or more Edge TPUs that can address many different future configurations.
A great example of how the Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU is being used is in the Series One meeting room kits for Google Meet.
The new Series One room kits for Google Meet run smarter with Coral intelligence
Google’s new Series One room kits use our Coral M.2 Accelerator with Dual Edge TPU to bring enhanced audio clarity to video meetings. TrueVoice®, a multi-channel noise cancellation technology, minimizes distractions to ensure every voice is heard with up to 44 channels of echo and noise cancellation, making distracting sounds like snacking or typing on a keyboard a concern of the past.
Enabling the clearest possible communication in challenging environments was the target for the Google Meet hardware team. The consideration of what makes a challenging environment was not limited to unusually noisy environments, such as lunchrooms doubling as conference rooms. Any conference room can present challenging acoustics that make it difficult for all participants to be heard.
The secret to clarity without expensive and cumbersome equipment is to use virtual audio channels and AI driven sound isolation. Read more about how Coral was used to enhance and future-proof the innovative design.
Expanding the AI edge
Earlier this year, we reduced the prices of our prototyping devices and sensors. We are excited to share further price drops on more of our products. Our System-on-Module is now available for $99.99, and our Mini PCIe Accelerator, M.2 Accelerator A+E Key, and M.2 Accelerator B+M key are now available at $24.99. We hope this lower price will make our edge AI more accessible to more creative minds around the world. Later, this month our SoM offering will also expand to include 2 and 4GB RAM options.
Multi-cam with AI
As we expand our platform and product family, we continue to keep new edge AI use cases in mind. We are continually inspired by our developer community’s experimentation and implementations. When recently faced with the challenges of multicam video production from home, Markku Lepistö, Solutions Architect at Google Cloud, created this real-time pose-based multicam tool he so aptly dubbed, AI Director.
We love seeing such unique implementations of on-device ML and invite you to share your own projects and feedback at coral-support@google.com.
For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, visit the Coral partnerships page. Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform.
Posted by the Coral Team
Summer has arrived along with a number of Coral updates. We're happy to announce a new partnership with balena that helps customers build, manage, and deploy IoT applications at scale on Coral devices. In addition, we've released a series of updates to expand platform compatibility, make development easier, and improve the ML capabilities of our devices.
First up, our Edge TPU runtime is now open-source and available on GitHub, including scripts and instructions for building the library for Linux and Windows. Customers running a platform that is not officially supported by Coral, including ARMv7 and RISC-V can now compile the Edge TPU runtime themselves and start experimenting. An open source runtime is easier to integrate into your customized build pipeline, enabling support for creating Yocto-based images as well as other distributions.
Coral customers can now also use the Mini PCIe and M.2 accelerators on the Microsoft Windows platform. New Windows drivers for these products complement the previously released Windows drivers for the USB accelerator and make it possible to start prototyping with the Coral USB Accelerator on Windows and then to move into production with our Mini PCIe and M.2 products.
We’ve also made a number of new updates to our ML tools:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install edgetpu
We are excited to share that the Balena fleet management platform now supports Coral products!
Companies running a fleet of ML-enabled devices on the edge need to keep their systems up-to-date with the latest security patches in order to protect data, model IP and hardware from being compromised. Additionally, ML applications benefit from being consistently retrained to recognize new use cases with maximum accuracy. Coral + balena together, bring simplicity and ease to the provisioning, deployment, updating, and monitoring of your ML project at the edge, moving early prototyping seamlessly towards production environments with many thousands of devices.
Read more about all the benefits of Coral devices combined with balena container technology or get started deploying container images to your Coral fleet with this demo project.
Mendel Linux (5.0 release Eagle) is now available for the Coral Dev Board and SoM and includes a more stable package repository that provides a smoother updating experience. It also brings compatibility improvements and a new version of the GPU driver.
Last but not least, we’ve recently released BodyPix, a Google person-segmentation model that was previously only available for TensorFlow.JS, as a Coral model. This enables real-time privacy preserving understanding of where people (and body parts) are on a camera frame. We first demoed this at CES 2020 and it was one of our most popular demos. Using BodyPix we can remove people from the frame, display only their outline, and aggregate over time to see heat maps of population flow.
Here are two possible applications of BodyPix: Body-part segmentation and anonymous population flow. Both are running on the Dev Board.
We’re excited to add BodyPix to the portfolio of projects the community is using to extend our models far beyond our demos—including tackling today’s biggest challenges. For example, Neuralet has taken our MobileNet V2 SSD Detection model and used it to implement Smart Social Distancing. Using the bounding box of person detection, they can compute a region for safe distancing and let a user know if social distance isn’t being maintained. The best part is this is done without any sort of facial recognition or tracking, with Coral we can accomplish this in real-time in a privacy preserving manner.
We can’t wait to see more projects that the community can make with BodyPix. Beyond anonymous population flow there’s endless possibilities with background and body part manipulation. Let us know what you come up with at our community channels, including GitHub and StackOverflow.
We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we continue to evolve our platform. For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, including balena, visit the Coral partnerships page. Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform and share your feedback at coral-support@google.com.
Posted by Billy Rutledge, Director of the Coral team
Recently, we’ve seen communities respond to the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic by using technology in new ways to effect positive change. It’s increasingly important that our systems are able to adapt to new contexts, handle disruptions, and remain efficient.
At Coral, we believe intelligence at the edge is a key ingredient towards building a more resilient future. By making the latest machine learning tools easy-to-use and accessible, innovators can collaborate to create solutions that are most needed in their communities. Developers are already using Coral to build solutions that can understand and react in real-time, while maintaining privacy for everyone present.
As mandatory isolation measures begin to relax, compliance with safe social distancing protocol has become a topic of primary concern for experts across the globe. Businesses and individuals have been stepping up to find ways to use technology to help reduce the risk and spread. Many efforts are employing the benefits of edge AI—here are a few early stage examples that have inspired us.
In Belgium, engineers at Edgise recently used Coral to develop an occupancy monitor to aid businesses in managing capacity. With the privacy preserving properties of edge AI, businesses can anonymously count how many customers enter and exit a space, signaling when the area is too full.
A research group at the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology in India are using Coral to develop a wearable device to serve as a COVID-19 cough counter and health monitor, allowing medical professionals to better care for low risk patients in an outpatient capacity. Coral's Edge TPU enables biometric data to be processed efficiently, without draining the limited power resources available in wearable devices.
All across the US, hospitals are seeking solutions to ensure adherence to hygiene policy amongst hospital staff. In one example, a device incorporates the compact, affordable and offline benefits of the Coral modules to aid in handwashing practices at numerous stations throughout a facility.
And around the world, members of the PyImageSearch community are exploring how to train a COVID-19: Face Mask Detector model using TensorFlow that can be used to identify whether people are wearing a mask. Open source frameworks can empower anyone to develop solutions, and with Coral components we can help bring those benefits to everyone.
In an effort to rally greater community involvement, Coral has joined The United Nations Development Programme and Hackster.io, as a sponsor of the COVID-19 Detect and Protect Challenge. The initiative calls on developers to build affordable and reproducible solutions that support response efforts in developing countries. All ideas are welcome—whether they use ML or not—and we encourage you to participate.
To make edge ML capabilities even easier to integrate, we’re also announcing a price reduction for the Coral products widely used for experimentation and prototyping. Our Dev Board will now be offered at $129.99, the USB Accelerator at $59.99, the Camera Module at $19.99, and the Enviro Board at $14.99. Additionally, we are introducing the USB Accelerator into 10 new markets: Ghana, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Israel, and Vietnam. For more details, visit Coral.ai/products.
We’re excited to see the solutions developers will bring forward with Coral. And as always, please keep sending us feedback at coral-support@google.com.
Last month, we announced that Coral graduated out of beta, into a wider, global release. Today, we're announcing the next version of Mendel Linux (4.0 release Day) for the Coral Dev Board and SoM, as well as a number of other exciting updates.
Coral is already delivering impact across industries, and several of our partners are including Coral in products that require fast ML inferencing at the edge.
In healthcare, Care.ai is using Coral to build a device that enables hospitals and care centers to respond quickly to falls, prevent bed sores, improve patient care, and reduce costs. Virgo SVS is also using Coral as the basis of a polyp detection system that helps doctors improve the accuracy of endoscopies.
In a very different use case, Olea Edge employs Coral to help municipal water utilities accurately measure the amount of water used by their commercial customers. Their Meter Health Analytics solution uses local AI to reduce waste and predict equipment failure in industrial water meters.
Nexcom is using Coral to build gateways with local AI and provide a platform for next-gen, AI-enabled IoT applications. By moving AI processing to the gateway, existing sensor networks can stay in service without the need to add AI processing to each node.
Coral’s Dev Board is designed as an integrated prototyping solution for new product development. Under the heatsink is the detachable Coral SoM, which combines Google’s Edge TPU with the NXP IMX8M SoC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, memory, and storage. We’re happy to announce that you can now purchase the Coral SoM standalone. We’ve also created a baseboard developer guide to help integrate it into your own production design.
Our Coral USB Accelerator allows users with existing system designs to add local AI inferencing via USB 2/3. For production workloads, we now offer three new Accelerators that feature the Edge TPU and connect via PCIe interfaces: Mini PCIe, M.2 A+E key, and M.2 B+M key. You can easily integrate these Accelerators into new products or upgrade existing devices that have an available PCIe slot.
The new Coral products are available globally and for sale at Mouser; for large volume sales, contact our sales team. By the end of 2019, we'll continue to expand our distribution of the Coral Dev Board and SoM into new markets including: Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Ghana and the Philippines.
We’ve also revamped the Coral site with better organization for our docs and tools, a set of success stories, and industry focused pages. All of it can be found at a new, easier to remember URL Coral.ai.
To help you get the most out of the hardware, we’re also publishing a new set of examples. The included models and code can provide solutions to the most common on-device ML problems, such as image classification, object detection, pose estimation, and keyword spotting.
For those looking for a more in-depth application—and a way to solve the eternal problem of squirrels plundering your bird feeder—the Smart Bird Feeder project shows you how to perform classification with a custom dataset on the Coral Dev board.
Finally, we’ll soon release a new version of the Mendel OS that updates the system to Debian Buster, and we're hard at work on more improvements to the Edge TPU compiler and runtime that will improve the model development workflow.
The official launch of Coral is, of course, just the beginning, and we’ll continue to evolve the platform. Please keep sending us feedback at coral-support@google.com.
Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team
Coral’s had a busy summer working with customers, expanding distribution, and building new features — and of course taking some time for R&R.; We’re excited to share updates, early work, and new models for our platform for local AI with you.
The compiler has been updated to version 2.0, adding support for models built using post-training quantization—only when using full integer quantization (previously, we required quantization-aware training)—and fixing a few bugs. As the Tensorflow team mentions in their Medium post “post-training integer quantization enables users to take an already-trained floating-point model and fully quantize it to only use 8-bit signed integers (i.e. `int8`).” In addition to reducing the model size, models that are quantized with this method can now be accelerated by the Edge TPU found in Coral products.
We've also updated the Edge TPU Python library to version 2.11.1 to include new APIs for transfer learning on Coral products. The new on-device back propagation API allows you to perform transfer learning on the last layer of an image classification model. The last layer of a model is removed before compilation and implemented on-device to run on the CPU. It allows for near-real time transfer learning and doesn’t require you to recompile the model. Our previously released imprinting API, has been updated to allow you to quickly retrain existing classes or add new ones while leaving other classes alone. You can now even keep the classes from the pre-trained base model. Learn more about both options for on-device transfer learning.
Until now, accelerating your model with the Edge TPU required that you write code using either our Edge TPU Python API or in C++. But now you can accelerate your model on the Edge TPU when using the TensorFlow Lite interpreter API, because we've released a TensorFlow Lite delegate for the Edge TPU. The TensorFlow Lite Delegate API is an experimental feature in TensorFlow Lite that allows for the TensorFlow Lite interpreter to delegate part or all of graph execution to another executor—in this case, the other executor is the Edge TPU. Learn more about the TensorFlow Lite delegate for Edge TPU.
Coral has also been working with Edge TPU and AutoML teams to release EfficientNet-EdgeTPU: a family of image classification models customized to run efficiently on the Edge TPU. The models are based upon the EfficientNet architecture to achieve the image classification accuracy of a server-side model in a compact size that's optimized for low latency on the Edge TPU. You can read more about the models’ development and performance on the Google AI Blog, and download trained and compiled versions on the Coral Models page.
And, as summer comes to an end we also want to share that Arrow offers a student teacher discount for those looking to experiment with the boards in class or the lab this year.
We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at coral-support@google.com.
Posted by Erica Hanson, Google Developer Relations
This spring, Google and Developer Student Clubs are looking for new passionate student leaders from universities across the globe!
Developer Student Clubs is a program with Google Developers. Through in-person meetups, university students are empowered to learn together and use technology to solve real life problems with local businesses and start-ups.
Less than two years ago, DSC launched in parts of Asia and Africa where 90,000+ students have been trained on Google technologies; 500+ solutions built for 200+ local startups and organizations and 170+ clubs participated in our first Solution Challenge!
Bridging the gap between theory and practical application, Google aims to provide student developers with the resources, opportunities and the experience necessary to be more industry ready.
You may be wondering what the benefit of being a Developer Student Club Lead is? Well, here are a few reasons:
Apply to be a Developer Student Club Lead at g.co/dev/dsc.
Deadline to submit applications has been extended to June 15th.
Posted by the Flutter and Chrome OS teams
Chrome OS is the fast, simple, and secure operating system that powers Chromebooks, including the Google Pixelbook and millions of devices used by consumers and students every day. The latest Flutter release adds support for building beautiful, tailored Chrome OS applications, including rich support for keyboard and mouse, and tooling to ensure that your app runs well on a Chromebook. Furthermore, Chrome OS is a great developer workstation for building general-purpose Flutter apps, thanks to its support for developing and running Flutter apps locally on the same device.
Since its inception, Flutter has shared many of the same principles as Chrome OS: productive, fast, and beautiful experiences. Flutter allows developers to build beautiful, fast UIs, while also providing a high degree of developer productivity, and a completely open-source engine, framework and tools. In short, it’s the ideal modern toolkit for building multi-platform apps, including apps for Chrome OS.
Flutter initially focused on providing a UI toolkit for building apps for mobile devices, which typically feature touch input and small screens. However, we’ve been building keyboard and mouse support into Flutter since before our 1.0 release last December. And today, we’re pleased to announce that Flutter for Chrome OS is now stronger with scroll wheel support, hover management, and better keyboard event support. In addition, Flutter has always been great at allowing you to build apps that run at any size (large screen or small), with seamless resizing, as shown here in the Chrome OS Best Practices Sample:
The Chrome OS best practices sample in action
The Chrome OS Hello World sample is an app built with Flutter that is optimized for Chrome OS. This includes a responsive UI to showcase how to reposition items and have layouts that respond well to changes in size from mobile to desktop.
Because Chrome OS runs Android apps, targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps. However, while building Chrome OS apps on Android has always been possible, as described in these guidelines, it’s often difficult to know whether your Android app is going to run well on Chrome OS. To help with that problem, today we are adding a new set of lint rules to the Flutter tooling to catch violations of the most important of the Chrome OS best practice guidelines:
The Flutter Chrome OS lint rules in action
When you’re able to put these Chrome OS lint rules in place, you’ll quickly be able to see any problems in your Android app that would hamper it when running on Chrome OS. To learn how to take advantage of these rules, see the linting docs for Flutter Chrome OS.
But all of that is just the beginning -- the Flutter tools allow you to develop and test your apps directly on Chrome OS as well.
No matter what platform you're targeting, Flutter has support for rich IDEs and programming tools like Android Studio and Visual Studio Code. Over the last year, Chrome OS has been building support for running the Linux version of these tools with the beta of Linux on Chrome OS (aka Crostini). And, because Chrome OS also supports Android natively, you can configure the Flutter tooling to run your Android apps directly without an emulator involved.
The Flutter development tools running on Chrome OS
All of the great productivity of Flutter is available, including Stateful Hot Reload, seamless resizing, keyboard and mouse support, and so on. Recent improvements in Crostini, such as high DPI support, Crostini file system integration, easier adb, and so on, have made this experience even better! Of course, you don’t have to test against the Android container running on Chrome OS; you can also test against Android devices attached to your Chrome OS box. In short, Chrome OS is the ideal environment in which to develop and test your Flutter apps, especially when you’re targeting Chrome OS itself.
With its unique combination of simplicity, security, and capability, Chrome OS is an increasingly popular platform for enterprise applications. These apps often work with large quantities of data, whether it’s a chart, or a graph for visualization, or lists and forms for data entry. The support in Flutter for high quality graphics, large screen layout, and input features (like text selection, tab order and mousewheel), make it an ideal way to port mobile applications for the enterprise. One purveyor of such apps is AppTree, who use Flutter and Chrome OS to solve problems for their enterprise customers.
“Creating a Chrome OS version of our app took very little effort. In 10 minutes we tweaked a few values and now our users have access to our app on a whole new class of devices. This is a huge deal for our enterprise customers who have been wanting access to our app on Desktop devices.”
By using Flutter to target Chrome OS, AppTree was able to start with their existing Flutter mobile app and easily adapt it to take advantage of the capabilities of Chrome OS.
If you’d like to target Chrome OS with Flutter, you can do so today simply by installing the latest version of Flutter. If you’d like to run the Flutter development tools on Chrome OS, you can follow these instructions to get started fast. To see a real-world app built with Flutter that has been optimized for Chrome OS, check out the the Developer Quest sample that the Flutter DevRel team launched at the 2019 Google I/O conference. And finally, don’t forget to try out the Flutter Chrome OS linting rules to make sure that your Chrome OS apps are following the most important practices.
Flutter and Chrome OS go great together. What are you going to build?
Posted by Roy Glasberg, Founder of Launchpad Accelerator
For the past six years, Launchpad has connected startups from around the world with the best of Google - its people, network, methodologies, and technologies. We have worked with market leaders in over 40 countries across 6 regional programs (San Francisco, Brazil, Africa, Israel, India, and Tokyo). Launchpad also includes a new program in Mexico announced earlier this year, along with our Indie Games Accelerator and Google.org AI for Social Good Accelerator programs.
We are pleased to announce that the next cohort of startups has been selected for our upcoming programs in Africa, Brazil, and India. We reviewed over 1,000 applications for these programs, and were thoroughly impressed with the quality of startups that indicated their interest. The startups chosen represent those using technology to create a positive impact on key industries in their region and we look forward to supporting them and connecting them with startup ecosystems around the world.
In Africa, we have selected 12 startups from 6 African countries for our 3rd class in this region:
In India, for our 2nd class, we are focused on seed to growth-stage startups that operate across a number of sectors using ML and AI to solve for India-specific problems:
In Brazil, we have chosen startups that are applying ML in interesting ways and are solving for local challenges.
Applications are still open for Launchpad Accelerator Mexico - if you are a LATAM-based startup using technology to solve big challenges for that region, please apply to the program here.
As with all of our previous regional classes, these startups will benefit from customized programs, access to partners and mentors on the ground, and Google's support and dedication to their success.
Stay updated on developments and future opportunities by subscribing to the Google Developers newsletter, as well as The Launchpad Blog.
With ARCore and Google Lens, we're working to make smartphone cameras smarter. ARCore enables developers to build apps that can understand your environment and place objects and information in it. Google Lens uses your camera to help make sense of what you see, whether that's automatically creating contact information from a business card before you lose it, or soon being able to identify the breed of a cute dog you saw in the park. At Mobile World Congress, we're launching ARCore 1.0 along with new support for developers, and we're releasing updates for Lens and rolling it out to more people.
ARCore, Google's augmented reality SDK for Android, is out of preview and launching as version 1.0. Developers can now publish AR apps to the Play Store, and it's a great time to start building. ARCore works on 100 million Android smartphones, and advanced AR capabilities are available on all of these devices. It works on 13 different models right now (Google's Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL; Samsung's Galaxy S8, S8+, Note8, S7 and S7 edge; LGE's V30 and V30+ (Android O only); ASUS's Zenfone AR; and OnePlus's OnePlus 5). And beyond those available today, we're partnering with many manufacturers to enable their upcoming devices this year, including Samsung, Huawei, LGE, Motorola, ASUS, Xiaomi, HMD/Nokia, ZTE, Sony Mobile, and Vivo.
Making ARCore work on more devices is only part of the equation. We're bringing developers additional improvements and support to make their AR development process faster and easier. ARCore 1.0 features improved environmental understanding that enables users to place virtual assets on textured surfaces like posters, furniture, toy boxes, books, cans and more. Android Studio Beta now supports ARCore in the Emulator, so you can quickly test your app in a virtual environment right from your desktop.
Everyone should get to experience augmented reality, so we're working to bring it to people everywhere, including China. We'll be supporting ARCore in China on partner devices sold there— starting with Huawei, Xiaomi and Samsung—to enable them to distribute AR apps through their app stores.
We've partnered with a few great developers to showcase how they're planning to use AR in their apps. Snapchat has created an immersive experience that invites you into a "portal"—in this case, FC Barcelona's legendary Camp Nou stadium. Visualize different room interiors inside your home with Sotheby's International Realty. See Porsche's Mission E Concept vehicle right in your driveway, and explore how it works. With OTTO AR, choose pieces from an exclusive set of furniture and place them, true to scale, in a room. Ghostbusters World, based on the film franchise, is coming soon. In China, place furniture and over 100,000 other pieces with Easyhome Homestyler, see items and place them in your home when you shop on JD.com, or play games from NetEase, Wargaming and Game Insight.
With Google Lens, your phone's camera can help you understand the world around you, and, we're expanding availability of the Google Lens preview. With Lens in Google Photos, when you take a picture, you can get more information about what's in your photo. In the coming weeks, Lens will be available to all Google Photos English-language users who have the latest version of the app on Android and iOS. Also over the coming weeks, English-language users on compatible flagship devices will get the camera-based Lens experience within the Google Assistant. We'll add support for more devices over time.
And while it's still a preview, we've continued to make improvements to Google Lens. Since launch, we've added text selection features, the ability to create contacts and events from a photo in one tap, and—in the coming weeks—improved support for recognizing common animals and plants, like different dog breeds and flowers.
Smarter cameras will enable our smartphones to do more. With ARCore 1.0, developers can start building delightful and helpful AR experiences for them right now. And Lens, powered by AI and computer vision, makes it easier to search and take action on what you see. As these technologies continue to grow, we'll see more ways that they can help people have fun and get more done on their phones.
We're excited to announce the three new startups joining Launchpad Studio, our 6-month mentorship program tailored to help applied-machine learning startups build great products using the most advanced tools and technologies available. We intend to support these startups by leveraging some of our platforms like Google Cloud Platform, TensorFlow, and Android, while also providing one-on-one support from product and research experts from several Google teams including Google Cloud, Verily, X, Brain, and ML Research. Launchpad Studio has also enlisted the expertise of a number of top industry practitioners and thought leaders to ensure Studio startups are successful over the long-term. These three startups were selected based on the novel ways they've applied ML to important challenges in the Healthcare industry:
The annual cost of treating heart failures in the US is currently estimated to be ~$40bn annually. With the continued aging of the US population, the impact of Congestive Heart Failure is expected to increase substantially.
Through light-weight, low-cost cloth-based form factors, Nanowear can capture and transmit medical-grade data directly from the skin enabling deep analytics and prescriptive recommendations. As a first product application, Nanowear's SimpleSense aims to transform Congestive Heart Failure management.
Nanowear intends to develop predictive models that provide both physicians and patients with leading indicators and data to anticipate potential hospitalizing events. Combining these datasets with deep machine learning capabilities will position Nanowear at the epicenter of the next generation of telemedicine and connected-self healthcare.
With the big data revolution, the medical and scientific communities have more information to work with than in all of history combined. However, with such a wealth of information, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate productive leads from dead ends.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning powered by systems biology can organize, validate, predict and compare the overabundance of information. Owkin builds mathematical models and algorithms that can interpret omics, visual data, biostatistics and patient profiles.
Owkin is focused on federated learning in healthcare to overcome the data sharing problem, building collective intelligence from distributed data.
A low percentage of healthcare specialists per patient and no interoperability between medical devices causes exam results in Brazil to take an average of 60 days to be ready, cost hundreds of dollars, and leaves millions of people with no access to quality healthcare.
The standard solution for such a problem is Telemedicine, but the lack of direct automatic communication with medical devices and pre processing AI behind it hurts its scalability, resulting in very low adoption worldwide.
Portal Telemedicina is a digital healthcare platform that provides reliable, fast, low-cost online diagnostics to hundreds of cities in Brazil. Thanks to revolutionary communication protocols and AI automation, the solution enables interoperability across systems and patients. Exams are handled seamlessly from medical devices to diagnostics. The company counts on a huge proprietary dataset and uses Google's TensorFlow to train machine learning algorithms in millions of images and correlated health records to predict pathologies at human level accuracy.
Leveraging artificial intelligence to empower doctors, the startup helps millions of lives in Brazil and wants to expand and provide universal access to healthcare.
Each startup will get tailored, equity-free support, with the goal of successfully completing a ML-focused project during the term of the program. To support this process, we provide resources, including deep engagement with engineers in Google Cloud, Google X, and other product teams, as well as Google Cloud credits. We also include both Google Cloud Platform and GSuite training in our engagement with all Studio startups.
Based in San Francisco, Launchpad Studio is a fully tailored product development acceleration program that matches top ML startups and experts from Silicon Valley with the best of Google - its people, network, and advanced technologies - to help accelerate applied ML and AI innovation. The program's mandate is to support the growth of the ML ecosystem, and to develop product methodologies for ML.
Launchpad Studio is looking to work with the best and most game-changing ML startups from around the world. While we're currently focused on working with startups in the Healthcare and Biotech space, we'll soon be announcing other industry verticals, and any startup applying AI / ML technology to a specific industry vertical can apply on a rolling-basis.
