Posted by Miguel Guevara, Product Manager, Privacy and Data Protection Office
At Google, we believe that innovation and privacy must go hand in hand. Earlier this month, we shared our work to keep people safe online, including our investments in leading privacy technologies such as differential privacy. Today, on Data Privacy Day, we want to share some updates on new ways we’re applying differential privacy technologies in our own products and making it more accessible to developers and businesses globally—providing them with greater access to data and insights while keeping people’s personal information private and secure.
Strengthening our core products with differential privacy
We first deployed our world-class differential privacy anonymization technology in Chrome nearly seven years ago and are continually expanding its use across our products including Google Maps and the Assistant. And as the world combats COVID-19, last year we published our COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, which uses differential privacy to help public health officials, economists and policymakers globally as they make critical decisions for their communities while ensuring no personally identifiable information is made available at any point.
This year in the Google Play console, we’ll provide new app metrics and benchmarks to developers in a differentially private manner. When launched, developers will be able to easily access metrics related to how successfully their apps are engaging their users, such as Daily Active Users and Revenue per Active user, in a manner that helps ensure individual users cannot be identified or re-identified. By adding differential privacy to these new app metrics, we’ll provide meaningful insights to help developers improve their apps without compromising people’s privacy, or developer confidentiality. Moving forward, we plan to expand the number of metrics we provide to developers using differential privacy.
As we have in the last year, we’ll continue to make our existing differential privacy library even easier for developers to use. For example, this month we’re open sourcing a new differentially private SQL database query language extension that is used in thousands of queries done every day at Google. These queries help our analysts obtain business insights, and observe product trends. This is a step forward in democratizing privacy safe data analysis, empowering data scientists around the world to uncover powerful insights while protecting and respecting the privacy of individuals.
Partnering with OpenMined to make differential privacy more widely accessible
As we continue to make advancements with privacy-preserving technologies in our own products, it’s also important to us that developers have access to this technology. That’s why in 2019, we open-sourced our differential privacy library and made it freely accessible, easy to deploy and useful to developers globally. Since then, hundreds of developers, researchers and institutions have incorporated Google’s differential privacy algorithms into their work, enabling them to tackle new problems while using data in a responsible and privacy protective way. One of these companies is French healthcare startup Arkhn. For Arkhn, differential privacy is making it possible to pursue its mission to revolutionize the healthcare industry with artificial intelligence, enabling them to gather, query and analyze cross-department hospital data in a secure, and safe way.
To help bring our world class differential privacy library to more developer teams, like the one at Arkhn, today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with OpenMined, a group of open-source developers that is focused on taking privacy preserving technologies and expanding their usage around the world. Together with OpenMined, we will develop a version of our differential privacy library specifically for python developers. By replicating Google’s differentially private infrastructure, Python developers will have access to a new and unique way to treat their data with world-class privacy.
A collaborative approach to improving the state of privacy in Machine Learning
Two years ago, we introduced TensorFlow Privacy (GitHub), an open source library that makes it easier not only for developers to train machine-learning models with privacy, but also for researchers to advance the state of the art in machine learning with strong privacy guarantees. In the past year, we've expanded the library to include support for TensorFlow 2, as well as both the Keras Model interface and TensorFlow's premade estimators. Thanks to a collaboration with researchers from University of Waterloo, we’ve improved performance, with our new release making it four times faster or more to train on common workloads.
We also recognize that training with privacy might be expensive, or not feasible. So we set out to understand how private machine learning models are. Last year we open-sourced our attack library to help address this and help anyone using the library get a broader privacy picture of their machine models. Since then, we partnered with researchers at Princeton University, and the National University of Singapore who have added new features that expand the library’s scope to test generative models and non-neural network models. Recently, researchers at Stanford Medical School tried it on some of their models, to test for memorization. This testing helped them understand the privacy behavior of their models, something that wasn’t possible beforehand.
We’ve also published new research studying the trade-offs between differential privacy and robustness, another property at the core of AI ethics, privacy and safety.
Our work continues as we invest in world-class-privacy that provides algorithmic protections to the people who use our products while nurturing and expanding a healthy open-source ecosystem. We strongly believe that everyone globally deserves world-class privacy, and we’ll continue partnering with organizations to fulfill that mission.
Posted by Nikita Gandhi (Community Manager, GDG India), Nilay Yener (Program Manager, Flutter DevRel)
Happy New Year folks. It’s the perfect time of year to learn something new! Do you have an app idea you’ve been dreaming of over the holidays? If so, we have just the opportunity for you! Starting February 1st, leading up to our big event on March 3rd, join us for #30DaysOfFlutter to kickstart your learning journey and meet Flutter experts in the community. Whether you are building your first Flutter app or looking to improve your Flutter skills, we have curated content, code labs, and demos!
Flutter is Google’s open source UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It’s one of the fastest growing, most in-demand cross platform frameworks to learn and is used by freelance developers and large organizations around the world. Flutter uses the Dart language, so it will feel natural to many of you familiar with object-oriented languages.
Along with the curated content, we will also have four live AskMeAnything sessions (#AMAs), where you can meet members of Google’s Flutter team and community. You can also join us on the FlutterDev Discord channel, where you can meet the other members of the community, ask and answer questions, and maybe make some new Flutter friends too!
Does this sound exciting? Visit the 30 Days of Flutter website to get more information and to register to join.
Your learning journey with Flutter for the month will look like this::
Week 1
Receive curated content to your inbox. Meet other Flutter Devs on Discord. Attend Kick Off Webinar on February 1st.
Week 2
Receive more content. Start building your first Flutter app. Join the webinar and ask your questions.
Week 3
Work on your app and attend the 3rd webinar to ask your questions.
Week 4
Complete your project and learn how to share it with the Flutter community.
Are you ready to learn one of the most in demand developer skills in the world?
Sign up to be a part of the journey and be sure to follow @FlutterDev on Twitter, to get updates about #30DaysOfFlutter.
Posted by Christina Yeh, Google Registry Team
Google Registry is always on the lookout for interesting websites that have launched using our top-level domains. 2020 was a rough year, so to help you make 2021 (at least a little bit) better, we’ve rounded up 21 ways you can start something .new, get .appy, turn a new .page, and make .dev(elopment) a breeze.
Start something .new:
Get .app(y):
Turn to the next .page:
Make .dev(elopment) a breeze:
Happy New Year from all of us at Google Registry! We hope these websites and apps help you get the most out of 2021.
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.
Posted by Erica Hanson, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs
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 Toni Klopfenstein, Developer Advocate
When a user connects a smart device to the Google Assistant via the Home app, the user must select the appropriate related Action from the list of all available Actions. The user then clicks through multiple screens to complete their device setup. Today, we're releasing two new features to improve this device discovery process and drive customer adoption of your Smart Home Action through the Google Home app. App Discovery and Deep Linking are two convenience features that help users find your Google-Assistant compatible smart devices quickly and onboard faster.
App Discovery enables users to quickly find your smart home Action thanks to suggestion chips within the Google Home app. You can implement this new feature through the Actions Console by creating a verified brand link between your Action, your website, and your mobile app. App Discovery doesn't require any coding work to implement, making this a development-light feature that provides great improvements to the user experience of device linking.
In addition to helping users discover your Action directly through suggestion chips, Deep Linking enables you to guide users to your account linking flow within the Google Home app in one step. These deep links are easily added to your mobile app or web content, guiding users to your smart home integration with a single tap.
Deep Linking and App Discovery can help you create a more streamlined onboarding experience for your users, driving increased engagement and user satisfaction, and can be implemented with minimal engineering work.
To implement App Discovery and Deep Linking for your Smart Home Action, check out the developer documents, or watch the video covering these new features.
You can also check out the smart home codelabs if you are just starting to build out your Action.
We want to hear from you, so continue sharing your feedback with us through the issue tracker, and engage with other smart home developers in the /r/GoogleAssistantDev community. Follow @ActionsOnGoogle on Twitter for more of our team's updates, and tweet using #AoGDevs to share what you’re working on. We can’t wait to see what you build!
