Dreaming of a Silicon Beach

It goes without saying that technology has changed a lot since my student days at Brighton High School in Adelaide. Today, it seems like every teenager has a smartphone. In many schools, both public and private, every child is given a laptop to use. The tools for learning and creating are now more accessible than ever.

Yet despite having these tools, our students and our country risks remaining the consumers, rather than becoming the creators, of technology. In short, it’s the difference between usinga smartphone, and creatingan app that reaches millions of people. At Google, we believe education is what will unlock this potential and that’s why we believe there must be a greater focus on science and maths education in Australia.

As an employer of hundreds of engineers in Australia, Google has a front row seat in the area of computer science. Right now, we’re seeing too few Aussies studying computer science, resulting in a workforce lacking a key skill.

A recent reportby our nation’s chief scientist Ian Chubb, also showed that university graduation rates in maths, engineering and science are low by international standards. When it comes to high school, OECD testing shows our students are stagnant in maths and slipping in science.  

This is not only a problem for Google and industry, but also for Australia’s future prosperity. Digital technology is a proven driver of economic growth. Over the next five years, the internet economy in Australia is likely to grow by $20 billion. That’s represents a growth rate twice as fast as the economy overall.

Of course Google benefits when more people want to become computer engineers, but science, technology, engineering and maths education are the building blocks to a whole range of industries such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, energy and resources. These skills are vital to our innovation economy and essential if we’re to become a nation of creators.

Supporting teachers is central to fixing this problem, yet our education system has not caught up. For example, computer science education is currently piecemeal. Some schools don’t offer classes at all, and when they do, it’s left to under resourced but passionate teachers to pick up the slack.

On our part, we at Google recently announced funding of nine universities across Australia and New Zealand to deliver free computer science training and workshops to high school teachers. The Computer Science for High Schools program takes the “teach the teachers” approach and recognises that professional development for teachers to keep up with new technology are insufficient.

As a technology company, we believe in the power of the web to help people discover, connect and learn. Australia can be home to a Silicon Beach of innovation, but for that to happen we need an educated workforce who have the right skills for the future.

Originally posted as an AFR opinion piece.

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Eureka Prize Winner Announced

Last night Associate Professor David Moss from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney was announced as the winner of the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science.

Associate Professor Moss was awarded the prize for his work in incorporating light onto silicon computer chips. This groundbreaking work has led to the development of a laser that allows light to be generated on silicon chips, which overcomes many energy and bandwidth obstacles for on-chip and chip-to-chip communications.

Associate Professor Moss was joined at last night’s Eureka Prize dinner by finalists who submitted excellent entries:

• Professor Gerwin Klein, SEL4 Project Team from NICTA, have created the first general purpose operating system kernel with a machine checked formal proof of correctness, covering high level security properties down to low level code.
• Professor Rajkumar Buyya, The Cloudbus Project from the University of Melbourne, who have developed architectural principles and software technologies that enable high-performance, scalable, and energy-efficient Cloud computing.

I would like to thank all the people and teams who entered the prize and to congratulate Associate Professor Moss for his work.

Google Australia is delighted to sponsor the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. We’re passionately committed to promoting innovation in computer science here in Australia and we believe that it creates great benefits for society.

Posted by Ben Appleton, Software Engineer

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Girl Geek Dinner at Google: Pink Optional

This is a guest post by Kellie Scott, Geek Girl Dinner Organiser, Sydney.



Last week, we held our quarterly Girl Geek Dinner at Google. These dinners were first started in London in 2005 by the original Girl Geek, Sarah Blow. As a software engineer, Sarah was sick of everyone at tech events assuming that she wasn’t an engineer; after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. These dinners are an opportunity for women who are passionate about tech to meet each other, hear about new ideas and generally to geek out together.

Aside from everyone receiving a “I'm a woman in tech. That doesn't mean everything has to be pink” sticker, which was a big hit, we enjoyed a tasty sit-down dinner with drinks, fun icebreaker games and as always, interesting talks. The event held together by the brilliant MC skills of Amaya “that goth chick that works at Google” Booker.

The keynote speaker was Mary Gardiner talking about her work for newly-founded non-profit organisation The Ada Initiative which supports women in open technology and culture. Mary’s talk engaged the audience with some surprising statistics about the participation of women in open source communities and she discussed why it is important to increase the proportion of women in open technology and culture, before focusing on the Ada Initiative’s plans for addressing the problem. For more information, and to find out how getting women involved can change the culture of the open source community, check out her talk on the Ada Initiative website.



After dinner, we moved into our lightning talks section - talks of (roughly) five minutes each, on a variety of topics. The first talk by Kirsti Rawstron discussed gender streaming and the way it is affected by course costs. Googler Alice Boxhall followed, with a general introduction to website accessibility. Alice demonstrated a couple of websites through ChromeVox to show how hard it can be for a blind person to navigate the web. To wrap up, Googler Katie Bell spoke about the National Computer Science Summer School, and Girls Programming Network, demonstrating that it does pay to get girls into programming from a younger age. All of the talks are available here.

Girl Geek Dinner continues to grow here in Australia with other groups in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. Our next Girl Geek Dinner will be held on Thursday 8th September. For more information please sign up here and follow us on Twitter here: @GGDSydney.

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Google Instant coming to Australia

A few weeks ago we introduced a new way of searching that makes search more interactive and helps you find information more quickly and easily. We called it Google Instant, and today we are excited to be rolling out Instant in Australia.

Google Instant combines three core features -- dynamic results, Autocomplete predictions, and ‘scroll-to-search’ functionality -- to deliver smart, predictive results as you type. Here is a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:



In the month since our initial release, we extended Instant to Google Books, Videos, Blogs and Updates, and launched keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate through search results. We have also learned more about how people are using Instant, and although it is still early days, we wanted to share some of those findings.

People are learning to use Instant. In just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. People are used to searching on Google by hitting enter or clicking “search,” but we’ve been happy to see that people are quickly adjusting to the new experience.

Search is getting more interactive. We’ve seen about a 7% increase in on-the-fly editing of search queries. Instant isn’t just about time savings, it’s also a new, more fluid way to search. We’ve seen people reformulating their queries more. As you type, you see search results, and often those results can inspire you to type better search terms.

People are making the extra effort to use Instant. In just one week, we saw an increase in the relative number of search sessions starting on the Google homepage, likely because they want to use Instant. Google Instant currently only works on the Google homepage and results page, not in other places such as browser search boxes, the Google Toolbar, and the Chrome Omnibox. As people have learned about Google Instant, many seem to be searching more on the homepage in order to use the feature.

We are thrilled to be bringing Google Instant to Australia, and we look forward to hearing what you think.

Posted by Jonathan Effrat, Product Manager

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5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Blast Off for National Science Week

Today was an exciting day for Google Australia. We are thrilled to partner with National Science Week to launch the National Science Tour. In honour of the launch, today we hosted in our offices NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, astrophysicist and indigenous astronomy expert Ray Norris, high school students from St Andrews Cathedral College, science teachers, and science writers.





At Google we're passionate about advancing science in Australia and inspiring students to study science, maths and engineering because we believe that these will be the important and sexy jobs of the future. These fields will allow you to pursue your passions, to think big, and to progress Australia and the world.

Today we were certainly inspired to think big as we heard the awesome space travel experiences of Astronaut McArthur, fresh from her May space mission on the STS-125 deployment that serviced the Hubble Telescope.

Astrophysicist Ray Norris wowed us with explanations of black holes and explored the possibility that Aboriginal Australians were the world’s first astronomers.

If you're interested in learning more about science and astronomy (it is International Year of Astronomy and Evolution), here are some great places to start:
www.scienceweek.gov.au
www.starhunt.net.au
earth.google.com/sky/
earth.google.com/moon/

Posted by Alan Noble, Head of Engineering

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