Tag Archives: google.org

Media literacy for Asia’s next generation

When I served as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, it often struck me that young people there had vastly more access to news and information than I did when I first lived in that country 20 years earlier—a sign of how things can change for the better from generation to generation.  


The internet has enabled people in Vietnam and across Asia Pacific to learn, connect and express themselves in ways we couldn’t have imagined in the past. We need to keep expanding those opportunities, but we also need to help the next generation explore the internet with confidence as they come online.


As Google marks UNESCO Global Media and Information Literacy Week, we’re building on our efforts to promote media literacy and combat misinformation. We’re constantly working to make a difference with our own products, like improving our algorithms to prioritize authoritative sourcesand original reporting in search results. At the same time, through a $10 million Google News Initiative media literacy campaign funded by Google.org, we’re supporting expert organizations across the region as they develop new approaches for teaching media literacy. 


In Southeast Asia, this includes programs run by the Indonesian Anti-Slander Society and the Child and Youth Media Institute in Thailand to create video teaching tools for local schools, building on a pilot program we developed with the University of Hong Kong. And today we took the next step, announcing that Google.org will support a new initiative run by the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication in the Philippines. The funding will enable the AIJC to hold “school summits” across the country, training 300 high school teachers so they can teach media literacy to around 9,000 students each year—helping them tell the difference between misinformation and reliable news online.


We asked Ramon Tuazon, President of the AIJC, to tell us a bit more.  


In 2017, the Philippines became the first country in Asia to make media and information literacy (MIL) part of its high school curriculum. Why is this so important?  


When we first started discussing adding MIL to the curriculum in 2013, we knew we had to address misrepresentation and propaganda in traditional media as well as social media. But we also had to deal with the new challenges the internet has created, including the fact that young people are becoming media literate online before they learn ethics and responsibility in how to use technology.  


With the new campaign, what do you hope students and teachers get out of the experience? 

I hope the students gain new perspectives and better understand how to verify news, deal with their biases and be sensitive to misinformation and disinformation. For teachers, I hope the training helps them learn new, creative and engaging teaching approaches.  Over the long term, I hope both teachers and students will be able to go out and challenge misinformation on social media and other platforms.  

What’s next after this initial campaign? 

We’ll be working closely with the Department of Education to continue improving how we teach media and information literacy as part of the curriculum, including through new tools and better teacher training.  Our challenge is to expand this new initiative nationwide.

Let’s build the way to a better Bay

Back in 2015, the Hidden Genius Project received a $500,000 Google.org grant to provide training and mentorship to young black men in the Bay Area. The grant went toward expanding their computer science bootcamp, and to break down the barriers that prevent many young black men from getting into the tech industry. Hidden Genius Project was a winner of our second Bay Area Impact Challenge, and they're now serving 1,500 students a year, up from 300 when they applied to the Challenge. Today, we’re kicking off our third and largest Challenge so we can support other Bay Area nonprofits as they work to improve our local communities.


In total, we’ll donate $10 million in grants to 35 nonprofits dedicated to making the Bay Area a place where everyone can thrive. From now until November 8, organizations across the Bay Area are invited to submit their proposals. The  boldest, brightest and most impactful ideas will be selected as finalists. Once the finalists are announced, we’ll come together as a community for a public vote on the People’s Choice Award. The winner will receive a $1 million grant from Google.org. And our panel of judges will select four other top submissions to each receive $1 million in funding.
bay area impact challenge judges-01.jpg

For over 20 years, we’ve partnered closely with nonprofits, supporting those who are on the frontlines of addressing the Bay Area’s most pressing needs. Since 2014, we’ve given $250 million in grants to nonprofits and we recently made a $1 billion commitment to help address the shortage of affordable housing options in the Bay Area.  


There are so many nonprofits making an impact across the Bay Area—tell us about your work, and submit your proposal by November 8.  

How we’re helping small businesses succeed

Owning a small business often means wearing many hats, and I know this firsthand. When I started my winery, I found I was not only a winemaker but also an accountant, marketer, sales person and tech support provider all at once. There was never enough time! Now that I’m at Google, I apply the lessons I learned every day as our team works to build products and solutions designed to meet the needs of small businesses.

Starting a small business can be a pathway to economic prosperity for both business owners and their communities. In fact, 67 cents out of every dollar spent at a local business stays in the local economy. Through our products like Search and Google Ads and Grow with Google, our initiative to create economic opportunity across the U.S., we’re committed to helping small businesses succeed. Being online is the way to win. Today we are releasing a new report that shows how Americans are searching for local businesses, and I can tell you that there is tremendous momentum. In fact, we’ve seen 350 times more search interest in "local" + "near me" than there was 10 years ago. 

To deepen our commitment to small businesses, Google.org is making a $10 million pledge to help low-income and underrepresented entrepreneurs start new businesses via access to training and capital.

Almost half of all libraries in the U.S. provide assistance to entrepreneurs looking to start a business of their own. That’s why the first grant will benefit the American Library Association (ALA) to support entrepreneurship centers at 10 libraries and to help libraries across the U.S. develop new offerings for small business owners. The grant will also support the ALA’s efforts to develop a guide for libraries on building their own entrepreneurship programs, including recommendations for better serving entrepreneurs from diverse communities and underrepresented backgrounds. This grant builds on our ongoing support for libraries, including the $1 million in funding that Grow with Google gave ALA earlier this year to help libraries across the U.S. provide communities with digital skills. The collaboration has already supported 130 libraries across 18 states and will continue to all 50 states. We are proud to be continuing our work with this important organization.

Google.org’s $10 million pledge is not the only way we’re investing in the success of American small businesses. In June, we introduced Google for Small Business - a website that offers free personalized plans for small businesses so they know which Google tools will help them reach more customers and work more efficiently. 

This work is important to me, both in my role at Google and as a former small business owner. Today, I’m back in my hometown of Dallas, Texas to share this news and to see some of Texas’s finest small business owners in action.

As a Googler, Texas native, woman and former small business owner, I am so proud to work alongside entrepreneurs and help American small businesses find new success in the 21st century. 

Take a look at our report below to check out how people across the U.S. are searching for small businesses.

Small Business Infographic

Google.org helps Nesta bring skills training to trade unions

Throughout history, technology has changed the nature of work. This has created new opportunities and jobs, but there are also concerns about technology’s impact on job security and displacement. Google.org’s $2 million grant to Nesta, a global innovation foundation, will set up partnerships with trade unions in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. The program will provide training to workers whose jobs are changing rapidly as a result of automation or digitalization—for example, people working in administrative roles, manufacturing and the service industry. 


Nesta will deliver training through a new program called FutureFit, which will help workers get the skills they need to adapt to changes in their workplace. Using training methods such as nano learning—where trainings are broken down into small chunks—and gamification, the program will shed light on learner behavior and motivation. This evidence will be used to inform future training.


While research from McKinsey shows that automation can actually increase the total number of jobs in the countries covered by this project, a recent poll showed that 40 percent of the Swedish workforce worries about not getting access to the training they need to compete in the future job market. And the OECD found that people in jobs most at risk from automation do less training than workers in jobs at low risk. 


The Nordics and Benelux countries are the perfect places to try Nesta’s techniques and build on Google.org’s engagement with nonprofits to equip people with the skills needed for the future labor market. The countries in the region are digital frontrunners, and have a tradition of investing in lifelong learning. We know this from Google initiatives we’ve introduced to the region: In Sweden, we toured the country with the national Swedish Public Employment Service to train thousands of people in digital skills. In the Netherlands, we worked with the trade union CNV to re-skill workers in transport and logistics. And in Denmark, we teamed up with the major trade union HK to educate administrative workers as “digital change agents.” Across Europe, we’ve now trained five million people in new skills. Since May 2018, we’ve also been building on the Digital Frontrunners program from Nesta, a collaborative program to help senior policymakers create a more inclusive digital economy.


In Finland, Nesta will run a pilot program with The Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK), Finland’s largest labour confederation. The program will focus on helping workers whose professions are undergoing high rates of change due to technology, such as administrative roles or manufacturing. SAK President Jarkko Eloranta put it this way: “A third of employees in Finland find modern technology a source of anxiety at work, so learning opportunities of this kind should be part of regular duties at all workplaces. Employees need new digital skills to embrace smart technology at work.”


We’re committed to providing one hundred million EUR in grants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the next five years to better understand the changing nature of work, and to support nonprofits that help people navigate a changing labour market. The Nesta program will be a great addition to that effort, and we hope the grant will help to ensure that workers are equipped with the skills needed to support them in changes to their everyday work lives.

Bringing online safety training to Irish schools with Barnardos

As a parent, I know how challenging it is to keep up with everything that your children are doing on their laptops, tablets and mobile phones every day. It’s more important than ever that we learn about issues like cyberbullying and the effects of children spending a lot of time online. At Google, we’re finding ways to help children make smart choices and protect themselves online, and helping parents find the right balance for their families.

Today, at an event in Dublin with Ireland’s Minister for Education and Skills, Joe McHugh, TD, our CEO, Sundar Pichai, unveiled a €1 million Google.org grant for online safety training with Irish children’s NGO Barnardos. The grant will help Barnardos bring it’s Online Safety Programme workshops to more than 75,000 Irish children over the next four years.

Barnardos Online Safety Programme provides interactive classes for children and young people, teachers, parents and professionals on internet safety and cyberbullying. One of the goals is to promote ongoing communication between children and adults on these topics.

We’ve also created an online resource for parents, children and teachers called Be Internet Legends, which is now available to everyone in Ireland. The program provides teaching resources, family guides and interactive online games, all focused on the five fundamentals of an Internet Legend: being sharp, alert, secure, kind and brave.

We recognize our responsibility as a company to ensure that the internet is accessible and  used in a positive way. Through this program and the rollout of Be Internet Legends, we intend to make the internet a safer place for young people in Ireland and around the world.


2,602 uses of AI for social good, and what we learned from them

For the past few years, we’ve applied core Google AI research and engineering to projects with positive societal impact, including forecasting floods, protecting whales and predicting famine. Artificial intelligence has incredible potential to address big social, humanitarian and environmental problems, but in order to achieve this potential, it needs to be accessible to organizations already making strides in these areas. So, the Google AI Impact Challenge, which kicked off in October 2018, was our open call to organizations around the world to submit their ideas for how they could use AI to help address societal challenges.


“Accelerating Insights from the Google AI Impact Challenge” sheds light on the range of organizations using AI to address big problems. It also identifies several trends around the opportunities and challenges related to using AI for social good. Here are some of the things  we learned—check out the report for more details.


AI is globally relevant 

We received 2,602 applications from six continents and 119 countries, with projects addressing a wide range of issue areas, from education to the environment. Some of the applicants had experience with AI, but 55 percent of not-for-profit organizations and 40 percent of for-profit social enterprises reported no prior experience with AI. 


Goog


Similar projects can benefit from shared resources

When we reviewed all the applications, we saw that many people are trying to tackle the same problems and are even using the same approaches to do so. For example, we received more than 30 applications proposing to use AI to identify and manage agricultural pests. The report includes a list of common project submissions, which will hopefully encourage people to collaborate and share resources with others working to solve similar problems.  


You don’t need to be an expert to use AI for social good

AI is becoming more accessible as new machine learning libraries and other open-source tools, such as Tensorflow and ML Kit, reduce the technical expertise required to implement AI. Organizations no longer need someone with a deep background in AI, and they don’t have to start from scratch. More than 70 percent of submissions, across all sectors and organization types, used existing AI frameworks to tackle their proposed challenge. 


Successful projects combine technical ability with sector expertise 

Few organizations had both the social sector and AI technical expertise to successfully design and implement their projects from start to finish. The most comprehensive applications established partnerships between nonprofits with deep sector expertise, and academic institutions or technology companies with technical experience.


ML isn’t the only answer 

Some problems can be addressed by using alternative methods to AI—and result in faster, simpler and cheaper execution. For example, several organizations proposed using machine learning to match underserved populations to legal knowledge and tools. While AI could be helpful, similar results could be achieved through a well-designed website. While we’ve seen the impact AI can have in solving big problems, you shouldn’t rule out more simple approaches as well. 


Global momentum around AI for social good is growing—and many organizations are already using AI to address a wide array of societal challenges. As more social sector organizations recognize AI’s potential, we all have a role to play in supporting their work for a better world. 


New tools to help Spanish speakers build their careers

Spanish is my first language, and it’s what I spoke with my family growing up in Costa Rica. Even today, after making the U.S. my home for more than two decades, it’s the language my brain thinks in. So I understand well the challenges of living in a country where the spoken language is your second language, or even completely new to you. Especially for those trying to get ahead—taking classes, learning new skills, finding work—it can be really hard.

That’s why I’m thrilled that today, through Grow with Google, our initiative to create economic opportunity for everyone, we’re making new resources available to help Spanish speakers learn skills they need to prepare for a job or grow a business in today’s economy.

For example, our Applied Digital Skills curriculum helps learners develop crucial digital skills to thrive in the workplace through free, video-based lessons. We also offer minicourses in Spanish for local businesses and job seekers on our free Google Primer app, which teaches business and digital marketing skills through short and easy interactive lessons. Our IT Support Professional Certificate, which is designed to prepare beginners for entry-level IT support jobs in as little as six months, will be available in Spanish starting September 16. These resources and more can be accessed at grow.google/espanol. 

Skills like these help people thrive in today's jobs. According to Brookings, nearly two thirds of all new jobs created since 2010 required either high or medium-level digital skills. 

The Latino community makes up 16 percent of the U.S. labor market and will make up half of the people entering the workforce by 2025. Latino nonprofits are key resources for educating and training community members. Google.org is making a grant to the Hispanic Federation to launch an accelerator to strengthen institutions serving the Latino community with workforce development and digital training programs. Through this grant, the Hispanic Federation will enhance the capacity of 20 Latino-led and Latino-serving nonprofit organizations, which in turn will provide career-aligned digital skills training to more than 10,000 Latinos over the next two years. This builds on our ongoing commitment to the Latino community, which includes a $5 million grant announced earlier this year to bring computer science education to over one million Latino students and their families by 2022. 

The LULAC Institute will integrate Applied Digital Skills and Primer into their programming, to bring digital skills training in Spanish to more than 60 local technology centers around the country. Community organizations across the U.S. can also apply to join the Grow with Google Partner Program, to access bilingual resources and trainers that help community members learn essential skills like creating a resume or growing a business through digital marketing.

I’m proud that the company I work for is helping provide more opportunities for Spanish speakers to grow their skills all across the U.S.

El español es mi primer idioma, y es el que utilice con mi familia, mientras crecía en Costa Rica. Aún ahora, después de que los Estados Unidos se convirtió en mi hogar, durante más de dos décadas, es el idioma en el que mi cerebro piensa en la mañana. Así que entiendo las dificultades de vivir en un país donde el idioma hablado es tu segundo idioma. Especialmente para aquellos que quieren salir adelante—tomar clases, aprender nuevas habilidades, encontrar trabajo—puede ser muy difícil.

Por eso estoy emocionada que hoy, por medio de Grow with Google, nuestra iniciativa para crear oportunidades económicas para todos, estamos proporcionando  nuevos recursos a los hispanohablantes, para aprender las habilidades que necesitan, prepararse para un trabajo, o hacer negocios en la economía digital.

Por ejemplo, nuestro plan de estudios,Habilidades Digitales Aplicadas, ayuda a desarrollar habilidades digitales cruciales para prosperar en el trabajo, por medio de lecciones gratuitas basadas en video. También ofrecemos mini cursos en español para pequeños negocios y personas buscando trabajo en nuestra aplicación gratuitaGoogle Primer, que enseña habilidades comerciales y de marketing digital, a través de breves lecciones interactivas y fáciles.  NuestroCertificado Profesional de Soporte de TI, está diseñado para preparar a principiantes para trabajos de nivel de entrada de TI, en solo seis meses, y estará disponible en español a partir del 16 de septiembre. Se puede acceder a estos recursos y más en grow.google/espanol.

Habilidades como estas, ayudan a las personas a prosperar en los trabajos actuales. De acuerdo conBrookings, casi dos tercios de todos los nuevos empleos, creados desde 2010, requieren habilidades digitales de nivel alto o medio.

La comunidad latina representa el16 por ciento del mercado laboral de los Estados Unidos, y será la mitad de los trabajadores que ingresen a la fuerza laboral para 2025. Las organizaciones latinas, sin fines de lucro,  son instrumentos clave para educar y capacitar a los miembros de la comunidad. Es por eso que Google.org está otorgando una donación a la Federación Hispana (Hispanic Federation), para lanzar un acelerador que fortalezca las instituciones que sirven a la comunidad latina, con programas para el desarrollo y capacitación digital de la fuerza laboral. Con esta donación, la Federación Hispana acelerará la capacidad de 20 organizaciones sin fines de lucro, dirigidas a los  latinos que, a su vez, proporcionarán capacitación en habilidades digitales a más de 10,000 personas durante los próximos dos años. Esto aumenta nuestro compromiso con la comunidad latina, e incluye una donación de$5 millones de dólares, anunciada a principios de este año, para brindar educación en ciencias de la computación a más de un millón de estudiantes y familias latinas para el 2022.

ElInstituto LULAC integrará lasHabilidades Digitales Aplicadas yPrimer en su programación, para brindar capacitación en español a más de 60 centros de tecnología comunitarios en todo el país. Organizaciones comunitarias en los Estados Unidos también pueden solicitar unirse al programaGrow with Google Partner Program para tener acceso a recursos, así como entrenadores bilingües, que ayudan al aprendizaje comunitario de  habilidades y destrezas esenciales, como crear un currículum o hacer crecer un negocio a través del marketing digital.

Me siento orgullosa de que la compañía, para la cual trabajo, esté ayudando a brindar más oportunidades de crecimiento para los hispanohablantes en los Estados Unidos.

Tackling cardiovascular disease with AI

Westmead team with Google’s Mel Silva and Australian Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Hon Karen Andrews MP


Heart disease and cardiovascular health are a major challenge around the world, and in Australia, one in six people is affected by cardiovascular disease. The University of Sydney’s Westmead Applied Research Centre is working on a digital health program for people at risk of cardiovascular disease, and they recently received a $1 million Google.org grant that will help them apply AI to give patients more personalised advice and support.  

We sat down with Professor Clara Chow, Professor of Medicine and Academic Director at Westmead Applied Research Centre, and Dr. Harry Klimis, a cardiologist and Westmead PhD student, to hear more about the program.   

Why is cardiac health such a big issue? 

Professor Chow: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of premature death and disability worldwide. In Australia, cardiovascular disease affects approximately 4.2 million people, has resulted in more than 1 million hospitalizations, and caused 1 in 3 deaths in 2016. That’s one death every 12 minutes, and these deaths are largely preventable.

How are you proposing to address this problem? 

Chow: Our goal is to support people at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease by encouraging them to adopt healthy habits, such as diet and exercise, and connecting them to health services when they need them. Data and mobile technology means we can do this in ways that weren’t possible before. 

Dr Klimis: We’ve already developed mobile health text-message programs using basic algorithms to customise programs to individuals. We now plan to use machine learning and AI to keep improving how we support participants and help them self-monitor measures like cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, physical activity, diet and smoking.

How will you use the funding and support from Google.org? 

Chow: The grant will help us create digital tools that enable clinicians and health services to provide personalized advice without the need to meet face to face. Initially, we’ll link data from existing secondary sources like hospital and clinic presentations to create programs tailored to individuals, and the system will learn from there. 

How does AI help?  

Klimis: An example would be if “John” went to the emergency room at hospital with chest pain and had type 2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension. After being assessed and treated, he could be flagged as a patient at high risk of heart attack and added to the mobile health prevention program. The AI program would learn from John’s activities and deliver health advice via SMS or through an app. If John was less active at a particular time of day, the program might register this and prompt him to take a 5-minute walk. 

What do you think is going to be the most challenging part of your project?

Klimis: Making sure we have reliable enough data to support a program capable of AI and machine learning. Our original program sent out standard text messages to over 3000 people, which allowed us—with their permission—to collect data on their characteristics, how they respond to different messages, and how this affects health outcomes. That data will be crucial in building an AI model for the current project.  

What are you most optimistic about?

Chow: We have the potential to help more people at risk of cardiovascular disease by giving them high-quality prevention programs developed by clinicians and researchers, without requiring frequent clinic or hospital visits. Over the long term, mobile and digital health solutions could reduce hospitalizations, bring down healthcare costs, and make healthcare more accessible.  


A proactive approach to disaster relief

"It was as if someone had thrown an atomic bomb. Everything was destroyed." Fisherman Luciano Morales says this was the damage that Hurricane Maria brought his small Puerto Rican village of Punta Santiago. One of three residents who decided to stay back to protect his household and belongings, Luciano soon realized that a generator and gasoline weren’t enough to weather the storm, or “Mrs. Maria” as he called it. His home and belongings, along with most of the village’s infrastructure, turned to rubble.

Following the hurricane, GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that gives money to the poor, no strings attached, applied it’s model in response to Maria, and gave cash to Luciano and over 4,700 families, empowering them to solve their most pressing needs. 

Historically, following major disasters, charitable organizations and aid agencies supply bottles of water, sheets of drywall or any number of other goods and services that those affected may need. While this support can at times be critical, it’s impossible for a pre-set bundle of goods and services to meet the diverse needs of those affected by a disaster. Some people need life preserving pharmaceuticals that require refrigeration. Some have medical conditions that call for a very specific kind of diet. And some have jobs for which they’re paid only when they show up. It’s impossible to forecast every person or family's most pressing needs. 

Research on direct cash transfers has shown wide-ranging positive outcomes and immediate improvement on recipients’ lives. Affected individuals largely prefer it over traditional forms of aid—yet cash giving makes up a very small share of disaster response spending. 

Ahead of this year’s storm season, Google.org is contributing $3 million to GiveDirectly to support large-scale cash transfers when a natural disaster hits the U.S. The grant will allow GiveDirectly to support more than 2,400 low-income families and help them better understand how people like Luciano want to be helped during different points of the recovery process. A team of four Google.org Fellows is working full-time to combine government data on socioeconomic indicators and storm damage data into a single tool that will help GiveDirectly better identify and support the people most in need.

In a study published by GiveDirectly, the organization found cash transfers had a significant impact on the poorest populations following the 2017 hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico. Cash allowed families to expand their children’s nutritional intake, improve the quality of their homes, avoid debt, reduce stress and improve living conditions.

There are still important questions remaining about direct cash giving after natural disasters. Our collaboration with GiveDirectly on this work will be guided by some of these outstanding questions: How does the impact change if you give the cash several weeks after a disaster, as opposed to several months later, as was the case in the pilot study? Does giving money at different intervals have different impacts? Do large cash transfer programs impact the economy beyond individual recipients?

Crisis response has always been a key focus area of Google.org. We’ve supported communities and nonprofits on the front lines through immediate and long-term recovery via our products, technical volunteers and over $60 million in funding since 2005. With GiveDirectly, we look forward to evolving the way we respond to ensure that we’re providing support to those who need it most in times of crisis in the most effective, data-driven and efficient way possible.  


Related Article

An environmental nonprofit takes on AI "sprint week"

WattTime, an environmental tech nonprofit, shares their experience from the AI Challenge Accelerator’s Tech Sprint Week.

Read Article

An environmental nonprofit takes on AI “sprint week”

This May, the global group of Google AI Impact Challenge grantees gathered in San Francisco to kick off the six-month Launchpad Accelerator program. With $25 million in funding from Google.org, credits from Google Cloud and mentorship by Google’s AI experts, the teams sought to apply AI to address a wide range of problems problems, from protecting rainforests to coaching students on writing skills. 

Now in the second phase of the program, Tech Sprint Week, the grantees tackled their projects’ greatest technical challenges with support from a team of mentors from Google. At Google for Startups’ campus in London, teams continued work on their ideas and learned user experience design principles along the way.

Grace Mitchell, a data scientist at grantee WattTime, opened up about her team’s experience at Tech Sprint Week—and how they’re using AI to build a globally accessible, open-source fossil fuel emissions monitoring platform for power plants.

Can you tell us about WattTime? 

WattTime is an environmental tech nonprofit, and our mission statement is to give people the power to choose clean energy. Users integrate our API into their IOT (Internet of Things) capable devices, which tells them the type of fuel that provides their energy. It also tells them the environmental impact of the type of fuel they’re using. As an example, coal has a value equivalent to around 900 to 1200 pounds of emissions per megawatt hour, whereas renewable energy would be zero.The whole point is to shift electricity usage based on high or low emission periods. 

For this program, we’ve partnered with The Carbon Tracker Initiative to take on a new challenge: fossil fuel emissions monitoring. We’re using image processing algorithms and satellite networks to replace expensive, on-site power plant emissions monitors with a globally accessible, open-source monitoring platform.

Who is on your team for this project?

Our project for the Google AI Impact Challenge is a partnership between two different organizations, WattTime and The Carbon Tracker Initiative. We're a collection of data scientists, and project managers, and we think about the best ways for organizing our data and how best to engage new users.

What have you learned at Tech Sprint Week?

We’ve covered a lot! We went through a lot of user experience design and research, thinking about how users will be interacting with our product as we design it. We’ve also learned a lot about machine learning and feature engineering. The mentors reminded us to make sure we train our model on the type of data that it would actually have, which sounds intuitive but it's actually hard to do. It might be easy to give your model a “leg up” with training data that it shouldn't have, but then you would see that it's not operating as you expected. 

Now that Tech Sprint Week is complete, what are your next steps? 

We need to catch up with everybody else on the team and share all of the great information and resources that we've received from this week. I’ve also been exposed to a lot of new tools like TensorFlow, an open source library that makes it easy to create machine learning models. So I want to get familiar with that tool and actually integrate it into our workflow. We're also doing a lot of hiring, so we’ll continue to build our team. 

What kinds of people have you met through this program? 

All the mentors have been helpful. Everyone has this attitude of “Hey, how can we help?” Our AI Coach, Ang Li, has been extremely useful and really responsive. I'll contact him at random times of the day and get a response within a few minutes.