Translating patents with the European Patent Office

Last March, we signed an agreement with the European Patent Office (EPO) to break down linguistic barriers and improve the machine translation of patents. Today, we’ve released an update to our Google Translate system that incorporates the EPO’s parallel patent texts and allows translation between English and French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish.

This improved system is now part of the EPO’s Espacenet service, and goes under the name Patent Translate. Espacenet provides free access to millions of patent documents worldwide - and its users can use Patent Translate to read patents from around the world in their own language. Here’s a video that shows how it works:



Using the EPO’s parallel texts, we’ve been able to improve our ability to translate patents, as the following examples show:

Polymerisable ink

• Source: une tête d'impression pour diriger une encre polymérisable par rayonnement vers un substrat reçu sur le support
• Old translation: a print head to direct a radiation curable ink to a substrate on the support received
• New translation: a print head for directing radiation polymerisable ink to a substrate received on the support

Ultrasonic vibration

• Source: The crystals supply the required ultrasonic vibration needed to drive both the horn and the attached cutting tip during phacoemulsification and are controlled by the console.
• Old translation: I cristalli di fornire la vibrazione necessaria ad ultrasuoni necessari per guidare sia il corno e la punta di sezionamento annesso durante facoemulsificazione e sono controllati dalla console.
• New translation: I cristalli forniscono la vibrazione ultrasonica richiesta necessaria per pilotare sia il corno e la punta da taglio allegata durante la facoemulsificazione e sono controllati dalla console.

We share a similar vision to the EPO, that machine translation can help to overcome language barriers - and help to make the information contained in patents universally accessible and useful. Whilst the improved system is pretty good, machine translation is a challenging computer science problem and does not always deliver perfect results. But it can be a very useful way for people to search and read patents that aren’t written in their language.

We’re excited to continue our collaboration with the EPO. We look forward to adding more languages - and showing how this public-private partnership will further improve access to patents for people around the world.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

Explore the mysteries of the universe on Google+ & YouTube

2012 is set to be a big year in particle physics, perhaps the most important for decades. At the European Organisation for Nuclear Research at CERN, the hunt for the famous Higgs Boson particle is in full swing, and experiments which create, trap and measure elusive anti-matter are reaching a dramatic stage.

To make things even more exciting, you can now follow the scientists’ progress, share in their discoveries and interact with them via the new CERN People Google+ Page and YouTube channel.

CERN People is a feature-length film project by the award-winning documentary-maker Films of Record. The documentary will explore the motivations, hopes and fears of the particle physicists as they explore the origins of the universe. The film will be released in 2013.

But instead of having to wait until then to see it, they are using Google+ and YouTube to tell this fascinating story, and invite everyone to get involved, as they go along. Here’s a taste:



A series of short films featuring the personalities behind the experiments will be posted on the CERN People Google+ Page and YouTube every month, and anyone from professional scientists to interested amateurs will be able to interact directly with CERN’s physicists via comments and Google+ Hangouts, a live video chat with up to 10 people.



As you can see from the videos, the scientists at CERN are pretty excited about what lies ahead. We are too.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations, EMEA

Testing skills in the Project Passion contest

In these tough times, it’s crucial for young people to enter a tight job market with the right skills, particularly Internet skills. We’re teaming up with the European Commission to support a fun way to meet the challenge - the Project Passion contest for young people between the ages of 18 and 26.

Tell a story about how e-Skills can help get a job. Video, digital art, or just plain words are welcome. Submit entries here.

Winners will get a top cash prize of EUR2,150 euros. Travel and accommodation will be paid to winners and runners up to attend the e-Skills Week Closing Event in Copenhagen on March 30.

The contest is part of the Commission’s E-skills Week. Check out the website to find information - and other suggestions of how the Internet can help provide the jobs of tomorrow.

Posted by Angela Steen, Policy Analyst, Brussels

Our thoughts on the right to be forgotten

One of the most talked about concepts in the European Commission’s new Data Protection Regulation proposal is the right to be forgotten. It is, at least in part, a continuation of the rights of access and objection that web users were granted in the 1995 Data Protection Directive. It also goes further, including other concepts that we have already embedded in our privacy principles and practices like improved transparency, providing clear information to people and giving them fine-grained privacy choices - including the ability to remove data they uploaded to our services.

Today, more and more people are entrusting their data to online hosting platforms and using social networks and search engines to find information on the Web - and there are no signs of web usage slowing. So it’s vitally important that both those who provide online services and those who use them have a clear understanding of how a concept such as the right to be forgotten might apply.

For providers of online services, we think there are some important distinctions that need to be made between services that host content created by people (such as Facebook and YouTube) and services that point people to content that exists elsewhere (for example, search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!).

Hosting Platforms:

• Users’ Rights: At the core of the right to be forgotten is the idea that a person using a hosting platform should have full control over, including the ability to delete, data he or she published intentionally. That means that a user should be able to delete an individual post, photo or video that he or she stored with the hosting platform. The user should also be able to delete his or her entire account with a given hosting platform, thereby deleting all the materials he or she had published and which was stored in that account.

• Hosting Platforms’ Obligations: Hosting platforms, for their part, should respect deletion requests made by a user regarding content placed there by that user, and carry them out in a timely way. That does not necessarily mean that deletion should be instantaneous; there are practical reasons why some delay should be permitted, for example to prevent the abusive deletion of content when an account has been compromised. Other limits, including legal or contractual obligations, may also legitimately delay deletion in certain circumstances.

• Understanding the practical limits on what hosting platforms can do: There are practical and legal limits to what can be expected of hosting platforms.
• First, it is possible for any material published online to be copied and re-published elsewhere. A hosting platform can and should delete copies of material that they store on behalf of a user upon his or her request, but it cannot be expected to maintain control over other copies of the material published elsewhere online, as these are outside of the control of the hosting platform.
• Second, it is important that hosting platforms not be obliged to delete materials when doing so would be likely to undermine the security of the service or allow for fraud.
• Third, hosting platforms cannot be expected to delete materials created collaboratively at the unilateral request of a single contributor. Where a clear ownership of a collaborative document has been assigned, responsibility for deletion should lie with that owner. In cases where ownership of a collaborative document is not clear - as in the case of wikis or usenet posts - the questions are more complex, and a clear solution is not currently obvious.
• Fourth, in the same way postal services are not expected to monitor what is in the letters they carry, Internet hosting platforms should not be expected to exercise control over materials published by third parties. Fundamental responsibility for information available online must rest with the party that put that particular copy online, rather than with the hosting platform. This is consistent with the premise of existing European law, namely, the eCommerce Directive.

Search engines:

• Search engines serve an important function online, and the right to be forgotten should not interfere with their ability to point consumers to information published elsewhere.
• For their part, search engines should respect the standard ways in which websites instruct search engines whether to crawl and index particular pages, such as header meta tags and robots.txt files
• When, in the course of crawling the web, a search engine discovers that a page or site is no longer available online, it should update its search index to reflect these changes in a timely way.
• Search engines should also provide a means for webmasters to accelerate removal of their site from search results. As with hosting platforms, the fundamental responsibility for information available online must rest with the publisher of that information, rather than with a search engine or other similar intermediary.

Ultimately, responsibility for deleting content published online should lie with the person or entity who published it. Host providers store this information on behalf of the content provider and so have no original right to delete the data. Similarly, search engines index any publicly available information to make it searchable. They too have no direct relationship with the original content.

We’re supportive of the principles behind the right to be forgotten - and believe that it’s possible to implement this concept in a way that not only enhances privacy online, but also fosters free expression for all.

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

Helping a Greek tourism revival

Amid Greece’s gloom and doom, one sector is thriving - tourism. Both tourist receipts and the number of visitors rose by about 10 percent last year, even as the country’s overall economy shrank by more than five percent. Tourism now accounts for one in five jobs and 16 percent of the entire Greek economy, and the Internet is playing a key role in its success, without relying on scarce government funds.

Many moves are responsible for the tourist bright spot. Taxes on ferry tickets and hotel rooms have been slashed. Low cost airlines are adding flights to the country and visa restrictions have been simplified for non-EU citizens from Turkey, China and India. Most of these rising number of visitors are using the Internet to book their flights and accommodations: the Tourist Board’s VisitGreece.gr webside attracted 2.2 million visitors last year, up from a mere 200,000 in 2009.



At the first ever Google Travel Forum in Greece, more than 2000 visitors showed up to hear the Tourism Minister, Pavlos Yeroulanos, describe the government’s “strategic shift towards online marketing and social media to grow tourism.” The Forum showcased how the Internet allows the smallest b&b on the most idyllic Greek island to reach potential visitors anywhere in the world, and at the same time, allows the country’s largest travel operators to compete effectively against multinationals.

The Forum’s closing session featured a one on one discussion between the Greek Tourism Minister Yeroulanos, and the Google Country Manager Stefanos Loukakos, The Minister concluded by tweeting how “internet and social media can help SMEs.” We couldn’t agree more - and will continue helping the Greek tourism industry and the Greek economy as a whole grow its way out of its current crisis.

Posted by Dionisis Kolokotsas, Public Policy manager Greece

European Commission clears Motorola deal

Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

We’re happy that today the European Commission approved our proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which we announced in August. This is an important milestone in the approval process and it moves us closer to closing the deal. We are now just waiting for decisions from a few other jurisdictions before we can close this transaction.

As we outlined in August, the combination of Google and Motorola Mobility will help supercharge Android. It will also enhance competition and offer consumers faster innovation, greater choice and wonderful user experiences.

Posted by Don Harrison, Vice President and Deputy Counsel

Paris names Google its Foreign Investor of the Year

Over the past few years, we have made extensive investments in France, recognizing how the country’s Internet economy is booming. Our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt recently inaugurated, in the presence of President Nicolas Sarkozy, a new 10,000-square meter office in a refurbished 19th century Second Empire building near the St. Lazare Train Station.



In recognition of these moves, the Greater Paris Investment Agency this month awarded Google its prize of the international investor of the year. Valérie Pécresse, Minister for the Budget, Public Accounts and State Reform presented the prize to Susan Pointer, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, Southern & Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Our efforts in France go far beyond new buildings. We’re encouraging French start-ups by creating a Startup Café, an online platform offering information and tools required by entrepreneurs to launch a business. We’re investing in French startups, creating a platform for content and tools.expanding our engineering presence to take advantage of France’s strong engineering talent pool and are making significant academic investments, including a partnership with the French national research center CNRS and the creation of a Google Chair at HEC.

The new Paris headquarters houses a cultural institute which aims to leverage digital technologies to expand access to cultural treasures around the world. Last year, the number of Googlers in France has doubled to nearly 400 employees, and we are continuing to hire. In the future, more and more products will Google "made in France"!

All of this is just the beginning of what we are sure will be a long love affair with France and its capital.

Posted by Elisabeth Bargès, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google France

Working with Le Monde to aid Tunisian journalism

Update, February 16. Google France welcomed five of the six Tunisian journalists at its offices for a lunch to hear about their experiences in Paris and to discuss progress of freedom of expression in their homeland.

In a single, magnificent moment, journalists in Tunisia liberated themselves from the shackles of censorship. They no longer were forced to regurgitate government propaganda and finally could write what they wanted. Instead, they were confronted with the challenges of freedom.

We are teaming up with the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde to help tackle this crucial challenge. Six Tunisian journalists are coming to Paris to work for three months in the Le Monde newsroom. As the paper explained, the journalists will help cover daily news and the upcoming French Presidential election. Our hope is that they then will return home with new skills that will serve to construct a new, free but responsible professional press in Tunisia.

The six winners of the Google internship are:

• Radhouane Somai, a political reporter for the Business News website.
• Hajer Ben Arjroudi, an an investigative reporter for the Express FM radio station.
• Thameur Mekki contributes to three online webzines, specializing in digital culture.
• Zbiss Hanene, the editor of the culture section for Realities magazine.
• Hajer Jeridi, the editor-in-chief of the www.gnet.tn news site.
• Nacer Talel, a freelance photographer

At Google, we are aware of the need to work with publishers to smooth the transition not only from oppression to freedom, but from analogue to digital distribution. We are sponsoring a series of digital journalism prizes with Institut de Sciences Politiques, the International Press Institute in Vienna and the Global Editors Network in Paris. We also are the proud backer of Reporters Without Borders’ annual Netizen of the Year award. In addition, we have come up with a series of products such as Adsense to split online ad revenues with publishers.

The collaboration with Le Monde marks a significant step forward in our engagement. We are working hard to support free elections in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, building a series of new Internet tools that allow politicians to reach voters and voters to have their voice heard by politicians.

A special thanks goes out to Le Monde’s Sylvie Kauffmann for this project. Sylvie covered Central Europe for Le Monde when it the communist imposed countries of the Soviet empire freed themselves. Sylvie continued to become the Le Monde’s first female editor-in-chief. She travelled to Tunis and personally interviewed and chose all the candidates. For her, and for Le Monde, strong journalism represents a key building block for free societies.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Searching for creative young minds

Are you between 18 and 24 years old and have done something to make an impact in the world? Do you fancy the opportunity to come to the UK and meet some of the great minds of our time?

If so, apply by March 19 to Google's youth challenge, Zeitgeist Young Minds, by uploading a short video telling your story, what matters to you and how you’re making a positive impact on your world. We want to find the most exceptional and inspiring young people who are helping others through science, the arts, education, leadership or innovation.



Winners will meet the leaders attending 2012 Zeitgeist. Previous Zeitgeist speakers have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Black Eyed Peas’ will.I.am, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, and Google CEO Larry Page.

The inaugural ‘Young Minds’ competition rewarded a series of pathbreakers, ranging from a student who launched free hip-hop dance classes for high-risk youth to a South African AIDS activist to a student who founded an organization offering IT education. A full list of last year's winning projects are found here.

Events agency Livity is managing the contest and will pick the winners. Zeitgeist Young Minds is open to all young people ages 18-24 who are residents of South Africa, Algeria, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Egypt, Spain, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Uganda, Holland, Poland, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Russia , Sweden, Tunisia, and Yemen.

Posted by Elizabeth Dupuy, Event Manager, External Relations

Supporting safety online

Telefono Azzurro, one of Italy’s main child protection NGOs, does amazing work on behalf of missing and sexually exploited children and their families. Last year, we donated a Google Search Appliance - essentially the Google ‘search engine in a box’ - to improve information retrieval on their internal network and make it easier to search on their public website.

Today, on Safer Internet Day 2012, we’re happy to announce that this collaboration is expanding. Telefono Azzuro will share its Search Appliance with all of the members of Missing Children Europe (MCE), the federation of national NGOs responsible for the European 116.000 phone hotline, who will use Google's search technology on their public websites. Eventually, the Search Appliance will also be linked to MCE’s interconnected European database of missing children (currently under construction), enabling each member NGO to better organise its own case files and conduct secure searches on its internal network.

This is just one example of how seriously we take the challenge of increasing safety on the web, but on Safer Internet Day, we’re also involved in a whole host of initiatives all over Europe, including:

Digital literacy education / workshops

• Italy: we’re running online safety workshops with Telefono Azzurro / Sicuri in Rete and with the Italian Postal and Communications Police (at more than 100 schools); and we’re distributing online safety information to parents together with the Italian Association of Paediatricians.
• Portugal: we’re launching the Google Family Safety Center at an event chaired by the President of National Commission for Support for Children.
• Russia: We’re partnering with Net Literacy to engage over 200 Russian journalism students in digital literacy campaigning in schools and communities

Events

• UK: we’re hosting online safety events with CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and Raceonline; we’re also participating in workshops organised by the UK Safer Internet Centre.
• Russia: we’re working with the Russia Safe Internet Centre and Russian Association of Electronic Communications to run a series of international expert panels at the Safer Internet Forum.
• Germany: Wieland Holfelder, Google Engineering Director, is keynoting a session on the platform for safe internet use at the Safer Internet Event in Germany, organized by Bitkom and the Ministry of Consumer Protection (BMELV).

Research

• UK: we're launching, together with YAW-CRC, new research funded by Google into how parents can keep their families safe online, and become more digitally literate themselves.

Technology

• France: we’re supporting the work of e-Enfance.org on a new Google Chrome browser extension called NetEcoute, which will make it easy for youngsters to start an online discussion with a helpline counselor.

These initiatives are part of our global outreach on Safer Internet Day - but we hope that each of them will - in their own way - be a step forward for online safety education.

Posted by Laura Bononcini, Senior Policy Analyst, Google

More information on our privacy policy changes

Update, Tuesday 28 February, 14:30 CET: Today we received a letter from the CNIL, and we have responded with this letter.

Update, Friday 20 April, 14:15 CEST: We have now responded to all the questions from the CNIL with this letter and this appendix.

Update, Thursday 21 June, 14:35 CEST: We have responded to the second set of questions from the CNIL with this letter.

Last night we received a letter from the Jacob Kohnstamm, Chairman of the Europe's Article 29 Working Party, asking for additional information about the changes to our privacy policy.

We briefed most of the members of the working party in the weeks leading up to our announcement. None of them expressed substantial concerns at the time, but of course we're happy to speak with any data protection authority that has questions.

We have responded to Mr Kohnstamm with further information, which you can read here.

As we’ve said several times over the past week, while our privacy policies will change on 1st March, our commitment to our privacy principles is as strong as ever.

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

German Office of Information Security recommends Chrome

Last month, we published the core principles around Chrome security. This included commitments such as working with the internet community to help increase security for all web browsers, and continuing to design Chrome to offer multiple layers of defence against cyber attacks.



Today, we’re honoured that the BSI, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, has highlighted several of Chrome’s security features in a best-practice guide for Windows users. The report is part of the BSI’s ongoing efforts to improve cyber security.

According to the report, the browser is the central component for accessing any online service on the web, and a common entry point for cyber attacks. In order to reduce the risk, the BSI recommends that users install a browser with sandbox technology.

“The browser that currently most consistently implements this protection is Google Chrome,” the report states. “Comparable mechanisms in other browsers are either weaker, or non-existent. By using Google Chrome...you can significantly reduce the risk of a successful IT attack.”

In addition to Chrome’s sandbox, the guide also points to the importance of Chrome’s auto-update feature.

“Equally positive is the auto-update functionality of Google Chrome, which includes a bundled version of the Adobe Flash Player,” the report continues. “By bundling it with Chrome, the Adobe Flash Player will also always be kept up to date.”

We hope our efforts to improve the security and privacy of our users continue to help make the web a better place.

Posted by Dr. Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director Google Germany, and Travis McCoy, Chrome Security Team

Mind the Gap: Encouraging women to study engineering

Women make up more than half the global population, but hold fewer than a third of the world’s engineering jobs. In the U.S., female students comprise fewer than 15 percent of all Advanced Placement computer science test takers. Even in high-tech Israel, few girls choose computer science. Not only is this a loss to companies like Google and everyone who benefits from a continually developing web; it's also a lost opportunity for girls.

Beginning in 2008, a group of female engineers at Google in Israel decided to tackle this problem. We established the “Mind the Gap!” program, aimed at encouraging girls to pursue math, science and technology education. In collaboration with the Israeli National Center for Computer Science Teachers, we began organizing monthly school visits for different groups of girls to the Google office and annual tech conferences at local universities and institutes. The girls learn about computer science and technology and get excited about its applications, as well as have a chance to talk with female engineers in an informal setting and see what the working environment is like for them.



Since we started this program over three years ago, we’ve hosted more than 1,100 teenage girls at our office, and an additional 1,400 girls at three annual conferences held in leading universities. These 2,500 students represent 100 schools from all sectors and from all over the country: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tira, Beer-Sheva, Jerusalem, Nazareth and more; what they have in common is the potential to become great computer scientists.

The results are encouraging. For instance, some 40 percent of the girls who participated in last year’s conference later chose computer science as a high school major.

We encourage people in other countries, at other companies and in other scientific disciplines to see how they could replicate this program. You can read more at the project site. Currently, we are working with the Google in Education group to expand the program to more offices globally and get even more young women excited about computer science. The difference we can make is real: At one of our first visits three years ago, we met a 10th grade student named Keren who enjoyed math but had never considered computer science as a high school major. Last month, Keren informed us that the visit made such an impact on her, she decided to change her major to computer science. “Talking to women in the field helped me change my mind,” she said.

Posted by Michal Segalov, Software Engineer at Google’s R&D Center, Israel

2012 global award winners RISE to the top

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Our business at Google is rooted in science education so we’re passionate about supporting organizations that are expanding access to these fields, especially for students who might not have the opportunity otherwise. The annual Google Roots in Science and Engineering (RISE) program supports organizations running innovative STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and CS (computer science) enrichment programs for K-12 and university students around the world.

This year, the Google in Education group received a record number of inspiring applications for RISE. We expanded the awards to include Sub-Saharan Africa, and in total, we’re awarding more than $340,000 in funding to 13 U.S., eight European and five African organizations.

Our recipients are diverse, ranging from girls robotics teams building high-tech machinery in Nairobi to after-school programs that have students configuring cluster computers in Salt Lake City. Below are just a few of the outstanding organizations receiving RISE awards this year for their efforts in advancing CS and STEM education:

Europe

• Frauennetzwerk Informatik at Universität Passau, Passau, Germany. University students from Passau act as ambassadors for computer science, engineering and math by reaching out to juniors and seniors at their former high schools and running workshops on topics like robotics and mobile app development. Ambassadors go on to serve as mentors to the students throughout their high school and college careers.
• The Centre for Academic Achievement, Dublin, Ireland. This center runs free after school educational classes in a university setting for bright primary school students from disadvantaged areas. Each term, students from 32 local primary schools have the opportunity to study science, math and engineering subjects and are encouraged to pursue college degrees in the future.

Sub Saharan Africa

• Savana Signatures, Tamale, Ghana. Savana Signatures educates youth and women, building their capacity to access information for the benefit of Ghana’s social and economic development.
• Fundi Bots, Kampala, Uganda. Fundi Bots is a technology outreach program for students in high school and university that uses robotics to introduce young children to the endless possibilities of technology in both their day-to-day lives and potential careers.

United States

• Santa Clara Valley Society of Women Engineers, San Jose, California. GetSET is a program created for underrepresented ethnic minority girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to expose them to engineering while building self confidence through leadership workshops, tours of technology companies and participation in team-building exercises.
• Saturday Academy, Portland, Oregon. Saturday Academy serves 2nd-12th grade students from Oregon and SW Washington with high quality and creative learning opportunities taught by STEM experts, including hands-on, real world activities that create meaningful connections between academic content and practical application.

Organizations interested in applying for 2013 funding can sign up for more information here. We look forward to hearing about all the great work being done in CS and STEM education.

Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K-12 Education Outreach