Google on Designing Tech Policy for AI

Greetings from the"Special Conversation with Kent Walker: President of Global Affairs @ Google" hosted by the Australian National University. Dr Walker cautioned against over regulation of AI, suggesting this be by application depending on the output, not input. Regulation of technology is not easy. The Australian Computer Society elected me a fellow for my work on public policy for Internet regulation (or it may have been for bravery fronting up to explain the Internet to the Senate).

Dr Walker gave the example of requiring someone to walk with a red flag in front of motor vehicle as an example of over-regulation. However, this was at a time when roads were not designed for motor vehicles, there were no safety standards for cars, or driving tests. It was not acceptable then, and I suggest not acceptable now to see how many people the technology mames and kills, before considering regulation. That may sound an exxeration, but the Australian government is acquiring up to 10,000 smart sea mines, each capable of sinking a ship, along with funding the development of robot aircraft and submarines. 

Dr Walker argued for shorter qualifications to keep up with needs and provide more flexibility. 

Presumably Dr Walker will be having a similar discussion with lawmakers in Parliament House, just up the road. It is useful to know the thinking of one of the companies involved in developing AI. Google was caught out by the popularity of Chat GPT and it is good to see them now taking the issues seriously.

Researching Floods with AI

Dr Yossi Matias, 
Head of Google Research 

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra where Yossi Matias,  Head of Google Research is visiting to talk about their work. 

One example is Google's flood and fire information for the public. I first came on Google's work in this area 10 years at an unconference at ANU. I had helped with an emergency management system so was bemused when someone I took to be a school student got up and talked about emergency management. It turned out they were a Google engineer with extensive experience.

Google Sees More Training for Workers in 2040

Alphabeta's report "FUTURE SKILLS" (November 2018), for Google, suggests the average Australian of 2040 will spend three hours a week training, and increase of one third on today. The report suggests that much of this will be upskilling and reskilling by older workers. The authors suggest skills will complement artificial intelligence, with the human workers contributing adaptability, team work, creativity, and integrity. Also they suggest this training will be on-the job, and short flexible courses, not at TAFE or university.

This is a future which, in 2019, I am already living. To retain my certified computer professional status (and limited legal liability), I am required to undertake thirty hours of professional development a year. However, over the last ten years I have also completed formal studies, which would bring the total up to about three hours a week.

While I am one of those older workers Google refers to, I suggest that younger workers will also need constant training. In the last ten years I have been retrained from a generalist computer professional, to an educator of computer professionals.

As the report suggests I train computer professionals in adaptability, team work, creativity, and integrity. I was trained on the job by the Australian Public Service in computing. However, I now design formal vocational and university courses, and learning modules, which can complement on the job training.

With improvements in online education tools and techniques, it is possible to provide a formal accredited tertiary education, made up of small flexible modules, incorporating workplace experience. This doesn't have to be a workplace versus campus, short versus long, vocational versus university choice: students can now have it all.

Google Wants Coders Who Can Communicate

Dr Will Uther, from Google Sydney, talked to the PHD students at the Australian National University this afternoon about "Some things a PhD student needs to know before applying at Google".  One point he made was that PHDs need to practice their coding skills for Google job interviews. Also he suggested trying some of the problems in Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions (Gayle Laakmann McDowell, 2011), for practice.

What Google Wants in a Job Applicant

Yesterday, I speculated about what Google wants in an applicant for a job. But on 27 February 2015, at 3pm, Dr Will Uther, from Google Sydney, is visiting the Australian National University to tell us exactly what Google is looking for in staff.

Some things a PhD student needs to know before applying at Google

Dr Will Uther (Google Sydney)

CECS SEMINAR SERIES

DATE: 2015-02-27
TIME: 15:00:00 - 16:00:00 ...

ABSTRACT:
I interview a range of people applying for jobs at Google. There are some common mistakes that seem to be made by PhD students who are applying from Australian Universities (+ NICTA) for software engineering positions at Google. I'd like to try and point out some of what Google is looking for so that PhD students can do better in their interviews.
BIO:
Will finished his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and then was hired back to NICTA/UNSW as a Researcher in the Machine Learning group in 2003. His research interests revolve around Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcement Learning and Robotics. He competed in the Legged League of the RoboCup robotic soccer competition - including world championships in 1998 (at CMU) and 2003 (at UNSW). He competed in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge self-driving vehicle competition. In 2013 he move to Google Australia where he currently works with the Google Maps APIs.

EdX/Google Open Course Software

The Massive Open On-line Course (MOOC) consortium EdX has announced they will work with Google on software and a course provision website "mooc.org" (10 September 2013).  EdX and Google will jointly develop the "Open edX" software and make it available to those not in the EdX consortium via MOOC.org. Google will collaborate on research into student learning and technology.

While not mentioned in the announcement, one of the EdX members is the Australian National University (ANU), where I have been looking at combining synchronous and asynchronous e-leaning. Also I would like to offer a free version of my course "ICT Sustainability", which is run by ANU in Australia as COMP7310 and by Athabasca University in Canada as COMP635.

The EdX/Google partnership makes a lot of sense. EdX's software has been slow to develop and Google has released some rubbish attempts at a MOOC. This partnership will hopefully combine the university's expertise in eduction and Google's in large scale software.

ANU Graduates Talk About Working at Google

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where graduate Nigel Tao is talking about his work on software development at Google. Each year Google visits the ANU campus to recruit computer science graduates.

Unlike many corporate recruiting campaigns, this has a local flavor by alumni of the university who work in Google's Sydney office. Google recruits graduates with degrees in computer science, commerce and/or business. The staff in Sydney undertake development of Google software, as well as product support. There is a special Australia Students Google jobs page. Google have an interesting approach to staff selection, where after the preliminaries are dealt with by human resources staff the applicant is interviewed by phone or on-line by engineers.

Nigel started by pointing out that in his daily work he spent a lot of time reading, both text and other people's computer code. At the end of each day he posted a quote of the day on the internal Google+ system. The quotes were designed to make a point short and succinctly as well as be entertaining.

Nigel talked about Google Wave which he worked on, but was one of Google's failures as a product. Wave was technically very sophisticated, but too much so to be popular. I attended several Wave seminars with the developers and found it very hard to use. Google is one of the few large companies which is willing to admit when it makes a mistake, learns and moves on. I assume the Google+ is the replacement for Wave: it is much simpler, less sophisticated and moderately successful.

One of the much smaller scale problems Nigel mentioned was the lack of consistency with how an end of line is indicated on computer systems. This can be incited by CR, CRLF, LF. These characters are hangovers from the early days of computing with mechanical teletypewriters, which had one code "Carriage Return" (CR) to return the printing head to the start of the line and " line feed" to  move the paper up one line. Different computer makers used one, the other, or both of these characters to indicate the end of a line of input text, which to this day causes problems of comparability.

Nigel mentioned the Apple Newton MessagePad an early 1990s hand held computer which failed as a product and was ridiculed in the press, cartoons and comics (but was the forerunner of the Apple iPhone). He pointed out that it is easy to see something wrong in retrospect.

Nigel pointed out that software engineers don't like to do documentation.

Nigel's talk was entertaining and contained much more credible content about IT than the average corporate presentation.