Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
More researchers dive into the digital humanities
Monday, December 20, 2010
When we started Google Book Search back in 2004, we were driven by the desire to make books searchable and discoverable online. But as that corpus grew -- we’ve now scanned approximately 10% of all books published in the modern era -- we began to realize how useful it would be for scholarly work. Humanities researchers have started to ask and answer questions about history, society, linguistics, and culture via quantitative techniques that complement traditional qualitative methods.
We’ve been gratified at the positive response to our initial forays into the digital humanities, from our
Digital Humanities Research Awards
earlier this year, to the
Google Books Ngram Viewer
and datasets made public just last week. Today we’re pleased to announce a second set of awards focusing on European universities and research centers.
We’ve given awards to 12 projects led by 15 researchers at 13 institutions:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
. Annotated Corpora in Studying and Teaching Variation and Change in Academic German, Anke Lüdeling
LIMSI/CNRS, Université Paris Sud
. Building Multi-Parallel Corpora of Classical Fiction, François Yvon
Radboud Universiteit
. Extracting Factoids from Dutch Texts, Suzan Verberne
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Jožef Stefan Institute
. Language models for historical Slovenian, Matija Ogrin and Tomaž Erjavec
Université d'Avignon, Université de Provence
. Robust and Language Independent Machine Learning Approaches for Automatic Annotation of Bibliographical References in DH Books, Articles and Blogs, Patrice Bellot and Marin Dacos
Université François Rabelais-Tours
. Full-text retrieval and indexation for Early Modern French, Marie-Luce Demonet
Université François Rabelais-Tours
. Using Pattern Redundancy for Text Transcription, Jean-Yves Ramel and Jean-Charles Billaut
Universität Frankfurt
. Towards a “Corpus Caucasicum”: Digitizing Pre-Soviet Cyrillic-Based Publications on the Languages of the Caucasus, Jost Gippert
Universität Hamburg
. CLÉA: Literature Éxploration and Annotation Environment for Google Books Corpora, Jan-Christoph Meister
Universität zu Köln
. Integrating Charter Research in Old and New Media, Manfred Thaller
Universität zu Köln
. Validating Metadata-Patterns for Google Books' Ancient Places and Sites, Reinhard Foertsch
University of Zagreb
. A Profile of Croatian neo-Latin, Neven Jovanović
Projects like these, blending empirical data and traditional scholarship, are springing up around the world. We’re eager to see what results they yield and what broader impact their success will have on the humanities.
Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager for Google Books
Supporting research and innovation in Europe’s universities
Thursday, December 16, 2010
As a company that
started out in academia
, we’ve always known that a lot of the world’s best computer scientists don’t work in the private sector (or in Silicon Valley, for that matter!) but in universities and research centres around the world.
Over the years, Google has invested in a large network of research and development centres around the globe, including 11 centres across Europe, Russia and Israel - and our
newly announced centre
in Paris. This diversity of engineering locations means that we’re able to create culturally diverse teams - and
fun working environments
. But they also enable us to stay closely in touch - and collaborate - with academics undertaking cutting-edge research at universities across Europe.
This week - building on an initiative we blogged about
earlier this year
- we announced nearly €3.7 million in research funding via our
Focused Research Awards
scheme. The grants are going to 14 universities and research centres in Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.
The
Focused Research Awards
are unrestricted gifts that provide support for one to three years, and have been awarded to researchers in disciplines including software engineering, mathematical optimisation, information extraction and integration - and policy areas such as privacy. Recipients also get access to Google tools, technologies and expertise.
The list of research projects that have received focused research awards in Europe includes:
German Academy of Science and Technology (Acatech)
:
User-centred Online Privacy
, Henning Kagermann
M
ax Planck Institut Informatik, Germany
:
Robust and Scalable Fact Discovery from Web Sources
, Gerhard Weikum, Martin Theobald, Rainer Gemulla
Saarland University, Germany
:
Test Amplification
, Andreas Zeller, Gordon Fraser
EPFL, Switzerland
:
Automated Software Reliability Services
, George Candea
CNRS, France and nine universities in France, Germany and Italy
:
Mathematical Optimization
: Thorsten Koch (Zuse Institute of Berlin), Stefan Nickel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Leena Suhl (University of Paderborn), Narendra Jussien (Ecole des Mines de Nantes), Pierre Bonami (CNRS/Université d’Aix/Marseille), Pierre Lopez (CNRS/LAAS in Toulouse), Denis Trystram (INP Grenoble), Safia Kedad-Sidhoum (LIP6 in Paris), Andrea Lodi (University of Bologna).
University of Cambridge, UK
:
Security-Oriented Analysis of Application Programs
, Steven Hand, Robert Watson
Alongside our Focused Research Awards programme, we provide grants for more than 200 smaller research projects every year, with recent awards highlighted in our
research blog
. These awards typically provide partial funding for PhD students. Google also supports 40 computer science PhDs worldwide through our
PhD Fellowship Programmes
, and currently supports 14 students in Europe. We also host over 20
faculty members on sabbatical
each year world-wide, enabling them to work with Google engineering and policy teams on special projects.
Our hope is that building close connections with universities and researchers will support innovation in Europe - and extend the research capabilities of both Google’s engineers and our colleagues in academia. You can find more information about all of our research programs on our
University Relations site
.
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations and David Harper, Head of University Relations (EMEA)
Open government = better politics?
Monday, December 13, 2010
Earlier this year, I blogged about the
Internet & Society Co://aboratory
, a new thinktank here in Germany that brings together independent Internet experts from academia, civil society and the private sector. Google initiated the group and funds its organisation. The Co://aboratory was set up to contribute to the public debate in Germany about how the Internet transforms our daily lives - and how we can ensure it continues to be an engine of innovation and economic growth. Back in July, the Co://aboratory released its
first report
on the state of online innovation culture.
Now, the second circle of
38 experts
has published a second paper, entitled
Open Statecraft - Better Politics Through Open Government?
It examines how the Internet can enable citizens to participate more in the political process. It asks whether open government concepts from other countries can be transferred successfully to Germany - and discusses whether more open policy-making also leads to better policy.
The report includes data from a specially commissioned
Dimap
survey of more than 1000 German voters (full results downloadable
here
), which shows that:
Nearly three-quarters of Germans want to be more involved in making decisions at a national level. Within this group, 85% of 25-34 year olds want to participate more in the political process via the Internet - as do 73% of 55-64 year olds.
Supporters of the German opposition parties are more in favour of open government initiatives than supporters of the current federal government coalition.
69% of people said they would want to participate if - for example - municipalities were to let local residents vote on planned projects or investments
The question whether to open up access to government data - and more specifically, whether national and state authorities should make all of their (non-personally identifying) information publicly available - is still not clear to the wider public. 45% were in favour of open data, but 44% opposed the idea.
On the face of it, it probably isn’t that surprising that German citizens want to be more involved in political decision-making. But it is interesting - especially given recent debates about the Internet in German society - that a high proportion of people, across age groups, want to get involved in the political process
via the web
. There are already numerous examples around the world of how the web can bring citizens, activists and politicians into closer and more productive dialogue - and Google supports and encourages this trend, both by organising
events
and through tools such as
Google Moderator
.
It’s surprising that people do not yet fully understand the benefits of opening up access to public sector information. It seems there is a need for better information about just how useful public data reuse can be - whether you’re talking about
raw weather modelling data
,
public transport schedules
or platforms that enable cool visualizations of public data (
Mapnificent
,
Google Public Data Explorer
).
The Co://aboratory is now undertaking its third initiative, due out in March 2011. This report will look at how the concept of copyright can be updated to better reflect the challenges and opportunities of the information age. In the meantime, please do take a few minutes to explore the
Co://aboratory website
and read the reports.
[BTW: if you’re not a German speaker, you might want to use
Google Translate
to take a closer look at some of the links I’ve included in this post.]
Posted by: Dr Max Senges, Public Affairs and Internet Policy, Google Germany
Making copyright work better online
Thursday, December 2, 2010
(Cross-posted from the
Google Public Policy Blog
)
There are more than
1 trillion unique URLs
on the web and
more than 35 hours of video uploaded
to YouTube every minute. It’s some pretty fantastic stuff - content that makes us
think
,
laugh
, and
learn new things
. Services we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago - iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, and many others - help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world.
But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright. As the web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.
That’s why today we’re announcing four changes that we’ll be implementing over the next several months:
We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours.
We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit
DMCA
takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our
“counter-notice”
tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.
We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in
Autocomplete
.
While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.
We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review.
We have always
prohibited
the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.
We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results.
Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of
making authorised content more accessible
on the Internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.
These changes build on our continuing efforts, such as
Content ID
, to give rightsholders choice and control over the use of their content, and we look forward to further refining and improving our processes in ways that help both rightsholders and users.
Posted by Kent Walker, General Counsel
Labels
Academics
18
Advertising
10
Africa
26
Austria
7
Belgium
25
Big Tent
11
Bosnia and Herzegovina
2
Browsers
1
Brussels Tech Talk
7
Bulgaria
5
Campus
2
Child Safety
24
Cloud computing
17
Competition
16
Computer Science
35
Computing Heritage
37
Consumers
11
controversial content
2
COP21
1
copyright
34
Crisis Response
2
Culture
116
Czech Republic
16
Data Centre
15
Denmark
4
Digital News Initiative
6
Digital Single Market
1
Diversity
7
Economic Impact of the Internet
57
Economy
24
Elections
7
Energy + Environment
16
Engineering
6
Environment
5
Estonia
6
European Commission
21
European Parliament
14
European Union
104
exhibitions
1
Finland
13
France
77
Free Expression
88
Free flow of information
47
German
1
Germany
65
Google for Entrepreneurs
9
Google in Europe Blog
846
Google Play
1
Google TechTalk
2
Google Translate
1
Google Trends
3
Google+
4
Greece
16
Growth Engine
3
Hackathon
3
Hungary
16
Innovation
70
Internet Governance
7
IP
10
Ireland
16
Israel
17
Italy
42
Journalism
34
Latvia
1
Lithuania
1
Luxembourg
3
Maps
17
Middle East
18
Netherlands
6
News
2
News Lab
1
North Africa
6
Norway
3
online
1
Online Safety
2
Open data
8
Open Government
7
Open source
2
Poland
24
Portugal
6
Power of Data
25
privacy
49
Publishing
30
Right to be Forgotten
9
Rio+20
1
Romania
3
Russia
18
Safer Internet Day
4
San Marino
1
Science
5
Security
7
Single Market
7
Slovakia
16
Slovenia
2
SMEs
24
Spain
39
Startups
6
State of the Union
2
STEM Education
36
Street View
38
Surveillance
1
Sweden
13
Switzerland
11
Telecoms
11
The Netherlands
4
Tourism
1
Transparency
12
Tunisia
4
Turkey
3
Ukraine
3
United Kingdom
94
Vatican
2
Youth
2
YouTube
42
Archive
2016
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
More researchers dive into the digital humanities
Supporting research and innovation in Europe’s uni...
Open government = better politics?
Making copyright work better online
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
