Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
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
Our thoughts on the European Commission review
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first by providing the best possible answers as quickly as possible - and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. However, given our success and the disruptive nature of our business, it’s entirely understandable that we’ve caused unease among other companies and caught the attention of regulators. Today, the European Commission has announced that they will continue to review complaints about Google's search and search advertising. We respect their process and will continue to work closely with the Commission to answer their questions.
So that everyone understands how we approach search and ads ranking, we thought it would be helpful to state clearly the principles that guide our business:
Answering users' queries accurately and quickly is our number one goal
. Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our traditional “ten blue links”, and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in “weather in London” or “15 grams in ounces” you get the answers directly (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more complex questions just as fast and as clearly. We believe ads are information too, which is why we work so hard to ensure that the advertisements you see are directly relevant to what you are looking for;
We built Google for users, not websites
. It may seem obvious, but people sometimes forget this -- not every website can come out on top, or even appear on the first page of our results, so there will almost always be website owners who are unhappy about their rankings. The most important thing is that we satisfy our users.
We are always clear when we have been paid for promoting a product or service.
Before we launched Google, many search engines took money for inclusion in their results without making that clear to users. We have never done that and we always distinguished advertising content from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and types of content, we promise to continue to be transparent about payments.
We aim to be as transparent as possible
. We provide more information about how our ranking works than any other major search engine, through our
webmaster central site
,
blog
,
diagnostic tools
,
support forum
, and
YouTube channel
. We give our advertisers information about the
ad auction
, tips on how to improve their
ad quality scores
, and the ability to
simulate their bids
to give them more transparency. And we’re committed to increasing that transparency going forward. At the same time, we don’t want to help people game our system. We do everything we can to ensure that the integrity of our results isn’t compromised.
Our final principle: the only constant is change. We’ve been working on this stuff for well over a decade, and in that time our search technology has improved by leaps and bounds. Our results are continuing to evolve from a list of websites to something far more dynamic. Today there’s real-time content, automatically translated content, local content (especially important for mobile devices), images, videos, books, and a whole lot more. Users can search by voice -- and in a variety of languages. And we’ve developed new ad formats such as
product listing ads
and new pricing models such as
cost-per-action
. We cannot predict where search and online advertising will be headed, but we know for sure that they won’t stay the same. By staying focused on innovation we can continue to make search even better -- for the benefit of users everywhere.
Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Udi Manber, Vice President, Engineering
Un soutien solide a la culture française
Friday, November 26, 2010
(English follows)
Hier, dans un hôtel particulier somptueusement décoré au coeur de Paris, siège de la Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, j’ai pris part à un évènement qui illustre parfaitement l’engagement de Google pour la promotion et le soutien de la culture française et de ses traditions.
YouTube, la
SACD
, la
SCAM
and
l’ADAGP
- trois sociétés de gestion collectives représentant un large spectre d’auteurs français, créateurs, compositeurs et artistes - ont signé un accord de soutien aux auteurs français. Ce partenariat vise a encourager une diffusion plus large d'émissions et de films français sur la plateforme YouTube en France.
En permettant aux auteurs de bénéficier d'une juste rémunération pour l'exploitation de leurs œuvres, cet accord encourage la création de programmes originaux français et leur diffusion sur Internet.
Pour l’occasion, les signataires ont tenu une conférence de presse sous l'égide du dramaturge
Beaumarchais
, premier défenseur des droits d’auteurs en France et représenté ce jour-la par un buste majestueux ornant la pièce qui accueillait cet événement. « C’est un accord qui permet de concilier le droit d’auteur tel qu’il a été imaginé par Beaumarchais avec le développement et l’utilisation des nouvelles technologies », déclare le cinéaste
Bertrand Tavernier
.
Le jour-même, le Ministre de la Culture Frédéric Mitterrand a salué l'accord annoncé entre YouTube, la SACD, la SCAM et l’ADAGP lors de
son discours
de clôture des Assises du Numérique organisées hier à Paris-Dauphine: « Je ne peux que saluer la démarche entreprise par certains de ces acteurs majeurs, qui intègrent progressivement les principes du droit d’auteur dans leur stratégie, en passant notamment des accords avec les sociétés d’auteurs françaises. Je veux parler bien sûr de l’accord qui vient d’être signé entre YouTube, la SACD, la SCAM et l’ADAGP.»,
Pour Jean-Marc Tassetto, récemment nommé Directeur Général de Google France, les partenariats conclus ces derniers mois avec les artistes, auteurs et éditeurs soulignent l’engagement réel de Google pour la culture française.
Il fait ainsi référence à l’accord stratégique annoncé la semaine dernière avec Hachette pour la numérisation des œuvres en langue française dont les droits sont contrôlés par
Hachette Livres
mais aussi à celui passé le mois dernier avec la
Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique
afin de proposer plus de contenus français sur la plateforme YouTube.
Beaumarchais aurait sans doute esquissé un sourire complice hier matin.
Par Christophe Muller, directeur des partenariats YouTube Europe du Sud, de l’Est, Moyen-Orient et Afrique
---------------------
Supporting French culture
Yesterday, in a lavishly decorated former palace in central Paris, the home of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, I took part in an event that offered a perfect picture of just how serious Google is about supporting French culture and traditions in the internet age.
YouTube and
SACD
,
SCAM
and
ADAGP
- three associations representing French screenwriters, composers and other creative artists - signed an agreement to put more TV shows and movies online in France. The deal improves YouTube’s access to French content - and allows French creators to profit.
Appropriately, the signatories gave a press conference sitting below a gilded mirror and in front of a bust of the 18th-century Ancien Regime dramatist
Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
- someone who also fought hard in the courts to protect his copyright. Well known French movie director
Betrand Tavernier
described the agreement as “allowing us to reconcile copyright as Beaumarchais defined it with the development and use of new technologies.”
It was great to hear support too from French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, who saluted the accord in a
speech
. “I can only welcome the approach taken by some of these major players, who are gradually incorporating the principles of copyright law into their agreements with French authors' societies. I refer of course to the agreement signed between YouTube and the SACD, SCAM and ADAGP. "
For Jean-Marc Tassetto, Google’s recently appointed managing director for France, the event represented another important step forward in the partnerships we are signing with artists, authors and publishers in France. Last week, we announced a breakthrough deal with France’s largest publisher
Hachette
and last month we signed a deal with
SACEM
, a French musicians association to bring more French music videos to YouTube.
Without a doubt, Beaumarchais would be smiling.
Posted by Christophe Muller, Director of Partnerships for YouTube in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa
Partnering to put out-of-print French works back in circulation
Thursday, November 18, 2010
It’s astonishing, but true: approximately 75% of the world’s books are in-copyright, but out-of-print. That can make things pretty difficult for people who want to find those books and read and enjoy them. Not to mention for the authors and publishers who created them and want to sell them and see them accessed and valued.
Yesterday morning in Paris, Google and
Hachette Livre
, one of France’s largest publishers, signed a Memorandum of Understanding that both companies believe will breathe new life into Hachette’s catalogue of dormant and commercially unavailable books. Within six months, we aim to sign a more detailed agreement which we believe will benefit French authors, publishers, booksellers, researchers, academics and the reading public - and will increase public access to cultural works.
Under the terms of the MoU, Hachette will determine which of its out-of-print works it wants scanned; these books will then be scanned by Google and made searchable via Google Books. Hachette will decide which books are to be made available for purchase via Google Editions. Hachette and Google will also be able to make these books available for other services.
Finally, French booksellers will be able to sell Hachette’s out-of-print works electronically and Hachette intends to make digital copies of scanned works available to public institutions such as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France - thus contributing to the growing corpus of French culture available online.
This might just be a first step, but it’s an important one to us, and to Hachette. We’re keen to work with the creative industries to find new business models and new solutions for increasing the value of public access to cultural works. We hope to sign similar MOUs with other publishers throughout France.
Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnerships Development Manager, France
Friday 19/11/2010, updated para 3 to better reflect the MoU
Learned lunches: the Oxford Internet Institute Lectures
Monday, November 8, 2010
Game theory in advertising content and pricing; the
Panopticon
implications of the Internet as our digital memory; and bringing 30 year old guidelines on privacy into the Internet age - these topics and more are addressed by leading academics in the new series of
Oxford Internet Institute
lectures, hosted by Google Brussels.
Established in 2001 as an academic centre for the study of the societal implications of the Internet, the Institute’s research faculty devotes its time to the study of the economical, social, political and ethical questions shaping the Internet today.
The first lecture of the autumn series was given by
Dr Greg Taylor
, an economist whose research focuses on the microeconomics of search and other online marketplaces, and the social science implications of commercial interactions. Greg presented his
study
of the relationship between the information content of online advertisements and the fee structure used to price them, looking at pay per-click, pay per-impression and pay per-scale.
On November 9th, we will welcome
Christopher Kuner
, Head of the International Privacy and Information Management Practice at law firm Hunton & Williams. Christopher will discuss the Regulation of Transborder Data Flows in the framework of the OECD privacy guidelines and will debate whether the policies that form the basis of today’s privacy and data protection laws are in line with the realities of the Internet age. You can sign up for his lecture
here
.
On December 8th,
Graeme B. Dinwoodie
, Professor of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law and Professorial Fellow of St. Peter’s College Oxford, will discuss keyword advertising and trademark law. You can sign up for his lecture
here
.
The 2011 calender will kick off on February 8th with a lecture from
Christopher Millard
, Professor of Privacy and Information Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, and researcher at the
QMUL Cloud Legal Project
. Christopher will discuss the shift of computing intelligence to the Internet cloud and the key legal and regulatory challenges of controlling and processing data in the cloud. The registration form for his lecture is
here
.
If you would like to be added to the mailing list for the Oxford Internet Institute lecture series, please contact Tim Davies: tim.davies [at] oii.ox.ac.uk
Posted by: Angela Steen, Policy Analyst, Google Brussels
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