Google comes to Canberra

Pamela Fox, Maps API Support Engineer at Google, will talk on "Living in the Cloud: Hosting Data & Apps Using the Google Infrastructure" at the ANU in Canberra, 14 May 2009. Google staff talk at ANU regularly on techncial issues and several students have gone on to work for Google. Pamela was respo0nsible for a Google Maps mashup used for Mapping the Victorian fires. I suggested the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission talk to the Google Mapping people and that seems to have happened as media respots suggest that the Commission will make use of Google maps.

Google's Infrastructure and Google Traffic

Google presented a Tech Talk at the ANU in Canberra today. Google comes to the university once a year to give some insights to how they do ICT and to recruit students.

This year's talk centered on Google's mapping function, which is developed in Australia. This can be used to easily develop mapping applications, such as for tracking vehicles.

Google's execution model uses racks of x86 computers, each of which has an IDE disk. A custom job scheduler allocates tasks to the CPUs, with the code written in C+. This is in many ways like an old fashioned job scheduling system, and in other ways like the systems used for managing scientific processing systems with very large numbers of CPUs. Google has centers distributed around the world, with the system routing jobs around problems, up to the loss of whole centers.

One interesting point is that HTTP is used for managing the jobs. Also there was a reference to "shards" of data. 64Mbyte chunks of files are allocated by the Google file system. Interestingly the same disk drives on the local clusters seem to be used both for the local temporary files and the long term Google file store.

One of the audience had used the open source version of the Google system for running a government application.

Google has jobs at its office in Sydney for software engineers, UNIX/Linux application administrators and product managers. There are also internships, graduate opportunities and a special scholarship for females. About one third of Google's staff come directly from university. Google has 60 engineers in Sydney and 140 other staff. Overseas students are welcome, provided they meet Australian immigration requirements. Google staff may also work at other offices around the world.

At question time I asked if there could be Australian involvement in the Sahana 2008 Google Summer of Code. This is to add mapping and other functions to the Sahana disaster management system (which I help with). The answer was that this tended to be a northern hemisphere event, but Google Australia is keen to foster Australian involvement.

Perhaps there would also be scope for Green ICT projects with the ACS Green ICT Group and Computers Off Australia (also Google has a new green building in Sydney). One possibility would be some online training materials to teach ICT people about power saving technology.

ps: Last year Google suggested ANU could replace its computer systems with Google's, giving each student a Google email address. There was also an emphasis on the Google free lunch and Google ethos. This did not go well with the audience and this year they did not make the same mistake. The presentation had much more of an Australian flavor to it.

Google Came to Canberra

On Thursday, Will Blott and Alan Noble from Google's Sydney office and Neetu Sabharwal from their Global University Programs, visited the ANU in Canberra:

"Google Australia is looking to forge relationships with key universities as they now have a dedicated 'on campus' focus in Australia. Google is keen to explore opportunities to partner that will add value to students' experience and help develop computer science engineers for Australia. ".

The overall message from the visit is that Google is looking for staff who can write useful computer programs. They are happy to provide support to researchers, to offer students the opportunity to work with Google people, but in the end they want people who can write useful computer programs, not just research papers. This was a refreshingly down to earth view.

One aspect I found interesting was Google's global nature. The company has a US West Coast base. This results in some slightly annoying cultural aspects of their promotional material making them a bit like a cross between the McDonalds hamburger chain and The Wiggles. But Google is developing labs around the world which are growing rapidly. While the staff are physically located in one lab, they work with those in others.

National research offices for global corporations can have their problems. When I visited Microsoft Research Labs in Cambridge (UK), there seemed to be a fear that they would be out researched by low cost PHDs at Microsoft Beijing. Google use their company culture to attempt to overcome this.

One interesting aspect of having a Google center in Australia is that students from the Asian region at Australian universities might have a better access to Google scholarships and jobs than they would at home. There is a much smaller pool of students in Australia to compete for attention, than at an Indian or Chinese university. Once in the Google door, they then have access to the Google center in the home country.

Google Work With the ANU

Before Will and Alan gave a seminar, there was a discussion of possible areas for cooperation. Three areas I thought worth looking at were:

* Digital Mapping for the Public Good: Mobile phones for bushfire mapping, and applications for a GPS open source smart phone.

Bushfire mapping

One student evaluated what was needed for an emergency management web site.

One application is adaption of the Sentinel Fire Mapping System for mobile devices. An experimental alternative web interface is available.

* Broadband Applications for Non-Broadband Users: New web applications are tending to require more and continuous network access. This makes it more difficult for those still on slow dial up connections and for wireless users with slow intermittent connections. These could be people in developing nations, such as India and China, but also in regional parts of places like Australia. These might not sound like high value customers for a company to target, but many of the same techniques used to provide Internet applications to rich people with smart phones can also be used for slow dialup users.

An example is to modify the Sahana open source disaster management system for a phone.

* Cultural Links: As I found when teaching web design to museum workers in Samoa, there is great interest and value in providing web access to cultural material. But this tends to result in relatively dull, academic web sites, separate from the lively commercial stuff. Creating lively web sites is hard work. It should be possible to enhance the culturally worthy stuff, using some automated techniques like those applied commercially.

Two students undertook projects to provide a better web interface to Australian museum materials, including those which inspired the movie Ten Canoes.

One student now working out how to use this to provide more relevant links from the ACS Digital Library to services such as Google.

Google Apps

There was a little of a sales pitch in the visit, with Google saying how good their Google Apps Education Edition. I am not sure how many universities, or companies, would be convinced of this. While organizations may be willing to use free third party systems to allow people to interact remotely, they are reluctant to have these systems as part of their "mission critical" applications. They are even more reluctant to have their data stored on someone else's system at an indeterminate location in some other country under that country's laws.

A lot of this reluctance to use external providers is irrational. Shared and remote systems used to be an everyday part of computing. Google's system is likely to be more reliable than the average corporate system and there are benefits in having your data stored away from head office. In a recent case a hail storm closed several buildings in Canberra for days. The ANU campus was closed, but the computer systems kept working and people were able to work remotely. With something like Google Apps an organization would be able to keep working remotely (perhaps even via smart phones).

However, I have to admit that while I use Google's Blogger service to prepare my blog, I still get it to put the files on my own web server located in Australia. I like the comfort of my data on a system I am paying for in a location under the same laws. Google will be hampered in promoting Google Apps in Australia, as their data centers are located in other countries, and so mostly not subject to Australian law.

Google would have difficulty locating a data center in Australia, as there are limited international telecommunications links to Asia and the USA. Perhaps the ALP could dip into the Future Fund some more to pay for extra fibre optic links to the USA and Asia. Given the amount of traffic coming from Google, this may have a significant impact on Australian telecommunications.

Google Comes to Canberra

Next Thursday Will Blott and Alan Noble from Google's Sydney office are visiting the ANU in Canberra.

The first part of the visit sounds like a sales pitch: "Google Australia is looking to forge relationships with key universities as they now have a dedicated 'on campus' focus in Australia. Google is keen to explore opportunities to partner that will add value to students' experience and help develop computer science engineers for Australia. ".

The second part is a technical presentation on the development being done for Google in Sydney, including Google Maps.

While I have been aware of some involvement of search engine developers locally, it will be interesting to put faces to names. The Standford University lab where Google originated uses my web site to test new search technology. AT one stage I had to tell them to slow down the crawling of my site. Some people from ANU have gone to work at Google and Microsoft on search technology.

Relevant projects at ANU include ones on semantic web for cultural publishing, mobile phones for bushfire mapping, and applications for a GPS open source smart phone.

Semantic Web for Cultural Publishing

Two students undertook projects to provide a better web interface to Australian museum materials, including those which inspired the movie Ten Canoes.

One student now working out how to use this to provide more relevant links from the ACS Digital Library to services such as Google.

Bushfire mapping

One student evaluated what was needed for an emergency management web site.

One application is adaption of the Sentinel Fire Mapping System for mobile devices. An experimental alternative web interface is available.

Another application is to modify the Sahana open source disaster management system for a phone.

Corporate social networking with web 2.0?

The IT business media seem to be taking Web 2 seriously, so perhaps it is time to look at it. But there seem to be several concepts mixed up together (or perhaps "mashed up"?). Sorting this out may solve some problems in corporate document management and academic publishing.

One is the use of AJAX and similar technology to provide a more interactive interface via the web. Another is traditional office applications provided via the AJAX interface (such as word processors and spreadsheets). The third is on-line meeting places, such as MySpace.

There is also YouTube, a video sharing web site, which usually gets mentioned in the same articles but does not seem to have anything to do with social networking or corporate applications, but just gets included because it is popular.

Capitalizing on Interactivity, Mobility and Personalization by Donna Bogatin, January 22nd, 2007:

Categories: Business Models, Web 2.0, Culture, Google, Blogs, User-Generated Content, MySpace, Social Web, Amateur Content, Self-Promotion, Google Software Applications, Social Networking, Social Media

Is MySpace coming to the enterprise? According to Business Week it is.

On what does Steve Hamm base his assertion? IBM's announcement today of “Lotus Connections.”

IBM describes its offering as “the industry's first platform for business-grade social computing”:

Lotus Connections facilitates the gathering and exchange of information through professional networks, provides a dashboard-like view of current projects and connects users to like-minded communities. In addition, Lotus Connections removes the need for multiple social software applications, providing businesses with a single destination for building professional communities. ...

Corporate social networking is name of game with Lotus Connections, By Stan Beer, 24 January 2007 :

While Microsoft has been trying to win Web 2.0 corporate hearts and minds with Sharepoint Server, IBM threatens to steal the show with a new corporate tested offering called Lotus Connections. Web 2.0 in the consumer space is all about social networking as exemplified by sites such as MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook. Users of these sites with common interests can network, share ideas and provide each other with information that builds upon their mutual knowledge base.

The idea of using more interactive web applications makes sense in the corporate environment, provided you have the bandwidth and processing power to do it and accept its limitations. In some ways this is a step back to centralized mainframe computing, with the web application running on the server. If the central application stops, no one can do any work. This would be a good way to go if you have a new application to introduce across a wide network.

The extreme case seems to be to run your corporate service on someone else's web server. Google have a service called "Google Apps for Your Domain" which provides online tools for email, instant messaging and shared calendar. The idea is that the same tools used for Google's Gmail and others are available for use by companies, educational institutions and other organisations. They use the Google system in place of their own in-house software.

Google are not charging for these services, but presumably are doing it to make people more familiar with Google's services which have advertising on them:

Google Apps for Your Domain lets you offer private-labeled email, instant messaging and calendar accounts to all of your users, so they can share ideas and work more effectively. These services are all unified by the start page, a unique, dynamic page where your users can preview their inboxes and calendars, browse content and links that you choose, search the web, and further customize the page to their liking. You can also design and publish web pages for your domain.

I remain a bit skeptical of online meeting places as a business tool. Any form of collaboration requires skills from the participants. Not everyone has these skills and corporations will need to invest in training and staff to make them work. As well as cooperation, workplace involve competition. Perhaps rather than a social network, an information market would be a better model for the on-line workplace. Also much social networking takes place outside the organisation.

Are companies prepared to formalize and document online the process by which their staff trade information with other organisations? In many cases these contacts take place verbally and informally, while tacitly endorsed by superiors. If the contacts took place via a computer system, all transactions would be recorded and could be used in evidence in court. Much of these contacts would be considered unethical or illegal, limiting the scope for using a formal system.

What has this to do with corporate document management or academic publishing? Organisations, particularly governments, are having difficulty with staff filing electronic documents properly. Academia are having difficulty over the role of academic publishing. In both these cases the problem is that the records manager or librarian sees the document or publication as an end in itself.

But the office worker or academic author sees them just as part of a process; a byproduct of doing some work or some research. By incorporating the social network process in the system used to produce the document, keeping good records or publications will be a natural by product of the work. This is more than just an automated work flow which prompts you for some keywords before you can save a document.