by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, World
San Francisco : In the run-up to European Union (EU) elections in May 2019, Google will introduce a EU-specific Election Ads Transparency Report and searchable ad library to provide more information about who is purchasing election ads, whom they’re targeted to and how much money is being spent.
In May 2019, up to 350 million voters across the EU will take to the Parliamentary polls to elect 705 Members of European Parliament (MEPs).
“To support this democratic process, we’re rolling out products and programmes to help people get the information they need to cast their votes,” Lie Junius, Director, EU Public Policy and Government Relations, said in a blog post on Thursday.
Google will require ads that mention a political party, candidate or current officeholder, to make it clear to voters who are paying for the advertising.
“We’ll also introduce a new process to verify EU election advertisers to make sure they are who they say they are,” Junius added.
The company will also work with campaigns, elections officials, journalists, human rights organisations and others across the EU to ensure the security of the online platforms that they depend on.
“For the EU 2019 Parliamentary elections, we’re offering in-person security training to the most vulnerable groups, who face increased risks of phishing attacks,” said Google.
The company will walking them through Google’s Advanced Protection Programme and Project Shield, a free service that uses Google technology to protect news sites and free expression from DDoS attacks on the web.
“Google News Lab will collaborate with news organisations across all 27 countries to support online fact checking,” said the company.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Business Summit, Events, Investing, Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : US internet giant Google Inc. has said its Cloud CEO Diane Greene will not attend an upcoming international business conference to be held in Saudi Arabia.
The high-profile Future Investment Initiative (FII) Summit, dubbed as “Davos in the Desert” is scheduled for October 23-25 in Riyadh, Xinhua news agency reported.
Greene is among the latest list of big-name executives in Silicon Valley that have announced staying away from the FII after Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for Washington Post, reportedly disappeared from a Saudi consulate in Turkey on October 2.
Over the past week, many corporate leaders and executives have announced their decision to shun the Saudi tech summit.
Among them were Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, former AOL CEO and venture capitalist Steve Case, J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Ford Chairman Bill Ford, and Google Android creator Andy Rubin. They have cancelled their plans for attending the event in Saudi Arabia last week.
“We can confirm Diane Greene will not be attending the FII Summit,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, without specifying whether the decision was linked to the Khashoggi incident.
Turkey media said Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, vanished soon after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and was said to have been killed there.
The Saudi government has denied any role in the alleged killing of the Washington Post columnist.
The business summit is being hosted by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which has invested in some Silicon Valley tech firms such as Uber and other startups.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Deepening their partnership on development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Google is integrating Facebook’s open source Machine Learning (ML) PyTorch framework across its software and hardware tools for AI development.
PyTorch is a deep learning framework designed for easy and flexible experimentation and Facebook on Tuesday announced the preview release of an updated version of the framework – PyTorch 1.0.
The new partnership is aimed at making PyTorch framework work with Google’s custom computer chips for ML, dubbed Tensor Processing Units, or TPU, Fortune.com reported.
“In conjunction with today’s release of PyTorch 1.0 Preview, we are broadening support for PyTorch throughout Google Cloud’s AI platforms and services,” Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
ML developers use many different tools, and Goolge has integrated several of the most popular open source frameworks into its products and services, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, and XGBoost.
“Today, we’re pleased to announce that engineers on Google’s TPU team are actively collaborating with core PyTorch developers to connect PyTorch to Cloud TPUs,” Sheth said on the blog.
“The long-term goal is to enable everyone to enjoy the simplicity and flexibility of PyTorch while benefiting from the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency of Cloud TPUs,” he added.
PyTorch 1.0 accelerates the workflow involved in taking breakthrough research in AI to production deployment, Facebook said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Adding more context and control over “Search” results, Google is rolling out a set of major updates to “Google Feed” including a fresh look, improved features and a new name — “Discover” — both for desktop and mobile browsers.
Introduced last year, “Google Feed” surfaces relevant content to users, even when they are not searching for it.
“With this new name comes a fresh design that makes exploring your interests easier than ever,” Karen Corby, Group Product Manager, Search, Google wrote in a blog-post on Monday.
To customise what appears on “Discover” for users, the search engine giant would now provide more ideas, visual content and articles of their interests based on their search history.
With this redesign, Google has also added multi-lingual support to “Discover” to make the feature easier to understand and use for people of different dialects.
“We’re starting with support for English and Spanish in the U.S. and will expand to more languages and countries soon,” said Corby.
Google is bringing “Discover” to mobile browsers also “as your new mobile homepage where you can not only search, but also discover useful, relevant information and inspiration from across the web for the topics you care about most.”
The updates would reach users over the next few weeks, Corby added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | C S R, Corporate, Entrepreneurship, Markets, Social Entrepreneur, Social Media, Success Stories, Technology
Sundar Pichai
San Francisco : Facing backlash from employees for its reported plan to enter China with a censored version of its search engine, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed them in an internal meeting and informed that the project, called Dragonfly, was at an exploratory stage, the media reported.
Pichai also addressed the controversy surrounding the secrecy of the project, BuzzFeed News reported late on Thursday.
“I think there are a lot of times when people are in exploratory stages where teams are debating and doing things, so sometimes being fully transparent at that stage can cause issues,” the Google CEO was quoted as saying.
The news about Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China broke earlier this month when The Intercept reported that the search platform would blacklist “sensitive queries” about topics including politics, free speech, democracy, human rights and peaceful protest.
This triggered an outrage among some Google staff who complained of lack of transparency within the company.
Over 1,400 employees reportedly signed a petition demanding more insight into the project.
At the company meeting on Thursday, Pichai said that Google has been “very open about our desire to do more in China,” and that the team “has been in an exploration stage for quite a while now” and “exploring many options”, CNBC reported.
While expressing interest in continuing to expand the company’s services in China, Pichai told the employees that the company was “not close” to launching a search product there and that whether it would — or could — “is all very unclear”, the CNBC report said.
Google had earlier launched a search engine in China in 2006, but pulled the service out of the country in 2010, citing Chinese government efforts to limit free speech and block websites.
—IANS
