We recently came acrossthis interesting articlewhich features imagery from satellite imaging company Planet, showing the flower blooms in California between December 2016 and March 2017. Although the region normally goes through an annual change, this year was especially dramatic due to heavy rains after years of drought. The article shows before and afters using imagery from Planet’sPlanet Explorer Beta.We thought it would be interesting to also check Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery of the region.We used ourLandsat animationsandSentinel-2 animationsKML files to find the best images.Here is a ‘ ...继续阅读 (20)

Posted by David Ha, Google Brain ResidentAbstract visual communication is a key part of how people convey ideas to one another. From a young age, children develop the ability to depict objects, and arguably even emotions, with only a few pen strokes. These simple drawings may not resemble reality as captured by a photograph, but they do tell us something about how people represent and reconstruct images of the world around them.Vector drawings produced by sketch-rnn.In our recent paper, “A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings”, we present a generativerecurrent neural networkcapable of prod ...继续阅读 (19)

Remember last year when Google released an AI-powered web tool thatplayed Pictionary with your doodles? Well, surprise! Those doodles you drew have now been used to teach Google’s AI how to draw. The resulting program is calledSketch-RNNand, frankly, it draws about as well as a toddler. But like any new parents, Google’s AI scientists areproud as punch.To create Sketch-RNN, Google Brain researchers David Ha and Douglas Eck collected more than half a million user-drawn sketches from the Google tool Quick, Draw! Each time a user drew something on the app, it recorded not only the final image, bu ...继续阅读 (20)

I love seeing these ads Apple creates for other countries. I can’t wait to see the ones they produce for my native Canadian language.∞ Read this on The LoopSource:http://ift.tt/2pB9GCe ...继续阅读 (20)

I bet you’ve never felt this wistful about a space probe before.Source:http://ift.tt/2oz7ZHL ...继续阅读 (30)

图片分享和短视频之所以有魅力，就是因为我们可以通过一个小小的App去体验这个世界上其它人此刻的生活。而当然，VR是比图片和视频都更适合“体验生活”的形式了，那么用VR做一个Instagram和快手靠谱吗？大多数人的第一反应一定是不靠谱，经过了前两年的泡沫之后，VR似乎已经成为了一个过去式——缺乏内容这个行业死穴让所有公司都一筹莫展。但如果你打开VeeR这个App，就会发现原来这个世界上每天新产出的VR内容，已经足以撑起一个欣欣向荣的分享社区。打开VeeR，你看到的不是国内许多VR视频库里的盗版电影、比基尼美女和游戏视频，而更多的是过山车、旅游随拍、实验性的小片段、延时摄影等内容。除了这些，这个平台上还有一些形式很新颖的内容，比如这个在今日观看量排名第一的就是一个关于重力和色彩的实验性艺术片，名叫《失去重力的房间》，播放量接近40万，即便在普通的UGC视频App里，这也是一个不错的数字。和当前大部分VR视频平台很像，视频内容的类型有很多，从明星演唱会到恐怖刺激的游戏体验。不太一样的是，这些VR视频内容大多是用户自己制作上传的，也就是所谓的UGC内容，从旅游随拍、实验动画、Minecraft（一款热度很高的沙盒游戏）到MMD（二次元舞蹈），创作者给出了很多自采自制式VR平台完全想不到的角度。这些制作内容的创作者来自全世界各地，打开视频的评论列表，有多一半的评论是来自海外的留言。VeeR ...继续阅读 (20)

It’s some consolation to think the soulless automata that willeventually replace youmight also be cute enough to go viral. Just look at this video of orange package-sorting robots working in a warehouse operated by Chinese delivery giant Shentong. They’re capable of handling 200,000 items a day, a spokesperson for the company told theSouth China Morning Post,and can work 24/7 because they don’t have robot families or feelings of any sort! And just listen to that jangly music: this is basically Pixar!The bot itself is actually called “Little Orange” and is one of a range of package-sorting devi ...继续阅读 (18)

At Google, we aim to make our products available for everyone, everywhere. Today, we’re extending that goal to our finest, most faithful (and four-legged) friends. On the Google app for iOS, you can now use 3D Touch on the app icon or head to settings and select I’m Feeling Woof or I’m Feeling Meow to let your dogs and cats get info on topics they care about—whether that means squeaky toys or a bowl of milk! With I’m Feeling Woof and I’m Feeling Meow on the Google app, canines and felines alike can surf pet-friendly info with just a press of their paw.image full widthNow when pups tap on I’m F ...继续阅读 (18)

We’re honored to have partnered with Dr. Louise Banks, esteemed linguistics professor, to develop instant camera translation for our 32nd language, Heptapod B. Following our experience with logograms inChineseandJapanese, as well as the many characters containing circles inKorean, we were ready to blend our expertise in low-memory-footprint convolutional modeling and Dr. Banks’ linguistic background to the deciphering of circular logograms in the Word Lens feature in the Google Translate app.image full widthThe challenge with understanding Heptapod B is its nonlinear orthography. Fortunately, ...继续阅读 (36)

Chromebooks are blurring the line between desktop and mobile with thelaunchof Google Play store on Chromebooks. Our latest Chromebooks were built from the ground up with this technology. But until now, it wasn’t possible to appreciate the full range of experiences Android Apps can offer.After extensive user research and market analysis, we’re excited to introduce a line of mobile accessories for Chromebooks. We’ve thoughtfully adapted your favorites to capitalize on larger screens and convertible form factors. Here’s a sneak peek at a few highlights:1. Chromebook Groupie Stickimage full widthF ...继续阅读 (24)

There are two foundational technology changes rolling through the car industry at the moment; electric and autonomy. Electric is happening right now, largely as a consequence of falling battery prices, while autonomy, or at least full autonomy, is a bit further off - perhaps 5-10 years, depending on how fast some pretty hard computer science problems get solved. Both of these will cycle into essentially the entire global stock of (today) around 1.1bn cars over a period of decades, subject to all sorts of variables, and both of them completely remake the car industry and its suppliers, as well ...继续阅读 (24)

Whether you’re jumping from meeting to meeting or on your way to meet a customer—your calendar needs to to work for you…anywhere, anytime.That’s why today, we’re bringing Google Calendar to the iPad.image full widthWith the new app, you’ll get all the Calendar features you know and love, now optimized for iPad. Use Calendar’s machine intelligence-powered features to:Find a time and book a room. Get everyone together faster for meetings. With smart scheduling, Calendar suggests meeting times and available rooms based on your team’s  availability and room preferences.Set Goals and achieve ...继续阅读 (30)

Ikea can be criticized for using cheap materials and veneers, but you have to admire its commitment to tasteful furniture design that has —to a fault— raised the baseline aesthetic of the average dorm and living room. In this way it’s helped to democratize design, bringing a sense of bespoke furnishings to people who might otherwise not have been able to afford them. Now the company is on the verge of using its global reach and manufacturing might to do it again — only this time it’s poised to make smart home technology as commonplace as the LED light bulb.Do you remember a world before ...继续阅读 (24)

In hisNext Generation Webpresentation at Google Conversions 2017 in Dublin, Ireland, Ani Mohan outlined the Chrome team’s efforts to bring native mobile app-like capabilites to the mobile Web. Here’s my notes from his talk:The Web has been around for about 25 years. In 1996, we had 360M people using it on desktop computers. Today it is at 3.6B, mostly on smartphones. This is the largest platform that’s ever been built.People spend most of their time in apps vs. Web sites on mobile. 188.6 minutes vs. 9.3 minutes. But people are getting tired of downloading new apps, rate is approach ...继续阅读 (43)

In hisMobile Patterns for Experimentspresentation at Google Conversions 2017 in Dublin, Ireland, Craig Sullivan walked through a set of optimization testing best practices for mobile experiences and why they are key to business. Here’s my notes from his talk:What has manufacturing taught us? Order doesn’t come by itself. The orchestration of people and stuff needs to be managed, this is what has been driving efficiency in manufacturing. This efficiency is critical to survival and used to: improve quality; remove defects & waste; increase capabilities; manage resources; plan resour ...继续阅读 (31)

Legal threats and disgruntled clients: inside the ‘Uber for private jets’Tim Martz made his fortune in broadcast radio, but even as a wealthy man, the price of chartering a private jet always stung a bit. So when Martz joined JetSmarter in February 2015, the service seemed like a steal. In return for a $7,000 annual membership fee, plus a $2,000 initiation charge, he could use the company’s mobile app to reserve flights on a private jet as often as he wanted. “You got the whole plane to yourself, which is great,” recalls Martz. He flew a half-dozen times in his first six months, taking trips f ...继续阅读 (47)

有这么一群人，你可能没听过他们的名字，但正是他们决定了你（和世界上其他千千万万的人）每天使用的互联网产品们的模样。他们就是 Facebook、Google、苹果等互联网巨头里的设计师，他们的想法决定了那些 10 亿用户级产品的模样。为什么硅谷的互联网产品的设计一直引领潮流？为什么为什么在硅谷更容易出现由设计驱动的创新产品？为什么很少公司会说，“我们照着 XX 做一个差不多的吧”？这一次，我们邀请到了 Facebook 的设计师 Ruthia He 何如佳，来分享她体验到的硅谷的设计哲学。何如佳设计了全球拥有数千万活跃用户的 Facebook 独立照片分享应用 Moments。她曾任 Facebook 视频、照片创作和编辑领域的主设计师，也曾是Facebook 前沿科技研究团队 Building 8 的第一个设计师。其设计为 Facebook 申请专利，并在国际设计比赛如 CSSDA 担任评委，在设计会议比如 UXD Summit 担任指导嘉宾。以下是她的分享，Enjoy！我是 Ruthia He 何如佳，在 Facebook 做设计。我的经历比较特殊，曾经在国内的互联网公司（腾讯和知乎）有过实战经历，后来又来到美国的互联网公司工作。对比我在中美优秀互联网公司的工作经历，我的感觉是，在硅谷更容易出现由设计驱动的创新产品。为什么呢？主要有 3 个方面的原因：第一个方面，是在文化上，鼓励 ...继续阅读 (25)

Job titles are a complicated terrain to navigate, and one that we don’t take lightly at Asana. After weighing many options of how to approach titles—and being very deliberate about how we use titles internally—we’ve established a system that we feel lends itself to supportingour values,empoweringallemployees, and scaling our teams.How we use (and don’t use) job titlesAt Asana, we use titles in varying ways, but we use them primarily to describe a person’s role or the type of work they do.For example, we have software engineers, recruiters, product managers, designers, and salespeople. We use t ...继续阅读 (22)

MotivationImagine you’re an engineer working on a new product feature that is going to have a high impact on the end user, like theDropbox Badge. You want to get quick validation on the functionality and utility of the feature. Each individual change you make might be relatively simple, like a tweak to the CSS changing the size of a font, or more substantial, like enabling the Badge on a new file type. You could set up user studies, but these are relatively expensive and slow, and are a statistically small sample size. Ideally, you write some code, add it to the codebase, have it tested automa ...继续阅读 (22)

The company’s self-driving division is in a “mini civil war,” according to insiders.For Uber, the embattled ride-hail juggernaut now valued at $70 billion, much of the company’s future is resting on what happens this week.But it’s not just the meetings that CEO Travis Kalanick is having with potential candidates to become itsfirst chief operating officer— an appointment focused on fixing the massive controversies that have washed over the ride-hailing company around its dysfunctional management.He’s also gathered leaders from Uber’s self-driving division in Pittsburgh and its counterpart in Sa ...继续阅读 (24)

It’s often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs. These were the first computing devices meant for individuals that weren’t kits, had screens and keyboards, and could actuallydosomething useful, like word processing, game play, or, eventually, spreadsheets.The best known of these, the Apple II, which remained on the market in various forms until 1993, will have its 40th anniversary in June. That makes mass-market personal computing younger than the Super Bowl, Starbucks, and Disneyland.The A ...继续阅读 (35)

If we’re all very unlucky, this could be what the biggest app updates of 2017 look like:Introducing Slack Stories!Spam all your coworkers with your favorite selfie filters!http://pic.twitter.com/nkMjXgRdoh— Rafael Conde (@rafahari)March 22, 2017Product designerRafael Conde, who leads design at Netlify and co-hosts the LayoutFM podcast, mocked up what Stories would look like inside a series of other apps to point out the absurdity of the format spreading so far and so quickly.“This started when I was talking to my co-host Kevin Clark,on the LayoutFM podcast, about the ‘Stories’ as a format, not ...继续阅读 (36)

This autumn Apple will release a new iPhone design, and the fact that it postponed a new design and kept the 6 design for three years instead of two suggests it has something that will attract attention. However, it will really still ‘just’ be another iPhone. Meanwhile, we have some indications that Apple is working on AR glasses (of which more later) and certainly was working on a car project - but neither of these is likely to see a mass-market consumer release for a year or two at the least (cars perhaps longer). So, expect a lot more 'innovation dead at Apple!’ stories.Th ...继续阅读 (29)

Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.This is a great app. Good purchase for Apple.∞ Read this on The LoopSource:http://ift.tt/2mSpIWw ...继续阅读 (22)

Whoa, huge news for iOS nerds. Matthew Panzarino has the scoop:Workflow has been around for a couple of years and we’ve covered it and its updates. It shares some similarity with the service IFTTT, in that it allows people to group together a bunch of actions that can allow them to perform complicated tasks with one tap. It had built up a sizeable number of users and downloads over the past few years.Workflow the app is being acquired, along with the team of Weinstein, Conrad Kramer and Nick Frey. In a somewhat uncommon move for Apple, the app will continue to be made available on the App Stor ...继续阅读 (29)

When we released our new messenger last year, we added the ability for customers to create rich, personal profiles so their users would always know there’s a real person on the other end.The problem? Nobody was using the feature. Shortly after release,only 13–15% of customers had fully completed their profiles. Most were being partially filled in while many others were left untouched.An example of a partial and fully completed profileAfter talking with colleagues on our research and analytics teams, we uncovered two primary reasons for such low adoption:Visibility. The ability to create your p ...继续阅读 (22)

Introducing the YesAQYears ago I was driving back to Chicago from Wisconsin. On the Illinois side there are a couple ofrest stopsover the tollway. It’s a great place to get some gas, grab some caffeine, and stretch your legs a little before the final 50 miles home.The rest stop usually has a booth where you can buy a iPass so you don’t need to stop and pay tolls all the time. During the day there’s a person in the booth to help answer any questions you have.It appears that a lot of the same questions are asked over and over. Enough, in fact, that the person who answers them is sick of giving t ...继续阅读 (25)

There’s suspicious silence about its failure — and already one lawsuit.The rise and fall ofLily Robotics, a camera drone startup, follows a now-familiar script:The company launched in mid-2015 with apromotional video of a breathtaking new gadget— in this case, a camera drone that automatically follows you around. It fetched millions of dollars worth of preorders, raised money from top-tier technology investors and hit unexpected snags leading to inevitable delays. Then, on Jan. 12, 2017, it announced it was shutting down before shipping a single device it sold.“Over the past few months, we hav ...继续阅读 (33)

FromGeekWire:The Department of Homeland Security has officially enacted a provision to make it easier for immigrant entrepreneurs to build startups in the U.S. The rule, proposed by President Barack Obama last summer, takes effect exactly one week before he leaves the Oval Office.The initial rule outlined a “parole” period that foreign entrepreneurs could apply for, granting two years in the U.S. to grow a startup. To qualify, the founder had to prove that the startup met certain requirements and demonstrated the potential for “significant public benefit.” After the initial parole period, the ...继续阅读 (43)

The scene stealers at CES 2017 were digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence. Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana were joined by Baidu’s Little Fish, LG’s Hub Robot and Mattel’s Aristotle among a host of other virtual Jeeves.Amazon which had been powering ahead all through 2016 with Alexa reportedly closed last year with 45,000 robots in its fulfilment centres. That was a 50 per cent increase in its robot headcount over a year before, signalling the rapid pace at which automation is moving at the e-commerce giant.IBM Watson’s augmented intelligence has been quietly making inroa ...继续阅读 (19)