Google Cloud Platform Podcast

On this episode of the podcast, Mark and Melanie delve into the fascinating world of robotics and reinforcement learning. We discuss advances in the field, including how robots are learning to navigate new surroundings and how machine learning is helping us understand the human mind better. Raia Hadsell Raia Hadsell, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, has worked on deep learning and robotics problems for the past 15 years. After completing a PhD at New York University, which featured a self-supervised deep learning vision system for a mobile robot, her research continued at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and SRI International, and in early 2014 she joined DeepMind in London to develop artificial general intelligence. Her current research focuses on the challenge of interactive learning for AI agents and robots, including subjects such as neural memory for real world navigation and lifelong learning. Cool things of the week AI Adventures How to Make a Data Science Project with Kaggle site Predict

On this episode of the podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Emiliano (Emi) Martínez to learn more about how VirusTotal is helping to create a safer internet by providing tools and building a community for security researchers. Emiliano (Emi) Martínez Emiliano has been with VirusTotal for over 10 years. He has seen the business grow from a small startup in southern Spain into a Google X moonshot under the new Chronicle bet. He is a software engineer acting as the Tech Lead for VirusTotal. Throughout the past 10 years, not only has he been immersed in coding and architecting the platform, but he has also participated at all levels of the business: from bootstrapping the very first sales to working close with marketing and other teams in order to take the project to the next level. His main interests are IT security (more specifically malware) and designing products and services from scratch. VirusTotal and Chronicle are Hiring VirusTotal is part of Chronicle, and Chronicle is hiring! Come join our team experts

Happy 4th of July! Today, Melanie and Mark go in depth with Brett Bibby and Micah Baker to learn more about Unity and its new strategic alliance with Google Cloud. We explore how an alliance between Google Cloud and Unity means easier development for game creators and better gaming for fans. Brett Bibby Brett Bibby is Unity’s Vice President, Engineering. Prior to his current role, Brett served as a Field Engineering and Evangelist at Unity consulting with developers throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, India, and greater Asia. Before Unity, Brett founded and ran a game studio developing console titles, and has more than 30 years of experience developing games and game engine technology. Micah Baker As Product Manager leading the strategy for Gaming on the Google Cloud Platform, Micah is committed to enabling developers to realize their vision for great games. An avid gamer on all major platforms, he never hesitates to get involved in games that were built with a passion for immersive storytelling, innovative

Brahim Elbouchikhi and Sachin Kotwani talk with Melanie and Mark about Firebase’s ML Kit and how it enables machine learning on mobile and cloud apps. We delve into why ML Kit was developed, how it makes machine learning easier, what it’s used for now and plans for the future. Sachin Kotwani Sachin Kotwani is a product manager with a special passion for making software development easy and fun. He has worked on several teams at Google, including Google Cloud, Play, and now Firebase. Before joining product management he worked worked as a strategy & ops manager in Google’s Sales organization, and prior to Google, he worked in finance at Amazon. He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and dual bachelor’s degrees in Business Management and Computer Science from the University of Missouri - Columbia. His hobbies include traveling with his family, chasing his daughter around the house, and tinkering with mobile apps and backends. Brahim Elbouchikhi Brahim Elbouchikhi is a Group Product Manager on the

Thadeu Luz from Hand Talk shares with Melanie and Mark how the free Hand Talk education application translates and interprets spoken and written Portuguese into Brazilian Sign Language (aka LIBRAS or BSL). The application uses an animated avatar Hugo to deliver the signs through gestures and facial expressions and its built off of a statistical machine translation system and Firebase. Future plans include expanding into other languages with a priority on ASL and they welcome support. Thadeu Luz Thadeu Luz is entrepreneur, data scientist and full-stack engineer with a background in 3D Animation, Video Compositing and Architecture. In early 2018 I have joined the Google Developers Experts program as a Firebase Expert. He’s CPO and founder of Hand Talk, an internationally decorated company that produces automatic sign language interpretation with the help of a friendly virtual 3D Character named Hugo. Cool things of the week Our video for NEXT video First research center in Ghana blog GCP in Finland blog AI Ad

This week is all about Voices!

Juliet Hougland and Michelle Casbon are on the podcast this week to talk about data science with Melanie and Mark. We had a great discussion about methodology, applications, tools, pipelines, challenges and resources. Juliet shared insights into the unique data science ownership workflow from idea to deployment at Stitch Fix, and Michelle dove into how Kubeflow is playing a role to help drive reliability in model development and deployment. Juliet Hougland Juliet Hougland leads the Workflow, Environment, and Execution team at Stichfix. She is a data scientist and engineer with expertise in computational mathematics and years of hands-on machine learning and big data experience. She has built and deployed production ML models, advised Fortune 500 companies on infrastructure and worked on a variety of open source projects (Apache Spark, Scalding, and Kiji) at the intersection of big data and machine learning. Michelle Casbon Michelle Casbon is a Senior Engineer on the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations t

Mandy Waite joins Mark and Melanie to share what is developer relations and how trust and empathy are key to its success. We discuss meeting developers where they are and the wide variety of differing communities that exist across the technology ecosystem. Mandy Waite Mandy Waite has worked at Google for nearly 8 years, 6 of which have been spent growing and nurturing the Cloud Advocacy team. She heads up the Infrastructure and Ops Advocacy team in Google Cloud with a focus on Cloud Native, DevOps, SRE, Observability and Security. Cool things of the week Better cost control with Google Cloud Billing programmatic notifications blog Music in Motion: a Firebase and IoT story blog Google Cloud Codelabs and Challenges codelabs Kubernetes Podcast site and blog Interview Google Cloud Platform site #46 Borg and K8s with John Wilkes podcast #118 OpenCensus with Morgan McLean and JBD podcast Felipe Hoffa & BigQuery reddit, blog and podcast Livestreaming with Jen Tong Twitch, Holden Karau Twitch, and Chris

Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov joins Mark and Melanie this week to explain data science, analytics, machine learning and statistical inference, in relation to decision intelligence. Cassie Kozyrkov As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie advises leadership teams on decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She works to democratize statistical thinking and machine learning so that everyone - Google, its customers, the world! - can harness the beauty and power of data. She is the innovator behind the practice of Decision Intelligence Engineering at Google and she has personally trained over 15,000 Googlers in machine learning, statistics, and data-driven decision-making. Before her current role, she served in Google’s Office of the CTO as Chief Data Scientist. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. When she’s not working, you’re

This week is a clash of titans! Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo join Mark and Melanie, to battle out on which is better: SRE or Devops (hint - everyone wins!). Liz Fong-Jones Liz is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google and works on the Google Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team in New York. She has worked on services ranging from Google Flights to Cloud Bigtable in her 10+ years at Google. She lives with her wife, metamour, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights. Seth Vargo Seth Vargo is a Developer Advocate at Google. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and a few Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. Seth is an active member of the DevOps community and has written thought-leader-y pieces such as the 10 Myths of DevOps. Cool things of the week Google I/O session youtub

Holden Karau is on the podcast this week to talk all about Spark and Beam, two open source tools that helps process data at scale, with Mark and Melanie. Holden Karau Holden Karau is a transgender Canadian open source developer advocate @ Google with a focus on Apache Spark, BEAM, and related “big data” tools. She is the co-author of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that’s a bit more out of date. She is a commiter on and PMC on Apache Spark and committer on SystemML & Mahout projects. She was tricked into the world of big data while trying to improve search and recommendation systems and has long since forgotten her original goal. Cool things of the week Twitter’s collaboration with Google Cloud blog & tweet Kaggle CERN TrackML Particle Tracking Challenge Competition site Open-sourcing gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime blog & repo Announcing Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring blog MLPerf: collaborative effort to standardize ML benchmarks site Interview Spark

Mark and Melanie are joined by Sarah Novotny, Head of Open Source Strategy for Google Cloud Platform, to talk all about Open Source, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and their relationships to Google Cloud Platform. Sarah Novotny Sarah Novotny leads an Open Source Strategy group for Google Cloud Platform. She has long been an Open Source community champion in communities such as Kubernetes, NGINX and MySQL and ran large scale technology infrastructures at Amazon before web-scale had a name. In 2001, she co-founded Blue Gecko, which was sold to DatAvail in 2012. She is a program chair emeritus for O’Reilly Media’s OSCON. Cool things of the week Now live in Tokyo: using TensorFlow to predict taxi demand blog Kubernetes best practices: Organizing with Namespaces blog youtube Announcing Open Images V4 and the ECCV 2018 Open Images Challenge blog dataset challenge Introducing Kubernetes Service Catalog and Google Cloud Platform Service Broker: find and connect services to your cloud-native apps blog docs

VP of Infrastructure at Google Cloud Eric Brewer, talks to Melanie and Mark all about open source at Google Cloud, distributed systems, hybrid cloud, and more! Eric Brewer Eric Brewer is the main inventor of a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet, which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world. He is a tenured professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation (bought by Yahoo! in 2003) and became a paper billionaire during the dot-com bubble. Working with Bill Clinton, he helped to create USA.gov, which launched in 2000.[1] He is known for formulating the CAP Theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s.[2] Starting in May 2011 he has been on a sabbatical at Google as VP of Infrastructure.[3] Credits: Wikipedia Cool things of the week Google Cloud Next site Google Cloud Next London site Google Cloud Next Tokyo site Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now generally available and ready for your production workload

Nick Sullivan, and Adam Langley join Melanie and Mark to provide a pragmatic view on post-quantum cryptography and what it means to research security for the potential of quantum computing. Post-quantum cryptography is about developing algorithms that are resistant to quantum computers in conjunction with “classical” computers. It’s about looking at the full picture of potential threats and planning on how to address them using a diversity of types of mathematics in the research. Adam and Nick help clarify the different terminology and techniques that are applied in the research and give a practical understanding of what to expect from a security perspective. Nick Sullivan Nick Sullivan runs the cryptography team at Cloudflare, an internet security and performance company. Adam Langley Adam Langley is a Principal Software Engineer at Google, responsible for a variety of cryptography-related efforts. Cool things of the week Google IO site & IO Extended Events site App Engine Turns 10 blog Introducing Sta

Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf join Melanie and Mark to discuss Project Jupyter from it’s interactive notebook origin story to the various open source modular projects it’s grown into supporting data research and applications. We dive specifically into JupyterHub using Kubernetes to enable a multi-user server. We also talk about Binder, an interactive development environment that makes work easily reproducible. Jessica Forde Jessica Forde is a Project Jupyter Maintainer with a background in reinforcement learning and Bayesian statistics. At Project Jupyter, she works primarily on JupyterHub, Binder, and JuptyerLab to improve access to scientific computing and scientific research. Her previous open source projects include datamicroscopes, a DARPA-funded Bayesian nonparametrics library in Python, and density, a wireless device data tool at Columbia University. Jessica has also worked as a machine learning researcher and data scientist in a variety of applications including healthcare, energy, and

Paris Pittman and Garrett Rodrigues join Mark and Melanie to discuss the Contributor Experience on Kubernetes, and how people can get involved with Kubernetes! Paris Pittman Co-Chair of Contributor Experience Special Interest Group for Kubernetes. Bay Area Kubernetes Meetup Co-Organizer Paris is a Developer Relations Program Manager on the Google Cloud Open Source Strategy team focusing on Kubernetes Community. She has 13 years of professional experience in attracting, retaining, growing, and incentivizing engineering talent for organizations and open source projects. She has also been organizing communities in one form or another for over 20 years, and at one point ran enough hackathons and meetups to subsist solely on the free pizza leftovers. Garrett Rodrigues Technical Lead of the Contributor Experience SIG for Kubernetes. Garrett is a Technical Program Manager at Google, and he joined the Kubernetes and GKE Team at Google in June 2016. As a lead of ContribX, he has focused on scaling the Kubernetes proje

Nenad Stojanovski and Andrew Hoying join Mark and Melanie this week to discuss Forseti - open source tools for Google Cloud Platform security. Nenad Stojanovski Staff Security Engineer, Spotify Andrew Hoying Andrew Hoying is a Senior Security Engineer at Google. His goal is to ensure all services built by Google and running on Google Cloud Platform have the same, or better, security assurances as services running in any other environment. He is also a top contributor to the Forseti Security open-source project, helping enterprises monitor and secure their GCP environments. Cool things of the week Shopify’s Infrastructure Collaboration with Google blog Kubernetes Engine Private Clusters now available in beta blog Easy HPC clusters on GCP with Slurm blog Understand your spending at a glance with Google Cloud Billing reports beta blog Interview Forseti Security site docs github Google Cloud Shell site docs Forseti Security Question of the week How do I automatically scan the Docker images in your Googl

Bryan Catanzaro, the VP Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, joins Mark and Melanie this week to discuss how his team uses applied deep learning to make NVIDIA products and processes better. We talk about parallel processing and compute with GPUs as well as his team’s research in graphics, text and audio to change how these forms of communication are created and rendered by using deep learning. This week we are also joined by a special co-host, Sherol Chen who is a developer advocate on GCP and machine learning researcher on Magenta at Google. Listen at the end of the podcast where Mark and Sherol chat about all things GDC. Bryan Catanzaro Bryan Catanzaro is VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, where he leads a team solving problems in domains ranging from video games to chip design using deep learning. Bryan earned his PhD from Berkeley, where he focused on parallel computing, machine learning, and programming models. He earned his MS and BS from Brigham Young University, where he worked on h

Product Manager Morgan McLean and Software Engineer JBD join Melanie and Mark this week to discuss the new open source project OpenCensus, a single distribution of libraries for metrics and distributed tracing with minimal overhead that allows you to export data to multiple backends. Morgan McLean Morgan McLean is the Product Manager for Tracing, Debugging, and Profiling at Google, including OpenCensus JBD JBD leads the OpenCensus Go and our integrations with other projects. Cool things of the week Introducing Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting built on Kubernetes blog github TensorFlow 1.6 release summit TensorFlow Object Detection on iOS youtube Optimizing your Cloud Storage performance: Google Cloud Performance Atlas blog Introducing GCP’s new interactive CLI blog docs Interview OpenCensus site docs Github Organisation github How Google uses Census internally blog The value of OpenCensus blog Tracing Zipkin site Stackdriver site docs jaeger github Metrics Stackdri

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google joins Melanie and Mark this week to talk about how Google enables businesses to solve critical problems through AI solutions. We talk about the work she is doing at Google to help reduce AI barriers to entry for enterprise, her research with Stanford combining AI and health care, where AI research is going, and her efforts to overcome one of the key challenges in AI by driving for more diversity in the field. Dr. Fei-Fei Li Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. She is also an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s main research areas are in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience. She has published more than 150 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, etc. Dr. Fei-