Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Blockchain takes the spotlight as new host Carter Morgan joins veteran Mark Mandel in a fascinating interview with Allen Day. Allen is a developer advocate with Google, specializing in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. This week Allen reveals how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can be applied to a variety of applications like distributed file storage and video services. We also discuss the hype and merits of blockchain + projects that Allen has worked on to analyze cryptocurrency transactions using Google Cloud’s big data platforms. The results may just surprise you. Allen Day Allen Day is a developer advocate with Google in Singapore. He specializes in streaming analytics for blockchain, biomedical, and agricultural applications. Allen studied at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine and earned his PhD in Human Genetics. Allen’s blockchain work is focused on interoperability between smart contract platforms and cloud platforms. He created Google Cloud’s blockchain public datasets program, which allows non-specialist engineers and data scientists to search and analyze public blockchain data. Cool things of the week Blockchain.com, scaling and saving with Cloud Spanner blog Cloud TPU Pods break AI training records blog Cloud Memorystore adds import-export and Redis 4.0 blog To run or not to run a database on Kubernetes: What to consider blog Google to acquire Elastifile blog Interview Blockchain site Bitcoin site Coinbase site Ethereum site $24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200% news article Blockchain ETL project on GitHub site BigQuery site Kubernetes site Cloud Composer site Pub/Sub site Bigtable site Tensorflow site Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog BigQuery public blockchain datasets on GCP site Ethereum in BigQuery: how we built this dataset blog Ethereum in BigQuery: a Public Dataset for smart contract analytics blog Introducing six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets—and how to analyze them blog Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud blog Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data blog Unchained Podcast podcast Off the Chain Podcast podcast Question of the week What are the four (or six?) types of VMs that exist on Google Cloud Platform? blog and docs Where can you find us next? Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit, as well as Pax Dev and Pax West. Carter will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and working on new videos. Allen will be at Strike Two Summit (Amsterdam), Singularity Festival (Heraklion), and Ethereum Devcon (Osaka). Sound Effect Attribution “mysterypeak1.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org “crowd laugh.wav” by Tom_Woysky of Freesound.org

This week on the podcast, Yuri Litvinovich of Scotiabank was able to join Mark Mirchandani and Michelle Casbon to talk about migration from on-prem and their partnership with Google Cloud. Mark Mandel stops in with some cool things of the week and the question of the week, too! With Yuri’s help, Scotiabank is working to become a modern financial services technology company. Their transition from working mostly on-prem to working in the cloud was exciting for him as he discovered how much cheaper, faster, and more secure large enterprise projects can be in the public cloud. Three years ago, Scotiabank’s CEO began encouraging this shift to keep the company up-to-date, with funds allocated to moving all their thousands of applications and products to a more efficient system. To accomplish this, Yuri turned to Kubernetes to make use of containers. Because they are light and homogenous in different environments, the modernization at Scotiabank went much more smoothly with Kubernetes and GKE. They also use a mix of managed systems like BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub, as well as made-from-scratch applications that help the Google products to be compatible with Scotiabank’s existing software. Yuri believes this was a key to their success in the migration from on-prem to the cloud. In the process of migration, Yuri experienced some pushback from developers who were concerned about the move. He encouraged them not to “lift and shift” their projects, but to completely re-build them with cloud dev ops principles in mind. Yuri’s goal was to convince developers that doing this would result in projects that were much easier, cheaper, and more secure in the long run. By outlining the benefits and goals of migration and sharing success stories of other businesses who have transferred to Kubernetes and the cloud, Scotiabank was able to help convince developers of the importance of it. Yuri also encourages trust and cooperation between teams. Yuri Litvinovich Yuri is a Senior Cloud Engineer and Kubernetes Tech Lead at Scotiabank. He’s currently part of Platform Organization (PLATO) within Scotiabank, which performs enterprise modernization program to transform the Bank into a modern technology company in financial services. Yuri has extensive experience in Cloud technologies, Kubernetes, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Automation, CI/CD, Linux, networking, and system administration. His pursuit of excellence led him to work on implementing cutting-edge technologies in both startups, and large enterprise environments making them vital part of organization’s digital transformation journey. Cool things of the week Introducing Deep Learning Containers: Consistent and portable environments blog How to implement document tagging with AutoML blog Analyze BigQuery data with Kaggle Kernels notebooks blog GCP Podcast Episode 84: Kaggle with Wendy Kan podcast Introducing the Jenkins GKE Plugin—deploy software to your Kubernetes clusters blog Interview Scotiabank site Kubernetes site Kubernetes Engine site Cloud SQL site BigQuery site Dataflow site Pub/Sub site Stackdriver site Anthos site GKE On-Prem site Istio site Autoscaling Streaming Applications in Cloud Dataflow with Scotiabank video Google Cloud Next ‘19: Day 2 Product Innovation Keynote video Kubeflow site Question of the week Rather than using the standard Cloud Shell image - what if I want to add my own “by default” installed tooling? Where can you find us next? Mark Mirch is working on This Week in Cloud. Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit. Sound Effect Attribution “crowd laugh.wav” by tom_woysky of Freesound.org

Happy Independence Day to our American listeners! Mark Mandel is back today as he and Gabi Ferrara interview Bill Creekbaum of Informatica to learn how they work with Google Cloud for a better big data user experience. Mark Mirchandani is hanging around the studio as well, bringing some cool things of the week and helping with the question of the week! Informatica provides data managing products that offer complete solutions focusing on metadata management, integration, governance, security, data quality, and discoverability. Bill’s job at Informatica is to ensure these products really take advantage of the strengths of Google Cloud Platform. One such example is a product that allows customers to design in Informatica and push their projects to Cloud Dataproc. Informatica also offers similar capabilities in BigQuery. When moving data from on-prem to the cloud, customers can use Informatica and Google Cloud together for a seamless transition, cost savings, and easier data control. Together, Informatica and Google Cloud can also facilitate the acquisition of high quality data. To have better, more trustworthy output, data inputed needs to be safe to access, have few or no duplicates and null values, and be complete. To achieve this, developers usually use a combination of the Informatica tools Intelligent Cloud Services, Enterprise Data Catalog, and Big Data Management, and the Google tools BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Analytics, Dataproc, and Pub/Sub. Bill’s closing advice for companies comes in three parts: take stock of the data you’ve got, set goals, and develop a well-rounded team. Bill Creekbaum Bill Creekbaum is Sr. Director of Product Management for Cloud, Big Data, and Analytic Ecosystems at Informatica. He is focused on delivering market leading unified data management platforms and services that help customers take advantage of their greatest assets, data. Bill has been in product management and product marketing for more than 20 years and for the past 10 has been focused on successfully delivering SaaS and Cloud Applications to the market. Prior to joining Informatica, Bill has worked at SnapLogic, GoodData, Oracle, Microsoft, Mindjet, and more. See more of Bill’s experience on LinkedIn. Cool things of the week Google Cloud + Chronicle: The security moonshot joins Google Cloud blog GCP Podcast Episode 135: VirusTotal with Emi Martinez podcast Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa blog Kubernetes 1.15: Extensibility and Continuous Improvement blog Future of CRDs: Structural Schemas blog See how your code actually executes with Stackdriver Profiler, now GA blog Interview Informatica site Informatica for GCP site BigQuery site Cloud Storage site Cloud Dataproc site Intelligent Cloud Services site Enterprise Data Catalog site Big Data Management site Google Analytics site Pub/Sub site Google Cloud & Informatica: Accelerate your Data-Driven Digital Transformation webinar Informatica for Google BigQuery data sheet Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for Google BigQuery site Question of the week If I want to have my App Engine Application serve any subdomain on my custom domain, how do I do that? Where can you find us next? Gabi is done traveling. Mark Mirch’ is working on Stack Chat. Mark Mandel is going to Tokyo Next, Open Source in Gaming Day , and the North American Open Source Summit. Sound Effect Attribution “small group laugh 6.flac” by tim.kahn of Freesound.org “Chewing, Carrot, A” by Inspector J of Freesound.org “Testtone1000hz” by Jobro of Freesound.org

On this episode, our hosts Mark Mirchandani and Gabi Ferrara dive into Google Cloud Platform UX with guest and Google Product Designer Michael Kleinerman. Michael’s path to Product Designer started with “ancient” tech designing with Flash and 3D motion graphics and progressed from there through interaction designer to his place now with Google. His experience has helped him appreciate the many different kinds of designers needed for projects and how they have to work together for a good product. At Google, Michael’s team builds design systems that create a balance between what Google uses and what the products built on Google use. He adopted Material Design, which offers guidelines for patterns and components of design, to Google Cloud. Material Design spans across multiple devices and screen sizes to help simplify design across devices. When Cloud reached the enterprise space, where components can be more complex, Michael’s team worked to adjust Cloud using Material Design so that features like tables would work correctly. Accessibility is also a top priority for Cloud and the design team. To begin the process of designing for accessibility, the team finds the top three or so reasons that a user would come to their product and ensures those are accessible to all. The next step is to create easier usability in the second tier features of the product, and then all features beyond. Using a screen reader, they go through the product to see if it’s usable, and really try to make the experience better. The team also makes sure there are a lot of guidance pages as well. The goal in product design is to make things simple and consistent for everyone. Michael Kleinerman Michael is a Product Designer at Google. He worked on Android and YouTube in the Bay Area before joining Cloud in NYC, where he started by leading the UX for Firestore until it launched in both Firebase and GCP. This work evolved into his current role on the core platform team, responsible for the design direction of the main design system used by producer teams to build and launch products on GCP. Cool things of the week Committed use discounts at a glance blog Networking in depth blog Chatbots with Dialog Flow blog and video Turn it up to eleven: Java 11 runtime comes to App Engine blog App Engine second generation runtimes now get double the memory; plus Go 1.12 and PHP 7.3 now generally available blog Interview Material.io site Material Design site Firebase site Cloud Firestore site Question of the week How do I work with my containers locally and then get them into the cloud? Where can you find us next? Gabi is done traveling. Mark Mirch’ is filming for customers in the Bay area. Everyone else is just laying low for now! Sound Effect Attribution “alert.wav” by danielnieto7 of Freesound.org “cell phone vibraion.wav” by MrAuralization of Freesound.org “laugh crowd 2.wav” by MrAuralizationFunWithSound of Freesound.org

This week, Jon Foust and Michelle Casbon bring you another fascinating interview from our time at Next! Michelle and special guest Amanda were able to catch up with Paco Nathan of Derwen AI to talk about his experience at Next and learn what Derwen is doing to advance AI. Paco and Derwen have been working extensively on ways developer relations can be enhanced by machine learning. Along with O’Reilly Media, Derwen just completed three surveys, called ABC (AI, Big Data, and Cloud), to look at the adoption of AI and the cloud around the world. The particular interest in these studies is a comparison between countries who have been using AI, Big Data, and Cloud for years and countries who are just beginning to get involved. One of the most interesting things they learned is how much budget companies are allocating to machine learning projects. They also noticed that more and more large enterprises are moving, at least partially, to the cloud. One of the challenges Paco noticed was the difference between machine learning projects in testing versus how they act once they go live. Here, developers come across bias, ethical, and safety issues. Good data governance polices can help minimize these problems. Developing good data governance policies is complex, especially with security issues, but it’s an important conversation to have. In the process of computing the survey data, Paco discovered many big companies spend a lot of time with this issue and even employ checklists of requirements before projects can be made live. In his research, Paco also discovered that about 54% of companies are non-starters. Usually, their problems stem from tech debt and issues with company personnel who do not recognize the need for machine learning. The companies working toward integrating machine learning tend to have issues finding good staff. Berkeley is working to solve this problem by requiring data science classes of all students. But as Paco says, data science is a team sport that works well with a team of people from different disciplines. Paco is an advocate of mentoring, to help the next generation of data scientists learn and grow, and of unbundling corporate decision making to help advance AI. Amanda, Michelle, and Paco wrap up their discussion with a look toward how to change ML biases. People tend to blame ML for bias outcomes, but models are subject to data we feed in. Humans have to make decisions to work around that by looking at things from a different perspective and taking steps to avoid as much bias as we can. ML and humans can work together to find these biases and help remove them. Paco Nathan Paco Nathan is the Managing Parter at Derwen. He has 35+ years tech industry experience, ranging from Bell Labs to early-stage start-ups. Paco is also the Co-chair Rev. Advisor for Amplify Partners, Recognai, Primer AI, and Data Spartan. He was formerly the Director of Community Evangelism for Databricks and Apache Spark. Cool things of the week CERN recreated the Higgs discovery on GCP video To discover the Higgs yourself, check out the CERN open data portal site Fun facts from Michelle’s visit: Seven total, four main experiments ATLAS (largest, general-purpose) site CMS (prettiest, general-purpose) site ALICE (heavy-ion) site LHCb (interactions of b-hadrons, matter/antimatter asymmetry) site The French/Swiss border runs across the CERN property Streetview of CERN control center site CERN is the birthplace of the web Where the protons come from site Watch Particle Fever movie Interview Derwen, Inc. site Derwen, Inc. Blog blog Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing paper Apache Spark site Google Cloud Storage site Datastore site Kubeflow site Quicksilver site O’Reilly Media site Google Knowledge Graph site Jupyter site JupyterCon site The Economics of Artificial Intelligence site “Why Do Businesses Fail At Machine Learning?” by Cassie Kozyrkov video The Gutenberg Galaxy site Programmed Inequality site Question of the week Stadia Connect occurred last Thursday. What are some of the biggest announcements that came out of it? Where can you find us next? Jon is in New York for Games for Change. Michelle and Mark Mirchandani are back in San Francisco. Brian & Aja are at home in Seattle. Gabi is in Brazil. Sound Effect Attribution “Crowd laugh.wav” by tom_woysky of Freesound.org

Your favorite Marks Mirchandani and Mandel are back hosting this week to touch base with Angela Yu about recent updates in Google Maps. As Angela describes Google Maps at a high level, it is your window into the real world, with coverage of Earth’s land and oceans. Google works hard to keep that information updated with satellite pictures, street view Google vehicles, and even backpacks for hikers to record hard to reach areas. The Google Maps API makes it easy for developers to use Maps data in their own projects. It can be used for something as simple as showing location to something more complicated, for example showing the user specific things around them to help them make decisions. Game developers can create rich experiences by building real-world gaming situations with Maps and augmented reality. Using the Places API can display parks, government buildings, and other interesting places beyond streets. And the Routes API can expand the user experience by providing directions, tracking drivers in real time, etc. Maps and Google Cloud together work well with BigQuery to search huge amounts of data and visualize them on a map. In the future, Angela is particularly excited about how ridesharing apps will continue to use Maps and Routes to optimize their businesses. She also looks forward to more augmented reality projects beyond gaming, where data, directions, and more are overlaid on the physical world. Angela Yu Angela Yu is a developer advocate for Google Maps Platform. Throughout her career, she has geeked out on voice recognition, mobile app development, and IoT. You can find her trapped in escape rooms or on Twitter. Cool things of the week Google to acquire Looker blog New Translate API capabilities can help localization experts and global enterprises blog Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud CDN blog Save money by stopping and starting Compute Engine instances on schedule blog An update on Sunday’s service disruption blog Interview Google Maps Platform site blog docs Google Maps Places site Google Maps Routes site Google Maps Treks site Visualizing data from Firebase on a Google Map site Google Maps Platform Codelabs site BigQuery site BigQuery Public Datasets docs Deck.GL site Google Maps SDK for Android Beta site Popular Antipodes on Google Maps site The True Size of countries site Google Maps on Github site Google Maps Client Libraries site StreetView Gallery site Earth Engine site xkcd: Map Projections site Beautiful data visualizations using deck.gl on Google Maps demo and docs Question of the week What is helm, and how do I use it? GCP Podcast Episode 50: Helm with Michelle Noorali and Matthew Butcher podcast Kubernetes Podcast podcast and twitter Kuberenetes twitter Where can you find us next? Angela will be at the Chrome Dev Summit. Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next. Mark Mirch will be customer filming for Stack Chat in NYC. Sound Effect Attribution “Striking a Match” by Nebulousflynn of Freesound.org “Bad Beep” by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org “Correct” by Tristan_Lohengrin of Freesound.org “Spaceship Atmosphere 02” by RICHERIandTV of Freesound.org “At the jazz concert Crowd laugh.wav” by Ftom_woysky of Freesound.org

Google Developer Advocate Jen Person talks with Mark Mandel and Mark Mirchandani today about developments in Firebase. Firebase is a suite of products that helps developers build apps. According to Jen, it’s equivalent to the client-side of Google Cloud. Firebase works across platforms, including Android, web, iOS and offers many growth features, setting it apart from other Google products. It helps site and app owners interact with and reach customers with services like notifications, remote configurations to optimize the app, testing, and more. Cloud Firestore has come out of beta, and it is available both through Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, making it easy for developers to move from one to the other if their needs change. Recently, the Firebase team has been working to refine their products based on user feedback. Firebase Authentication has been upgraded with the additions of phone authentication, email link authentication, and multiple email actions. They’ve also added a generic authentication option so developers can use any provider they choose. ML Kit makes machine learning much easier for client apps or on the server. With on-device ML features, users can continue using the app without internet service. Things like face recognition can still be done quickly without a wifi connection. ML Kit is adding new features all the time, including smart reply and translation, image labeling , facial feature detection, etc. Cloud Functions for Firebase is also out of beta. It includes new features like a crash-litics trigger that can notify you if your site or app crashes and scheduled functions. An emulator is new as well, so you can test without touching your live code. Jen Person Jen is a Developer Advocate at Google. She worked with Firebase for 2.5 years prior to recently joining Google Cloud. She loves building iOS apps with Swift and planning the ideal data structures for various apps using Cloud Firestore. Jen is currently co-starring with JavaScript in a buddy cop comedy where the two don’t see eye to eye but are forced to work together, eventually forming a strong loving bond through a series of hilarious misadventures. Cool things of the week Uploading images directly to Cloud Storage using Signed URL blog Build your own event-sourced system using Cloud Spanner blog Cloud Shell on the Cloud Console app site Google Cloud networking in depth: Cloud Load Balancing deconstructed blog Interview Firebase site Firestore site Cloud Storage site Firebase Authentication site ML Kit site TensorFlow Lite site Cloud Functions for Firebase site Cloud Functions Samples site I/O 2019 Talk: Zero to App video Guide - Cloud Firestore collection group queries docs Guide - Scheduled Cloud Functions docs YouTube - #AskFirebase Playlist videos Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: iOS site Codelab - Train and deploy on-device image classification model with AutoML Vision in ML Kit site Codelab - Recognize text, facial features, and objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site Codelab - Identify objects in images using custom machine learning models with ML Kit for Firebase site Codelab - Detect objects in images with ML Kit for Firebase: Android site Previous episodes on Firebase: GCP Podcast Episode 13: Firebase with Sara Robinson and Vikrum Nijjar podcast GCP Podcast Episode 29: The New Firebase with Abe Haskins and Doug Stevenson podcast GCP Podcast Episode 78: Firebase at I/O 2017 with James Tamplin and Andrew Lee podcast GCP Podcast Episode 97: Cloud Firestore with Dan McGrath and Alex Dufetel podcast GCP Podcast Episode 99: Cloud Functions and Firebase Hosting with David East podcast Question of the week How do I save money on my GCP resources? Where can you find us next? Mark Man will be at Tokyo Next! Watch him live code on Twitch. Mark Mirch is going on vacation!

Jon Foust is back this week, joining Mark Mirchandani for an in-depth look at Stackdriver with fellow Googler, Rory Petty. To start, Product Manager Rory explains that Stackdriver is a full observability solution for Google Cloud (as well as other clouds). We touch on how monitoring, logging, and APM tools allow developers and operators to fully understand how a website is performing. In addition to Monitoring and Logging, the suite of Stackdriver tools also includes Debugger, Trace, and Profiler to help users not only monitor their sites, but to solve problems that occur. Stackdriver Monitoring and Logging support Google Cloud services out of the box. Users can use Monitoring to set up alerts, so if something goes awry, they are notified immediately and can address the problem. Alerts can also be custom designed to inform developers of things like number of checkouts on your e-commerce site, the amount of time between checkouts, and more. Stackdriver Monitoring allows blackbox monitoring, too, to make sure your service is healthy. The Monitoring dashboard makes it really easy to get started, with a resources section that has pre-made dashboards for developers to use. Developers don’t have to do a lot of configuration out of the box. However, if you need a more customized dashboard, that is also possible in Stackdriver Monitoring. At Cloud Next earlier this year, Stackdriver announced Service Monitoring in alpha, which shows users a map of their microservices architecture. Public beta will hopefully be later this year. Stackdriver Sandbox, another recent project currently in the alpha stage, gives people an easy way to configure a test Stackdriver environment. This way, developers can play with Stackdriver tools without effecting their websites. Stackdriver Profiler, a great tool to understand the performance of your system, went GA at Cloud Next as well. Stackdriver’s tools are all meant to work together to help you maintain and perfect development projects on many different cloud services and on-prem. Rory Petty Rory Petty is Product Manager for the Stackdriver Monitoring Platform. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and is a vinyl record enthusiast. Rory is a midwest transplant living in Brooklyn. Cool things of the week Commute just got easier with Google Pay and Google Assistant blog 5 year anniversary of Kubernetes and KubeCon content videos Kubernetes Podcast podcast Early Preview of AR in Google Maps video Interview Stackdriver site Stackdriver with Kubernetes video Stackdriver Monitoring site Stackdriver Logging site Stackdriver Debugger site Stackdriver Trace site Stackdriver Profiler site App Engine site Compute Engine site GKE site Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Book site Istio site Stackdriver Service Monitoring site Stackdriver Sandbox site Cloud Next ‘19 DevOps & SRE Sessions videos Cloud On Air site Stack Doctor Playlist videos Implementing GCP Stackdriver and Adapting SRE Practices to Samsung’s AI System video Stackdriver Documentation site Question of the week How do I decide between Apps Script and App Maker? Where can you find us next? Jon is going to Games for Change. Mark is going to be in NYC right before Games for Change. Sound Effect Attribution “Spaceship Fly-by, A” by InspectorJ of Freesound.org “Teleport” by Sergenious of Freesound.org “Moretube.wav” by NoiseCollector of Freesound.org “Mystery Peak2.wav” by FoolBoyMedia of Freesound.org

Today on the podcast, we’re speaking with Chris Aniszczyk about the Linux Foundation and the important work they do to further the advancement of technology through open source initiatives. Mark and Mark are your hosts this week, and they begin by speaking with Chris about what the Linux Foundation is and how it’s unique. The Linux Foundation, while seeking to support open source projects, sets itself apart by also providing professional services such as marketing, technical writing, legal help, and running events. It acts as a parent foundation for smaller open source foundations like Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Node.js Foundation, and the Automotive Linux Foundation, which strives to bring open source to the automotive industry. Though typically companies can be leery of working with competitors, The Linux Foundation has been successful bringing companies together to create useful software that benefits everyone. Collaboration can be easier when done through the foundation. Chris also actively reaches out to companies in industries that don’t typically engage in open source practices and encourages them to consider working together to make their industry better. Specifically, Chris works with companies within CNCF and the Open Container Initiative. Chris Aniszczyk Chris Aniszczyk is an open source executive and engineer with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He’s currently a VP at the Linux Foundation where he co-founded the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and currently serves as CTO. Furthermore, he’s a partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups. Throughout his career he has worked at the intersection of open source, internet scale organizations and the enterprise; at Twitter he created their open source program/strategy and led their open source efforts to change the infrastructure industry. In a previous life, he bootstrapped an open source startup, was a Gentoo maintainer, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many developer tooling and Linux related projects. Cool things of the week Uber datasets in BigQuery: Driving times around SF (and your city too) blog Topping the tower: the Obstacle Tower Challenge AI Contest with Unity and Google Cloud blog Querying the Stars with BigQuery GIS blog GKE Sandbox: Bring defense in depth to your pods blog Google Cloud launches new Osaka region to support growing customer base in Japan blog Interview Linux Foundation site OpenJS Foundation site CNCF site Automotive Linux Foundation site Let’s Encrypt site How to start a project with the Linux Foundation site Community Bridge site Academy Software Foundation site Open Container Initiative site CNCF Cloud Native Definition site CNCF Annual Report site GraphQL site Linux Foundation Events site Question of the week How do I connect Cloud SQL to my serverless? Where can you find us next? Mark Mirchandani will be working on more film projects. Mark Mandel will be at Tokyo Next in July and will be at Open Source in Gaming the day before the Open Source North America Summit in August.

Michelle and Mark are together again this week to talk with John Bohannon about AI startup, Primer. His goal is to build systems that continuously read documents and write about what they discover. He discusses his recent work building a self-updating knowledge base and the research his team just published. Perhaps most interesting is the circuitous path he took to get to Primer. Hear about his adventures along the way to becoming a data scientist specializing in natural language processing. How does a microbiologist who developed a pregnancy test for fish get distracted by Python? What does contemporary dance have to do with establishing AI policy? Join us as he weaves a common thread along his career path: encountering interesting problems and discovering creative ways to solve them. John Bohannon John Bohannon is the Director of Science at Primer, an AI startup in San Francisco. Until 2017 he was an investigative journalist and data scientist writing mainly for Science magazine and Wired. He spent the first half of his career as a foreign correspondent, including as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin. His reporting from Gaza won the Reuters-IUCN Media Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting from Europe. While embedded with military forces in Afghanistan he engineered the first voluntary release of civilian casualty data by NATO and the United Nations. As a visiting scholar in the Program in Ethics and Health at Harvard University he focused on the involvement of doctors and social scientists in the US government’s torture program. He was also the scientific advisor to Isabella Rosselini for “Green Porno” (winner of 4 Webby awards) and “Animals Distract Me” (official selection, 2011 Sundance Film Festival). He is the author of a peer-reviewed study of people’s inability to distinguish pet food from paté, which inspired Stephen Colbert to eat cat food on television. He has a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Oxford. Cool things of the week Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone book Next ‘19 Recap video I/O ‘19 Recap video All I/O Sessions videos Michelle’s Favorites: Session: Taylor Wilson interviewing Michio Kaku on the future of humanity video Sandbox: AI on the Edge by Gabe Weiss, Noah Negrey, Yu-Han Liu, and Luiz Gustavo Martins TensorFlow Lite site OSS site Codelab: AI on a microcontroller with TFLite and SparkFun Edge site Interview Primer site Primer Blog blog Headline Generation: Learning from Decomposable Document Titles paper BERT site Ngram Viewer site Google Books site Dance Your PhD 2018 WINNER - Superconductivity: The Musical! video Kinetech Arts site John Bohannon’s Website site Question of the week How can we be like John? Where can you find us next? Michelle will be at Kubecon Europe and CERN. Mark Mirchandani will be hanging around the bay area. Mark Mandel is in Tokyo. Gabi is in France. John is in NYC. Brian will be in Boulder, Colorado.