Google Cloud Platform Podcast

Happy Thanksgiving! On this episode, Mark and Melanie learn about Grace.health with co-founders Therese Mannheimer and Roman Jasins. Grace.health’s goal is to give women control of information about their own bodies, allowing them to make informed healthcare decisions. Grace.health is a female health companion that lets women track and plan their periods, fertility, and ask questions. It is a global undertaking, hoping to reach not just the tech savvy woman, but all women in all markets worldwide. Stigmas and taboos around the world portray periods as dirty and contagious, preventing women from being able to work, go to school, or even sleep in the house. Grace.health’s goal is to educate people to help limit these superstitions and allow women to live fuller lives. With Grace.health, women know when their periods are coming or when the are ovulating so they can make the proper plans. In the longterm, Grace.health hopes to be a tool to not only help women identify any health concerns but also find a healthcare professional and get the treatment necessary. Therese Mannheimer Therese, one of the founders of Grace.health, is an experienced business developer and product person who believes that the best way to solve problems is to put relevant solutions into the hands of people. She is also co-founder of the Allbright Foundation that works with driving opinion around meritocracy. Roman Jasins Roman is CTO and co-founder of Grace.health. Cool things of the week Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video Getting started with Kubeflow Pipelines blog Subatomic particles and big data: Google joins CERN openlab blog GCP Podcast Episode 145: ATLAS with Dr. Mario Lassnig podcast Istio Routing Basics site Interview Grace Health site Google Cloud Startup site Dialogflow site FEM International site UN site Doctors Without Borders site The Hunger Project site Question of the week With background cloud functions - how can I set them up to retry on failure? Background functions Retrying Background Functions Where can you find us next? Mark and will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML in November and Black in AI and LatinX in December.

Viktor Gamov, a Developer Advocate at Confluent, joins Mark and special guest host Michelle to discuss Kafka's real-time data streaming capabilities and how Confluent helps connect with cloud platforms like Google Cloud. They also answer a question about Next 2019 and share tips for writing effective conference abstracts.

Joanna Smith and Alicia Williams talk G Suite with Mark and Melanie this week! G Suite is Google’s collection of apps to help make working easier. It includes things like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and more and is designed to be collaborative. It’s customizable, allowing users to adjust the programs to their needs and be more effective – including integrating it with Google Cloud! G Suite has an active community of developers building add-ons to increase functionality as well. Joanna Smith Joanna is a Developer Advocate for G Suite, working to make sure that anyone can extend G Suite with clever solutions to make Google work for them. Alicia Williams Alicia is an advocate for Google Cloud, trying to help data analysts solve problems. She uses machine learning, SQL, and visualizations to help solve problems and tell stories. Cool things of the week A dataset of congressional bills and built a text classification model with AutoML Natural Language by Sara Robinson tweet and blog Serverless from the ground up: Connecting Cloud Functions with a database (Part 3) blog How 20th Century Fox uses ML to predict a movie audience blog Kick off developer projects with improved G Suite Developer Hub blog This multiplayer game integrates Open Match, a highly-scalable, open source matchmaking framework from Google Cloud, Unity tweet, and Google Doodle Happy Anniversary, Melanie! Interview G Suite site Google Sheets site G Suite on Google Plus site G Suite Marketplace site G Suite on Github site G Suite APIs site G Suite App Maker site Building IoT Applications on Google Cloud video Firestore Google Apps Script Library site Build on G Suite site Advanced Services Documentation site BigQuery site New Google Sheets enterprise data integrations with BigQuery and SAP blog Analyze big data within Google Sheets site Analyzing text in a Google Sheet using Cloud Natural Language API and Apps Script blog Entity sentiment analysis on text data in a Google sheet using Cloud Natural Language Github site Question of the week What if I want to write a code sample with a link that opens the Cloud Console and automatically clones a Git repository into Cloud Shell? Where can you find us next? Alicia will be at DevFest. Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML this month.

Happy Halloween! On this not-so-spooky episode of the Google Cloud Podcast, Melanie and Mark talk with Tony Aiuto of Bazel. Bazel grew from Google’s internal build system, Blaze, to become the open source Bazel that it is today. The aim of the project is to quickly make very large builds across multiple languages. Tony Aiuto Tony is the tech-lead/manager for Bazel Product Excellence. He works on removing what enterprise users see as barriers to adoption. Tony’s efforts are on bridging the gap between the piece of open source code that the developers see and the product that users want to see. Commentary of the week Where can I donate if I’m angry or sad by last week’s news? Time’s Up Now site Project Alloy site MeToo Stem site HIAS site ADL site Protest NIPS conference name site Interview Bazel site BazelCon site Bazel on GitHub site Bazel Discuss on Google Groups site Bazel on Slack site Tweag site Tweag Haskell Rules site Cool things of the week It’s Halloween! And it’s the 3rd anniversary of the podcast! Gain insights about your GCP resources with asset inventory blog Introducing the Cloud KMS plugin for HashiCorp Vault blog Serverless from the ground up: Adding a user interface with Google Sheets (Part 2) blog Cyber Security for the Previous Generation blog The Red Sox won the World Series! Where can you find us next? Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML in November.

On the podcast today, we have two more fascinating interviews from Melanie’s time at Deep Learning Indaba! Mark helps host this episode as we speak with Karim Beguir and Muthoni Wanyoike about their company, Instadeep, the wonderful Indaba conference, and the growing AI community in Africa. Instadeep helps large enterprises understand how AI can benefit them. Karim stresses that it is possible to build advanced AI and machine learning programs in Africa because of the growing community of passionate developers and mentors for the new generation. Muthoni tells us about Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, a community she is heavily involved with in Nairobi. The group runs workshops and classes for AI developers and encourages volunteers to participate by sharing their knowledge and skills. Karim Beguir Karim Beguir helps companies get a grip on the latest AI advancements and how to implement them. A graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products. Karim is also the founder of the TensorFlow Tunis Meetup. He regularly organises educational events and workshops to share his experience with the community. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience. Muthoni Wanyoike Muthoni Wanyoike is the team lead at Instadeep in Kenya. She is Passionate about bridging the skills gap in AI in Africa and does this by co-organizing the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning community. The community enables learning, mentorship, networking, and job opportunities for people interested in working in AI. She is experienced in research, data analytics, community and project management, and community growth hacking. Cool things of the week Is there life on other planets? Google Cloud is working with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to find out blog In this Codelab, you will learn about StarCraft II Learning Environment project and to train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent. You will also get familiar some of the concepts and frameworks to get to train a machine learning agent. site A new course to teach people about fairness in ML blog Serverless from the ground up: Building a simple microservice with Cloud Functions (Part 1) blog Superposition Podcast from Deep Learning Indaba with Omoju Miller and Nando de Freitas tweet and video Interview Instadeep site Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science site Neural Information Processing Systems site Google Launchpad Accelerator site TensorFlow site Google Assistant site Cloud AutoML site Hackathon Lagos site Deep Learning Book book Ranked Reward: Enabling Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization research paper Lessons learned on building a tech community blog Kenya Open Data Initiative site R for Data Science GitHub site and book TWIML Presents Deep Learning Indaba site Question of the week If I want to create a GKE cluster with a specific major kubernetes version (or even just the latest) using the command line tools, how do I do that? GCloud container clusters create site Specifying cluster version site Where can you find us next? Our guests will be at Indaba 2019 in Kenya. Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at SOCML in November.

Mark and Melanie speak with Patrick Flynn and Mike Eltsufin about their exciting new Java products for Google Cloud. Mike tells us all about the new Spring Cloud GCP, a helpful tool that integrates Google Cloud Platform APIs and the Spring Framework. Patrick elaborates on his team’s new tool, Jib, a Java container image builder, and how it helps Java developers. Patrick Flynn Patrick Flynn is a long time Java developer who spent many years in Google Ads, and is now four years into being the tech lead of the Google Cloud Java Tools team. Mike Eltsufin Mike Eltsufin has been an enterprise Java application developer in the banking sector for over a decade before joining Google. Currently, he’s the tech lead of the Cloud Java Frameworks team, focusing on bringing the goodness of Spring Boot to Google Cloud Java developers. Cool things of the week Introducing container-native load balancing on Google Kubernetes Engine blog Simplifying cloud networking for enterprises: announcing Cloud NAT and more blog Store it, analyze it, back it up: Cloud Storage updates bring new replication options blog Postmortems and Retrospectives with Liz and Seth video GCP Podcast Episode 127: SRE vs Devops with Liz Fong-Jones and Seth Vargo podcast Interview App Engine site Kubernetes Engine site Spring Framework site Spring Boot site Spring Cloud GCP site Spring Cloud GCP on GitHub site Cloud Pub/Sub site Spanner site Cloud Sql site Cloud Datastore site Docker site Jib on GitHub site Cloud Tools for IntelliJ Documentation site Introducing Jib — build Java Docker images better blog Bazel site Skaffold on GitHub site Netty site SpringOne site Knative and riff for Spring Developers video Jib Gitter site Sig Apps site Kubernetes Slack site Codelabs site Question of the week What if we have an object in Google Cloud Storage, and I want to automatically change an aspect of it – such as: Downgrade the storage class of objects older than 365 days to Coldline Storage. Delete objects created before January 1, 2013. Keep only the 3 most recent versions of each object in a bucket with versioning enabled. Managing Object Lifecycles docs and guide Where can you find us next? Patrick’s team will be at KubeCon Shanghai and Oracle Code One and he will be at KubeCon Seattle Mark will be at KubeCon in December. Melanie will be at Twilio Signal $BASH event on Thursday and SOCML in November.

Melanie and Mark celebrate their 150th episode this week with a high-energy interview of mutual friend, KF, at Strange Loop. KF gives her perspective on Strange Loop, working remotely, and distributed systems. She compliments Strange Loop for the diversity it has achieved as the conference has grown. She laments the lack of introductory material for distributed systems learners, saying it’s not as complicated as everyone thinks but needs more educational material for beginners! In general, she believes everyone could benefit from some code study, especially if you can find a good mentor. KF also gives us some great tips for working remotely and staying effective and social. Katherine Fellows KF is a senior engineer focusing on backend, infrastructure, and data engineering. She has worked remotely for companies at all stages of growth in San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and Philadelphia. Most recently, she’s been a Senior Software Engineer at Turbine Labs, developing tools that leverage a service mesh to make collaboration more effective for engineering teams. KF currently lives with her cat in Portland, OR. Cool things of the week Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog Is that a device driver, golf driver, or taxi driver? Building custom translation models with AutoML Translate blog A developer onramp to Kubernetes with GKE blog Network controls in GCP vs. on-premises: Not so different after all blog Interview Strange Loop site Kubernetes site Docker site SRE site GCP Podcast Episode 102: Smart Parking and IoT Core with Brian Granatir podcast Question of the week How do I encrypt and decrypt data with Cloud KMS? Symmetric and Asymmetric Where can you find us next? Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December. Mark streams on Twitch streaming. Melanie will be at CAMLIS. Get in touch! Website Email us! Ask us a question Reddit Google Plus Twitter

Today, Melanie brings you another great interview from her time at Deep Learning Indaba in South Africa. She was joined by Yabebal Fantaye and Jessica Phalafala for an in-depth look at the deep learning research that’s going on in the continent. At the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the aim is to gather together minds from all over Africa and the world to not only learn but to use their distinct perspectives to contribute to research that furthers the sciences. Our guests are both part of this initiative, using their specialized skills to expand the abilities of the group and stretch the boundaries of machine learning, mathematics, and other sciences. Yabebal elaborates on the importance of AIMS and Deep Learning Indaba, noting that the more people can connect with each other, the more confidence they will gain. Jessica points out how this research in Africa can do more than just advance science. By focusing on African problems and solutions, machine learning research can help increase the GDP and economic standards of a continent thought to be “behind”. Jessica Phalafala Jessica Phalafala is a PhD Applied Mathematics student at Stellenbosch University and currently affiliated with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In her mid-twenties, she finds herself with four qualifications all obtained with distinction, including a Master of Science in Pure Mathematics degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. Jessica is interested in using her functional analysis background together with a number of newly developed skills to contribute towards developing rigorous mathematical theory to support some existing deep learning methods and algorithms for her PhD research. Outside of research she takes great interest in fast-tracking the level of accessibility of higher education in South Africa as co-founder of the Sego Sa Lesedi Foundation, a platform created to inform underprivileged high school learners of career and funding opportunities in science as well as provide them with mentorship as they transition into undergraduate studies. Yabebal Fantaye Dr. Fantaye is an AIMS-ARETE Research Chair based in South Africa. His research is in applying artificial intelligence and advanced statistical methods to cosmological data sets in order to understand the nature of the universe and to satellite images of the Earth in order to find alternative ways to monitor African development progress. Dr. Fantaye is a fellow of the World Economic Forum Young Scientists community, and a fellow and a Chair of the Next Einstein Forum Community of Scientists. Cool things of the week A Kubernetes FAQ for the C-suite blog BigQuery and surrogate keys: a practical approach blog Adding custom intelligence to Gmail with serverless on GCP blog Announcing Cloud Tasks, a task queue service for App Engine flex and second generation runtimes blog Unity and DeepMind partner to advance AI research blog Interview African Institute for Mathematical Sciences site Provable approximation properties for deep neural networks research Next Einstein Initiative site Square Kilometer Array (SKA) site University of the Witwatersrand site Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) site South African National Space Agency (SANSA) site National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP)site IndabaX site Coursera site Andrej Karpathy research Andrej Karpathy Blog blog Question of the week If I’m using the Cluster Autoscaler for Kubernetes (or GKE), how can I prevent it from removing specific nodes from the cluster when scaling down? How can I prevent Cluster Autoscaler from scaling down a particular node? github What types of pods can prevent CA from removing a node? github Where can you find us next? Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December and will probably be at Unite L.A. this month. Melanie is speaking at Monktoberfest Oct 4th in Portland, Maine and will be at CAMLIS the following week.

In our last (but not least!) interview from NEXT, Mark and Melanie talked with Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko about Wellio, an awesome new platform that combines AI and healthy eating. Wellio was developed as a way to not only educate users on the importance of proper nutrition for well-being but to give them their own personal nutritionist. The data scientists at Wellio started from scratch (pun intended) to create their own food-related database and then began training models so the data could be organized and personalized. Using a combination of human power and machine learning techniques, Wellio learns your preferences, allergies, diets, etc. and will make healthy decisions for you based on these key facts. It chooses recipes, populates a grocery list, and even has the ingredients delivered to your door in time for dinner! Sivan Aldor-Noiman Sivan heads Data Science for Wellio, an early stage startup in the FoodTech space that is helping people eat better. In Wellio, her team delivers models that help inspire, empower and adapt to people’s eating needs, cooking abilities and health constraints. She began her career in the Israeli military serving as an instructor for an anti-tank missile unit (please don’t think Rambo, think more like a classroom teacher). Sivan then transitioned to school and received her undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a Master in Statistics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She moved to the U.S. to complete a Ph.D. degree in Statistics from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In her previous job, Sivan ended up leading several Data Science teams and learned that she really liked leading technical people since she got to learn a lot from them. Ultimately, she missed the smaller company mentality, so she is back in the startup world. Sivan was once asked to define herself so here goes: “I am an enthusiastic disagreeable giver and a constant empirical driven learner”. Erik Andrejko Erik has spent his career making a positive impact on the world through mathematics. He is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Wellio - an early stage startup applying AI to the intersection of food and human health. Previously, Erik lead the data science and research organization at The Climate Corporation, which applies data science to solve challenging problems in numerous domains including climatology, agronomic modeling and geospatial applications. When not analyzing interesting datasets, Erik can often be found riding up some incline on a bicycle or cooking. Cool things of the week Summary of Google Cloud Next Tokyo site Deep Learning Indaba GCP Credit Awards site Data Studio and Dataprep are now generally available blog DS: BI analyze more than 500 other data sources via more than 100 partner-built connectors and used by over a million people globally DP: new look, team collab and more analytics features blog Announcing general availability of Cloud Memorystore for Redis blog Coursera Advanced Machine Learning with TensorFlow with GCP blog Webinar on October 9th at 9AM PST to learn more Simplifying ML predictions with Google Cloud Functions blog 50 Best Cloud Security Podcasts site GCP Podcast Episode #100: Vint Cerf: past, present, and future of the internet podcast Interview Wellio site GKE site Cloud Storage site Pub/Sub site Cloud Composer site Cloud ML Engine site Stackdriver site Cloud Functions site TensorFlow site Keras site Scikit Learn site Cloud TPU site Cloud AutoML site Cloud Vision site DevOps201 for Application Developers video Cloud Firestore site Day 3 Keynote: Made Here Together video Spinnaker site Contact Wellio email Questions of the week Is Inbox going away? Inbox is signing off: find your favorite features in the new Gmail blog 5 ways the new Gmail can help you get more done blog Where can you find us next? We’ll both be at Strangeloop. Mark will probably be at Unite L.A. in October. Melanie speaking at Monktoberfest Oct 4th in Portland, Maine.

This week we are bringing you a couple of interviews from last week’s Deep Learning Indaba conference. Dr. Vukosi Marivate, Andrea Bohmert and Yasin(i) Musa Ayami talk about the burgeoning machine learning community, research, companies and AI investment landscape in Africa. While Mark is at Google Cloud Next in Tokyo, Melanie is joined by special guest co-hosts Nyalleng Moorosi and Willie Brink. Vukosi and Yasin(i) share how Deep Learning Indaba is playing an important role to recognize and grow machine learning research and companies on the African continent. We also discuss Yasin(i)’s prototyped app, Tukuka, and how it won the Maathai Award which is given to individuals who are a positive force for change. Tukuka is being built to aid economically disadvantaged women in Zambia get access to financial resources that are currently unavailable. Andrea rounds up the interviews by giving us a VC perspective on the AI start-up landscape in Africa and how that compares to other parts of the world. As Nyalleng says at the end, AI is happening in Africa and has great potential for impact. Willie Brink Willie Brink is a senior lecturer of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He teaches various courses in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, at all levels, and his research interests fall mainly in the broad fields of computer vision and machine learning. He has worked on multi-view geometry, visual odometry, recognition and tracking, probabilistic graphical models, as well as deep learning. Recent research directions include visual knowledge representation and reasoning. Willie is also one of the founders and organisers of the Deep Learning Indaba, an exciting initiative working to celebrate and strengthen machine learning and artificial intelligence research in Africa, and to promote diversity and transformation in these fields. Nyalleng Moorosi Nyalleng is a Software Engineer and Researcher with the Google AI team in Ghana. Before joining Google, Nyalleng was a senior Data Science researcher at South Africa’s national science lab, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with the Modeling and Digital Sciences Unit. In her capacity at CSIR, she works on projects ranging from: rhino poaching prevention with park rangers, working with news outlets to understand social media sentiments, and searching for Biomarkers in African cancer proteomes. Before getting into ML research at CSIR, she was a computer science lecturer at Fort Hare University and a software engineer at Thomson Reuters. Moorosi is an active member of Women in Machine Learning, Black in Artificial Intelligence, and an organising member of the Deep Learning Indaba - a yearly workshop that gathers African researchers in one space to share ideas and grow machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. Dr. Vukosi Marivate Dr. Vukosi Marivate holds a PhD in Computer Science (Rutgers University) and MSc & BSc in Electrical Engineering (Wits University). He has recently started at the University of Pretoria as the ABSA Chair of Data Science. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (due to the abundance of text data and need to extract insights). As part of his vision for the ABSA Data Science chair, Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is an organizer of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He is passionate about developing young talent, supervising MSc and PhD students, and mentoring budding Data Scientists. Yasin(i) Musa Ayami Yasin(i) Musa Ayami is Team Lead at TsogoloTech and a certified Oracle Associate. Mr. Ayami recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in Information Technology at the prestigious Durban University of Technology (DUT) were his study mainly focused on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Prior to him enrolling for his Master’s Degree, Mr Ayami served as an Intern Software Engineer at DUT’s App Factory where he also served as Team Lead before deciding to further his studies. He also worked as a Part-Time Student Instructor at the DUT. In 2017, he co-founded TsogoloTech. His vision has always been to leverage technology for social good. Andrea Bohmert Andrea Bohmert is a Co-Managing Partner at Knife Capital. Before joining Knife Capital, she was the Founder and Co-Managing Partner of Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa. Passionate about strategizing how to scale businesses and meeting the entrepreneurs responsible for creating them, she has been actively involved in numerous initiatives aiming to accelerate the African entrepreneurial ecosystem. What are you looking forward to this week? AlphaGo Movie site WiML: Women in Machine Learning site Deep Learning Indaba Poster Sessions site Neural Information Processing Systems site Interview Deep Learning Indaba site Deep Learning Indaba GitHub site Deep Learning Indaba Tutorials site Deep Learning Indaba 2018 Slides site Deep Learning Indaba 2017 Presentations videos Deep Learning Indaba X site Yasin(i) Musa Ayami on GitHub site and LinkedIn site Deep Learning Indaba Award Winners site and tweet Maathai Award site Xamarin site SuperPosition at The Deep Learning Indaba with Dr. Vukosi Marivate podcast Knife Capital site Investing in AI by Andrea Bohmert article 10 Defining Moments that shaped the 2016 SA startup ecosystem article Data Science Africa site International Data Week site Google Cloud Platform Credits award winners tweet Question of the week The co-hosts weigh in on our question of the week: What have you taken away from this week and will take forward? Where can you find us next? Mark and Melanie will be at Strangeloop. Willie will be teaching Machine Learning at Stellenbosch University this summer. Nyalleng will be at the Women in Machine Learning Workshop and the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Montreal in December.