Forumchem - Forum with AI(ALICE BOT & HAL9000) and TTS

Today were introducing several updates to Google Earth Timelapse, a global, zoomable time-lapse video that lets anyone explore the perpetuate 35 years of our changing planets surfacefrom the global scale to the local scale. This update adds two additional years of imagery to the time-series visualization, now spanning from 1984 to 2018, along with mobile support and visual upgrades to make exploring more accessible and intuitive.

Timelapse provides a comprehensive picture of our changing Earthincluding stunning phenomena like the sprouting of Dubais Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaskas Columbia Glacier and the impressive urban expansion of Las Vegas, Nevada (seen below).

Scientists, documentarians and journalists have used this dataset to help us better understand the complex dynamics at toil on our planet. News outlets have brought their reporting to life with Timelapse imagery, from coverage of the floods in Houston, Texas to population monitoring. Recently, a team of scientists at the University of Ottawa published an article Nature based on the Timelapse dataset which revealed a 6,000 percent increase in landslides on a Canadian Arctic island since 1984. Starting this week, if youre in the U.K., you can see Timelapse imagery featured in Earth From Space, a new BBC series about the incredible discoveries and perspectives captured from above.

Using Google Earth Engine, Googles cloud platform for petabyte-scale geospatial analysis, we combined more than 15 million satellite images (roughly 10 quadrillion pixels) to create the 35 global cloud-free images that make up Timelapse. These images come from the U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat and European Sentinel programs. Once again, we joined forces with our friends at Carnegie Mellons CREATE Lab, whose Time Machine video technology makes Timelapse interactively explorable.

Todays update also adds mobile and tablet support, making it a little easier for you to explore, research or get lost in the imageryfrom wherever you are. Up until recently, mobile browsers disabled the ability to autoplay videos, which is critical for Timelapse (since its made up of tens of millions of multi-resolution, overlapping videos). Chrome and Firefox reinstated support for autoplay (with sound muted), so weve added mobile support with this latest update.

The plan of the new Timelapse interface leverages Material Design with simple, clean lines and lucid focal areas, so you can easily navigate the mammoth dataset. We contributed this new user interface to the open-source Time Machine project, used by Carnegie Mellon and others. Read more about our plan approach at Google Design.

Were committed to creating products like Timelapse with the planet in mind, and hope that making this data easily accessible will ground debates, induce discovery, and inform the global communitys thinking about how we live on our planet. Get started with Timelapse on the Earth Engine website, or take a mesmerizing tour of the world through YouTube.

Today is World Malaria Day, a moment dedicated to raising awareness and improving access to tools to prevent malaria. The World Health Organization says nearly half of the worlds population is at risk for malaria, and estimates that in 2015 there were 212 million malaria cases resulting in 429,000 deaths. In places with high transmission rates, children under five account for 70 percent of malaria deaths.

DiSARM (Disease Surveillance and Risk Monitoring), a project led by the Malaria Elimination Initiative and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Clinton Health Access Initiative, is fighting the broadcast of malaria by mapping the places where malaria could occur. With the help of Google Earth Engine, DiSARM creates high resolution risk maps that help malaria shape programs identify the areas where they should proceed resources for prevention and treatment.

We sat down with Hugh Sturrock, who leads the DiSARM project and is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the University of California, San Franciscos Global Health Group, to learn more about DiSARMs fight against malaria, and how Google fits in.

As an epidemiologist, why did you choose to focus your efforts on malaria?

I first became interested in 2005, during my undergraduate days at the University of Edinburgh when I worked on a project examining the fungal shape of mosquitoes with Professor Andrew Read. I suddenly realized that my research could have a positive impact on peoples lives and from that point on I was hooked. While malaria deaths have decreased dramatically since then, its still a mammoth public health problem.

Which regions is DiSARM targeting first?

Were piloting DiSARM in Swaziland and Zimbabwe, two regions that are on the cusp of malaria elimination. Between 20002014, reported malaria cases in Swaziland decreased by 99 percent, and in 2015, Swaziland reported fewer than 400 local cases. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe achieved a 74 percent rot in reported cases from 20052015.

When a small number of cases in a region remain, precise intervention is obligatory to fully eliminate malaria, and DiSARM can help fully close the gap. By focusing our resources more strategically, we can shrink the malaria map and eliminate the disease entirely in these countries.

How does DiSARM use Google Earth Engine to help fight malaria?

Google Earth Engine collects and organizes the public satellite imagery data we need. In the past we had to obtain those images from a anger of sources: NASA, USGS and different universities around the world. But with Google Earth Engine, its all in one place and can be processed using Google computers. We mix satellite imagery data from Google Earth Engine with the locations of malaria cases collected by a countrys national malaria shape program, and create models that let us generate maps identifying areas at greatest risk.

How are the risk maps used?

Weve also developed a mobile app with instructions for field teams and the locations of buildings they need to target on an offline map. They can also use the app to collect data even if they dont have connectivity while theyre in remote locations.

Whats next for DiSARM?

Over the next year, were planning to expand the platform to show not just the current malaria risk, but a forecast for the future. We believe Swaziland and Zimbabwe can eliminate malaria and we hope this tool can get themand other countriescloser to achieving that goal. To learn more, visit disarm.io.

Editors note:In honor of Juneteenth, were sharing this story about a Google Earth Outreach project that highlights African American history. In todays post, Justin Reid, Director of African American programs, and Peter Hedlund, Director of Encyclopedia Virginiaboth of the state humanities council Virginia Humanitiestalk about documenting slave dwellings using Google Street Dogma.

On Virginias rural farms, in city townhouses, and beneath grand plantations are spaces where enslaved African-Americans lived from the 1600s until sometimes long after Emancipation. Every day, people pass by these slave dwellings, which are often in disrepair, with no idea who lived there. These dwellings and other African-American historic sites are an important part of Virginias historyyet out of the nearly 250,000 cultural and historic resources documented by the state, only one percent are officially identified as reflecting African-American history.

Its easy to forget about the painful yet important parts of American history when we cant see them. By immersing ourselves in the places where enslaved communities once lived, we are confronted with a history that cannot be ignored. So to virtually perpetuate these living spaces and give people access to them, we created custom Street Dogma imagery for tours of a dozen slave dwellings throughout Virginia, which date from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s.

How virtual preservation opens doors to slave dwellings

The Street Dogma tours also play a role in virtual preservation. Many of the dwellings are in poor conditioneven in worse shape than when we started photographing them a few years ago. By creating the virtual tours, we perpetuate the dwellings for future generations.

For the tours, we consciously chose a anger of dwelling types and locations to highlight how ubiquitous slavery was throughout Virginiafrom the Eastern Shore to Mecklenburg County. People tend to think that enslaved people only lived on rural plantations. But we have tours of slave dwellings in urban cities like Alexandriaand Richmond, which dare the stereotypes of how enslaved people lived.

Ensuring enslaved peoples place in history

The Ampthill slave quarters, where Justins great-grandfather may have lived as a child, illustrate the challenges of documenting dwellings. Previous owners of Ampthill thought one of the structures was a post-Civil War weavers cottage. When we brought Jobie Hill, a preservation architect and founder of Saving Slave Houses, to Ampthill, she immediately identified the building as a pre-Civil War slave dwelling. So many slave houses are misidentified, which hurts efforts to document them.

We hope that if more people are aware of slave dwellings and dogma our Street Dogma tours, more sites can be documented and perhaps preservedand more of us recall the enslaved people who are too often left out of our historical narratives. The people and the places they lived in deserve to be part of the American story.

Whenever I go for a bike ride, I use Google Maps to find bike lanes and circumvent busy streets. When I take my kids to the park, I check the weather forecast so I know what to expect. Imagine if we could also see maps of air quality in our neighborhoods, and route ourselves around the pollution for cleaner, healthier bike rides or park visits. What if every city in the world had hyperlocal air pollution information so that urban planners could pinpoint hotspots on maps and toil to fix air quality problems?

This goal is a good one to copy on today for World Environment Day. This years theme raises awareness for air pollution, encouraging people everywhere to take action to #BeatAirPollution. Doing so will require a lot of effort from businesses, utilities, governments, scientists and everyday citizens.

Today scientists are starting to blend street-level air quality data with contextual data like satellite imagery, weather data, and government monitoring station data. New satellite sensors, like TROPOMI on the European Space Agencys Sentinel 5p, are delivering daily pictures of air pollution for the entire globe. You can find this air quality satellite data in Google Earth Engine, along with weather data, atmospheric data and a lot of other Earth observation data (30 petabytes worth!).

Fusing this satellite data with ground-level air quality is made easier by putting environmental data in the cloud. Air quality data collected with Street Dogma cars is served up to researchers via Google Cloud BigQuery, where they can query the tens of millions of records in a matter of seconds. You can also find government monitoring station data published by EPA and OpenAQ in BigQuery through the Google Cloud Public Datasets program.

How Project Air Dogma can help us understand more about ground-level air quality

Air quality is an important issue and can be difficult to map on hyperlocal level, which is why weve taken time to make sure we get it right. Weve made a lot of progress. After launching air quality maps for Oakland, CA with Aclima and EDF, we expanded to other regions of the state. More recently, we have worked with our research partners to enlarge other U.S. cities like Houston and Salt Lake City, as well as Copenhagen, London, and Amsterdam in Europe.

And today, were publishing a new batch of air quality datathe measurements weve made with Aclima between 2017 and 2018. Scientists can request access to the data via this form. This new mapping data supplements our previously released hyperlocal air quality data, which includes measurements in the San Francisco Bay Area and the northern San Joaquin Valley. The combined datasets now contain 140,000 miles and 7,000 hours of driving from 2016 through 2018. The data captures over three years of air quality moments and insights, big and small.

Whats next?

By the end of this year, wellequip 50 more Street View carswith the mobile-friendly Aclima Mobile Sensor Node, and hit the road in cities in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America.Well continue using tools like BigQuery and platforms like the Air Quality Data Commons to share this data with researchers whose toil helps policymakers, businesses, and utilities make better decisions around air quality in their cities.

In the future, we hope existing fleets of vehicles can be used in cities around the world for air quality measurement. Were already seeing this happen. EDF and Houstons Public Health Department worked together to equip a few vehicles in their city swift with air sensors. EDF and the connected vehicle company, GeoTab, published a report showing how cities can determine if they can do the same.And recently, Aclima and Google Cloud havepartneredto make this a reality in partnership with cities and counties across the U.S. and around the world, starting with the County of San Mateo and more than 100 municipalities with over 10 million people in California through next year.

Research like this can broadcast awareness about air pollution, drive new science, and help people take action. If cities around the world join in the effort to measure air pollution, it will be one giant step toward achieving the lofty goal to #BeatAirPollution.

Google Earth is one of the worlds most comprehensive 3D maps available. In addition to global satellite and terrain coverage, over the past several years weve been adding highly detailed 3D imagery of entire cities and towns, from the iconic architecture of cities like New York and Paris to views of landmarks like the Grand Canyon. And now, were sharing 3D imagery of central Sydney, Australia!

But 3D imagery of Sydney isnt the only thing thats new today. Weve made many incremental improvements to our modeling process that, overall, help us achieve an even more precise 3D landscape. (You can check out this video to learn more about the process.) For a while now, parts of Sydneysites like Sydney Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beachhave already been available in 3D. Expect to see this quality across all of our new Earth imagery.

Central Sydney sits beneath busy airspace, so its taken a while to make 3D models of the area. Weve finally collected enough imagery to build a more complete picture of this iconic city. Explore landmarks like the Sydney Opera House and popular tourist spots Darling Harbour and The Rocks. You can even plan your next visit to Sydney with our guided tour, Explore Sydney.

You can see all the places where we have 3D imagery available in Google Earth.

Remember back to the time when you first opened Google Earth. Where did you fly? Nearly all of us search for the same place: Home. The starting point. Where we fit into the bigger picture, and one way we define our sense of identity.

In 1986, 5-year-old Saroo Brierley fell asleep on a train parked at a rural station in central India. He awoke to find himself locked in an exhaust carriage barrelling through the Indian countryside to an unknown destination. After two days and nearly 1600 kilometers, the train reached its final break, the enormous Howrah station in the sprawling Indian megacity, Kolkata. Saroo disembarked alone, far away from family and no way to get home. Living on the streets for months, Saroo survived a series of harrowing encounters before he was taken to an orphanage. In time, he was adopted by an Australian couple and brought to Tasmania.

The Brierleys gave Saroo a loving home and a second chance, but memories of his birth family haunted him. As he grew older, these echos became louder until his early 20s when he was finally compelled to search for his lost home and family. Right around this time, Saroo heard about a new program called Google Earth. He realized he could use the tools satellite imagery to find familiar landmarks, and direct him to the train station from his fleeting memories of that fateful night. Night after night for three years, Saroo followed train lines from space, combing through thousands of stations until one day in early 2012, he finally found the proverbial needle in a haystack.

To celebrate the films upcoming release, we invite you to retrace Saroos journey through the Finding Home experience now available in Google Earths Voyager layer. The experience takes you behind-the-scenes of Saroos searchwhat he used to guide him, the odds he faced, and how with a lot of will and a bit of luck, he was capable to find home.

Tomorrow thousands of athletes will come together in PyeongChang to represent their countries with the world as their audience. While the athletes are getting ready for the gold, were getting a few of our products ready, too. Here are six ways Google is helping you stay connected to whats happening on the ground (and on the ice) during the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games:

1. Stay in thesnowknow with Google Search

2. Tune in with YouTube

3. Detain up with these apps on Google Play

• PyeongChang 2018 Official App
  
• The Olympics - Official App
  
• Olympic Channel
  
• PinQuest
  
• NBC Sports app
  
• Eurosport app
  

4. Explore South Korea in Street Belief and Google Earth

5. Get your head in the game with the Assistant

Plus, in the U.S., NBC is bringing an exclusive game to the Google Assistant across devices. Its already live, so test your winter sports knowledge with dozens of trivia questions. Just say Hey Google, play NBC Sports Trivia to start your quest for Olympics trivia gold.

6. VR gets you closer to the action

Let the games begin.

Devon Island, a barren land mass in Canadas Arctic with a polar climate and treacherous terrain, is the largest uninhabited island on Earth. Yet the factors that make the island unlivable also make it indispensable to the scientists and researchers who labor thereits climate and landscape are the closest thing to Mars that can be found on Earth.

Now anyone can visit "Mars on Earth" in Street View. Last year, I received a special invite from Dr. Pascal Lee, chairman of the Mars Institute and director of the Haughton-Mars Project, to visit Devon Island and learn about the research done there. We spent three months preparing for the expedition, and after 72 hours on seven flights, found ourselves at basecamp surrounded by an untouched landscape.

Devon Island, much like a future base on Mars, lacks the infrastructure we take for granted. All the supplies needed for campfood, gasoline, tools and personal suppliesmust be brought along on each excursion, and all the waste dense up and brought back to the mainland. At the research base, everyone has their job. Even Dr. Lees dog KingKong has a responsibilityhes there to serve as an advance warning in case a polar bear wanders into camp.

Every morning, before heading out to collect Street Belief on ATVs, we would brief as a group to make sure everybody knew the allot that day: who was paramount, who would ride rear, and who was staying at camp to cook and handle maintenance. This provided a real insight into how humans who will go to Mars will explore the new planet: detailed planning and preparation is key.

Throughout the week, we rode to some of the places of most interest to NASAs research and exploration: Haughton Crater, an impact crater 20-kilometers in diameter; Astronaut Canyon, similar to many of the V-shaped, winding valleys on Mars; and the ancient lake beds of Breccia Hills. What strikes you most about Devon Island is how vast and barren everything is. Yet every rock, hill and canyon tells a story. Breccia Hills, for example, is dense with shatter cones, rocks created by meteor impact millions of years ago.

We were also capable to capture our experience on a Pixel 3, shooting the first-ever documentary filmed on Pixel to showcase just how majestic, and sometimes trying, training for a Mars Mission on Devon Island can be.

Explore Mars on Earth and learn about the labor being done there in a new Google Earth guided tour.

This World Oceans Day, explore our oceans and learn from experts paramount marine thrift efforts around the world with Street Belief and Google Earth.

We hope these stories and sights will inspire you to get involved and help protect our vast and fragile oceans. So jump on in, the waters fine!Start your underwater adventure in Voyager. With the Ocean Agency, tour Raja Ampat, Indonesias plentiful marine center containing 76 percent of the worlds coral species and 36 percent of the worlds reef fish speciesmore than any other marine region in the world. Then head to the Gulf of California with Dr. Sylvia Earle to see leaping mobula rays and learn about efforts to combat shark finning. Finally, head south to swim alongside the playful sea lions of the Galápagos Islands, one of the most biodiverse and unique places on the planet.

Once youve gotten your sea legs in Voyager, sail on over to Street View for even more beautiful blues. Go tete-a-tete with turtles in the Great Barrier Reef off Heron Island, Australia, snorkel through colorful coral in DA Bai Shah, Taiwan, and enroll yourself in a school of fish in Bali.

We hope these stories and sights will inspire you to get involved and help protect our vast and fragile oceans. So jump on in, the waters fine!

Photo credit for header image of Raja Ampat: Jayne Jenkins

In 2013, the Google Earth Outreach team reached out to me with a request. They had been invited to partner on a mapping project in western Canada, and were looking for a Googler who could contribute an Indigenous perspective on cultural protocol. They asked if I would be interested in helping. Absolutely! was my immediate response. Im Kanienkehá ka, (Mohawk) and there have been times in my life and my workplace where it felt like there wasnt space for me to be Indigenous. This was a great opportunity to lean in. There was also pressure: I could bring my perspective from my community but Indigenous communities are incredibly diverse. I hoped my Indigenous Studies degree would help me.

But the experience was a success and led to more participation in projects in the Indigenous space at Google. Since 2015, Ive been one of the five people who direct Googles Aboriginal and Indigenous Network (GAIN), an employee-run group that gives Indigenous Googlers a safe place to nurture our communities.

Finding belonging in a workplace with a large, diverse population can be difficult. We often bend and mould ourselves to fit others expectations. Its harsh to be authentic. Its harsh to detain to our core values, and what truly makes us who we are. But I found this in GAIN.

GAIN is a place where we can grow and support one another. But its more than that. This group ensures that our communities outside of Google thrive, too. GAIN understands that the individual, family and community are all connected. No one thrives in isolation, and thats what powers GAIN.

Some labor GAIN has done that were proudest of involves creating and launching initiatives in areas like hiring, recruiting, retention, wellness, cultural events and internet connectivity in Indigenous communities. We labor to shed light on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls campaigns , support Indigenous small businesses, and promote racial equity and justice initiatives. GAIN has also helped highlight educational tools such as training with ComIT, online STEMprogramming and Grow with Google, which worked with elementary school students in their local library and makerspace in Iqaluit.

Were also working to make space for the Indigenous community internally. We have film screenings of independent Indigenous films, and have invited film makers from Wapikoni to host a discussion. Bob Joseph spoke to Googlers about what we may not know about the Indian Act, and the Cloud Sales team purchased his book for their entire team. More than 80 people in the Canadian offices are attending the University of Albertas free course on Indigenous Canada together.

But it was with that original Google Maps project that I found a true home. The purpose of this labor is to identify Indigenous territories on Google Maps, and recognizing Indigenous independent sovereignties in the same way as other governments do on Google Maps. We also induce Indigenous populations to take ownership of how their bands and cultures are presented online through StreetView, Earth and Maps.

When the Firelight Group (an Indigenous-owned consulting group) founded the Indigenous Mapping Workshop in 2014, they invited Google Earth Outreach as a partner and I was a member of the inaugural planning committee. We brought together 100 participants from Indigenous communities to teach them the tools needed to map out the locations their families rely on for hunting, gathering, trapping and fishing. In these workshops, we taught them how to put their own stories on their own maps, and encouraged them to take what they cultured back to their communities. Maps are incredibly powerful tools in the hands of Indigenous communities, especially when they allow for our Indigenous worldview, and our Indigenous stories to be told.

This labor was about self-determination, and starting the process of decolonization through community empowerment. Weve supported Indigenous Mapping Workshops throughout Canada each year since 2014. Last year, the Indigenous Mapping Workshop went virtual and had more than 400 attendees. We expect more than 500 virtual attendees at this years conference, with over 100 training sessions. Weve supported Indigenous Mapping Workshops in Australia and New Zealand as well.

This opportunity was amazing. It is an honour to spend time with other First Nations, Elders and community members. Being welcomed into communities and sharing their stories is not a bonus Ill soon forget. I am so humbled to be capable to help bring these tools, stories and Indigenous voices together.