Official Google Canada Blog: November 2020

Setting the Record Straight on Google and Canadian News Publishers.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The disruption of the newspaper business model was not caused by Google. Digital advertising dollars are not controlled by Google. helped generate $23 billion in annual economic activity for over 500,000 businesses in Canada Our advertising platforms allow publishers of all sizes to make money online. over 69% of the revenueeven more of the revenue Google is not stealing news publishers’ content. can opt-out of being included5 billion visits to Canadian news publishers last yearestimated $500 million worth of value News Media Canada’s proposal would undermine Google Search for Canadians. Google supports publisher diversity -- big, small, old and new. Subscribe with GoogleGoogle News Initiative$1 billion news funding program Google believes there is a way forward.No, the news business is not the same as it was decades ago. Innovative Canadians are making it better. Posted by Sabrina Geremia, Vice President, Google Canada

Google Maps updates to get you through the holidays

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

live busynesscritical health and safety information

Get around Whether you’re heading out of town or staying local, keeping a pulse on the latest COVID trends can help you stay safe. Since we launched the COVID layer, it’s helped nearly 10 million people get critical information about COVID-19 right from Google Maps.
We’re rolling out two new improvements in the coming weeks. The updated COVID layer on Android and iOS will soon show more information, including all-time detected cases in an area, along with quick links to COVID resources from local authorities. This is especially handy if you’re heading out of town and need to get up to speed about the local guidelines, testing sites and restrictions in another city.

Caption: Now you can see all-time detected COVID-19 cases in an area and links to local, authoritative resources right from the COVID layer

Avoiding holiday crowds might have always been your thing, but this year, we’re making it especially easy for everyone. If you need to take transit, Google Maps can help you more easily social distance with live crowdedness information. On Android and iOS globally, you’ll start seeing how crowded your bus, train, or subway line is right now based on real-time feedback from Google Maps users around the world (wherever data is available).

Caption: See how crowded your transit line is right now

The right information, at just the right time You may be in the mood to cook an elaborate holiday meal–or you may not. If you fall into the latter category, we’re rolling out the ability to see the live status of takeout and delivery orders in the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, Brazil and India when you book or order from Google Maps on Android and iOS. Now, you can know when to pick up your food, or when you can expect it to arrive at your doorstep. You can also see expected wait times and delivery fees, and easily reorder your favorites right from the Google Maps app. And when it’s safe to head to restaurants, you’ll also be able to quickly see the status of your reservation in 70 countries around the world.

Caption: Now you can see the live status of your restaurant reservation, takeout, or delivery order

Get more done While the ways we make life easier for you have changed, our commitment to do this has been there all along. Over the past 15 years, Google Maps has used technology to bring helpful information about the real world right to your fingertips. To make sure that information is as accurate and up-to-date as possible, we rely on 170 billion high-definition Street View images from 87 countries, contributions from hundreds of millions of businesses and people using Google Maps, and authoritative data from more than 10,000 local governments, transit agencies and organizations. We also invest in technical approaches that power some of our most beloved and essential features—from the 20 million places globally that now show popular times data to AR-powered Live View.
Even in a pandemic, more than 1 billion people still turn to Google Maps to navigate their new normal—and our work is far from done. We’re continually working to build new features and services to help all of us emerge from this challenging time stronger than ever. So whatever your plans are this holiday season and no matter how much they’ve changed, Google Maps can make them easier and safer for you.

Posted by Dane Glasgow, VP of Product, Google Maps

Why innovation is critical for our nation

Friday, November 13, 2020

Guest authored post by Yoshua Bengio, scientific director of Mila - Quebec AI Institute

This year marked a watershed moment for the Canadian artificial intelligence community with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers everywhere have been rolling up their sleeves to help fight the virus, putting their expertise to work for the scientific and medical communities and towards the global common good. During my 30 years of research, I have gradually learned and internalized the importance of producing science that benefits society at large. Recent efforts at Mila and across Canada highlight our collective commitment to working together to address the global challenge in front of us today and the challenges we will face in the future.

COVID-19 has changed the world forever and many industries, from healthcare to retail, will need to adapt to thrive in our “new normal.” As we look to the future and how priorities will shift, it is clear that artificial intelligence is no longer an emerging technology but a useful tool that can serve to solve world problems. Google Canada recognizes not only this opportunity but the important task at hand and I’m thrilled they have reconfirmed their support of Mila with an additional $3 million USD funding grant until 2022.

Canada’s Unique AI Ecosystem

In Canada, we are fortunate to benefit from a system that allows experts in AI to contribute to our broader social dialogue, fostering an interdisciplinarity culture and inclusive democracy. While the surge in AI knowledge and expertise in Canada has been exponential over the last decade, the trials and tribulations that we are currently facing can teach us important lessons about the responsible development of AI in the future. I believe that our attention to these issues makes our country’s AI sector unique.

Canada’s flourishing AI ecosystem is not a happenstance. This “golden age” of AI we are currently experiencing is due in great part to investment in curiosity-driven research, particularly by CIFAR, and an immigration policy that welcomes global talent. Since 2015, federal and provincial governments have invested nearly a billion dollars in our AI ecosystem, including significant efforts to attract and retain leading AI researchers in Canada, which includes Mila’s 36 active Canada CIFAR AI Chairs.

Canada was the first country to develop a national AI strategy, supporting and unifying an open collaborative mindset into its ecosystem. In 2018, Mila and Université de Montréal, with the Fonds de recherche du Québec, unveiled the Montreal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence—a set of ethical guidelines recognized internationally as one of the most important initiatives for the development of responsible AI with tangible societal benefits. I believe that our forward thinking in both science and commitment to a greater common good is what attracts some of the brightest minds in AI to our leading research institutes, like AMII in Edmonton, the Vector Institute in Toronto, and Mila, right here in Montreal. The possibilities for Canadian AI research are endless and we will continue to lead the world in this area.

Mila is also benefiting from unprecedented financial support from the private sector. In 2016, Google Canada awarded Mila $4.5 million over a three-year-period. Their generous contribution as well as funding from others have helped catalyze Mila’s growth in more ways than one. Since this influx of funding, the number of faculty members has increased by 56% and we welcomed 50% more students, currently sitting at 519 - making Mila the research institute with the largest concentration of deep learning academic researchers worldwide.

On the research front, our 50 most cited publications have been referenced in scholarly literature cumulatively over 24,000 times since the start of the Google funding. Last year, Mila members produced high-impact work, including, a Nature Neuroscience paper on a deep learning framework for neuroscience, a Nature Methods paper introducing Deep Learning methods to single cell data exploration, including applications in characterizing immune response to dengue viral infections, a paper on Recurrent Independent Mechanisms, and the first known fully differentiable SLAM system.

AI: Must Benefit All

Canadian AI innovations are being developed to help visualize climate change and raise social awareness, to power self-driving cars, and to improve healthcare outcomes. One of our biggest COVID-19 projects, LambdaZero, a deep reinforcement learning system, allows for the rapid evaluation of billions of candidate molecules, making it possible to progressively modify the molecular structure by adding or removing building blocks to discover new molecular structures capable of binding to a target protein.

The development of responsible AI that will benefit everyone is, and will always be, at the heart of everything Mila does. And not just here in Canada, we’re playing a leadership role globally, as members and leaders of the OECD Global Partnership on AI. We remain humble and accept that AI as a scientific discipline is still very much in its infancy and it's critical that academics, research institutes as well as the private and public sectors work together to help steer our society and technologists in the responsible development of AI that benefits everyone. We need to accept the limits of our knowledge and continue to collaborate with experts from all fields.

Ongoing support and established trust from the federal and provincial governments, and from the main industry players like Google, is the reason why Mila—and the entire Canadian ecosystem—is able to continue to push boundaries and maintain scientific leadership in the development of innovative approaches to machine learning for AI. Google Canada’s generous support, and our pledge toward Mila’s mission, further solidifies Mila and Google’s longstanding mutual commitment to continue to develop AI for the benefit of everyone.

Official Canada Blog

Setting the Record Straight on Google and Canadian News Publishers.

Google Maps updates to get you through the holidays

Why innovation is critical for our nation

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