Data: How Google's Self-Driving Cars Work

The Trick That Makes Google's Self-Driving Cars Work - The Atlantic
"Google has created a virtual track out of Mountain View. 

The key to Google's success has been that these cars aren't forced to process an entire scene from scratch. Instead, their teams travel and map each road that the car will travel...

They're probably best thought of as ultra-precise digitizations of the physical world, all the way down to tiny details like the position and height of every single curb. A normal digital map would show a road intersection; these maps would have a precision measured in inches...

Google has mapped 2,000 miles of road. The US road network has 4 million miles of road. "It is work," Urmson added, shrugging, "but it is not intimidating work." 

www.datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.pdf @ IEEE
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira, Google

• For many tasks, words and word combinations provide all the representational machinery we need to learn from text.
• Because of a huge shared cognitive and cultural context, linguistic expression can be highly ambiguous and still often be understood correctly.
• The same meaning can be expressed in many different ways, and the same expression can express many different meanings. 
• Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data.

IoT: Google Project Brillo, Weave protocol (!)

Project Brillo   |   Google Developers
"Brillo extends the Android platform to all your connected devices, so they are easy to set up and work seamlessly with each other and your smartphone."

"Weave, the IoT protocol for everything

Phone to device to cloud

Weave provides seamless and secure communication between devices both locally and through the cloud. It’s integrated into the Google mobile platform, so support is built-in to Android and easily available for iOS.

Interoperate across manufacturers

The Weave program will drive interoperability and quality through a certification program that device makers must adhere to. As part of this program, Weave provides a core set of schemas that will enable apps and devices to seamlessly interact with each other.

Compatible with Nest

Nest and Nest ecosystem devices will also use Weave, so they can easily and securely interoperate with devices from other manufacturers."

VR: Google Jump (!)

Jump – Google

Google's big jump into virtual reality | Sundar’s Google: an exclusive look at the future of Google’s most important products

Hands-On With Google Jump: A Virtual Reality Rig - Bloomberg Business

Get Cardboard – Google