Google’s self-driving car project sets up shop in Michigan

The Google Self-Driving Car Project, as it is accurately named, announced via Google+ yesterday that it is building out a 53,000 square-foot technology development center in Novi, Michigan where it will “further develop and refine self-driving technology.”

“Many of our current partners are based here,” the team wrote, “so having a local facility will help us collaborate more easily and access Michigan’s top talent in vehicle development and engineering.”

Novi is about a 35-minute drive from Fiat Chrysler’s US headquarters in Auburn Hills, so it makes sense that Google would set up shop nearby in order to do some R&D work on those autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans. (It’ll also give the company a chance to test some wintry conditions to balance out those tough desert conditions in Arizona.) Google has previously said it wants to see 100 Pacificas added to its self-driving fleet by the end of 2016, which lines up nicely with their move-in plans at the Novi facility.

TripAdvisor is offering two free months of Google Play Music

Google Play Music is a solid service, but it’s a bit of an afterthought in the marketplace compared to bigger players like Spotify and Apple Music. And in a crowded market, Google’s likely looking for ways to muster up more interest and exposure for the service — but the partnership the company announcing is a bit of an odd one, no matter how you slice it. Google has partnered with Tripadvisor to put specific travel-focused stations inside the Tripadvisor Android app. Tapping one to start it up will drop you into the Google Play Music app and offer you two months of the premium service for free, provided you’ve never used it before.

The suggested stations show up when you’re viewing various pages for different cities around the globe. It doesn’t look like they were created custom for the TripAdvisor partnership but rather are existing stations that have been curated and linked to various cities. They’re built on the same Songza technology that Google has been using for its stations since late 2014. The connection to travel may be slightly dubious here, but Play Music’s activity- and mood-based stations remain one of the service’s best features, so exposing it to more potential users is a reasonably good idea.

Ultimately, the goal is to push users into giving the free trial a shot and eventually converting a subset of those into full paying members, but how successful it’ll be remains to be seen. Despite it being a somewhat odd and obscure partnership, two free months of a strong streaming music service is hard to pass up. If you haven’t tried Google Play Music, you can get this promo starting today through the TripAdvisor Android app.

New Google Maps ads will drop branded pins on your search results

Yes, Google builds plenty of useful and fun products, but don’t ever forget — the company is first and foremost an advertising business. As such, today the company is announcing a number of updates to its various advertising products to help brands do a better job at reaching the billion-plus people using Google’s core services like search, Gmail and Maps.

The change that’ll probably be most noticeable to Google’s end users comes to Maps, a particularly valuable product for the company — Google says that nearly a third of all mobile searches are related to specific locations, and lots of those searches likely end up with the user in Google Maps. So now, when you’re looking at Google Maps on your phone, you’ll see the occasional “branded pin.” It’s similar to the red pin that shows up when you do a search, but it contains a brand’s logo right in it. These will show up when you’re looking at a map or looking at the navigation view in Google Maps.

Google is also offering brands and advertisers more customizable product pages within Google Maps itself. If you tab through to an advertising business’s detail page, you’ll be able to search a store’s local inventory or redeem special offers (if the store chooses to offer those options, that is). During a press briefing, we saw a Best Buy that offered 10 percent off iPhone accessories and a Starbucks that offered a dollar off your drink when you tapped through to the specific location details.

Obviously, none of us really want more ads in our products, but it’s an inevitability when dealing with Google. And there are worse things than having the option to save a few bucks if you need to hit a big-box store or chain. Hopefully Google and advertisers will exercise some restraint when using this tool, which will start popping up on iOS and Android over the coming months.

Source: Google

YouTube Gaming launches event hubs with E3 live streams

YouTube Gaming is making live coverage of eSports competitions and other big events much easier to find. The channel is launching event hubs, starting with E3 in June. Each hub will house all the official YouTube shows and streams covering that particular tournament or expo, so you can browse them all in one page. YouTube’s E3 coverage will begin with EA’s and Bethesda’s keynotes on June 12th, followed by a 12-hour stream on June 13th. It’ll cover press conferences, live “Let’s Play” playthroughs and maybe even the free public event the expo’s holding this year. Twitch is still E3’s official streaming partner this year — and we’re covering the event, as well! — but YouTube’s hub sounds like a good place to check if you’re looking for even more videos.

Source: YouTube Gaming E3 hub

Google’s Paris HQ raided by French tax authorities

French authorities have raided Google’s Paris headquarters as part of an ongoing investigation into the company’s tax affairs in the country. In February, reports claimed the government believed Google owed 1.6-billion Euros ($1.2-billion) in back taxes. According to The Guardian, investigators were on the scene at Google’s Paris headquarter at around 5am this morning, with the raid involving up to 100 investigators, reports in Le Parisien.
This isn’t the first time a tech giant has come under fire for its tax dealings in Europe. Apple was fined $347-million in Italy, and Google’s UK operations were squeezed for $185-million in a deal with the British government. Many large US firms base their European operations in Ireland (including Google), which offers more favourable tax conditions, but that’s a situation which might not last much longer. In a statement given to Reuters, the French prosecutors believe the Irish-based European headquarters isn’t full-filling its fiscal obligations in the country. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Google’s ‘Magenta’ project will see if AIs can truly make art

Google’s next foray into the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence will be a creative one. The company has previewed a new effort to teach AI systems to generate music and art called Magenta. It’ll launch officially on June 1st, but Google gave attendees at the annual Moogfest music and tech festival a preview of what’s in store. As Quartz reports, Magenta comes from Google’s Brain AI group — which is responsible for many uses of AI in Google products like Translate, Photos and Inbox. It builds on previous efforts in the space, using TensorFlow — Google’s open-source library for machine learning — to train computers to create art. The goal is to answer the questions: “Can machines make music and art? If so, how? If not, why not?”

That’s not an entirely new endeavor. Researchers and creatives have been generating music through technology for years. One notable name in the field is Dr. Nick Collins, a composer who uses machine learning to create songs, some of which were adapted in the making of a computer-generated musical launched earlier this year. Individuals have also created songs using publicly available recurrent neural network code, while companies like Jukedeck are already commercializing their models.

How Google’s efforts in the space will differ from those that came before it is still unknown. From the brief demo at Moogfest, though, it appears Magenta will be similar to others. The most important part of the process will be training, where the AI will absorb and learn from a particular type of media — at Moogfest, the focus was obviously music. Once it’s trained, the network can be “seeded” with a few notes, and then let loose its creativity to turn those notes into a full piece of music. The output of this process can generally be tweaked with variables that define how complex its calculations should be, and how “creative” or “safe” its output.

DeepDream, Google’s visual AI that could transform photos into psychedelic art, worked on a similar principle, as do other neural networks like Char-RNN, which we used to train a writing bot. Douglas Eck, a Google Brain researcher who led the talk at Moogfest, said the ultimate aim was to see how well computers can create new works of art semi-independently.

A neural network demoed at Moogfest extrapolated five notes into a more complex melody.

Unless Google has made a significant breakthrough, it’s likely Magenta will involve multiple unique efforts in the fields it’s looking into — one neural network wouldn’t be able to create music and art. At first, the focus will be on music, before moving onto visual arts with other projects.

Before working on Magenta, Eck was responsible for music search and recommendation for Google Play Music. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that he’s also interested in other uses for AI in music and the arts. If a computer can understand why you like to listen to a song at any given moment, it can better recommend others. This sort of user-specific, context-aware recommendation is something all music services want to offer, but none have really nailed yet. This research isn’t part of Magenta, but gives you an idea of how many uses AI can have in the field beyond “just” generating pieces.

As with DeepDream, Google will be working on Magenta out in the open, sharing its code and findings through developer resources like GitHub. The first public release will be a simple program that can be trained using MIDI files. It’s not clear if there’ll be an equally simple way to output new music based on that training on June 1st also, but Eck committed to regularly adding software to the Magenta GitHub page and updating its blog with progress reports.

Source: Quartz