Google Student Blog: February 2017

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‘Paying It Forward’ in honor of Black History Month

February 22, 2017

Challenge Spotlight: ‘Paying It Forward’ in honor of Black History Month
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Are you a social change agent in your community or know someone who is? If so, we invite you to join Google’s fourth annual “Pay It Forward” Challenge. The deadline to submit an application is March 10, 2017, at 11:59 pm PST.
At Google, we value diversity and inclusion, and we support individuals who do the same. In honor of Black History Month, undergraduate and graduate students are invited to showcase how they have positively impacted and influenced their local communities within the US. In particular, we’re seeking leaders whose work has demonstrated a commitment to expanding access and opportunities for the Black community.
Last year, we showcased the work of two groups paving the way for leadership in their communities; the Spelman College section of the National Council of Negro Women and the Detroit Revitalization and Business Initiative (Detroit R&B) at the Ross School of Business.
To apply:

Please review our Pay It Forward FAQ

Then complete this entry form and tell us how you have positively impacted the Black community

Criteria to apply:

Individuals who:

Currently attend an undergraduate or graduate school at an accredited college or university in the United States

Demonstrate a commitment to expanding access and opportunity for their local community

Submissions will be judged by a team of Googlers who will be assessing the innovation, scale and the short- and long-term effects of your impact. The organizations that are chosen will be featured here on the Google Students Blog to amplify their voice, and will have the opportunity to receive mentorship from a Googler to take their impact to the next level!
To both enter the challenge and get more info, visit our 2017 Black History Month website.
If you have questions about the challenge, please email payitforward@google.com.
We look forward to seeing your submission! The Google Programs team

A Day in the Life: Computer Science Summer Institute/Generation Google Scholarship — Applications open

February 13, 2017

There’s less than a month left to apply for Generation Google Scholarships and CSSI, so submit your applications now!
In today’s blog post, we’re giving you a look at a day in the life of Riya, one of our Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) students from this past summer. We’ll walk you through her schedule, giving any Generation Google and CSSI applicant a better idea of what the experience is like.

8:45am: I use my badge to get in and head into the classroom with my fellow CSSIers before class starts, where sitting on the tables I see boxes of donuts waiting for us!
9am: Class starts. This morning, we’re learning about object oriented programming in Python.
10:30am: Break for a snack (of more donuts and fruit snacks) and an icebreaker to wake us up.
10:45am: Head back into the classroom and go through a few Python Labs with my partner.
12pm: Lunch time. I head to the cafeteria with the rest of the CSSIers where they’re serving wings. I wait in line and of course have to head over to the panini station to make my own custom sandwich. We then head upstairs to the roof to enjoy lunch in the sun before playing a competitive game of baggo (beanbag tossing!). Afterwards, we go back down to grab a quick yogurt bowl and take it back to the classroom.
1pm: We trickle back into the classroom for the afternoon workshop. Each day, a new person comes to talk to us about different development topics. Today, we’re talking about Impostor Syndrome and how to address this issue.
2pm: Back to OOP in Python. We are working on coding a Ninja game!
3:30pm: We stop for a break where we play Google trivia. The winning students get Google swag — pillows, socks and android toys!
3:45pm: We finish coding the Ninja game and then are tasked with breaking up into groups and implementing a harder version of the Ninja game.
4:30pm: We break into smaller groups to work on the project, and a TA assists when we need help.
5:30pm: Exit survey and daily meme time! At the end of each day a meme is posted by Jessie, the lead for our Chicago site, and we fill out snippets to let the instructors and CSSI program managers know what topics we’re finding challenging, what we thought of the development workshop and overall how we’re doing.
6pm: Over and out. Heading home to get some rest and relaxation!
A big thanks to Riya for sharing her day!

Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

February 6, 2017

This month, the Google Play team in our London office was hyped to welcome back Anamaria Cotîrlea, a former intern who is now a full-time software engineer. She joins us from Romania, where she studied in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Babeș-Bolyai University. As a software engineer at Google, Anamaria will be building upon the incredible impact she made as an intern on the Play team this past summer, when her work resulted in saving users an expected 1.5 petabytes (that's 1.5 million gigabytes) of data each day.

Back in 2015, Anamaria did her first internship with Google in Krakow, Poland. The technical skills she honed at that time set her up for her second Google internship this past summer with the Google Play team. During that internship, she integrated Brotli compression with the Google Play Store in order to streamline app installs and updates. This is hugely meaningful because Android users download tens of billions of apps and games on Google Play — totalling over 65 billion times (and growing), in fact!
It takes a lot of data to download new apps and updates to your existing apps, and we know users care about how much data their devices are using. Play is continually investing in making these installs and updates smaller, and in December 2016, we announced that we started using a new approach to delivering updates, known as File-by-File patching, which reduced the average update size to 65% smaller than the full app.
Anamaria’s project was to add support for Brotli for both new app installs and app updates. Brotli is a compression algorithm developed by Jyrki Alakuijala and Zoltán Szabadka of the Compression Team at Google Research Europe. Brotli was initially launched in 2015, offering enhancements in generic lossless data compression, especially when used for HTTP compression. Its compression rates, speed, and memory usage have been continuously improved, and it has proven to be a powerful tool for app compression, generally outperforming GZIP.
During her internship, Anamaria evaluated Brotli’s performance on our app library and made the changes necessary to our servers and the Play Store app to deploy Brotli for app delivery.
Here are a few examples of Brotli’s compression rate compared to GZIP’s:

Description	GZIP download size (MB)	Brotli download size (MB)	Percent Brotli saves over GZIP
Update Pinterest	4.64	3.70	20.27%
Update WhatsApp	5.75	4.73	17.63%
Install WhatsApp	13.95	13.04	6.52%
Install Pinterest	24.76	24.14	2.51%

Not only is this great news for our Android users, but it is also a terrific example of the real-life problems that Google interns are helping to solve, as well as the impact a Google intern can have in just a few short months. Brotli compression for app downloads is rolling out now, and users should start to enjoy the benefits over the coming weeks.

**A previous version of this blog didn't make it clear that Anamaria is now a full-time Googler. She is, and we've edited the blog to reflect that**

Student Blog

‘Paying It Forward’ in honor of Black History Month

A Day in the Life: Computer Science Summer Institute/Generation Google Scholarship — Applications open

Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

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