At Google, there’s a side project/perk/philosophy called “20% time” that encourages employees to spend one day a week working on their own Google-focused ideas and inventions. Googlers Natalie Hammel and Lorraine Yurshansky decided to use their 20% time to start the Nat & Lo web series so that they could learn about all of the cool tech projects at the company.
Since we play a lot with Google Maps, Google Treks, and Google Translate, episodes 1 and 3 are our favorites thus far: Google Street View (Minus The Car), above, and How Google Translate Makes Signs Instantly Readable, which is a crazy amazing app feature:
This recent Nat & Lo episode goes behind the scenes with Machine Learning & Deep Neural Networks, which sounds intense, but it’s basically the automagical secret sauce in so many technologies that we use everyday, like spam filters, voice search, face and object photo recognition, depositing checks by phone, related recommendations, and more:
For more episodes, check out Nat & Lo’s 20% Project on YouTube.
Related reading: Why “20% Time” is Good for Schools.
On this site: Watch more videos about Google, including using the Trekker backpack at the Burj Khalifa and Google Glass in the Gobi – Dinosaur Nest.This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.
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