Tag Archives: Google

Current Affairs, Travel, Web & Technology

Google Maps adds an ‘Immersive View’ of major cities | Engadget

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Pan around popular tourist destinations directly from your phone.

By A. Tarantola, @terrortola, May 11th, 2022

Google

Google Maps is getting an “Immersive View” that will offer users digitally rendered looks at major US cityscapes, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience at Google’s I/O 2022 keynote on Wednesday.

Google Maps is getting an “Immersive View” that will offer users digitally rendered looks at major US cityscapes, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience at Google’s I/O 2022 keynote on Wednesday.

From keynote

The new feature uses computer vision and AI to blend Maps’ existing Street View function with aerial photography to create high-resolution models of the various buildings and urban features of a given location. “With our new immersive view, you’ll be able to experience what a neighborhood, landmark, restaurant or popular venue is like — and even feel like you’re right there before you ever set foot inside,” wrote Miriam Daniel, VP of Google Maps, in a blog post. What’s more, Maps’ other tools and features can be applied to the view as well, enabling users to see what the area looks like at different times of the day and varying weather conditions.

Source: Google Maps adds an ‘Immersive View’ of major cities | Engadget

Current Affairs, Libraries

Belgium: KU Leuven Libraries, KBR (Royal Library of Belgium) and Google to Put Thousands of Books and Historic Documents Online

From a KU Leuven Announcement:

Image Source: KBR

KU Leuven Libraries, KBR (Royal Library of Belgium) and Google signed agreements to share a large portion of important digitized documents reflecting the rich cultural and historical heritage located in the libraries. This entails several thousand works, some dating back to the 15th century, that will be made freely accessible in the coming years via Google Books and the institutions’ own library catalogues. Highlights are the printed works by professors of the University of Leuven published before the abolishment of the Old University in 1797, several thousands of works from the world’s largest collection of books printed in Brussels (15th-18th century) and recognised unique pieces such as the first work in Western literature dedicated exclusively to biographies of women.

The selected books have been previously scanned at the libraries and the digital versions will be sent over to Google’s data centers to be further enriched with data allowing the text to be searchable and machine readable. After this process is complete, Google will make the digital copies available on Google Books. “The KU Leuven Libraries and KBR will also keep a copy of the enriched data which will be incorporated into their own catalogue. The books that are part of this project are no longer subject to copyright”, explains Stefano Reccia, Partner Manager at Google for the digitisation project.

Among the selected documents are:

Printed works by professors of the Old University of Leuven (1425-1797), digitised in the framework of the Lovaniensia project.
Corble collection: collection of the British fencer Archibald Corble (1883-1944), one of the world’s most extensive collections on the history of fencing.
A unique collection of 25,000 books printed in Brussels in the 17th and 18th centuries: the largest collection of old and rare books from the capital of the (Southern) Low Countries, with a strong emphasis on government publications in French, Dutch, Spanish and Latin.
The most complete collection in the world of pamphlets and leaflets from the time of the Brabant revolution that led to the independent United States of Belgium (1789-1790), comprising nearly 7.000 items.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

See Also: Announcement From Royal Library of Belgium

Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Google search’s next phase: context is king – The Verge

Google says search is still far from solved

By Dieter Bohn@backlon Sep 29, 2021, 1:42pm EDT

Google Lens will let users search using images and refine their query with text.
Image: Google

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box.

By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions.

The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience.

Source: Google search’s next phase: context is king – The Verge

Books & Reading, Libraries, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Event Recap: Why Trust a Corporation to Do a Library’s Job? – Internet Archive Blogs

Posted on April 30, 2021 by Caralee Adams

Event image from blog…

Although people are increasingly turning to Google to search for information, a corporate search engine is not the same as a trusted librarian.

And while libraries are used to buying and preserving books, they are now often unable to buy and own digital materials because of publisher licensing restrictions.

The tension between the interests of business and the public was the focus of a conversation hosted by the Internet Archive and Library Futures on April 28.

Wendy Hanamura moderated the event with guest panelists Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User; Darius Kazemi, an internet artist and cofounder of Feel Train, a creative technology cooperative in Portland, Oregon; and Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of Library Futures.

A recording of the event is now available.

Source: Event Recap: Why Trust a Corporation to Do a Library’s Job? – Internet Archive Blogs