How Google.org is using its algorithms to save the world
- Predicting outbreaks
HaiKiElimu has received $1.8million from Google to educate Tanzanians about politics
If knowledge is power, the Google revolution has empowered us all. Never in human history have so many people had access to so much knowledge, made relevant and ordered to their needs.
And while critics may decry the company's privacy-invading omniscience, from Street View to Latitude (mobile phone software that tracks your friends' whereabouts), what's less publicised are its little-known humanitarian projects through its charitable arm, Google.org.
Call it goodwill or a fluffy PR tactic: either way, Google.org is sizing up its technologies for the world's pressing issues – by getting information quickly to disaster relief teams, finding new ways to save energy, and helping impoverished communities.
The organisation is also funding other charitable groups with $100million, and has pledged one per cent of Google's profits for philanthropic purposes.
Predicting outbreaks
Last April, swine flu took the world by surprise. After the 2003 Asian bird flu outbreak died down, public health experts suspected the next epidemic would come from Southeast Asia, where dingy slums and a moist climate breed germs. If any developing country was low on the World Health Organisation's list of candidates, it was Mexico.
But days before news stations broke the April H1N1 outbreak, Google.org detected an increase in search terms from Mexico related to flu – searches like 'headache' and 'fever'. Months earlier it had released software called 'Flu Trends', which graphs estimates of flu levels in near-real time based on flu-related searches. Now it's angled the software towards Mexico.
PLOTTING OUTBREAKS: The Flu Trends software shows flu levels based on related searches
A program called 'Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico' ended up graphing the country's flu levels with clear-cutting accuracy before official figures had been made available.
Of course, there are limitations to this approach. Google doesn't have enough data on Mexico's flu levels from the past – a must for estimating current trends – and not enough people in Mexico use the internet, so the system is constantly being tweaked.
Attentive users will notice questionnaires at the bottom of each page when they search for 'headache' or 'fever.' "Did you search for this topic because you have a fever or your friend has a fever?" it asks.
Weeding out those who feel sick from students researching a school project is proving a tough task. But Flu Trends' estimates are still accurate, despite the margin of error. Many believe the spread of HIV/AIDS could have been averted had Africa been monitored more in the 1970s.
That's why Google.org has laid down the motto 'predict and prevent', with the aim of preventing outbreaks rather than just reacting to them. Following that line, it gave a $5.5million multi-year grant to the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI) to collect and analyse blood samples of people and animals in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Another $2.5million Google grant to the Global Health and Security Initiative, which works in Southeast Asia, is funding similar detection networks.
Everyone's talking about reducing the amount of energy we consume. But the fact is, most people don't know how much electricity they use until they're billed, which makes it difficult to make informed choices.
Google.org is proposing equipping every electric device with a meter, then linking it to a Google service that tells you these numbers in real time. 'PowerMeter', a plug-in being tested for iGoogle, will save you five to 15 per cent on your monthly bill, Google claims, and could reduce carbon emissions as much as taking one car off the road for every six households involved.
Another Google.org project is addressing the reduction of emissions from cars themselves. RechargeIT is aimed at measuring the performance of plug-in hybrid cars with recording devices more effectively. Google claims that most measurements of hybrids are idealistic and often not taken in real-world driving conditions.
By measuring hybrid cars' performance vis-à-vis conventional cars, and making the information available to the public, the benefits of plug-ins will be more widely recognised, it argues.
Google is trying to keep its own house in order too. The company's massive solar panel complex in Mountain View is well-known, and hybrid vehicles are being plugged into these panels. Google is testing these cars with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, seeing if they can be used as a 'battery' from the company's electricity grid. The idea is to turn plug-in hybrids into power suppliers, letting car owners avoid brown-outs and get electricity during peak hours.
Google.org's largest grants and investments are also being used to develop alternative energies. For instance, Makani Power, a designer of high-altitude power devices, has received a whopping $15million from the organisation. While low altitude wind power is an inconsistent source of energy, up high it's a different matter.
Since the power of wind is related to the cube of its velocity, wind that blows slightly faster contains far more energy. Makani remains tight-lipped about its devices, which reportedly resemble wing-shaped kites, but in theory they promise a new age of cheap and abundant energy.
Poor communities
Google has declared education for the developing world as a major focus of its philanthropic efforts, offering multi-million dollar grants to organisations in Africa and Asia. Again, this is informed by the notion that knowledge is power.
Google reasons that once enough people in a community are educated, and have easy access to information, they can bring accountability to a government's projects in their community. For instance, HaKiElimu, a Tanzanian educational non-profit organisation is using a $1.8million Google grant to distribute brochures and handbooks that teach people how to monitor and analyse government policies.
Meanwhile in India, Pratham is working with a $2million grant to do assessments of the education sector, a daunting task for a country numbering one billion people. For huge countries like India, which sports a space program but can't even feed much of its rural population, messy bureaucracy means that tackling poverty has been slow and cumbersome.
For Africa, a continent mired by strife for a century, a lack of information keeps communities in the dark. Whether Google can plug the knowledge gap remains to be seen, since most of its projects are still in development. But the company's vast funds, expertise and far reach across the world could spell good news for future generations in some of the world's poorest countries.