Web3, where platforms and apps were supposed to be built and owned by users, is spurring the greatest consolidation of power in recent times.Read More
Web3, where platforms and apps were supposed to be built and owned by users, is spurring the greatest consolidation of power in recent times.Read More
Gessica Chies is a Principal Solution Consultant in Infor. Even though she doesn’t have a technical background, she started her career in IT as a Marketing Intern at Microsoft while she was finishing her Bachelor’s degree in Economics and made her way up by studying and challenging herself. She worked for some of the top IT companies: Oracle, Microsoft, Ingram Micro, VMWare, Mcafee, and finally Infor. After living abroad for 4 years, she decided to go back home and have a more stable life but she is always on the move, enjoying working in IT and traveling to different countries, speaking different languages and still learning every day something new.”
Rain, a marketing agency building custom voice experiences for brands, has raised $11 million in venture capital.
Mosquitoes aren’t just the peskiest creatures on Earth; they infect more than 700 million people a year with dangerous diseases like Zika, Malaria, Dengue Fever, and Yellow Fever. Prevention is the best protection, and stopping mosquito bites before they happen is a critical step.SC Johnson — a leading developer and manufacturer of pest control products, consumer packaged goods, and other professional products — has an outsized impact in reducing the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. That’s why Google Cloud was honored to team up with one of the company’s leading pest control brands, OFF!®, to develop a new publicly available, predictive model of when and where mosquito populations are emerging nationwide. As the planet warms and weather changes, OFF! noticed month-to-month and year-to-year fluctuations in consumer habits at a regional level, due to changes in mosquito populations. Because of these rapid changes, it’s difficult for people to know when to protect themselves. The OFF!Cast Mosquito Forecast™, built on Google Cloud and available today, will predict mosquito outbreaks across the United States, helping communities protect themselves from both the nuisance of mosquitoes and the dangers of mosquito-borne diseases — with the goal of expanding to other markets, like Brazil and Mexico, in the near future. Source: Sadie J. Ryan, Colin J. Carlson, Erin A. Mordecai, and Leah R. JohnsonWith the OFF!Cast Mosquito Forecast™, anyone can get their local mosquito prediction as easily as a daily weather update. Powered by Google Cloud’s geospatial and data analytics technologies, OFF!Cast Mosquito Forecast is the world’s first public technology platform that predicts and shares mosquito abundance information. By applying data that is informed by the science of mosquito biology, OFF!Cast accurately predicts mosquito behavior and mosquito populations in specific geographical locations.Starting today, anyone can easily explore OFF!Cast on a desktop or mobile device and get their local seven-day mosquito forecast for any zip code in the continental United States. People can also sign up to receive a weekly forecast. To make this forecasting tool as helpful as possible, OFF! modeled its user interface after popular weather apps, a familiar frame of reference for consumers.SC Johnon’s OFF!Cast platform gives free, accurate and local seven-day mosquito forecasts for zip codes across the continental United States.The technology behind the OFF!Cast Mosquito ForecastTo create this first-of-its-kind forecast, OFF! stood up a secure and production-scale Google Cloud Platform environment and tapped into Google Earth Engine, our cloud-based geospatial analysis platform that combines satellite imagery and geospatial data with powerful computing to help people and organizations understand how the planet is changing. The OFF!Cast Mosquito Forecast is the result of multiple data sources coming together to provide consumers with an accurate view of mosquito activity. First, Google Earth Engine extracts billions of individual weather data points. Then, a scientific algorithm co-developed by the SC Johnson Center for Insect Science and Family Health and Climate Engine experts translates that weather data into relevant mosquito information. Finally, the collected information is put into the model and distilled into a color-coded, seven-day forecast of mosquito populations. The model is applied to the lifecycle of a mosquito, starting from when it lays eggs to when it could bite a human.It takes an ecosystem to battle mosquitosOver the past decade, academics, scientists and NGOs have used Google Earth Engine and its earth observation data to make meaningful progress on climate research, natural resource protection, carbon emissions reduction and other sustainability goals. It has made it possible for organizations to monitor global forest loss in near real-time and has helped more than 160 countries map and protect freshwater ecosystems. Google Earth Engine is now available in preview with Google Cloud for commercial use.Our partner, Climate Engine, was a key player in helping make the OFF!Cast Mosquito Forecast a reality. Climate Engine is a scientist-led company that works with Google Cloud and our customers to accelerate and scale the use of Google Earth Engine, in addition to those of Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery, among other tools. With Climate Engine, OFF! integrated insect data from VectorBase, an organization that collects and counts mosquitoes and is funded by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.The model powering the OFF!Cast Mosquito Forecast combines three inputs — knowledge of a mosquito’s lifecycle, detailed climate data inputs, and mosquito population counts from more than 5,000 locations provided by VectorBase. The model’s accuracy was validated against precise mosquito population data collected over six years from more than 33 million mosquitoes across 141 different species at more than 5,000 unique trapping locations.A better understanding of entomology, especially things like degree days and how they affect mosquito populations, and helping communities take action is critically important to improving public health.A version of this blogpost appeared on the Google Cloud blog.
Dianna Galarrager is a Business intelligence analyst at an internet brokerage company.Diana is from Spain and currently living in London.When Diana is not at work, her hobbies include traveling,learning about different cultures, and engaging in adventurous experiences, such as skydiving.She believes that her adventurous nature has a part toplay in her daily job.As a business intelligence analyst, Diana is responsiblefor converting data to meaningful insights (find patterns) that can help drive the value within her company.Her daily routine can range from cleaning real-world trade data, to analyze them on requests.In linking her adventurous behavior to her job, she stated thatone of the exciting things that she enjoyed in her job was that you never know what is coming for you the next day in terms of the kind of data that you would work on, which would often requireyou to think outside of the job.Retracting back on her journey, Diana recounted her experience during high school after having moved to the UK when she was 15 years old.While in high school she was not totally sure what she wanted to become.She did eventually choose to be in politics and public relations.She was pursuing this choice of career when an assignment in the fieldhad her use a statistical software. She started getting interested in the field of data analysis and began attending the python class organized byher university.When she graduated, she went applied and got a job in a consulting firm, where she was trained on a hybrid training of project management and businessintelligence.Having gone through such a period of uncertainty on her journey, Diana wishes to inspire young women who are going into tech and those who did not study STEM-related course or backgrounds.