How Google Developers communities are using tech for social good
Technology has incredible power to help us develop solutions that can serve a broader social and economic impact and can help humanity drive towards Sustainable Development Goals. With Google Developer programs we connect more than 1 million developers globally who come together to learn, grow and use Google technologies to build for the future. Developers always come up with creative solutions and we wanted to support our communities innovate, educate and solve through the use of tech. For this reason, in the Europe’s Developer Ecosystem team of Google, we started a pilot initiative called Social Impact Fund that provides mentoring and funding to support tech for good initiatives of our community members from Google Developers Groups (GDG), Women Techmakers and Google Developer Experts. In this blog, we want to introduce you to five community initiatives in Europe that were chosen in the first pilot.
Helping forest restoration through drones
Dronecoria project aims to enable large-scale, low-cost environmental restorations through sowing drones and seed enhancement. This open source initiative uses Google Earth, Flutter, TensorFlow, and Google Maps. The drones are made of wooden carcasses for light weight. Andreu Ibáñez from GDG Lleida collaborates in this project, with Lot Amorós, Dronecoria founder, and other GDG leads in Spain. During April and May, six introductory events and workshops are being held across Spain for high school students to raise awareness about deforestation and showcase the potential of drone technologies for solving the issue. As part of the workshop, the audience learns about the technological process and components of the project, and is taught to assemble an initial basis of the drone. Learn more about the project and the event dates here.
Prototyping a solution to help detect food quality
George Soloupis, a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning is working together with team members from GDG Athens, android developers and data scientists, Konstantinos Michelis, Akis Vlissidis, Dimitris Panagopoulos and George Kandilogiannakis to a solution that can help those with smell impairment identify food degradation. Raspberry Pi is used to collect data from air sensors over time during the food degradation process. The sensors collect data of the chemical elements such as ammonia (NH3), H2s, O3, CO, CH4. The data is then evaluated with the help of Tensorflow in values of 1 to 10 (1 totally spoiled food, 10 fresh food). As an end result the users with no advanced technical knowledge will be able to see food quality values on an app built on Android, Kotlin.
Piloting hydrogen based clean energy solutions
Clean energy sources are vital for sustainable development. To address this Javier López, a Google Developer Expert on Google Cloud Platform, and a GDG lead is collaborating with Guzmán Pérez, David Mayor and Juan García , from GDG Burgos, in Spain to prototype a low cost portable/home scale green hydrogen electrolyser based on hydrogen and small domestic plants. The project is called H2forAll and an entire web platform is deployed on Google Cloud, using IoT Core to capture all the data from the different sensors and data processing using Cloud big data services. At the end of the project the team will present their prototype and share knowledge with university students and community members and promote the importance of clean energy sources for sustainable cities.
Breaking socio-economic bias in AI development with TensorFlow.js
Gerard Sans, a Google Developer Expert for Angular has teamed up with Gen Ashley, WomenTechmakers Ambassador and an organiser for GDG London to provide new upskilling opportunities for people from historically underrepresented groups. “Road to TensorFlow.js” is a full day in-person free training on Machine Learning for Web using JavaScript. The hands-on workshop provides experience with deep learning and expands participants’ knowledge on building, training, and running machine learning models in the browser using the latest version of TensorFlow.js. The training will be held face-to-face in London in May for up to 50 participants. Join the event or share with someone who can benefit from it!
Flutter trainings for better future
Another exciting initiative empowering women with technology education is taking place in Portugal, led by Gonçalo Palma, Google Developer Expert for Flutter and Dart, in collaboration with Inês Mascarenhas, Filipe Barroso an organiser for GDG Lisbon and Flutter Portugal, and Inês Armada Brás a Women Techmakers ambassador. Um Futuro Diferente aims to give opportunities for women who don’t have any monetary resources to study on their own but have the curiosity to switch to highly-demanded tech careers. As part of the project up to 10 women will learn programming fundamentals, and application development in Flutter.
Stay tuned for more updates on these five projects and on how our Google Developers community members are reaching social impact with their tech expertise and voluntary work.
