Computer science resources for academics

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Google has a long history of involvement with universities, and we're excited to share some recent news on that front with you. At the main Google campus this week we're hosting the Google Faculty Summit, which involves universities all over participating in discussions about what we're up to in research-land as well as computer science education - something very near and dear to us.

Meanwhile, because we know that between teaching, doing research and advising students, computer science educators are quite strapped for time, we've recently launched a site called Google Code for Educators. While you may have previously heard about our offerings for K-12 teachers, this new program is focused on CS topics at the university level, and lets us share the knowledge we've built up around things like distributed systems and AJAX programming. It's designed for university faculty to learn about new computer science topics and include them in their courses, as well as to help curious students learn on their own.

Right now, Google Code for Educators offers materials for AJAX web programming, distributed systems and parallel programming, and web security. The site includes slides, programming labs, problem sets, background tutorials and videos. We're eager to provide more content areas and also more iterations for existing topic areas. To allow for liberal reuse and remixing, most sample course content on Code EDU is available under a Creative Commons license. Please let us know your thoughts on this new site.

Beyond CS education, another important faculty topic is research. Google Research offers resources to CS researchers,including papers authored by Googlers and a wide variety of our tech talks. You might be interested in learning more about MapReduce and the Google File System, two pieces of Google-grown technology that have allowed us to operate at enormous scale. We also recently put together a few university research programs and we're eager to see what academics come up with.