Today is the last day to apply for the Android Developer Challenge! And to spark your imagination, we wanted to take a look at one of the original Android Developer Challenge winners, from over 10 years ago. Meet Maurizio Leo:
Maurizio and team have been working on Android for a while now. In fact, he was one of the winners of the original Android Developer Challenge, which launched with the start of Android over ten years ago. Their app, which won 3rd place worldwide at the time, has gone on to be downloaded over 30 million times!
If you’ve got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear! We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition, in part from this amazing set of experts we’ve assembled. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here.
There’s still time to submit your idea before the deadline today! Submitting your idea is as simple as creating a repository on GitHub, telling us what you’d build and how we can help (we’ve included all of the materials here), and then officially submitting your repository here. Ideas can be in a concept phase to something that’s already complete; we can’t wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by machine learning to more and more users!
Just a little over a week left to finish your submission for the Android Developer Challenge, due December 2! Technology is enabling us to create a whole new era of helpful innovation by helping people get things done more quickly and surfacing patterns that would be difficult to detect using traditional methods. Ultimately, this helpful innovation is enabling us to live better, more productive, and safer lives.
Earlier this week, we highlighted the type of helpful innovation ideas powered by machine learning which are the sort of examples we’re looking for, to help inspire you. Today, we wanted to share the names of the panel of experts we’ve assembled to help bring your projects to life as part of the Android Developer Challenge. These experts will be making the final decision on the 10 finalists of the Android Developer Challenge, and if you’re selected as one of those finalists, we plan to have you meet them when we bring you to Google HQ for a bootcamp next year:
There’s still time to submit your idea before the December 2 deadline. Submitting your idea is as simple as creating a repository on GitHub, telling us what you’d build and how we can help (we’ve included all of the materials here), and then officially submitting your repository here. Ideas can be in a concept phase to something that’s already complete; we can’t wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by machine learning to more and more users!
Last month, we kicked off the next Android Developer Challenge, and asked you to submit your ideas focused on helpful innovation, powered by on-device machine learning. But what exactly do we mean when we say helpful innovation? We’re glad you asked! We rounded up a few of Google’s on-device machine learning offerings, together with some great recent examples of this technology in action, to help inspire your submission. Don’t forget, submit your idea by December 2!
Using machine learning to tackle Fall Armyworm
Take Nazirini Siraji. When she and a team of developers noticed a crop-pest threatening the livelihood of Ugandan farmers, they taught themselves TensorFlow to combat this pest. They collected training data from nearby fields in the form of images. With TensorFlow, they re-trained a MobileNet, a technique known as transfer learning and then used the TensorFlow Converter to generate a TensorFlow Lite FlatBuffer file which they deployed in an Android app. With the app, a farmer can snap a picture of their crop and the image frame is analysed to look for Fall armyworm damage. Depending on the results from this phase, a suggestion of a possible solution is given. It’s pretty cool!
Helping doctors detect respiratory diseases using machine learning
Tambua Health is helping doctors determine the likelihood of respiratory diseases by turning any smartphone into a powerful non-invasive screening tool. They developed an app using TensorFlow Lite that can help doctors analyze lung sounds for the presence of abnormal sounds like wheezes, crackles, stridor, and other adventitious sounds.
adidas uses machine learning to make the shopping experience easier
Even brands are tapping the power of machine learning. Take adidas, who recently launched a new “Bring It to Me” experience for their London store. Shoppers can use Visual Lookup to scan products on their phones while they are in the store, and the app lets them check stock and request their size without the need for queues. Under the hood, ML Kit is helping power the experience. It’s another way machine learning is helping users get things done more quickly.
The benefits of on-device machine learning
Running machine learning on a user’s device comes with a number of benefits. First, you reduce the amount of data you send to your server, enhancing user privacy. And because it runs on device, it can also work offline - perfect for inaccessible areas such as the middle of a rainforest, a desert or the London Underground. Last but not least, the most exciting aspect of running your model on device is low latency and this can enable all kinds of new user experiences. Machine learning is not just for automating tasks, it can work alongside your users and give them super powers too!
At Google, we offer a number of different technologies to help you take advantage of this:
If you’ve got a great idea that can help users get things done, we want to hear from you! We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. You can read more about all of the prizes here.
There’s still time to submit your idea before the December 2 deadline. We can’t wait to hear what you come up with, and to work with you on bringing helpful innovation powered by on-device machine learning to more and more users!
Posted by The Android team
Developers like you have always played an important role in shaping the direction of Android, fueling the wave of Android innovation. It’s the reason that when we first launched the SDK for Android 10+ years ago, we simultaneously announced the Android Developer Challenge: a way to help reward model apps and show us what user problems you wanted to solve. As Android continues to push the boundaries into emerging areas like ML, 5G, foldables and more, we need your help to bring to life the consumer experiences that will define these new frontiers.
So we’re bringing back the Android Developer Challenge and asking you to help us unlock new experiences on Android, and help inspire other developers around these emerging technologies.
As we kick off this challenge, the first area we’ll be focusing on is On-Device Machine Learning. At Google, we’re big believers in how this new technology can open up a world of helpful innovation so you can get things done in ways you never thought possible. Take Live Captions: for the almost 500 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing, Live Captions bring content to life and is exactly the type of machine learning-powered innovation we expect to see more of someday, and with your help we can turn someday into today!
Bringing your idea to life in front of billions of eyes
Got an idea? Whether it’s still a concept or ready for users, tell us how you could use Google’s help, and how it supports the mission of using machine learning to help people get something done. Join the #AndroidDeveloperChallenge topic on GitHub, and share your idea as a repository under this topic. Don’t forget to come back here and officially submit your concept.
We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. Here’s what those 10 developers will get:
Expertise and development support bootcamp: We’ll work with you to provide expertise and guidance to help in your plans to bring your app from concept to reality, including:
Exposure and street cred! Once your idea is ready for prime-time, we’ll help you get users, and celebrate you to the broader Android community, including:
Helpful innovation is an important investment area for us on the Android team, and On-Device Machine Learning has played a critical role in powering new features in the last several releases of Android. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Back in May at Google I/O, we announced ADC 2 -- the second Android Developer Challenge -- to encourage the development of cool apps that delight mobile users. We received many interesting and high-quality applications -- everything from exciting arcade games to nifty productivity utilities. We also saw apps that took advantage of openness of Android to enhance system behavior at a deep level to provide users with a greater degree of customization and utility. We were particularly pleased to see submissions from many smaller and independent developers.
Over the last couple of months, tens of thousands of Android users around the world reviewed and scored these applications. There were many great apps and the scores were very close. Together with our official panel of judges, these users have spoken and selected our winners!
I am pleased to present the ADC 2 winners gallery, which includes not only the top winners overall and in each category, but also all of the applications that made it to the top 200. There are a lot of great applications in addition to the top winners.
Thanks to everyone who submitted applications or helped us judge the entrants. We encourage all developers to submit their applications to Android Market where their app can be downloaded and enjoyed by Android users around the world.
Thanks to tens of thousands of Android users around the world who participated in the review of ADC 2 finalist applications, we have now collected sufficient scores to complete Round 2 of public judging.
We are reviewing the final results and will announce the top winners this coming Monday, November 30. Thanks to all who've participated in ADC 2 and good luck to all the finalists.
The results from ADC 2 Round 1 are now tabulated and verified. With the top 200 applications identified, it's time to begin the final round judging. Be sure to download the ADC 2 judging application, or update your existing application, and help us select the final winners!
For the final round, both users and a Google-selected panel of industry judges will provide votes to determine the final winners. Prizes will be distributed to the top 3 entrants in each of the 10 categories, and the top 3 overall entrants will receive additional prizes. Please see our reference page for full challenge information.
Your vote is critical! We will keep voting open until we have received sufficient votes for all of the applications. We encourage you to download the ADC 2 judging application and evaluate entrants for yourself.
Download Android Developer Challenge 2:
The response to round one of the Android Developer Challenge 2 has been phenomenal! We originally expected that it would take two weeks to get all the necessary data to complete scoring. Over the last 10 days, more than 26,000 Android users reviewed and submitted our target of over 100 scores per application. With this enthusiastic support of the Android community, we are closing the first round of ADC 2 judging today.
We will now be reviewing the results and preparing for round 2. Please stay tuned for information about round 2, where the community, combined with a panel of judges, will narrow down the top 20 applications in each category to determine the final winners. Until then, users with the ADC 2 judging application currently installed will get a notice saying that round 1 is over. When round 2 opens, the judging application will resume giving out new submissions to score. We look forward to seeing the results of the final round and hope that you choose to help us score these top apps as well!
I am happy to announce that Android Developer Challenge 2's first round of judging has begun!
As a reminder, user voting determines which apps will make it to the second round. Voting will occur through an application called Android Developer Challenge 2, which is now available for download from Android Market. Android Developer Challenge 2 presents apps for each user to download and score according to a set of criteria, such as originality and effective use of the Android platform, among others. The first round of judging will last at least two weeks from today. Judging will continue until we receive a sufficient number of votes to identify the top 20 applications in each of the 10 categories (200 apps total) that qualify for the second round.
During the second round, judging will occur through a combination of user voting and input from a panel of industry experts. User voting will continue to occur via Android Developer Challenge 2 and will account for 40% of the final score that each app receives in round two. The remaining 60% of the final score will be determined by the industry expert panel.
It has been a little less than a year since the first Android-powered phones became available. Today, there are more than 10,000 applications available in Android Market. We are pleased by the energy and commitment demonstrated by developers in such a short period of time. Our goal with Android Developer Challenge 2 is to inspire the developer community to produce even more innovative apps for Android. Now on to the voting!
Don't forget to submit your ADC2 apps by midnight PST on Monday, August 31! Remember that this is Pacific time in the US (GMT - 7) so be sure to convert the deadline into your local timezone.
Also, even if you've already submitted your apps, please double check and make sure that your app is in the "Submitted" state in the UI! If it says "Unsubmitted", it will NOT be considered as an entry.
The time has come! The submission site for Android Developer Challenge 2 is now open. You can now submit applications for the Challenge at http://market.android.com/adc. Full instructions are also available on the site.
The key thing to remember is that all submissions must be entered by 11:59:59pm Pacific Time in the United States on August 31, 2009. If your applications are not submitted by that time, they won't be eligible for participation. Please carefully note what time that is in your local time zone.
It's very important that your apps only use published APIs. Some users might be judging your submissions on new phones you haven't seen or tested. If your apps depend on unpublished APIs, they might not work on some of these phones. Please note that you won't be able to submit new versions of your apps after the deadline!
Since you'll be competing against developers around the world for users' attention, it is important to focus on the fit and finish of your app. Your apps will be judged by users as a final product and not just a cool demo.
As a final note, if you've uploaded a version of your app to Android Market, you'll need to use a different Android package name for the version you submit to the Challenge.
I look forward to see all the great apps and innovations from you all.
Since the announcement of Android Developer Challenge 2 in May, Android phones continue to be deployed in countries worldwide. Android phones are currently available in over 20 countries, with more on the way. As I've mentioned earlier, we'll be including real-world users of these phones to help review and score your submissions. It is important to remember that your apps will be reviewed by judges around the world on actual devices; thus, be sure to make it extremely easy for users/judges to access your apps with minimum setup.
Some of you have been asking for clarifications on what we mean by "open only to applications that have not been published". To be specific, applications that are available on Android Market before August 1, 2009 will not be eligible to participate in the contest. Users have already been providing comments for apps that are currently available on Android Market, so it wouldn't make sense for them to "judge" the same apps again in this contest. In addition, apps that include or that are based on open source projects are fully welcomed, as long as the application itself is not on Android Market until August 1, 2009.
If you want to find out more details about ADC 2, you can find everything at the ADC 2 page along with the Terms and Conditions. For the moment, the most important thing to know is that ADC 2 submissions will be due August 31. I can't wait to see what you all come up with this time.
Happy coding -- and good luck!
I'm excited to announce the second Android Developer Challenge (ADC)! The first challenge was a huge success with over 1,700 entries that resulted in 50 excellent winners. With the recent release of Android 1.5, as well as the availability of devices in multiple markets around the world, I'm pleased to announce the second ADC.
We've expanded ADC 2 to involve a very important part of the Android community—the users who will be running these applications. Users of Android-powered devices with Android Market will be able to download a special Android judging application and use it to download and rank applications submitted to the Challenge. The results from this round will determine the top ranking applications in each of the 10 categories. These top applications will then be ranked by a combination of users and a panel of Google selected judges through a similar process as the first round to determine the final winners.
I've already seen a lot of great apps on Android and I look forward to seeing even more innovative and unexpected cool apps that will come out of this Challenge! For more details on ADC 2, please see the official site. Start your engines and good luck!
Since we started the first Android Developer Challenge late last year, we all have been eager to see who the winners of $275,000 and $100,000 would be. All 50 applications that emerged from Round 1 of ADC I showed great promise, and these teams have been working intensely for the past several months to polish their apps for the final round.
Similar to round 1 we sent laptops preconfigured with the judging environment, emulator, and all entries to each of our seven judges. In this round, each judge reviewed all 50 applications, took collaborative notes and gave initial scores. Then, all judges met together over conference calls to discuss and debate these applications, finally coming to consensus on which applications should receive $275,000 and which should receive $100,000.
We're pleased to present all of the winners and finalists in our detailed ADC gallery. Peruse and enjoy — there are awesome applications and unique uses of the Android platform. We would like to congratulate the winners and thank all the entrants for their hard work!
It's been a busy few weeks here as we've wrapped up the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. We'd like to share a couple pieces of information with you:
The prize recipients' entries were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of great applications submitted, and we'd like to thank and congratulate everyone who entered the challenge. We look forward to seeing all of the application in the hands of consumers with Android devices.
Well, the submission deadline for the first Android Developer Challenge has come and gone, the apps are in, the judges are finished, and the waiting is over. We got a lot of great submissions, and I can tell you personally that the competition was fierce. I didn't see all 1,788 submissions, but I saw quite a lot of them, and I uttered more than one wail of despair as some of my favorite submissions didn't quite make the cut, by razor-thin margins in some cases. But, the judges have spoken.
Speaking of the judges...we'll soon publish a list of who the judges are, but I know many of our developers are still curious: what were all those judges doing? Well, the short answer is that they were judging applications using a custom laptop configuration that we provided. But we thought some people might be interested in the "long" answer, so we put together this blog post. If you're not interested in the gory details of the judging, you can stop here; but if you are interested, read on!
How We Got Started
Making the Challenge fair was by far our primary goal. We knew we had to do whatever we could to make sure that the judges' scores are based solely on their review of the application. We automated as much as possible, to make it easy for judges to focus on judging, and not on administrivia or complicated setup.
The first thing we realized was that we were going to have way more submissions than any single judge could look at. No one could review all 1,788 submissions in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, we definitely needed more than one judge reviewing each submission. Our goal was to have each submission reviewed by four different judges, with a minimum of three.
The big question was then: how many judges would we need?
For 1,788 submissions, a panel of 4 judges per application meant that we needed a whopping 7,152 reviews to be performed. Since our judges would have to be crazy to agree to do more than 75 reviews, we needed at least 95 judges. In the end we recruited around 125, including backup judges.
Making Order out of Chaos
The next thing we realized was that judges need to be able to actually review the submissions. Since the judges came from our Open Handset Alliance partners and many are not engineers, we knew that we couldn't send instructions like "run the M5-RC15 emulator, open a terminal window, and run the command adb push geodb /data/misc/location—and don't forget the --sdcard option!" They'd think we were quoting Star Wars.
adb push geodb /data/misc/location
--sdcard
Besides that, we also knew that once we gave the judges their assignments, what they did was out of our hands. We couldn't control how the judges review the applications, but we could certainly make it as easy as possible for the judges to do a thorough review.
So, we built a program in wxPython that automates judging. This application launches a clean emulator for each submission, supports emulator features like SD card images and mock location providers, and allows judges to launch multiple emulators and simulate calls and SMS messages for applications which need that functionality. We asked our friendly neighborhood Google Tech Stop for 140 laptops, installed Ubuntu Linux and our software on one, and then cloned that installation for use on all the others. We then had a huge shipping party, where we imaged, boxed, and shipped 115 or so laptops in one day.
An important side effect of these custom laptops is that they are all identical. This means that each judge's experience of the submissions was the same, which eliminated the risk of one judge rating an app poorly just because it ran slowly on his personal computer.
Managing All that Data
Once we sent 100+ laptops all over the world, we needed a way to get the data back. Another goal was to eliminate as many sources of human error as possible. With 7,152 reviews to complete, and 4 categories per review, that's 28,608 scores to keep track of. Mistakes would be bound to happen, so filing paperwork or transcribing scores by hand from one file to another was out of the question.
Our solution was the Google Data web API for accessing things like Google Spreadsheets and Google Base. Here's how it worked.
This approach had two great things about it: first, it didn't require any new server infrastructure to make it work. Second, our "database" had a built-in rich "admin" UI for managing the data — namely, Google Spreadsheets itself. If any of our judges ran into problems or needed help, we could simply open that spreadsheet in our browser and review or fix problems.
This approach worked quite well, and I'd bet that the judges didn't even know the Spreadsheets API was being used, unless they actively poked around.
Tying Up the Loose Ends
Of course, our work wasn't done once we retrieved all the submission scores. We couldn't just average up the scores, you see. First, judges could recuse themselves from scoring specific submissions; perhaps they were assigned an application similar to one their own company is working on, or perhaps they realized they knew one of the authors. Second, despite our best efforts there was a chance that some judges might have a problem — for instance, if one judge had a poor network connection but reviewed an application that requires the network, then that judge might have scored the application unfairly poorly.
For the first two cases, we simply discarded the outlying data points, if we had enough. For instance, if three judges reported good scores and one recused herself, we simply dropped that fourth score. If dropping the conflicting score would have brought the application below three reviews, we sent it back for review by a new judge to bring it up to our minimum number of judges per application.
The third case is more subtle. Just because a judge rated an application differently than others doesn't mean that that review is invalid, so we can't simply discard outliers. Instead, we took the highest and lowest scores in each category and gave them half weight. The effect is to bring the average scores a bit closer to the median scores, which helps minimize the impact of unusually high or low scores. This process was applied to all submissions (not just "suspicious" scores) since it has a minimal effect on submissions that don't have a large outlier.
We actually ran the whole process above twice: first we ran it to choose a first cut of the top 100 submissions from the original 1,788, and we then sent those 100 to a second group of judges for selection of the final 50. (Actually, the "top 100" were really "top 119", since we added a few more submissions to accommodate scoring ties in the first round.)
Wrapping Up
Now you know what we've been spending all our time on, and what's been keeping us up at night (sometimes literally)! Throughout, our key objectives were to keep the process fair, let the judges focus on judging, and give applications the benefit of the doubt in cases of scoring outliers.
What's next? Well, the 50 submissions that were awarded a prize now begin the refinement process for their Round 2 submissions, which will award the final, larger prizes to the top 20 applications. I also hope that the developers of the other great apps that didn't receive prizes will consider the second Android Developer Challenge, which should begin later this year.
To everyone, I'd also like to say thanks for participating, and congratulations on your hard work!
As you may have heard, the results from Android Developer Challenge Part 1, Round 1 were announced to all the participants late last week. We're still working on pulling together a more extensive listing for each application that made it into the top 50, but in the spirit of releasing early and often, here's a list containing the name of the application and its author(s):
Those of you following along carefully at home (or who bothered to read this far) will notice that there's only 46 in this list. 4 winners opted to continue their efforts in secret and so while we congratulate them too, we can't list them here.
Regardless, congratulations to all those who made it this far!
The last few weeks were both extremely intense and rewarding. Based on feedback from the judges, it was apparent that large number of applications were compelling, innovative and well implemented. The quality of these entries clearly reflects the creativity and hard work that developers have invested in building their apps.
In addition to developers' participation and contributions, over 100 industry judges around the world spent weeks reviewing these submissions. I want to thank all the developers and judges who have worked incredibly hard over the last few months, making the Android Developer Challenge such a success.
Many of the top submissions took advantage of the geo and social networking capabilities of Android. These applications allow friends to share their personal experiences and favorite content such as vacations, photos, shows, music, cooking recipes, restaurants, and much more as they relate to certain locales. I've also seen applications that connect people during emergency situations and others that allow users to share information on how they can reduce their carbon footprint. One developer even turned a real city block into a playing field where gamers can role-play and chase after villains.
Furthermore, some of these applications provide rich interactive experiences by combining web services and mash-ups to bring together data that's on the web with data that's on the mobile device. One application combined weather, pollen and allergy information in the context of a map that is relevant to a user's location.
Though many applications use a traditional "download" model for data, many also enable users to publish content, such as photos or even voice memos, for others to use on other mobile devices or the web.
This is just a brief snapshot of the many impressive applications I've seen. The 50 highest scoring applications will receive $25,000 each and go on to compete in the final round. We plan to publish a list of these applications as soon as we receive the developers' consent. The real winners, however, are the consumers who will benefit from the work of these talented developers.
I'm thrilled to share the news that developers from over 70 countries submitted 1,788 entries to the Android Developer Challenge!
Here are a few facts that I thought were interesting. When we announced the Android Developer Challenge back in January, developers started submitting entries right away but it wasn't until the April 14 deadline approached that the flood really began. The rate of submissions spiked in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, reaching as high as 170+ submissions per hour.
What I find truly amazing is how global the interest in the challenge has been. Developers from the United States submitted one-third of the total applications while the rest came from countries such as Germany, Japan, China, India, Canada, France, UK, and many others. The entries are also very diverse representing many application areas, from games to social-networking applications, to utilities, to productivity and developer tools, and many more. On behalf of the Open Handset Alliance, I want to thank everyone who has submitted entries to the challenge. We look forward to reviewing all of them.
Now that the applications are in, over 100 judges will soon receive judging packets and laptops that we've preloaded with all the submissions, for a consistent, fair environment to judge the submissions. The majority of the judges are from member companies of the Open Handset Alliance, in addition to non-alliance mobile industry experts who have all graciously volunteered their time. I'd like to thank these judges too for all the time they will be putting into this.
In May, we'll be informing the 50 Semi-finalists who will be awarded $25,000 each. Until then, the team and I will have our hands full.
We have received a few inquiries regarding the judges who will be evaluating entries to the Android Developer Challenge (ADC). All Entries will be judged by a panel of experts in the fields of mobile devices, cellular telecommunications, software development, and/or technology innovation ("Judges"). Google will select the Judges from the member organizations of the Open Handset Alliance, Google and/or mobile experts.
As a reminder, the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge is April 14, 2008. We're really looking forward to seeing what you've created so make sure you submit in time. Good luck!
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