At the same time, executives are also being asked to integrate smarter tools into their operations to help their employees work more productively. 

At  Google Cloud Next ’24, Google Cloud experts Ganesh Chilakapati, director of product management and Luke Camery, group product manager, were joined by executives from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), UK energy retailer OVO and Air Liquide, a global industrial gases supplier, to discuss how Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities are helping to achieve those objectives.

How Gemini safeguards your data 

Chilakapati and Camery demonstrated some of Gemini’s and Google Workspace’s signature capabilities, emphasizing features such as client-side encryption and comprehensive security frameworks. They also explained what happens to data inside Gemini.

“What is Gemini doing with all this data? How is it providing these customized and targeted responses that are so helpful? Is it learning and training on all of my enterprise data? No, it’s not. All of the privacy commitments we’ve made over the many decades to Google Workspace customers remain true,” said Chilakapati.

“Your data is your data and strictly stays within the workspace data boundary. Your privacy is protected, your content is not used for any other customers, and all of your existing data protections are automatically applied,” he added.

Your data, your trust boundary, managed by you

“Everything happens within your Google Workspace trust boundary. That means you have the ability to control whether or not Gemini stores not only the user prompts but also the generated responses. It’s completely up to you,” added Camery.

“One of the things we’re most excited to announce is the general availability of AI classification for Google Drive. This is a privacy-preserving customer-specific model that you have the option to train on your own specific corpus using your unique data class taxonomy,” said Camery.  “Leveraging AI classification and the guarantees that we’ve built into Gemini itself, you can have a virtuous cycle where you are leveraging AI while protecting your organization from emerging threats.”

Unparalleled Security: 5 key takeaways

Chilakapati and Camery stressed how the platform is designed to offer unparalleled security, built on the robust foundations of Google’s secure cloud infrastructure:

·  Enterprise terms of operation: Gemini operates strictly under processor enterprise terms, even when fetching the latest information from the internet, not on consumer controller terms.

·  Client-side encryption extension: Enterprises that have traditionally leveraged client-side encryption capabilities, ensuring that sensitive data remains inaccessible, can extend that one step further to protect against access attempts by any unauthorized entity, including other generative AI models.

·  Foundation on secure cloud infrastructure: Gemini is constructed on Google’s secure cloud platform, providing a solid foundation to enhance the overall security posture.

·  Zero-trust architecture: Zero-trust protocols are built in, not bolted on, not just on Google Cloud’s foundation but all the way up the stack to Gemini itself.

·  Sovereign controls integration: Gemini is also seamlessly integrated into an enterprise’s sovereign controls for Google Workspace, ensuring the integrity of data’s digital sovereignty journey, regardless of wherever you are in the world.

How Gemini AI is boosting productivity for the global workforce

Those features are especially important to customers like Soren Thomassen, director of IT solutions at UNFPA, which operates in 150 countries. Thomassen initially started using Gemini in May of 2023 to make chat functionality available to the fund’s entire user base. He began piloting Gemini Workspace last November.

“As an agency, safety and privacy is paramount. That’s why we were quick at rolling out the Gemini Chatbot because it’s covered by the same rules and the same controls as with Workspace.”

How Gemini AI is boosting productivity for the global workforce

Thomassen also pointed out how Gemini AI is helping UNFPA’s global workforce work more productively.

“Our users have been using it as a superpower writing assistant,” he said. Project managers spend a lot of time writing proposals.  “Instead of starting out with a blank screen…they can at least have a zero-draft that they can start working with. But the feedback that’s on my heart the most was when I hear those who have English as a second language say that Gemini helps them get their ideas across a little bit more clearly. Gemini (helps) everybody write English perfectly. And I think that’s important for a global organization.”

Jeremy Gibbons, Air Liquide’s digital and IT CTO, and Simon Goldsmith, OVO’s enterprise security and platforms lead, echoed Thomassen’s testament to Gemini’s utility. Each attested how the strategic deployment of Gemini within their organizations helped bolster productivity and ensure security. A recurrent theme throughout their conversation was the transformative potential of AI in reimagining work securely.

“I like to think of Workspace as kind of a walled garden of Eden,” said Goldsmith. “We want to give our people a really amazing experience in that garden… and allow them to experiment. But at the same time, within that safe environment, Workspace gives us the ability to, at an enterprise level, do the sensitive detective and corrective control work.”

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your generative AI journey.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

The post Keeping public sector data private and compliant with AI appeared first on FedScoop.

One groundbreaking development in pathology and cancer detection is the augmented reality microscope (ARM). During a session at Google Cloud Next ’24, experts discussed how the ARM is poised to revolutionize cancer diagnosis. The initiative is a collaboration between the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs (VA), DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit, Google Public Sector and Jenoptik.

The AI-assisted microscope provides not only a view of how AI is increasing the diagnostic accuracy and efficiency of cancer detection but also its ability to operate on edge devices to support medical and other professionals. That allows those professionals to operate locally, independent of internet or cloud connectivity. That’s becoming increasingly critical as the number of experienced healthcare specialists qualified to perform diagnostic evaluations is declining in the U.S.

ARM’s impact also extends beyond individual diagnoses. By digitizing tissue samples and harnessing the power of AI, the microscope eliminates geographical barriers, ensuring that patients everywhere have access to the expertise of top-tier pathologists.

A look at the development process

The genesis of the ARM lies in the recognition of a critical challenge faced by pathologists — the meticulous task of analyzing tissue slides, often numbering in the hundreds, to detect cancerous abnormalities. While traditional microscopes are indispensable, they present inherent limitations in terms of efficiency and accuracy, which are compounded by the sheer volume of data pathologists need to process.

The ARM integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into the diagnostic process. At its core, this device leverages AI algorithms deployed on the edge to analyze digitized tissue samples in real time. This transformative approach enables pathologists to identify potential abnormalities with unprecedented speed and precision, significantly enhancing diagnostic accuracy.

“The job of pathologists is to make sure that what we do is very accurate and that we can identify the disease. We don’t want to make a mistake,” said Dr. Nadeem Zafar, director of pathology and laboratory medicine service at Veterans Affairs Puget Sound. “This is where the technology comes in, and this is why we are so excited about it.”

The development process of the (ARM) also illustrates the power of collaboration. “Here at Google… we don’t just want to incrementally improve things like cancer diagnosis; we want to do it at scale,” said Scott Frohman, head of defense programs for Google Cloud. “And this project enabled us to think and connect and do something good for humanity.”

Current and future impacts

Central to the microscope’s functionality is its ability to highlight areas of interest detected by AI algorithms, providing pathologists with guidance during the diagnostic process. In addition, combining AI-driven insights with human expertise will empower healthcare professionals to make more informed decisions with greater confidence.

“Why I’m so excited about this technology is that it will bring so many experts to your desktop — while in the workflow, while in the flow of time,” Dr. Zafar said. “This is not something you have to learn. As long as you have the software… it will start giving you the heatmap and help detect cancer. So this is brilliant.”

In addition, this endeavor’s success underscores the pivotal role of public-private partnerships in driving innovation and advancing healthcare. Through concerted efforts and a shared vision, stakeholders across government, industry, and academia have made the ARM a reality, with tangible benefits for patients and healthcare providers alike.

“We know that we can’t solve these kinds of problems alone. So the partnership that we have with the government has been fantastic for bringing the subject matter expertise, the data, and the commitment to solving this problem with us,” said Frohman. “And it helps us to do the mission that we have at Google — making information available and accessible during cancer and making the human condition better every day.”

Thanks to AI and edge computing, the ARM promises to redefine the standard of care in pathology, offering new hope in the relentless pursuit of a cancer-free future.

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your generative AI journey.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

The post How DOD and Google Public Sector partnered using AI to fight cancer appeared first on FedScoop.

During a session on public sector innovation at Google Cloud Next ’24, leaders from the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, and the United Nations Office for Project Services shared strategies for boosting productivity by fostering operational consistency and shared understanding. They also stressed the importance of transparency and continuous feedback and focused on the tangible benefits of eased workloads and enhanced efficiencies.

Enhancing collaboration

Public sector agencies operating worldwide are adopting cloud-based collaboration tools to create a more integrated work environment where documents and projects are easily accessible anytime and on any device. This shift not only boosts productivity but also enhances the flexibility of working environments by giving employees more universal access to agency resources and reports from offices around the world. It also helps overcome language barriers by providing translation services. And it helps ensure communications with international partners meet agency standards across different time zones and geographies. 

Justin Waugh, head of platforms, ITG enterprise platforms team at UNOPS, highlighted the transformative impact of Google Workspace in managing extensive infrastructure projects involving frequent account and project turnover. By leveraging Workspace tools like Google Docs and Sheets, UNOPS has streamlined project management and data handling and significantly reduced operational friction while enhancing user experience.

“The key thing to remember is to reduce friction for people using the systems that we’ve got, and we’ve been heavily into the book to do that,” said Waugh.

Waugh’s comments underscored the importance of integrating various Google products within organizational applications. Doing so facilitates more seamless project communication, budgeting and reporting. This strategic integration has allowed UNOPS to maintain standardized procedures across projects, fostering consistency and understanding throughout the organization.

Leveraging AI enterprise search solutions for efficient and confident information access

One of the standout applications of AI within the public sector is improving information access through enterprise search solutions. AI-powered search tools within Google Workspace can easily access vast amounts of data to find relevant documents, emails, and files. This capability is particularly transformative for government agencies, where quickly retrieving and correlating information can influence policy-making and public service delivery.

Raman Pugalumperumal, senior IT officer and lead for AI and ML platforms at the World Bank, discussed how Vertex AI and Google Cloud Search have revolutionized their data management practices. The World Bank, which manages extensive financial and economic analysis datasets, has benefited from the enhanced speed and accuracy these tools provide.

“We can measure things with quantitative information… we’re able to do [certain things] faster, or maybe things which we weren’t able to do — they’re able to do it because of the volume process,” said Pugalumperumal.

Pugalumperumal explained how AI is being used to quicken information retrieval, creating a more responsive and productive environment. This shift towards leveraging AI in its operations has unlocked new avenues for global access and sharing the World Bank’s wealth of knowledge, positioning AI as a pivotal asset in its mission to distribute developmental knowledge.

At UNFPA, IT Director Nayanesh Bhandutia said they’re working on developing an AI-powered search experience product. “We aim to break the data silos. We don’t want our users to worry about the data source when they’re looking for something,” said Bhadutia.

“This will be very time-saving because now the global population is not going through the pain of finding information.”

Maintaining the flow of multilingual work with AI-assisted translation 

Another significant advantage of integrating AI with Google Workspace in the public sector is overcoming language barriers. AI-driven language translation tools embedded within Google Workspace allow government employees from different linguistic backgrounds to collaborate effectively.

At UNFPA, IT Director Nayanesh Bhandutia highlighted the transformative role of the Gemini AI interface within Google Workspace. Introduced initially to simplify operations, Gemini has evolved to solve more complex challenges, particularly in multilingual settings. The AI-driven tool has been instrumental in helping staff draft clear and concise communications in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

“The introduction of Gemini has solved the [fluency] problem. Our users are getting more confident, and they’re spending less time making revisions, but we want to take it to the next level. We noticed many potentials,” said Bhandutia.

The potential for AI to extend beyond basic translations to fully integrated document management systems is vast. Bhandutia shared ambitious plans to leverage Gemini AI to automate the generation of critical documents, such as requests for proposals and job descriptions, which would reduce administrative overhead and enhance responsiveness.

For example, teams can use AI to translate documents and emails directly within the Google Workspace environment when collaborating on international aid programs or global policy initiatives. This seamless integration of translation services helps maintain the flow of work without the interruptions typically caused by language differences, fostering stronger connections and more cohesive teamwork.

“It is a fantastic stepping stone in the technology sector — [the capability] to deliver what people need…this is an excellent step towards accessibility,” said Waugh.

The future of AI and public sector innovation

The ongoing advancements in AI are expected to introduce more sophisticated tools for predictive analytics, supporting complex decision-making and personalized public services. These developments will not only drive greater efficiency within agencies but also enhance the quality of services provided to the public.

By leveraging these tools, government agencies are enhancing their operational capabilities and setting new standards for accessibility, efficiency, and collaboration in public service.

The post Breaking silos worldwide; how Google Cloud is fueling public sector AI, collaboration and innovation appeared first on FedScoop.

While advances in search technology have provided government employees with more powerful search tools, the dramatic growth of multi-modal data in all its forms has made search, and the ability to find the right information in petabytes of datasets more challenging than ever.

That was the challenge the United States Patent and Trademark Office and its patent examiners were facing, setting the stage for taking a new approach to search, enabled by advanced AI technologies. 

In a strategic partnership with Accenture Federal Services and Google Cloud, USPTO has developed and implemented a comprehensive system to refine its search mechanisms. This initiative has been about upgrading the traditional examination protocols, providing examiners with new, swift and precise search capabilities that respond to the complexity and scale of modern innovations.

At Google Cloud Next ’24, Jonathan Horner, supervisory patent IT specialist at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Ian Wetherbee, software engineer at Google, joined Anna Hoffman, USPTO lead at Accenture Federal Services, on stage to discuss the agency’s ambitious efforts to leverage AI.  

The USPTO’s initiative highlights a broader challenge public agencies face in reviewing mountains of documents, artifacts and existing application decisions—and identifying where else in the world similar work may be underway and what’s verifiable. Until recently, Generative AI platforms had limited ability to provide grounded or verifiably sourced content in real time from the Internet.

“One of the things we recently announced is Grounding with Google Search,” said Katharyn White, head of public sector marketing for Google Cloud in a podcast from Google Cloud Next.

“Grounded means we know the source that the AI is using to come up with the answer. It’s grounded in a data source that you can check and ensure that is giving you the results that you want. And we’re making that easier.” 

For the USPTO, the need for advanced search capabilities meant first tackling its internal data retrieval and analytics capabilities.

Horner detailed the constitutional roots of patent law and the monumental task of examining each application against all human knowledge. “That’s a lot of information to go through… You’re looking for a needle in a stack of other needles,” Horner said, explaining the enormity of their challenge.

Traditionally, patent examiners relied on Boolean search techniques. However, with the exponential increase in information, these tools became increasingly inadequate for maintaining the high standards required for U.S. patents, said Horner. To address this, the USPTO has turned to AI, deploying tools in production that are not only efficient but also explainable, respecting the office’s duty to the public and applicants.

Hoffman discussed the journey starting in 2019 with a small prototype aimed to demonstrate that AI could meet these challenges. She mentioned conducting dozens of interviews and workshops, deploying a modern Google infrastructure and launching a prototype within three months—a pace unheard of in federal government operations. The prototype focused on finding prior art — evidence that an invention might already exist — that examiners might likely have missed otherwise.  The pilot paved the way for production features like showing “more like this” documents, enabling examiners to find similar documents more effectively.

“This feature became used by examiners immediately, which allowed us to run with a much bigger and more robust AI user interface directly similar to the examiner search system called Similarity Search,” Hoffman added. 

Google’s Wetherbee emphasized the necessity of “supporting the full Boolean search syntax as the model’s input.” A robust data collection process involved over a million data points from human raters and a pattern corpus of over 170 million documents. 

“There are hundreds of millions of citations inside patterns. It’s a huge corpus of over two terabytes of text content…We were able to process all of this human-rated data and the pattern data using Google infrastructure and turn that into training data to train our models,” said Wetherbee. 

Horner reiterated that despite technological advancements, the examiner is “still in the driver’s seat. All of these tools are based on an examiner’s ability to guide the AI towards what it is looking for, and that’s very important to us.” It’s a symbiotic relationship where AI extends the reach of human capability rather than replacing it.

Adopting these AI tools signifies a broader shift within the federal landscape—embracing cutting-edge technology to ensure accuracy and efficiency in governmental functions. It also poses an example for other federal agencies that are considering a similar path toward digital transformation.

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your generative AI journey.”

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

The post Reimagining search: How AI and Google Search turbocharges patent examinations at USPTO  appeared first on FedScoop.

One challenge that remains at the forefront of those efforts is ensuring that today’s increasingly dynamic and distributed IT environments continue to meet the government’s complex security, regulatory and data privacy compliance rules — while learning how best to capitalize on AI’s potential to serve the public.

Google Cloud’s understanding and recognition of those challenges was widely reflected in a series of sweeping announcements at last week’s Google Cloud Next ’24, that promise new levels of security, flexibility and AI-assisted capabilities to Google Cloud’s public sector customers.

Building AI capabilities within protected workspaces

When it comes to securely managing public sector data, agencies using Google Cloud gain immediate benefits by building on top of its foundational architecture. Because the architecture was built for the cloud and also incorporates a substantial portion of federal security controls, it’s possible to demonstrate security compliance and obtain operating authority in weeks instead of months when folding in applications like Workspace or AI models like Gemini.

Another way agencies can enhance the security of their workloads is by using the Google Cloud Assured Workloads, which also have foundational government security compliance assurances built in, according to a panel of technology experts speaking at Google Cloud Next ’24.

The panelists, representing NASA, Palo Alto Networks, SAP and Google Cloud, argued that using zero-trust and compliance-as-a-code technologies has become essential to creating and maintaining easily reproducible compliant workload environments. That’s in part because of the diversity of government agency compliance requirements, from FedRAMP to the Department of Defense Impact Level 2, 4, and 5 security controls. 

By deploying workloads in pre-certified, software-defined environments set up to limit activity to compliant products and restrict where data can flow and who can access it, agencies can better ensure their workloads meet government requirements.

“Moving to Assured GCP is not just an upgrade; it’s a transformational leap forward,” said Collin Estes, the CIO of MRI Technologies working at NASA.

He pointed to two benefits: The “ability to generate compliant documentation as both a product of these large language models as well as helping us produce very well-structured definitions of what we’re doing, based on your actual implementations within Google Cloud. It is not a human saying, here’s what we do. It is us generating what we do from our environment. I think that’s going to really change the game in terms of how federal agencies manage risk across these portfolios.”

Among other benefits, the panelists pointed to:

Streamlining software development – Transitioning to Assured GCP allows government bodies to leverage and deploy cutting-edge technologies and methodologies, such as containerization and microservices, with unprecedented ease.

Focusing on the mission – By moving to Assured GCP, organizations can shift their focus from the backend to what truly matters—their mission. This shift represents not just an operational change but a philosophical one, where technology becomes an enabler rather than a hurdle in support of agency missions.

According to Palo Alto Networks Senior Manager Michael Clark, another reason for adopting Assured Workloads is the volume of data and the compute intensity with all this data. “We’re at that critical pivot point. We’ve been using this data to learn new threats and find zero-day threats so that we can enforce zero trust, improve security protection mechanisms, and map into new areas of innovation for threat detection and automated remediation.”

When building a compliant environment, SAP’s NVP Architecture and Product Launch, Hunter Downey, urged session attendees “to build it within a framework that I can ensure controls are in place, so I can rinse and repeat across 20 to 100 different teams, potentially touching 1,000 or 5,000 developers. If you start with the lowest common denominator, you’re going to fail. The reason why we partnered with GCP Assured Workloads is because you’re able to control the flow of information and messages. The minute the data goes global, it’s a different jurisdiction.”

Among other AI-related developments announced at Google Cloud Next ‘24:

• Google Public Sector achieves Top Secret and Secret cloud authorization. 

• Gemini for Google Cloud is a new generation of AI assistants for developers, Google Cloud services and applications that help users work and navigate security challenges more effectively.
• See more announcements here. 

Learn more about how Google Public Sector can help your organization “Kickstart your AI and security journey”.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Google Public Sector. Google Public Sector is an underwriter of AI Week.

The post How Google Cloud AI and Assured Workloads can enhance public sector security, compliance and service delivery at scale appeared first on FedScoop.