Marzo, 2021

Editor’s note: Melkon Toroysan is the mobile solutions architect with Swiss Federal Railways.

At Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), mobility is the key to how our teams stay connected and fulfill our mission as the public rail transport agency in Switzerland. We strive to provide a safe and pleasant journey for passengers and reliable transport for cargo. Many of our 33,000 employees are on the frontline of helping customers, keeping the trains running smoothly and doing the critical maintenance work to ensure our infrastructure is always in optimal condition. 

The foundation behind all this is the technology that enables our employees to communicate with each other, serve our customers and get up-to-the-minute information. With Android Enterprise, we now have the ability to choose a diverse selection of devices and integrate them into a common management system, along with the security and privacy we require.

Enhancing frontline work with Android

When evaluating our device strategy, we spent significant time in the field considering how our teams worked and what opportunities there would be to modernize workflows. We wanted to streamline much of our work through internal apps and provide devices to employees who had not been assigned one before. 

Android Enterprise allowed us to do all of this. Now our IT team manages over 24,000 devices, with a mix of tablets and smartphones tailored to individual job roles. We chose Android Enterprise Recommended devices so we’d have guaranteed operating system and security updates, and we replaced a fair amount of outdated hardware. 

Our devices are essential for nearly everyone across the organization; employees can report maintenance issues, answer messages and access our collaboration tools. This takes place across over 70 internal enterprise apps we distribute and maintain through managed Google Play.

For example, our train conductors use their smartphones to stay on top of departure information, communicate with others to know what details to announce before departing. Our conductors use their devices to issue and check tickets with an NFC scanner. They also get real-time information about departures and arrivals to give passengers up-to-date information. And every member of our maintenance team uses an Android Enterprise Recommended smartphone to get their daily assignments, mark them complete and note necessary repairs they detect. Teams are using their Android devices to take pictures of needed repairs to provide better details about what needs to be fixed.

Security and privacy

Many of our devices are deployed with the Android work profile, which means employees can use the same device for personal apps and data without compromising their privacy. Our teams appreciate the separation of their company apps in a dedicated work tab, and our IT team has the enterprise tools they require to help secure our corporate apps in the work profile. This became even more important as the pandemic took hold—we relied heavily on mobility to stay connected and work safely. 

We’ll continue to explore how Android can improve our teams’ communication and collaboration. With Android Enterprise we’re confident in our ability to expand our device deployment and help our teams find new ways to be productive.

In our JournalismAI report, journalists around the world told researchers they are eager to collaborate and explore the benefits of AI, especially as it applies to newsgathering, production and distribution. 

To facilitate their collaboration, the Google News Initiative and Polis – the journalism think tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science – are launching the JournalismAI Collab Challenges, an opportunity for three groups of five newsrooms from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific to experiment together.

Each cohort – selected by Polis – will have six months to either cover global news stories using AI-powered storytelling techniques or to develop prototypes of new AI-based products and processes.

Participants will receive support from the JournalismAI team and partner institutions in each region: in the Americas, the challenge will be co-hosted with the Knight Lab at Northwestern University; in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the challenge will be co-hosted with BBC News Labs and Clwstwr. JournalismAI’s partner in Asia Pacific will be announced later this year.

The Collab Challenges build on a successful pilot run by JournalismAI last year. More than 20 global newsrooms joined forces to solve four common problems using AI, from creating automated news summaries to mitigating newsroom biases, and from powering archives to increasing audience loyalty. JournalismAI online trainings are available on the Google News Initiative Training Center, where they have already been seen by more than 110,000 participants.

Newsrooms interested in participating in this free, year-long program must have made AI a strategic priority, must guarantee the participation of two staff members – one from editorial and one from the technical department – who can participate two to four hours a week, and must embrace collaboration with other publishers.

The outcome of their work – whose ownership will be shared among participants – will be presented at the second edition of the JournalismAI Festival in November.

Applications for the Americas challenge and the Europe, the Middle East and Africa Challenge open today and close at 11:59 PM GMT on April 5. The Challenge will open later this year in Asia Pacific.

To learn more about the process, please visit Polis blog and sign up for the JournalismAI newsletter.

Mikeal Cho, co-founder and CEO of Unsplash, believes that there’s an image at the heart of every story. Since 2013, Unsplash has allowed more than 200,000 photographers to share their work and build relationships with other creators and organizations. 

Cho refers to Unsplash “an accidental company.” When looking for images online, he found that “great images were often locked up with confusing licenses,” meaning people couldn’t easily use them. So he uploaded 10 photos left over from a photoshoot to Tumblr and allowed anybody to use them for personal or commercial purposes, without attribution or licensing fees. Now, far from simply being a source of free stock photos, the platform has become the foundation for new careers, relationships and stories.

When Nithya Sambasivan was finishing her undergraduate degree in engineering, she felt slightly unsatisfied. “I wanted to know, ‘how will the technology I build impact people?’” she says. Luckily, she would soon discover the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and pursue her graduate degrees. 

She completed her master’s and PhD in HCI focusing on technology design for low-income communities in India. “I worked with sex workers, slum communities, microentrepreneurs, fruit and vegetables sellers on the streetside…” she says. “I wanted to understand what their values, aspirations and struggles are, and how we can build with them in mind.” 

Today, Nithya is the founder of the HCI group at the Google Research India lab and an HCI researcher at PAIR, a multidisciplinary team at Google that explores the human side of AI by doing fundamental research, building tools, creating design frameworks, and working with diverse communities. She recently sat down to answer some of our questions about her journey to researching responsible AI, fairness and championing historically underrepresented technology users.

How would you explain your job to someone who isn’t in tech?

I’m a human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher, which means I study people to better understand how to build technology that works for them. There’s been a lot of focus in the research community on building AI systems and the possibility of positively impacting the lives of billions of people. I focus on human-centered, responsible AI; specifically looking for ways it can empower communities in the Global South, where over 80% of the world’s population lives. Today, my research outlines a road map for fairness research in India, calling for re-contextualizing datasets and models while empowering communities and enabling an entire fairness ecosystem.

What originally inspired your interest in technology? 

I grew up in a middle class family, the younger of two daughters from the South of India. My parents have very progressive views about gender roles and independence, especially in a conservative society — this definitely influenced what and how I research; things like gender, caste and  poverty. In school, I started off studying engineering, which is a conventional path in India. Then, I went on to focus on HCI and designing with my own and other under-represented communities around the world.