A collaboration between Google, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab, and TIME has released what is possibly the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public. Using millions of satellite images of Earth collected over the last quarter century from the ongoing Landsat mission, Google Earth Engine and Focused Research Award recipients CREATE Lab utilized nearly 2 million CPU hours of processing time to convert these annual Earth images into a browsable HTML5 animation. This was released as part of TIME's new Timelapse project. Visit the Google Blog to see more.

Co-leaders of the Big Picture visualization group in Google's Cambridge, MA office, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas are the minds behind compelling visualizations, such as Google+ Ripples.  Authors of more than 30 academic papers, Martin and Fernanda are committed to a rigorous understanding of visualization informed by academic research. Prior to joinging Google, Martin and Fernanda founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer oriented projects.  Before this, the two led IBM's Visual Communication Lab, creating the public visualization platform Many Eyes.  Read more about their work in our Google+ interview.

This May, Google sponsors WWW 2013, hosted in Rio de Janeiro. Organized by the IW3C2, the WWW conference is an annual event which explores the future direction of the World Wide Web, drawing industry professionals, developers, researchers, and all those who are passionate about the Web to discuss its evolution and impact on society. Google will be present to share our research on topics including Big Data, Search, Visualization, and more, with Googlers presenting multiple papers, tutorials, and workshops. Visit the Google exhibit schedule to see details on the Google's participation at WWW 2013, including in-booth demos, paper presentations, and more.