I’m Laurence Moroney: I lead AI Advocacy at Google, am a best-selling author of both programming books and fiction, and also find time to enjoy the hobby of being a digital artist. Please reach out if you have any questions using the social contacts at the bottom of this page.
What I do at Google
What does that mean? I’m glad you asked. AI Advocacy aims to educate, inspire, and inform developers, and by extension, the rest of the world about AI.
Educate:
First, let’s talk about education. We support this in several ways:
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We help Universities to create curricula for their students to understand how to build AI systems with Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and more
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We support Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) through the creation and teaching of content. I teach many courses, which you can find on the teaching tab at the top of this page
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We support other initiatives to widen access to AI to traditionally underserved groups, including driving racial and gender equity. I personally ran a Women in TensorFlow 6-week crash course for over 100 women in Seattle! Hopefully post-pandemic, I can do it again!
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We run the TensorFlow YouTube channel with hundreds of videos to help developers understand AI and start building it.
Inspire:
I get daily questions from developers or students who want to know how to get started with a career in AI. With this in mind, we like to inspire, connected with the education initiative by:
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We designed a certificate curriculum and test that demonstrates to potential employers that the person with this certificate has gained expertise in building AI and ML systems for common scenarios like Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Sequence modeling.
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We work with communities like Google Developer Groups, TensorFlow User Groups, and many more to help them have material for their meet-ups, and when possible, attend them ourselves.
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We drive the messaging and narratives used by Google at major events. I was privileged to help write the keynotes for Google IO this year!
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We deliver keynote conferences at developer events. The largest I ever did was at a Google Developer Days in Shanghai that got streamed to 10 million people!
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I regularly keynote hackathons, workshops and bootcamps. My recent favorite (in the picture above), as for a Korean AI bootcamp that I got to kick off along with Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng.
Inform:
Developers need regular updates on frameworks, technology, and roadmaps, and it’s my job to drive this forward for Google AI.
- The TensorFlow YouTube Channel has regular updates and how-tos
- We drive, create, and present talks and workshops at conferences like Google IO and the TensorFlow Dev Summit
- We write and run the TensorFlow blog and regularly contribute to other Google outreach.
My Writing
The writing page on this site lists out all my books. I’ve written many programming ones, a few fiction ones, a couple of comic books, and a produced screenplay.
I’m particularly passionate about Science Fiction and am currently at work on a collection of short stories about how technology will impact the world the day after tomorrow. I am a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and I hope someone will publish it! If you are an agent or know an agent, please contact me!
I also got the chance to dabble in writing comic books a few years back and learned what a brutal, cut-throat industry that can be! I did get a publication out of it – the official prequel to the movie ‘Equilibrium,’ created as a six-part comic book series, but sales of the first issue were so bad, it got canceled :(
My Art
I got bitten by the CGI bug after writing my novel, “The Fourth World”. Some Hollywood folks were asking about it, so I quickly learned how to visualize characters, and ever since then, I’ve been hooked! I like to work with Daz3D, and you can see some samples of my work here.