The National Alliance on Mental Illness on Wednesday announced that Google on mobile now provides people who search for the term "clinical depression" with a direct link to the PHQ-9 questionnaire used by medical professionals in the United States to evaluate patients for the disorder.
Google Connects Mobile Searchers to Depression Assessment Tool
People can conduct a self-assessment by filling in the questionnaire online.
When someone conducts a Google search on mobile for information on "clinical depression," a link to "check if you're clinically depressed" will appear in the depression knowledge panel.
Clicking on the link will take the user to the PHQ-9 questionnaire.
NAMI hopes teaming up with Google will help raise awareness of clinical depression and lead sufferers to determine their level of depression and the need to seek help, said Mary Giliberti, the organization's CEO.
Clinical depression is a treatable condition, and the PHQ-9 can be the first step to getting a proper diagnosis, she noted.
Noble Effort
One in five Americans experience an episode of clinical depression in their lifetime, but only about half the sufferers receive treatment, Giliberti pointed out, and generally only after six to eight years.
"By making PHQ-9 easily accessible in the Clinical Depression Knowledge Panel, we hope that will help provide useful and insightful information to spur deeper research on the Web or to help you have more in-depth conversations with your doctor," said Google spokesperson Susan Cadrecha.
"The effort is noble, though I'd feel better if this project was managed by someone other than Google, with the appropriate medical background, oversight and protections, such as a major hospital," remarked Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
Privacy Questions
Because Google stores user data, there may be legitimate concerns that information entered into the PHQ-9 form would be retained.
"The privacy and security of our users is of the utmost importance," Google's Cadrecha told TechNewsWorld.
"We recognize that this information is sensitive and private, and Google will not store your responses or your results," she said.
"This speaks to trust, and whether management actually knows what the engineers who have set this up actually did," Enderle told TechNewsWorld.
"In the past, Google has been lax with regard to oversight," he added, so concerns about data retention are reasonable, "even though it clearly isn't an executive intent."
Google parent Alphabet already collects some data on consumers' health.
Its Verily Life Sciences division, formerly Google Life Sciences, in 2014 launched Project Baseline, which seeks to collect phenotypic health data from about 10,000 participants over four years.
The project will make de-identified data from the study available to qualified researchers for exploratory analysis.
Google Is Watching You?
"Google sees everything that moves through their portal," said Michael Jude, a research manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.
"At some level, everything's stored for some period of time," he told TechNewsWorld.
Google is "asking us to trust them not to store anything long term," Jude added. "However, the act of seeing this data lets it build profiles of users."
The company "probably already can build a psychological profile of its users from their searches and other user data," he speculated. "If a profile leaked, they could claim that it was simply from publicly disclosed data. How could anyone prove otherwise?" 
source: http://www.technewsworld.com
source: http://www.technewsworld.com
Tensor Flow Serving 1.0
We've come a long way since our initial open source release in February 2016 of TensorFlow Serving, a high performance serving system for machine learned models, designed for production environments. Today, we are happy to announce the release of TensorFlow Serving 1.0. Version 1.0 is built from TensorFlow head, and our future versions will be minor-version aligned with TensorFlow releases.
For a good overview of the system, watch Noah Fiedel's talk given at Google I/O 2017.
When we first announced the project, it was a set of libraries providing the core functionality to manage a model's lifecycle and serve inference requests. We later introduced a gRPC Model Server binary with a Predict API and an example of how to deploy it on Kubernetes. Since then, we've worked hard to expand its functionality to fit different use cases and to stabilize the API to meet the needs of users. Today there are over 800 projects within Google using TensorFlow Serving in production. We've battle tested the server and the API and have converged on a stable, robust, high-performance implementation.
We've listened to the open source community and are excited to offer a prebuilt binary available through apt-get install. Now, to get started using TensorFlow Serving, you can simply install and run without needing to spend time compiling. As always, a Docker container can still be used to install the server binary on non-Linux systems.
With this release, TensorFlow Serving is also officially deprecating and stopping support for the legacy SessionBundle model format. SavedModel, TensorFlow's model format introduced as part of TensorFlow 1.0 is now the officially supported format.
To get started, please check out the documentation for the project and our tutorial. Enjoy TensorFlow Serving 1.0!
source: Kiril Gorovoy, Software Engineer
Google launches Security features while report shows iOS threats outpacing Android
Google has cracked down on security with the launch of Play Protect and other new defense mechanisms while a report has been released which shows iOS malware growth outpacing that of Android.
After the Google Docs phishing attack, the company has been ramping up its security in recent months. This started back in May with the implementation of machine learning to improve the detection of phishing messages – and the company now estimates it can block spam and malicious content with a 99.9 percent accuracy.
The following month, in June, Google added security controls to G Suite which enables admins to block employees from accessing untrustworthy apps. The phishing attack was caused by a bogus app using a Google sign-in, so this feature helps to ensure admins can vet third-party apps.
Earlier this week, Google added a new warning screen for apps from developers which are yet to go through verification. You can still choose to continue, at your own risk, but you’ll be prompted with a warning message and must type “continue” in the field to help ensure the user has read the prompt and hasn’t just clicked ‘ok’ to get rid of the message (against our better judgement, most of us have probably done it at some point!)
"We're committed to fostering a healthy ecosystem for both users and developers," wrote Google's Naveen Agarwal and Wesley Chun in a blog post. "These new notices will inform users automatically if they may be at risk, enabling them to make informed decisions to keep their information safe, and will make it easier to test and develop apps for developers."
Now the company is putting its focus on Android security with the roll-out of Play Protect to all devices running Google Play Services 11 and up. All of the apps downloaded from the Play Store will be scanned to detect anything malicious and will be removed or blocked on the device. Of course, if the user is side-loading apps outside the official store, they still run a higher risk of being hit by a form of malware.
Speaking of, as reported by our sister publication EnterpriseCIO, the growth of malware targeting iOS has tripled and now outpaces Android which remained largely flat over the past couple of quarters. The research was conducted by mobile security company Skycure.
Varun Kohli, Vice President of Marketing at Skycure, said, "iOS is used on one of the more popular devices and that is where hackers are focusing and that is where the money is. A more affluent community tends to use the iPhone."
iOS still has some way to go before it has the same level of risk as Android, but it’s good to see Google being more proactive about the security issue on its platform. Hopefully, the rapidly growing threat to iOS will ensure Apple doesn’t become complacent.
Do you think Google is doing enough in terms of security? Share your thoughts in the comments.
source: developer-tech.com
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