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DOUG STEVENSON: Hey, Firebase developers.
My name is Doug Stevenson.
I'm a developer advocate with the Firebase team.
Thank you for tuning in to "Meet Firebase."
We've come off pretty fresh from the Firebase
Summit in Amsterdam.
A lot of great product announcements there.
And I'm super excited to have one person who worked very hard
on one of the new releases.
His name is John Burge.
John--
JOHN BURGE: Hello.
DOUG STEVENSON: --thanks for joining me on the show.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
Thank you.
DOUG STEVENSON: So what was your big announcement
from the Firebase Summit?
JOHN BURGE: So our announcement was
for a product called Firebase Predictions, which
is a tool that allows developers to kind of understand
what users are doing in their apps
so that they can kind of custom tailor the experience
in their app for those users.
For instance, if a user is about to churn out of your app,
you might want to treat them a little bit differently,
maybe entice them to stay, give them a special offer,
something like that--
something that you could necessarily do to everybody,
but you might want to do to just the people that
are going to leave.
So you can try to keep them around a little bit longer.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you have a way to target these users
who you think--
who the product thinks are about to leave the app.
So you could use Firebase Cloud Messaging or something
like that to send a notification.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
One of the great things about Firebase
is that we're just a small part of it.
There's a lot of other tools, Firebase Remote Config
and Firebase Notifications being the two most important
for this.
But you can take our predictions that we
make in Firebase Predictions and then target people with Remote
Config to tailor the use of your app in a particular way.
DOUG STEVENSON: I see.
I see.
JOHN BURGE: So it's deeply integrated
with the other Firebase tools, which is what's
really so great about Firebase.
DOUG STEVENSON: So with Remote Config
you can change the look and feel and behavior of your app
to suit these-- the special segment?
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
I mean, you could change your app arbitrarily.
If you had a game where you killed zombies, for instance,
you could make zombies 10 times harder
to kill for some set of population if you wanted to.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
Yeah.
JOHN BURGE: Users might not like that one in particular.
DOUG STEVENSON: They might not.
Well, I actually had a talk at the Firebase Summit
about how to use Remote Config in your games.
And you can sort of tweak some of the physics in some cases.
That can have interesting results.
JOHN BURGE: Yup, absolutely.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you have to definitely
practice on development, not on your users, unless you--
unless you're really risky.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
DOUG STEVENSON: But I'll ask you a little bit more
about Predictions in a bit.
But first, I think there's one thing you love to talk about
maybe even more than work.
[LAUGHTER]
What's that?
JOHN BURGE: Well, there's lots things
I like to talk about more than work, I think.
But I think one of the things that's
kept my interest my entire life is that I've always really
been an avid gamer, and it doesn't matter what kind
of games you're talking about.
It could be board games, computer games, sports.
I played volleyball.
I still play volleyball pretty regularly.
So there's just something about solving
the puzzles that exist inside of games that I
find very appealing.
So I've been a gamer my entire life.
DOUG STEVENSON: You grew up playing games, right?
JOHN BURGE: Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
When I was a little kid, and I'd be sick at school
and then I'd go to my grandparents' house,
my grandparents had one of those old Ataris
with the little plastic joysticks.
And I would just love playing on that that Atari.
And I would play games all the time when I was over there.
DOUG STEVENSON: Well, that's what I did too.
So I had Atari 2600.
That's this controller on my shirt.
JOHN BURGE: Yup, everyone that has
played on that recognizes that.
DOUG STEVENSON: Everyone knows I'm a retro gamer,
because I have the shirt.
That's how you know that I am into retro games.
JOHN BURGE: I can still feel that joystick in my hand.
DOUG STEVENSON: It's particular--
the way that it squeaks.
JOHN BURGE: Plastic.
[LAUGHTER]
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah, it's definitely good times.
Another hobby of yours that I know is painting.
So I'm curious how you got into that.
JOHN BURGE: So painting I got into really recently, actually.
Maybe about a year ago or so, we had an off-site.
So teams here at Google, we like to go off-sites together.
It's like team-building events, and they're are a lot of fun.
This was up to Lake Tahoe, and there
was a host of activities that you could do,
maybe 10 different activities.
And one of them was painting, and I'd never
really painted before.
But I said, yeah, I'll give this a try.
We went and painted.
And I painted some mountains and a little lake.
And I had kind of lucked into getting the shading
right on one of the mountains.
And it kind of popped.
It kind of looked like it was in 3D, like it was this real--
DOUG STEVENSON: So you think it was luck.
You say it was luck.
JOHN BURGE: It was luck-- well, it was luck.
Because the instructor that was telling us how to paint
everything wasn't telling us to do this.
I had seen the Bob Ross videos before
and other videos of people painting.
And I was a little bored, so I mixed--
I had blue.
And I mixed a little white into it.
And I made a little light area.
And I had black, and I mixed it into the blue
to make a dark area.
And it worked.
And I didn't know what I was doing.
But the fact that it looked kind of real to me
really blew me away.
And then months went by after that--
DOUG STEVENSON: We actually have that picture here
if you want to show us that.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah, so this was--
DOUG STEVENSON: This was your first one, right?
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
This was my first painting that I did.
You can see that it's not like it's going to be a Picasso
quality any time soon.
But it was this actual mountain here on this side
where I had the edge of the mountain kind of curve.
And it just looked-- it looked real.
It looked better than the other mountains that I had done.
And I mean my bridge--
I mean, my little thing here looks horrible, of course.
The perspective's all wrong.
And my clouds look like these floating cotton balls.
But this painting was enough to kind of say, hey wow,
this is something that I could do.
And if I practiced, I could actually get better at it.
DOUG STEVENSON: So you got hooked.
And you have-- we have others here
that you've done more recently.
JOHN BURGE: So this is an acrylic one that I did.
And I was just following along with Bob Ross.
I really--
DOUG STEVENSON: He's the guy who does all the happy stuff,
right?
JOHN BURGE: He's the one with happy little trees and stuff.
The guy is amazing.
But the technique that he came up with--
and I think his predecessors came up with--
really allows you, in a short amount of time, to create
a painting that's actually pretty reasonable.
This was me before I'd realized he used oil paints.
I thought he used acrylics, like all beginners tend to.
This was an acrylic painting that I did.
And you can see that it's gotten a little bit better
from my last one.
But I think we have--
yeah, why don't we just go to this one right here?
This right here is what I consider one of my best.
It's one of my most recent.
And you can see-- here, I'll hold up my original one
at the same time.
And you can see the difference in my abilities.
DOUG STEVENSON: Oh, yeah.
JOHN BURGE: So it's really pretty exciting
to go from something like this, in a relatively short amount
of time, to something like this.
I really like this one.
DOUG STEVENSON: You could hang this one up, like that's--
JOHN BURGE: I could, yeah.
Yeah.
And one interesting thing is--
I don't know how well it shows in the cameras--
but the grass and stuff here is kind of blue.
It was supposed to be silver, but I don't really
know how to mix colors very well.
And as I was painting the grass, it
was supposed to be kind of like covered in snow a little bit.
It came out blue.
And I ended up really liking it.
And it felt like I was painting an alien planet--
DOUG STEVENSON: I was gonna say like a fantasy
landscape or something.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah, exactly.
DOUG STEVENSON: And this is-- we have one more.
This is your most recent one.
JOHN BURGE: Actually, the one that I just
showed was my most recent.
This was my second most recent one.
And some people say that this one is their favorite
of the ones that I've done.
The setting is actually really quite nice in this one.
It's got a good balance to it.
You know, I'm a computer scientist and a software
engineer and have background in machine learning.
And a lot of things that you do as an engineer and a researcher
are following these rules to create something.
Painting has a really strong similarity to that.
DOUG STEVENSON: Oh, really?
JOHN BURGE: Some people, of course,
are going to have a natural gift for this.
But painting, this is just rules.
Oil paints, you just follow a set of rules
to have a desired outcome.
And I wish I would have appreciated this more when
I was younger.
I'd be much further along in my ability to paint.
But yeah, I'm super excited about painting.
I try to paint something every week if I can.
DOUG STEVENSON: And there's more connections
between art and computer science--
well, art and programming that goes into games.
You think that there's art in games.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
Well, I absolutely consider games to be an art form.
Back when I played games as a teenager and even younger--
I think I got my first computer when
I was around 10 that was just ridiculous--
Timex Sinclair thing with the memory keyboard.
But back then, it wasn't cool to play games.
All of the cool kids weren't playing games.
DOUG STEVENSON: No, they weren't.
JOHN BURGE: This wasn't something
that you did so you got a whole bunch of girlfriends at school.
DOUG STEVENSON: No, definitely not.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah, didn't make you popular.
It was right underneath maybe like speech and debate
team and chess club b or something like that, right?
DOUG STEVENSON: Right in the middle, yeah.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
But I loved games back then.
And it was clear that there's a lot of artistic work
that goes into these games, a lot of music.
And clearly, people draw--
there's a lot of art in the games themselves.
But I think the overall layout of the game
itself is an art form.
I think that's more apparent to people nowadays.
But it certainly wasn't 20 to 30 years ago.
DOUG STEVENSON: Your interest in art
does have something to do with your interest in engineering.
And you've done some things personally
on that crossover-- maybe not making games but making
other things.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
I have an 8-year-old daughter.
And when she was born-- so this was a while ago,
eight years ago--
I had some paternity leave.
So I found this really cool guy who'd
done this project of using genetic algorithms to try
to learn the placement of translucent polygons
to look like famous paintings like the "Mona Lisa"
or just pictures of Barack Obama or "Star Trek" characters.
That's what I liked to do it too.
But you can imagine, you put a purple triangle
right here and like a little red square on top of it
and maybe a circle over here.
And if they're are all kind of transparent,
you can tweak around the colors.
With about 40 or 50 polygons, you
can make a pretty good representation of some image,
like the "Mona Lisa."
So I spent weeks on my paternity leave
developing this genetic algorithm that
would tune these.
So it would kind of estimate the photo but not perfectly.
It would have this kind of artistic touch
to it, because it's limited in what you can do right.
But that was fascinating.
I'm deeply interested in all of these efforts that
exist about trying to use both machine learning and just
software engineering in general to generate art.
Google's done-- with TensorFlow--
has done an amazing amount of work in this area,
generating all these cool fractal images.
And they're doing it with music too.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah.
ML's doing pretty much everything, which
leads me to my next question.
With Firebase Predictions, I'm kind of
curious to know how it works.
I know there's ML back there.
But I'm wondering if you could tell me
a little bit about how it knows when a user is about to churn,
or leave the app.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
Yeah.
Good question.
So when a user is engaged with an app-- you know,
they're playing on their phone, pressing all these little
buttons--
not surprisingly, a whole bunch of little discreet events
get triggered.
And those events get sent ultimately to the Google--
to our Google servers.
And then what my team does is it takes
this kind of constant stream of events--
and we get just trillions of events,
just a tremendous number of them-- well,
we organize all of these events chronologically
for an individual user.
And then so now, for each user inside the app,
we kind of have this history of what events that
they triggered.
We then take all of these events--
we take a user, and that becomes a data point for us
to learn a machine learning model.
So we create these really large neural networks
with TensorFlow.
And these neural networks take all of the features, which
are really just elements in the time series,
and then associate those features with whether or not
this user in the next seven days is going to churn or spend
money or kind of trigger any event in the developer's app.
A developer can make a prediction
with our tool that will say, tell me
if this user is likely to finish a tutorial,
or tell me if this user is likely to engage
in a multiplayer app.
It's a really flexible tool--
DOUG STEVENSON: So it's kind of like experiments where you're
setting up your hypothesis and figuring out
if that's going to satisfy--
that's going to be satisfied by whatever
the user's doing in your app?
JOHN BURGE: Yeah, absolutely.
And it's amazing to me, in a sense,
that we can really just throw all
of this data at this enormous neural network
and the power of TensorFlow.
So TensorFlow is the underlying machinery here at Google
for learning these really large, complicated neural networks.
And it just blows me away that we can throw our data at it
And then, it can learn these relationships between like--
you know, there are some obvious relationships,
like if you haven't logged into the game in the last four
or five days, there's a really good chance that you're not
going to come back.
It's not guaranteed, and maybe in some games,
it's more guaranteed than others.
TensorFlow figures all of this kind of stuff out.
It's really an amazing platform.
You know the phrase, "standing on the shoulder of giants"?
That certainly happens here at Google.
I think a lot of people will Google up
leveraging just this immense power that we have here,
that if we weren't here at Google,
we really just couldn't do these same kinds of things.
DOUG STEVENSON: And we're offering this at no cost,
right?
JOHN BURGE: Yes.
DOUG STEVENSON: So that seems pretty amazing to me.
It seems like we have all this computing power,
and you get to basically use it for free.
And that seems kind of amazing to me.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah.
And from the outside world, I think
there's this kind of perception that it all just kind of works.
I'm in the deep nitty-gritty of it all.
So it's like-- we'll get little alerts
that trigger and little parts of our pipeline
don't finish on time, and so we're scrambling around
to make everything work.
DOUG STEVENSON: Sounds like engineering, yeah.
JOHN BURGE: It's engineering.
And yeah, this is--
so I've been here at Google for a while.
I've been here for about 10 years now.
This product, the Firebase Predictions product,
is certainly the most visible thing
that I've done to the outside world.
I was on the ads team for a long time.
And so I would tweak around algorithms and how
ads are placed, and no one would ever notice the difference.
We'd have some of our metrics on the back
and go up by like 2% or a half a percent, which,
of course, means a lot of money, depending on the improvement
that was made.
But this is the first time I've really
shipped this product that's just highly visible unto itself.
And that's both really exciting.
It's also pretty scary.
DOUG STEVENSON: Well, I'm so happy that Predictions
found a home with Firebase.
JOHN BURGE: Me too.
DOUG STEVENSON: Yeah, you've been
working on this for so long.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah, thank you.
DOUG STEVENSON: But I'm sure everyone
who's watching at home also will see some benefits as well.
JOHN BURGE: Yup, hope so.
DOUG STEVENSON: So go out there, use Firebase Predictions.
Let us know if it's working for you.
We definitely thrive on community feedback.
So be sure to let us know how it's going,
and hope you get a lot out of it.
JOHN BURGE: Yeah, thank you so much.
DOUG STEVENSON: John, thanks for being on the show.
JOHN BURGE: You're very welcome.
DOUG STEVENSON: And thank you for tuning in
to "Meet Firebase."
So if you want to see more great video content like this,
be sure to tune in right here to the Firebase channel
on YouTube.
There will be more new episodes of "Meet Firebase" coming up,
so be sure to stay tuned.
And I'll see you next time.
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