Latest from MIT Tech Review – The industrial metaverse: A game-changer for operational technology

Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is…

Posted by Donald Martin, Jr., Technical Program Manager, Head of Societal Context Understanding Tools and Solutions (SCOUTS), Google Research AI-related products and technologies are constructed and deployed in a societal context: that is, a dynamic and complex collection of social, cultural, historical, political and economic circumstances. Because societal contexts by nature are dynamic, complex, non-linear,…

In a packed room in MIT’s Stata Center, hundreds of digital robots collide across a giant screen projected at the front of the room. A crowd of students in the audience gasps and cheers as the battle’s outcome hangs in the balance. In an upper corner of the screen, the people who have programmed the…

Margaret Mitchell had been working at Google for two years before she realized she needed a break. “I started having regular breakdowns,” says Mitchell, who founded and co-led the company’s Ethical AI team. “That was not something that I had ever experienced before.” Only after she spoke with a therapist did she understand the problem:…

Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia. But do the words radiologists use to express their confidence level accurately reflect how often a particular pathology occurs in patients? A new study shows that…

Posted by Zi Wang and Kevin Swersky, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team Bayesian optimization (BayesOpt) is a powerful tool widely used for global optimization tasks, such as hyperparameter tuning, protein engineering, synthetic chemistry, robot learning, and even baking cookies. BayesOpt is a great strategy for these problems because they all involve optimizing black-box functions…