Latest from MIT Tech Review – Exquisite bullshitters

For weeks, the whiteboard in the lab was crowded with scribbles, diagrams, and chemical formulas. A research team across the Olivetti Group and the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) was working intensely on a key problem: How can we reduce the amount of cement in concrete to save on costs and emissions?  The question was…

Sophisticated robots don’t have to cost a fortune. Even relatively cheap robots can do complex manipulation tasks and learn new skills quickly using AI, a new study has shown. With just $32,000, researchers from Stanford University managed to build a wheeled robot that can cook a three-course Cantonese meal with human supervision. Then they used…

Audio is being added to AI everywhere: both in multimodal models that can understand and generate audio and in applications that use audio for input. Now that we can work with spoken language, what does that mean for the applications that we can develop? How do we think about audio interfaces—how will people use them,…

Posted by Artem Dementyev, Hardware Engineer, Google Research Most wearable smart devices and mobile phones have the means to communicate with the user through tactile feedback, enabling applications from simple notifications to sensory substitution for accessibility. Typically, they accomplish this using vibrotactile actuators, which are small electric vibration motors. However, designing a haptic system that…

One reason deep learning exploded over the last decade was the availability of programming languages that could automate the math — college-level calculus — that is needed to train each new model. Neural networks are trained by tuning their parameters to try to maximize a score that can be rapidly calculated for training data. The…

Posted by Yutian Chen, Staff Research Scientist, DeepMind, and Xingyou (Richard) Song, Research Scientist, Google Research, Brain Team One of the most important aspects in machine learning is hyperparameter optimization, as finding the right hyperparameters for a machine learning task can make or break a model’s performance. Internally, we regularly use Google Vizier as the…