Posted by Jacky Liang, Research Intern, and Andy Zeng, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google <!—-><!—-> A common approach used to control robots is to program them with code to detect objects, sequencing commands to move actuators, and feedback loops to specify how the robot should perform a task. While these programs can be expressive, re-programming…
Posted by Jason Wei and Yi Tay, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team The field of natural language processing (NLP) has been revolutionized by language models trained on large amounts of text data. Scaling up the size of language models often leads to improved performance and sample efficiency on a range of downstream NLP tasks….
Posted by Peter H. Li, Research Scientist, and Sven Dorkenwald, Student Researcher, Connectomics at Google Mapping the wiring and firing activity of the human brain is fundamental to deciphering how we think — how we sense the world, learn, decide, remember, and create — as well as what issues can arise in brain disease or…
It’s a dilemma as old as time. Friday night has rolled around, and you’re trying to pick a restaurant for dinner. Should you visit your most beloved watering hole or try a new establishment, in the hopes of discovering something superior? Potentially, but that curiosity comes with a risk: If you explore the new option,…
To receive The Algorithm newsletter in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to the Algorithm! This year we’ve seen a dizzying number of breakthroughs in generative AI, from AIs that can produce videos from just a few words to models that can generate audio based on snippets of a song. Last week, Google held an AI event in its swanky,…
Like millions of others during the global Covid-19 lockdowns, Emmanuel Kasigazi, an entrepreneur from Uganda, turned to YouTube to pass the time. But he wasn’t following an influencer or watching music videos. A lifelong learner, Kasigazi was scouring the video-sharing platform for educational resources. Since 2013, when he got his first smartphone, Kasigazi has been…
Among the Pulitzer Prizes awarded in 2021 was a citation for a teenager who changed history with her cell phone. The Pulitzer committee acknowledged Darnella Frazier “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for…
Teaching a machine to recognize human actions has many potential applications, such as automatically detecting workers who fall at a construction site or enabling a smart home robot to interpret a user’s gestures. To do this, researchers train machine-learning models using vast datasets of video clips that show humans performing actions. However, not only is…
Neural networks, a type of computing system loosely modeled on the organization of the human brain, form the basis of many artificial intelligence systems for applications such speech recognition, computer vision, and medical image analysis. In the field of neuroscience, researchers often use neural networks to try to model the same kind of tasks that…
To receive The Algorithm newsletter in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to the Algorithm! It’s never been more important for companies to ensure that their AI systems function safely, especially as new laws to hold them accountable kick in. The responsible AI teams they set up to do that are supposed to be a priority,…