The holidays are over, and it’s time to digest. Although I don’t subscribe to the idea that history or technology moves in jerky one-year increments, it’s still valuable to take stock, look at what’s happened, and decide what was important and what isn’t. We started the year with many people talking about an “AI winter.”…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. How was your break? I spent mine back home in snowy Finland, extremely offline. Bliss! I hope you’re well-rested, because this year is going to be even wilder than 2022 for AI. Last…
When Greg unboxed a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in December 2019, he thought he knew what he was getting into. He would allow the preproduction test version of iRobot’s Roomba J series device to roam around his house, let it collect all sorts of data to help improve its artificial intelligence, and provide feedback…
OpenAI introduced a world of weird and wonderful mash-ups when its text-to-image model DALL-E was released in 2021. Type in a short description of pretty much anything, and the program spat out a picture of what you asked for in seconds. DALL-E 2, unveiled in April 2022, was a massive leap forward. Google also launched…
When deep learning models are deployed in the real world, perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images, they are often able to outperform humans. But what exactly are these deep learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in clinical images, for example, actually…
Have you ever been advised to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?” Considering another person’s perspective can be a challenging endeavor — but recognizing our errors and biases is key to building understanding across communities. By challenging our preconceptions, we confront prejudice, such as racism and xenophobia, and potentially develop a more inclusive perspective…
The way electrons interact with photons of light is a key part of many modern technologies, from lasers to solar panels to LEDs. But the interaction is inherently a weak one because of a major mismatch in scale: A wavelength of visible light is about 1,000 times larger than an electron, so the way the…
Over 2,000 years ago, Baiae was the most magnificent resort town on the Italian peninsula. Wealthy statesmen including Mark Antony, Cicero, and Caesar were drawn to its natural springs, building luxurious villas with heated spas and mosaic-tiled thermal pools. But over the centuries, volcanic activity submerged this playground for the Roman nobility—leaving half of it…
Posted by Jinsung Yoon and Sercan O. Arik, Research Scientists, Google Research, Cloud AI Team Analysis of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has a tremendous potential for enhancing patient care, quantitatively measuring performance of clinical practices, and facilitating clinical research. Statistical estimation and machine learning (ML) models trained on EHR data can be used to predict…
Posted by Pritish Kamath and Pasin Manurangsi, Research Scientists, Google Research Differential privacy (DP) is an approach that enables data analytics and machine learning (ML) with a mathematical guarantee on the privacy of user data. DP quantifies the “privacy cost” of an algorithm, i.e., the level of guarantee that the algorithm’s output distribution for a…