“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Alex Hanna wrote on February 2, her last day on Google’s Ethical AI team. She felt that the company, and the tech industry as a whole, did little to promote diversity or mitigate the harms its products had caused to marginalized people. “In a word, tech has a whiteness…
Posted by Avi Singh, Research Scientist, and Laura Graesser, Research Engineer, Robotics at Google Robot learning has been applied to a wide range of challenging real world tasks, including dexterous manipulation, legged locomotion, and grasping. It is less common to see robot learning applied to dynamic, high-acceleration tasks requiring tight-loop human-robot interactions, such as table…
A recently passed law in New York City requires audits for bias in AI-based hiring systems. And for good reason. AI systems fail frequently, and bias is often to blame. A recent sampling of headlines features sociological bias in generated images, a chatbot, and a virtual rapper. These examples of denigration and stereotyping are troubling…
In the 1990s, if you suggested that the corner three-pointer was the best shot in basketball, you might have been laughed out of the gym. The game was still dominated largely by a fleet of seven-foot centers, most of whom couldn’t shoot from more than a few feet out from the basket. Even the game’s…
To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to The Algorithm! Let me introduce you to Philip Nitschke, also known as “Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide.” Nitschke has a curious goal: He wants to “demedicalize” death and make assisted suicide as unassisted as possible through technology. As…
Posted by Yi Tay and Mostafa Dehghani, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team Building models that understand and generate natural language well is one the grand goals of machine learning (ML) research and has a direct impact on building smart systems for everyday applications. Improving the quality of language models is a key target for…
Posted by Ashish Thapliyal, Software Engineer, and Jordi Pont-Tuset, Research Scientist, Google Research Image captioning is the machine learning task of automatically generating a fluent natural language description for a given image. This task is important for improving accessibility for visually impaired users and is a core task in multimodal research encompassing both vision and…
In a workshop in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke—“Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide” to some—is overseeing the last few rounds of testing on his new Sarco machine before shipping it to Switzerland, where he says its first user is waiting. This is the third prototype that Nitschke’s nonprofit, Exit International, has…
Many organizations have adopted machine learning (ML) in a piecemeal fashion, building or buying ad hoc models, algorithms, tools, or services to accomplish specific goals. This approach was necessary as companies learned about the capabilities of ML and as the technology matured, but it also has created a hodge-podge of siloed, manual, and nonstandardized processes…
Gartner has anointed “Hyperautomation” one of the top 10 trends for 2022. Should it be? Is it a real trend, or just a collection of buzzwords? As a trend, it’s not performing well on Google; it shows little long-term growth, if any, and gets nowhere near as many searches as terms like “Observability” and “Generative…