When you picture a hospital radiologist, you might think of a specialist who sits in a dark room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that with your dentist, who in addition to interpreting X-rays must also perform surgery, manage staff, communicate with patients, and run their business. When dentists analyze X-rays,…
FIGS (Fast Interpretable Greedy-tree Sums): A method for building interpretable models by simultaneously growing an ensemble of decision trees in competition with one another. Recent machine-learning advances have led to increasingly complex predictive models, often at the cost of interpretability. We often need interpretability, particularly in high-stakes applications such as in clinical decision-making; interpretable models…
The inner child in many of us feels an overwhelming sense of joy when stumbling across a pile of the fluorescent, rubbery mixture of water, salt, and flour that put goo on the map: play dough. (Even if this happens rarely in adulthood.) While manipulating play dough is fun and easy for 2-year-olds, the shapeless…
Posted by Jarrod McClean, Staff Research Scientist, Google Quantum AI, and Hsin-Yuan Huang, Graduate Student, Caltech In efforts to learn about the quantum world, scientists face a big obstacle: their classical experience of the world. Whenever a quantum system is measured, the act of this measurement destroys the “quantumness” of the state. For example, if…
Posted by Sara Beery, Student Researcher, and Jonathan Huang, Research Scientist, Google Research, Perception Team Over four billion people live in cities around the globe, and while most people interact daily with others — at the grocery store, on public transit, at work — they may take for granted their frequent interactions with the diverse…
Hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs), since they’ve proven fruitful test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios. Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, since testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn’t…
Posted by Shaina Mehta and Kristen Borg, Program Managers This week marks the beginning of the premier annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (CVPR 2022), held both in-person in New Orleans, LA and virtually. As a leader in computer vision research and a Platinum Sponsor, Google will have a strong presence across CVPR 2022 with over…
Upon looking at photographs and drawing on their past experiences, humans can often perceive depth in pictures that are, themselves, perfectly flat. However, getting computers to do the same thing has proved quite challenging. The problem is difficult for several reasons, one being that information is inevitably lost when a scene that takes place in…
Upon looking at photographs and drawing on their past experiences, humans can often perceive depth in pictures that are, themselves, perfectly flat. However, getting computers to do the same thing has proved quite challenging. The problem is difficult for several reasons, one being that information is inevitably lost when a scene that takes place in…
Many of us easily recognize emotions expressed in others’ faces. A smile may mean happiness, while a frown may indicate anger. Autistic people often have a more difficult time with this task. It’s unclear why. But new research, published June 15 in The Journal of Neuroscience, sheds light on the inner workings of the brain…