Welcome to The Algorithm 2.0! I’m Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review’s senior reporter for AI. I’m so happy you’re here. Every week I will demystify the latest AI breakthroughs and cut through the hype. This week, I want to talk to you about some of the unforeseen consequences that might come from one of the hottest…
Nearly a decade after they emerged from science labs, AI and machine learning are firmly embedded in enterprise technology environments and are starting to generate value for many businesses. It is increasingly difficult to find organizations that have not at least explored AI use in their business in some way. In a survey, conducted by…
To regulate the distribution shift experience by learning-based controllers, we seek a mechanism for constraining the agent to regions of high data density throughout its trajectory (left). Here, we present an approach which achieves this goal by combining features of density models (middle) and Lyapunov functions (right). In order to make use of machine learning…
The world is facing a maternal health crisis. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 810 women die each day due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Two-thirds of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality is infected Cesarean section wounds. An interdisciplinary team…
Posted by Cat Armato, Program Manager, Google This week, the 23rd Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2022) is being held in Incheon, South Korea, representing one of the world’s most extensive conferences on research and technology of spoken language understanding and processing. Over 2,000 experts in speech-related research fields gather to…
Posted by Santiago Balseiro, Staff Research Scientist, Google Research, and Associate Professor at Columbia University, and Vahab Mirrokni, Distinguished Scientist, Google Research The emergence of digital technologies has transformed decision making across commercial sectors such as airlines, online retailing, and internet advertising. Today, real-time decisions need to be repeatedly made in highly uncertain and rapidly…
Posted by Xi Chen and Xiao Wang, Software Engineers, Google Research Advanced language models (e.g., GPT, GLaM, PaLM and T5) have demonstrated diverse capabilities and achieved impressive results across tasks and languages by scaling up their number of parameters. Vision-language (VL) models can benefit from similar scaling to address many tasks, such as image captioning,…
There’s a new text-to-image AI in town. With ERNIE-ViLG, a new AI developed by the Chinese tech company Baidu, you can generate images that capture the cultural specificity of China. It also makes better anime art than DALL-E 2 or other Western image-making AIs. But there are many things—like Tiananmen Square, the country’s second-largest city…
Posted by Daniel Rebain, Student Researcher, and Mark Matthews, Senior Software Engineer, Google Research, Perception Team An important aspect of human vision is our ability to comprehend 3D shape from the 2D images we observe. Achieving this kind of understanding with computer vision systems has been a fundamental challenge in the field. Many successful approaches…
The health of the planet is one of the most important challenges facing humankind today. From climate change to unsafe levels of air and water pollution to coastal and agricultural land erosion, a number of serious challenges threaten human and ecosystem health. Ensuring the health and safety of our planet necessitates approaches that connect scientific,…