Posted by Gabriel Barcik and Duc-Hieu Tran, Research Engineers, Google Research In today’s digital age, smartphones and desktop web browsers serve as the primary tools for accessing news and information. However, the proliferation of website clutter — encompassing complex layouts, navigation elements, and extraneous links — significantly impairs both the reading experience and article navigation….
Self-driving car startup Wayve can now interrogate its vehicles, asking them questions about their driving decisions—and getting answers back. The idea is to use the same tech behind ChatGPT to help train driverless cars. The company combined its existing self-driving software with a large language model, creating a hybrid model it calls LINGO-1. LINGO-1 synchs…
AI is getting better at passing tests designed to measure human creativity. In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports today, AI chatbots achieved higher average scores than humans in the Alternate Uses Task, a test commonly used to assess this ability. This study will add fuel to an ongoing debate among AI researchers about…
It can be a hassle to get to the doctor’s office. And the task can be especially challenging for parents of children with motor disorders such as cerebral palsy, as a clinician must evaluate the child in person on a regular basis, often for an hour at a time. Making it to these frequent evaluations…
The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Alan Turing Institute in a new opinion piece published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The rising…
An accomplished MIT student researcher in health care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his name, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he chose his path. “I kind of fell into it,” the mechanical engineering PhD candidate says, adding that growing up in suburban California, he was social, athletic — and good…
Powerful machine-learning algorithms known as vision and language models, which learn to match text with images, have shown remarkable results when asked to generate captions or summarize videos. While these models excel at identifying objects, they often struggle to understand concepts, like object attributes or the arrangement of items in a scene. For instance, a…
Posted by Matt Barnes, Software Engineer, Google Research Routing in Google Maps remains one of our most helpful and frequently used features. Determining the best route from A to B requires making complex trade-offs between factors including the estimated time of arrival (ETA), tolls, directness, surface conditions (e.g., paved, unpaved roads), and user preferences, which…
A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet that said “Writing code isn’t the problem. Controlling complexity is.” I wish I could remember who said that; I will be quoting it a lot in the future. That statement nicely summarizes what makes software development difficult. It’s not just memorizing the syntactic details of some programming…
Sharon Li is MIT Technology Review’s 2023 Innovator of the Year. Meet the rest of this year’s Innovators Under 35. As we launch AI systems from the lab into the real world, we need to be prepared for these systems to break in surprising and catastrophic ways. It’s already happening. Last year, for example, a…