As a car travels along a narrow city street, reflections off the glossy paint or side mirrors of parked vehicles can help the driver glimpse things that would otherwise be hidden from view, like a child playing on the sidewalk behind the parked cars. Drawing on this idea, researchers from MIT and Rice University have…
It’s hard to ignore the discussion around the Open Letter arguing for a pause in the development of advanced AI systems. Are they dangerous? Will they destroy humanity? Will they condemn all but a few of us to boring, impoverished lives? If these are indeed the dangers we face, pausing AI development for six months…
Imagine sitting on a park bench, watching someone stroll by. While the scene may constantly change as the person walks, the human brain can transform that dynamic visual information into a more stable representation over time. This ability, known as perceptual straightening, helps us predict the walking person’s trajectory. Unlike humans, computer vision models don’t…
After more than two decades as part of Amazon’s core leadership team, Jeff Wilke helped transform the way people buy almost everything. His next act is no less ambitious: proving that America can make just about anything. In March 2021, Wilke stepped down from his post as CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer business — encompassing…
Posted by AJ Piergiovanni and Anelia Angelova, Research Scientists, Google Research Vision-language foundational models are built on the premise of a single pre-training followed by subsequent adaptation to multiple downstream tasks. Two main and disjoint training scenarios are popular: a CLIP-style contrastive learning and next-token prediction. Contrastive learning trains the model to predict if image-text…
Researchers often use simulations when designing new algorithms, since testing ideas in the real world can be both costly and risky. But since it’s impossible to capture every detail of a complex system in a simulation, they typically collect a small amount of real data that they replay while simulating the components they want to…
When medical companies manufacture the pills and tablets that treat any number of illnesses, aches, and pains, they need to isolate the active pharmaceutical ingredient from a suspension and dry it. The process requires a human operator to monitor an industrial dryer, agitate the material, and watch for the compound to take on the right…
Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton announced on Monday that he was stepping down from his role as a Google AI researcher after a decade with the company. He says he wants to speak freely as he grows increasingly worried about the potential harms of artificial intelligence. Prior to the announcement, Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology…
Posted by Joanne Truong, Student Researcher, and Wenhao Yu, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google Teaching mobile robots to navigate in complex outdoor environments is critical to real-world applications, such as delivery or search and rescue. However, this is also a challenging problem as the robot needs to perceive its surroundings, and then explore to identify…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week’s big news is that Geoffrey Hinton, a VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, and a pioneer of deep learning who developed some of the most important techniques at the heart…