Brian Nord first fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin. His high school physics program wasn’t exceptional, and he sometimes struggled to keep up with class material, but those difficulties did nothing to dampen his interest in the subject. In addition to the main curriculum, students were encouraged…
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 year millions of people have tried—and been wowed by— artificial-intelligence systems. That’s in no small part thanks to OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. When it launched last November, the chatbot became an instant…
Posted by Sara Ahadi, Research Fellow, Applied Science, and Andrew Carroll, Product Lead, Genomics Aging is a process that is characterized by physiological and molecular changes that increase an individual’s risk of developing diseases and eventually dying. Being able to measure and estimate the biological signatures of aging can help researchers identify preventive measures to…
It’s an evening in 1531, in the city of Venice. In a printer’s workshop, an apprentice labors over the layout of a page that’s destined for an astronomy textbook—a dense line of type and a woodblock illustration of a cherubic head observing shapes moving through the cosmos, representing a lunar eclipse. Like all aspects of…
Posted by Thomas Lew, Research Intern, and Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Research Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Over the past several years, the capabilities of robotic systems have improved dramatically. As the technology continues to improve and robotic agents are more routinely deployed in real-world environments, their capacity to assist in day-to-day activities will take on…
Posted by Oren Gilon, Software Engineer, and Grey Nearing, Research Scientist, Google Research Floods are the most common type of natural disaster, affecting more than 250 million people globally each year. As part of Google’s Crisis Response and our efforts to address the climate crisis, we are using machine learning (ML) models for Flood Forecasting…
Posted by Greg Blascovich and Eric Gomez, User Researchers, Google As companies settle into a new normal of hybrid and distributed work, remote communication technology remains critical for connecting and collaborating with colleagues. While this technology has improved, the core user experience often falls short: conversation can feel stilted, attention can be difficult to maintain,…
Posted by Zi Wang and Kevin Swersky, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team Bayesian optimization (BayesOpt) is a powerful tool widely used for global optimization tasks, such as hyperparameter tuning, protein engineering, synthetic chemistry, robot learning, and even baking cookies. BayesOpt is a great strategy for these problems because they all involve optimizing black-box functions…
The response from schools and universities was swift and decisive. Just days after OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in late November 2022, the chatbot was widely denounced as a free essay-writing, test-taking tool that made it laughably easy to cheat on assignments. Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s…
Figure 1: “Interactive Fleet Learning” (IFL) refers to robot fleets in industry and academia that fall back on human teleoperators when necessary and continually learn from them over time. In the last few years we have seen an exciting development in robotics and artificial intelligence: large fleets of robots have left the lab and entered…