The way electrons interact with photons of light is a key part of many modern technologies, from lasers to solar panels to LEDs. But the interaction is inherently a weak one because of a major mismatch in scale: A wavelength of visible light is about 1,000 times larger than an electron, so the way the…
Over 2,000 years ago, Baiae was the most magnificent resort town on the Italian peninsula. Wealthy statesmen including Mark Antony, Cicero, and Caesar were drawn to its natural springs, building luxurious villas with heated spas and mosaic-tiled thermal pools. But over the centuries, volcanic activity submerged this playground for the Roman nobility—leaving half of it…
Posted Keerthana Gopalakrishnan and Kanishka Rao, Google Research, Robotics at Google Major recent advances in multiple subfields of machine learning (ML) research, such as computer vision and natural language processing, have been enabled by a shared common approach that leverages large, diverse datasets and expressive models that can absorb all of the data effectively. Although…
Posted by Jinsung Yoon and Sercan O. Arik, Research Scientists, Google Research, Cloud AI Team Analysis of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has a tremendous potential for enhancing patient care, quantitatively measuring performance of clinical practices, and facilitating clinical research. Statistical estimation and machine learning (ML) models trained on EHR data can be used to predict…
Posted by Pritish Kamath and Pasin Manurangsi, Research Scientists, Google Research Differential privacy (DP) is an approach that enables data analytics and machine learning (ML) with a mathematical guarantee on the privacy of user data. DP quantifies the “privacy cost” of an algorithm, i.e., the level of guarantee that the algorithm’s output distribution for a…
Posted by Tal Schuster, Research Scientist, Google Research Language models (LMs) are the driving force behind many recent breakthroughs in natural language processing. Models like T5, LaMDA, GPT-3, and PaLM have demonstrated impressive performance on various language tasks. While multiple factors can contribute to improving the performance of LMs, some recent studies suggest that scaling…
Posted by Quan Wang, Senior Staff Software Engineer, and Fan Zhang, Staff Software Engineer, Google In 2019 we launched Recorder, an audio recording app for Pixel phones that helps users create, manage, and edit audio recordings. It leverages recent developments in on-device machine learning to transcribe speech, recognize audio events, suggest tags for titles, and…
Cognitive scientists have long sought to understand what makes some sentences more difficult to comprehend than others. Any account of language comprehension, researchers believe, would benefit from understanding difficulties in comprehension. In recent years researchers successfully developed two models explaining two significant types of difficulty in understanding and producing sentences. While these models successfully predict…
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 has been a wild year for AI. If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably bumped into images generated by AI systems like DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, or jokes, essays,…
In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a…