Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) student Sarah Cen remembers the lecture that sent her down the track to an upstream question. At a talk on ethical artificial intelligence, the speaker brought up a variation on the famous trolley problem, which outlines a philosophical choice between two undesirable outcomes. The speaker’s scenario: Say a…
Posted by Aurelien Boffy, Senior Staff Software Engineer, and Roberto Pieraccini, Engineering Director, Google Assistant When people converse with one another, context and references play a critical role in driving their conversation more efficiently. For instance, if one asks the question “Who wrote Romeo and Juliet?” and, after receiving an answer, asks “Where was he…
Even as rapid improvements in artificial intelligence have led to speculation over significant changes in the health care landscape, the adoption of AI in health care has been minimal. A 2020 survey by Brookings, for example, found that less than 1 percent of job postings in health care required AI-related skills. The Abdul Latif Jameel…
No one likes sitting at a red light. But signalized intersections aren’t just a minor nuisance for drivers; vehicles consume fuel and emit greenhouse gases while waiting for the light to change. What if motorists could time their trips so they arrive at the intersection when the light is green? While that might be just…
When you think of pyramids does your mind wander to the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt or the Mayan Temples of Guatemala? Great civilizations built each of these pyramids and inscribed their stories onto the walls of them, offering glimpses into their daily life. The Pyramids of Meroë in Sudan, while lesser known, are no…
Technology shines when it helps us get things done in our daily lives, and that’s exactly why a group of around 100 very eager seniors gathered in Odense, Denmark. All older than 65, many up to 85, they decided to stay on top of the latest technological tricks and tools. On this March day, the…
Posted by Sara Ahmadian and Matthew Fahrbach, Research Scientists, Google Research, Large-Scale Optimization Team Economics, combinatorics, physics, and signal processing conspire to make it difficult to design, build, and operate high-quality, cost-effective wireless networks. The radio transceivers that communicate with our mobile phones, the equipment that supports them (such as power and wired networking), and…
Algorithms recommend products while we shop online or suggest songs we might like as we listen to music on streaming apps. These algorithms work by using personal information like our past purchases and browsing history to generate tailored recommendations. The sensitive nature of such data makes preserving privacy extremely important, but existing methods for solving…
People have always gathered information in a variety of ways — from talking to others, to observing the world around them, to, of course, searching online. Though typing words into a search box has become second nature for many of us, it’s far from the most natural way to express what we need. For example,…
Posted by Isaac Caswell and Ankur Bapna, Research Scientists, Google Translate Machine translation (MT) technology has made significant advances in recent years, as deep learning has been integrated with natural language processing (NLP). Performance on research benchmarks like WMT have soared, and translation services have improved in quality and expanded to include new languages. Nevertheless,…