Posted by Gil Shamir and Dong Lin, Research Software Engineers, Google Research Ever queried a recommender system and found that the same search only a few moments later or on a different device yields very different results? This is not uncommon and can be frustrating if a person is looking for something specific. As a…
Thomas Tull, leading visionary entrepreneur and investor, has been appointed a School of Engineering visiting innovation scholar, effective April 1. Throughout his career, Tull has leveraged the power of technology, artificial intelligence, and data science to disrupt and revolutionize disparate industries. Today, as the founder, chair, and CEO of Tulco LLC, a privately held holding…
Posted by Sharan Narang and Aakanksha Chowdhery, Software Engineers, Google Research In recent years, large neural networks trained for language understanding and generation have achieved impressive results across a wide range of tasks. GPT-3 first showed that large language models (LLMs) can be used for few-shot learning and can achieve impressive results without large-scale task-specific…
What does it mean to be human in an age where artificial intelligence agents make decisions that shape human actions? That’s a deep question with no easy answers, and it’s been on the mind of Dan Huttenlocher SM ’84, PhD ’88, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, for the past few years. “Advances…
Chemical engineers and materials scientists are constantly looking for the next revolutionary material, chemical, and drug. The rise of machine-learning approaches is expediting the discovery process, which could otherwise take years. “Ideally, the goal is to train a machine-learning model on a few existing chemical samples and then allow it to produce as many manufacturable…
Posted by Ye Jia and Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Software Engineers, Google Research Automatic translation of speech from one language to speech in another language, called speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), is important for breaking down the communication barriers between people speaking different languages. Conventionally, automatic S2ST systems are built with a cascade of automatic speech recognition (ASR),…
MIT President L. Rafael Reif recently joined Raúl Rodríguez, associate vice president of internationalization at Tecnológico de Monterrey, for a wide-ranging fireside chat about the power of education and its impact in addressing global issues, even more so in a post pandemic world. “When I was younger, my parents used to always tell me and my…
Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Chatbots could one day replace search engines. Here’s why that’s a terrible idea. Large AI models can simulate natural language with remarkable realism. Trained on hundreds of books and much of the internet,…
Growing up in Spain’s Catalonia region, Alberto Rodriguez loved taking things apart and putting them back together. But it wasn’t until he joined a robotics lab his last year in college that he realized robotics, and not mathematics or physics, would be his life’s calling. “I fell in love with the idea that you could…