By the end of 2020, DeepMind, the UK-based artificial-intelligence lab, had already produced many impressive achievements in AI. Still, when the group’s program for predicting protein folding was released in November of that year, biologists were shocked by how well it worked. Nearly everything your body does, it does with proteins. Understanding what individual proteins do…
Artificial intelligence systems may be able to complete tasks quickly, but that doesn’t mean they always do so fairly. If the datasets used to train machine-learning models contain biased data, it is likely the system could exhibit that same bias when it makes decisions in practice. For instance, if a dataset contains mostly images of…
A heart attack patient, recently discharged from the hospital, is using a smartwatch to help monitor his electrocardiogram signals. The smartwatch may seem secure, but the neural network processing that health information is using private data that could still be stolen by a malicious agent through a side-channel attack. A side-channel attack seeks to gather…
Posted by Ali Kemal Sinop and Kostas Kollias, Research Scientists, Google Research In the world of networks, there are models that can explain observations across a diverse collection of applications. These include simple tasks such as computing the shortest path, which has obvious applications to routing networks but also applies in biology, e.g., where the…
Building driverless cars is a slow and expensive business. After years of effort and billions of dollars of investment, the technology is still stuck in the pilot phase. Raquel Urtasun thinks she can do better. Last year, frustrated by the pace of the industry, Urtasun left Uber, where she led the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving research…
Posted by Daniel Suo, Software Engineer and Elad Hazan, Research Scientist, Google Research, on behalf of the Google AI Princeton Team Mechanical ventilators provide critical support for patients who have difficulty breathing or are unable to breathe on their own. They see frequent use in scenarios ranging from routine anesthesia, to neonatal intensive care and…
Posted by Joshua Greaves, Software Engineer and Pablo Samuel Castro, Staff Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Benchmark challenges have been a driving force in the advancement of machine learning (ML). In particular, difficult benchmark environments for reinforcement learning (RL) have been crucial for the rapid progress of the field by challenging researchers to overcome…
DeepMind’s streak of applying its world-class AI to hard science problems continues. In collaboration with the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL—a university in Lausanne, Switzerland—the UK-based AI firm has now trained a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to control the superheated soup of matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor. The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature,…
Posted by David Patterson, Distinguished Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Machine learning (ML) has become prominent in information technology, which has led some to raise concerns about the associated rise in the costs of computation, primarily the carbon footprint, i.e., total greenhouse gas emissions. While these assertions rightfully elevated the discussion around carbon emissions in…
I haven’t written much about AI recently. But a recent discussion of Google’s new Large Language Models (LLMs), and its claim that one of these models (named Gopher) has demonstrated reading comprehension approaching human performance, has spurred some thoughts about comprehension, ambiguity, intelligence, and will. (It’s well worth reading Do Large Models Understand Us, a…