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…
The MIT AI Hardware Program is a new academia and industry collaboration aimed at defining and developing translational technologies in hardware and software for the AI and quantum age. A collaboration between the MIT School of Engineering and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, involving the Microsystems Technologies Laboratories and programs and units in the college,…
At last year’s Google I/O, its annual showcase of new widgets and work-in-progress tech, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed his company’s “latest breakthrough in natural-language understanding”: a chatbot called LaMDA, designed to converse on any topic. He then gave a demo in which LaMDA answered questions about Pluto in natural language. The exchange showed off a…
Surveillance cameras have an identity problem, fueled by an inherent tension between utility and privacy. As these powerful little devices have cropped up seemingly everywhere, the use of machine learning tools has automated video content analysis at a massive scale — but with increasing mass surveillance, there are currently no legally enforceable rules to limit…
Posted by Boris Babenko, Software Engineer and Naama Hammel, Clinical Research Scientist, Google Health Three years ago we wrote about our work on predicting a number of cardiovascular risk factors from fundus photos (i.e., photos of the back of the eye)1 using deep learning. That such risk factors could be extracted from fundus photos was…
Posted by Mohammad Saleh, Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team and Anjuli Kannan, Software Engineer, Google Docs For many of us, it can be challenging to keep up with the volume of documents that arrive in our inboxes every day: reports, reviews, briefs, policies and the list goes on. When a new document is received,…
Figure 1: Airmass measurements over Ukraine from February 18, 2022 – March 01, 2022 from the SEVIRI instrument. Data accessed via the EUMETSAT Viewer. Satellite imagery is a critical source of information during the current invasion of Ukraine. Military strategists, journalists, and researchers use this imagery to make decisions, unveil violations of international agreements, and…
It’s been roughly 23 years since one of the first robotic animals trotted on the scene, defying classical notions of our cuddly four-legged friends. Since then, a barrage of the walking, dancing, and door-opening machines have commanded their presence, a sleek mixture of batteries, sensors, metal, and motors. Missing from the list of cardio activities…