Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors. They’re also used for night-vision systems and for research, such as in particle detectors or electron microscopes. Researchers at…
Posted by AJ Piergiovanni and Anelia Angelova, Research Scientists, Google Research While not immediately obvious, all of us experience the world in four dimensions (4D). For example, when walking or driving down the street we observe a stream of visual inputs, snapshots of the 3D world, which, when taken together in time, creates a 4D…
Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL), where RL agents pre-train with self-supervised rewards, is an emerging paradigm for developing RL agents that are capable of generalization. Recently, we released the Unsupervised RL Benchmark (URLB) which we covered in a previous post. URLB benchmarked many unsupervised RL algorithms across three categories — competence-based, knowledge-based, and data-based algorithms. A…
In March 2016 Demis Hassabis, CEO and cofounder of DeepMind, was in Seoul, South Korea, watching his company’s AI make history. AlphaGo, a computer program trained to master the ancient board game Go, played a five-game match against Lee Sedol, a top Korean pro with the second-highest number of international championship wins to his name…
Last year, researchers at Data Science Nigeria noted that engineers looking to train computer-vision algorithms could choose from a wealth of data sets featuring Western clothing, but there were none for African clothing. The team addressed the imbalance by using AI to generate artificial images of African fashion—a whole new data set from scratch. Such…
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…