This is an excerpt from Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini, published on October 31 by Random House. It has been lightly edited. The term “x-risk” is used as a shorthand for the hypothetical existential risk posed by AI. While my research supports the…
To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain. How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised…
With the proliferation of computationally intensive machine-learning applications, such as chatbots that perform real-time language translation, device manufacturers often incorporate specialized hardware components to rapidly move and process the massive amounts of data these systems demand. Choosing the best design for these components, known as deep neural network accelerators, is challenging because they can have…
Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA have developed two techniques that accelerate the processing of sparse tensors, a type of data structure that’s used for high-performance computing tasks. The complementary techniques could result in significant improvements to the performance and energy-efficiency of systems like the massive machine-learning models that drive generative artificial intelligence. Tensors are data…
Joy Buolamwini, the renowned AI researcher and activist, appears on the Zoom screen from home in Boston, wearing her signature thick-rimmed glasses. As an MIT grad, she seems genuinely interested in seeing old covers of MIT Technology Review that hang in our London office. An edition of the magazine from 1961 asks: “Will your son…
Posted by Damien Pierce, Software Engineer, and John Anderson, Senior Research Director, Google Research Some cities or communities develop an evacuation plan to be used in case of an emergency. There are a number of reasons why city officials might enact their plan, a primary one being a natural disaster, such as a tornado, flood,…
Posted by Jesse Hoke, Student Researcher, and Pedram Roushan, Senior Research Scientist, Quantum AI Team Quantum mechanics allows many phenomena that are classically impossible: a quantum particle can exist in a superposition of two states simultaneously or be entangled with another particle, such that anything you do to one seems to instantaneously also affect the…
Posted by Jagan Sankaranarayanan, Senior Staff Software Engineer, and Indrajit Roy, Head of Napa Product, Google Google Ads infrastructure runs on an internal data warehouse called Napa. Billions of reporting queries, which power critical dashboards used by advertising clients to measure campaign performance, run on tables stored in Napa. These tables contain records of ads…
Posted by Eric Malmi, Senior Research Scientist, and Jakub Adamek, Senior Software Engineer, Google, Bard Team Many people with questions about grammar turn to Google Search for guidance. While existing features, such as “Did you mean”, already handle simple typo corrections, more complex grammatical error correction (GEC) is beyond their scope. What makes the development…
Posted by Yi-Fan Chen, Software Engineer, and Carla Bromberg, Program Lead, Google Research Wildfires are becoming larger and affecting more and more communities around the world, often resulting in large-scale devastation. Just this year, communities have experienced catastrophic wildfires in Greece, Maui, and Canada to name a few. While the underlying causes leading to such…