Posted by Yossi Matias, VP Engineering & Research, and Grey Nearing, Research Scientist, Google Research Floods are the most common natural disaster, and are responsible for roughly $50 billion in annual financial damages worldwide. The rate of flood-related disasters has more than doubled since the year 2000 partly due to climate change. Nearly 1.5 billion…
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Over the last year, a few Chinese influencers have made millions of dollars peddling short video lessons on AI, profiting off people’s fears about the as-yet-unclear impact of the new technology on…
Posted by Srinivas Sunkara and Gilles Baechler, Software Engineers, Google Research Screen user interfaces (UIs) and infographics, such as charts, diagrams and tables, play important roles in human communication and human-machine interaction as they facilitate rich and interactive user experiences. UIs and infographics share similar design principles and visual language (e.g., icons and layouts), that…
Soccer teams are always looking to get an edge over their rivals. Whether it’s studying players’ susceptibility to injury, or opponents’ tactics—top clubs look at reams of data to give them the best shot of winning. They might want to add a new AI assistant developed by Google DeepMind to their arsenal. It can suggest…
Posted by Pooja Rao, Research Scientist, Google Research Health datasets play a crucial role in research and medical education, but it can be challenging to create a dataset that represents the real world. For example, dermatology conditions are diverse in their appearance and severity and manifest differently across skin tones. Yet, existing dermatology image datasets…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It’s official. After three years, the AI Act, the EU’s new sweeping AI law, jumped through its final bureaucratic hoop last week when the European Parliament voted to approve it. (You…
Imagine yourself glancing at a busy street for a few moments, then trying to sketch the scene you saw from memory. Most people could draw the rough positions of the major objects like cars, people, and crosswalks, but almost no one can draw every detail with pixel-perfect accuracy. The same is true for most modern…
Posted by Mark Matthews, Senior Software Engineer, and Dmitry Lagun, Research Scientist, Google Research A person’s prior experience and understanding of the world generally enables them to easily infer what an object looks like in whole, even if only looking at a few 2D pictures of it. Yet the capacity for a computer to reconstruct…
Cancer Grand Challenges recently announced five winning teams for 2024, which included five researchers from MIT: Michael Birnbaum, Regina Barzilay, Brandon DeKosky, Seychelle Vos, and Ömer Yilmaz. Each team is made up of interdisciplinary cancer researchers from across the globe and will be awarded $25 million over five years. Birnbaum, an associate professor in the…
If you’ve watched Boston Dynamics’ slick videos of robots running, jumping and doing parkour, you might have the impression robots have learned to be amazingly agile. In fact, these robots are still coded by hand, and would struggle to deal with new obstacles they haven’t encountered before. However, a new method of teaching robots to…