Finding your Raspberry Pi 3 isn’t quite reaching its limits? You’re not alone. Despite it being the most advanced version of the little computer to date, it can be tricky to get your set up right. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using your Raspberry Pi to run retro games, as a media center, or any of the other wonderful projects that might pique your interest. If the Pi isn’t configured to run at its most optimum, you’re going to have a bad experience. No one wants that. So, take a look at our seven tips to find out just what...
Posted by Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow, on behalf of the entire Google Brain Team
The Google Brain team works to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence by research and systems engineering, as one part of the overall Google AI effort. In Part 1 of this blog post, we shared some of our work in 2017 related to our broader research, from designing new machine learning algorithms and techniques to understanding them, as well as sharing data, software, and hardware with the community. In this post, we’ll dive into the research we do in some specific domains such as healthcare, robotics, creativity, fairness and inclusion, as well as share a little more about us.
We have continued our work on early detection of diabetic retinopathy (DR) and macular edema, building on the research paper we published December 2016 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In 2017, we moved this project from research project to actual clinical impact. We partnered with Verily (a life sciences company within Alphabet) to guide this work through the regulatory process, and together we are incorporating this technology into Nikon's line of Optos ophthalmology cameras. In addition, we are working to deploy this system in India, where there is a shortage of 127,000 eye doctors and as a result, almost half of patients are diagnosed too late — after the disease has already caused vision loss. As a part of a pilot, we’ve launched this system to help graders at Aravind Eye Hospitals to better diagnose diabetic eye disease. We are also working with our partners to understand the human factors affecting diabetic eye care, from ethnographic studies of patients and healthcare providers, to investigations on how eye care clinicians interact with the AI-enabled system.
First patient screened (top) and Iniya Paramasivam, a trained grader, viewing the output of the system (bottom).
We have also teamed up with researchers at leading healthcare organizations and medical centers including Stanford, UCSF, and University of Chicago to demonstrate the effectiveness of using machine learning to predict medical outcomes from de-identified medical records (i.e. given the current state of a patient, we believe we can predict the future for a patient by learning from millions of other patients’ journeys, as a way of helping healthcare professionals make better decisions). We’re very excited about this avenue of work and we look to forward to telling you more about it in 2018.
Robotics
Our long-term goal in robotics is to design learning algorithms to allow robots to operate in messy, real-world environments and to quickly acquire new skills and capabilities via learning, rather than the carefully-controlled conditions and the small set of hand-programmed tasks that characterize today’s robots. One thrust of our research is on developing techniques for physical robots to use their own experience and those of other robots to build new skills and capabilities, pooling the shared experiences in order to learn collectively. We are also exploring ways in which we can combine computer-based simulations of robotic tasks with physical robotic experience to learn new tasks more rapidly. While the physics of the simulator don’t entirely match up with the real world, we have observed that for robotics, simulated experience plus a small amount of real-world experience gives significantly better results than even large amounts of real-world experience on its own.
In addition to real-world robotic experience and simulated robotic environments, we have developed robotic learning algorithms that can learn by observing human demonstrations of desired behaviors, and believe that this imitation learning approach is a highly promising way of imparting new abilities to robots very quickly, without explicit programming or even explicit specification of the goal of an activity. For example, below is a video of a robot learning to pour from a cup in just 15 minutes of real world experience by observing humans performing this task from different viewpoints and then trying to imitate the behavior. As we might be with our own three-year-old child, we’re encouraged that it only spills a little!
We also co-organized and hosted the first occurrence of the new Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in November to bring together researchers working at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. The summary of the event contains more information, and we look forward to next year’s occurrence of the conference in Zürich.
Creativity
We’re very interested in how to leverage machine learning as a tool to assist people in creative endeavors. This year, we created an AI piano duet tool, helped YouTube musician Andrew Huang create new music (see also the behind the scenes video with Nat & Friends), and showed how to teach machines to draw.
We also demonstrated how to control deep generative models running in the browser to create new music. This work won the NIPS 2017 Best Demo Award, making this the second year in a row that members of the Brain team’s Magenta project have won this award, following on our receipt of the NIPS 2016 Best Demo Award for Interactive musical improvisation with Magenta. In the YouTube video below, you can listen to one part of the demo, the MusicVAE variational autoencoder model morphing smoothly from one melody to another. People + AI Research (PAIR) Initiative
Advances in machine learning offer entirely new possibilities for how people might interact with computers. At the same time, it’s critical to make sure that society can broadly benefit from the technology we’re building. We see these opportunities and challenges as an urgent matter, and teamed up with a number of people throughout Google to create the People + AI Research (PAIR) initiative.
PAIR’s goal is to study and design the most effective ways for people to interact with AI systems. We kicked off the initiative with a public symposium bringing together academics and practitioners across disciplines ranging from computer science, design, and even art. PAIR works on a wide range of topics, some of which we’ve already mentioned: helping researchers understand ML systems through work on interpretability and expanding the community of developers with deeplearn.js. Another example of our human-centered approach to ML engineering is the launch of Facets, a tool for visualizing and understanding training datasets.
Facets provides insights into your training datasets.
Cultural differences can surface in training data even in objects as “universal” as chairs, as observed in these doodle patterns on the left. The chart on the right shows how we uncovered geo-location biases in standard open source data sets such as ImageNet. Undetected or uncorrected, such biases may strongly influence model behavior.
We made this video in collaboration with our colleagues at Google Creative Lab as a non-technical introduction to some of the issues in this area. Our Culture
One aspect of our group’s research culture is to empower researchers and engineers to tackle the basic research problems that they view as most important. In September, we posted about our general approach to conducting research. Educating and mentoring young researchers is something we do through our research efforts. Our group hosted over 100 interns last year, and roughly 25% of our research publications in 2017 have intern co-authors. In 2016, we started the Google Brain Residency, a program for mentoring people who wanted to learn to do machine learning research. In the inaugural year (June 2016 to May 2017), 27 residents joined our group, and we posted updates about the first year of the program in halfway through and just after the end highlighting the research accomplishments of the residents. Many of the residents in the first year of the program have stayed on in our group as full-time researchers and research engineers, and most of those that did not have gone on to Ph.D. programs at top machine learning graduate programs like Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, NYU and Toronto. In July, 2017, we also welcomed our second cohort of 35 residents, who will be with us until July, 2018, and they’ve already done some exciting research and published at numerous research venues. We’ve now broadened the program to include many other research groups across Google and renamed it the Google AI Residency program (the application deadline for this year's program has just passed; look for information about next year's program at http://ift.tt/2hHjufa).
Our work in 2017 spanned more than we’ve highlighted on in this two-part blog post. We believe in publishing our work in top research venues, and last year our group published 140 papers, including more than 60 at ICLR, ICML, and NIPS. To learn more about our work, you can peruse our research papers.
The Google Brain team is becoming more spread out, with team members across North America and Europe. If the work we’re doing sounds interesting and you’d like to join us, you can see our open positions and apply for internships, the AI Residency program, visiting faculty, or full-time research or engineering roles using the links at the bottom of g.co/brain. You can also follow our work throughout 2018 here on the Google Research blog, or on Twitter at @GoogleResearch. You can also follow my personal account at @JeffDean.
One in six Americans now own a smart speaker, according to new research out this week from NPR and Edison Research – a figure that’s up up 128 percent from January, 2017. Amazon’s Echo speakers are still in the lead, the report says, as 11 percent now own an Amazon Alexa device compared with 4 percent who own a Google Home product. Today, 16 percent of Americans own a… Read More
Waymo is bringing its self-driving cars back to San Francisco streets for testing. TechCrunch has obtained pictures of the Waymo Chrysler Pacifica autonomous test vehicle on SF city roads, and Waymo confirmed that it is indeed bringing test vehicles back to one of the first spots where it ever tested AVs in the first place. A Waymo spokesperson provided the following statement about its… Read More Read Full Article
Linux often gets associated with being cheap. It’s a bit unfair, but it’s true that you can save some big bucks if you buy a computer with a free operating system. So how inexpensive can you go? Check out these best cheap Linux laptops to save money. Yes, you can install Linux on just about any computer out there, so the need for a dedicated machine is difficult to understand. It’s all about drivers though, as there is plenty of hardware that doesn’t play nicely with Linux drivers, and so you have a dysfunctional component. A dedicated Linux machine will...
The internet is the world’s greatest surveillance tool. Or at least that’s how it often feels. We’ve always known that we’re being watched online, but many of us thought it was just to sell us more. Post-Snowden it became clear that governments and companies around the world use every last drop of data they can find in order to surveil and profile us. The NSA wants to know every digital move we make. Amazon and Google are installing surveillance devices in our homes. Facebook wants to profile and commodify our lives. Now there is another thing to add to the...
Facebook is changing the News Feed, focusing on posts from family and friends rather than those from pages and brands. The social network is also trying to initiate more meaningful social interactions, which will be promoted above more passive activities such as watching videos. Facebook had mixed fortunes in 2017. One the one hand its userbase continued to grow, but on the other hand it faced criticism over the way it’s changing society. This led to founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising to fix Facebook in 2018, and those efforts are starting to bear fruit. Mark Zuckerberg Makes Changes In...
There are days when you’re happy with your life and the world around you, and then there are days when everything you do makes you feel like you’re beating your head against a wall. That’s because the world can be a dark place, and things are looking particularly bleak at the moment. Of course, when you’re enjoying one of your happy days, you might want to watch something cheerful like uplifting romantic comedies or brilliant stand-up shows. But if you are looking to wallow in your own misery, it’s time to turn to the dark side of Netflix. The following...
Slack took the world by storm when it released in 2013, enabling companies to communicate internally using real-time chat instead of email. With its advanced features and slick design, Slack became the go-to solution for big teams, especially those with remote workers. But not everyone likes Slack. All kinds of Slack alternatives have popped up over the years, trying to dethrone the king by being unique in this way or that. Flock, on the other hand, is a direct competitor to Slack that aims to be the same but more productive without gimmicks. If you need a real-time communication tool...
People perpetually look for ways to streamline their processes, maximize their productivity and manage their workflows. Kanban is one popular process that does all of those things. Developed by a Toyota engineer, it originated in the manufacturing sector. However, many tech firms now use Kanban to meet development goals. How Does Kanban Work? Task prioritizing is one of Kanban’s main concepts. Think about the constant influx of user requests after a software release. In that scenario, people who use Kanban visualize the workflow on Kanban boards. They also take a team approach to assigning priorities for each user request or...
Our verdict of the Mobvoi Ticwatch S:The Ticwatch S is a functional, reasonably priced smartwatch. If you aren't a Android Wear fan, then this is unlikely to convert you. However, the Ticwatch S is a respectable entry to the market, even if the lack of NFC and cellular support disappoint. 710Smartwatches: every company has made one, but consumers just don’t seem to be interested. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reasons that smartwatches haven’t caught our imagination. It could be the cost. It could be the design. Many people just see them as glorified notification screens. Despite these criticisms, smartwatches do have many great features...
One aspect that Microsoft got very wrong was Windows Updates. The situation has slowly improved with subsequent updates, but performing updates still isn’t as smooth or customizable as it should be. If you’re fed up with thinking about Active Hours and dealing with random restarts, you might want to kill the update feature altogether. In this article, we’ll explain how to stop Windows 10 updates. Note: Failure to keep your operating system updated can leave you with security vulnerabilities. If you turn off automatic updates, you should still manually check for updates on a regular basis. How to Stop Windows 10...
Going on a trip soon? Hopefully you have an awesome time planned with the help of some travel sites. But before you go, it’s a good idea to set up an “out of office” responder in your email. Doing so lets people who send you a message know that you won’t respond until you’re back. If you don’t set this up, people will probably wonder why you’re taking so long to respond. We’ll show you how to set up the out of office feature in Yahoo Mail. How to Set Up “Out of Office” Replies in Yahoo Mail Visit your...
You can say a lot with the right animated GIF in your Google documents, whether to explain concepts better or to make your presentation slides shine — so it’s a good thing that you can make your own animated GIFs with free tools in minutes. However, GIFs won’t play correctly if you just drag-and-drop or insert directly into a Google document! Follow the steps below to make your GIFs animate currently. How to Add Animated GIFs in Google Docs and Slides You can use Google’s Image Search to sift through the GIF universe. Unfortunately, you can’t use the Image Search within...
Tumblr is a blogging platform (read our best Tumblr tips) that’s been around for a while. If you signed up for your account many years ago, you can change your username to something more appropriate to your current interests. The process is simple, but somewhat destructive. How to Change Your Tumblr Username After you’ve logged in to the Tumblr dashboard, do the following: Click the profile icon and click Settings. You can see the blogs in your account listed in the right sidebar. Click on the blog you want to edit. A new window will open with a list of items you can edit related...
It’s rare that I pay much attention to automaker infotainment and multimedia system updates at CES – usually there’s too much going on with autonomy, electrification and mobility services to give it much thought. This year, however, Mercedes-Benz had one of the most interesting announcements at the show with its new MBUX smart multimedia system and in-car voice activated… Read More
Facebook is making a huge change to its News Feed algorithm to prioritize friends and posts that spark comments between them at the expense of public content, news outlets, and importantly, the total time spent and ads you see on the social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook today, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find… Read More Read Full Article
Facebook is making a huge change to its News Feed algorithm to prioritize friends and posts that spark comments between them at the expense of public content, news outlets, and importantly, the total time spent and ads you see on the social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook today, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find… Read More
CES, the yearly bacchanal of tech and innovation, has outgrown its shell. Las Vegas has been home to the event since the late 1970s and, for better or worse, the city has survived and served the influx of technologists who flock to the event each year to see the latest and greatest. But two things are happening simultaneously that make Las Vegas the last place to find innovation. First,… Read More
Samsung has committed to unlocking the FM radio chip in its upcoming handsets. This will allow owners of Samsung phones in the U.S. and Canada to listen to FM radio without the need to be connected to the internet. This is thanks to an ongoing partnership with NextRadio. It’s a little-known fact that most smartphones have the capability of receiving FM radio signals. The technology is present in the hardware, but many manufacturers and/or carriers don’t activate the chip. Some are starting to see the light though, including Apple’s nemesis, Samsung. Samsung Commits Support for FM Radio To be clear,...
Google is preparing to launch a new set of parental control features for users of its Chrome browser. The announcement was made in an email sent this week to users of its current system for parental controls and other restrictions called “Chrome Supervised Users,” which is soon shutting down. Read More Read Full Article
It’s been a long week since we first learned about the now infamous Spectre and Meltdown chip vulnerabilities. One of the issues with mitigating the danger these vulnerabilities pose is that they could result in serious performance degradation. In a blog post today, Google claimed their solutions resulted in no performance degradation across the different mitigation techniques they… Read More Read Full Article
Consistent access to clean water is something billions lack, and part of that is the inability to check whether one’s water is clean or not. Lishtot could help change this with a tiny device that instantly determines if water is safe to drink just by analyzing the electric field around it — no strips, no microfluidics, no toxic chemicals. Read More
One in six Americans now own a smart speaker, according to new research out this week from NPR and Edison Research – a figure that’s up up 128 percent from January, 2017. Amazon’s Echo speakers are still in the lead, the report says, as 11 percent now own an Amazon Alexa device compared with 4 percent who own a Google Home product. Today, 16 percent of Americans own a… 
Waymo is bringing its self-driving cars back to San Francisco streets for testing. TechCrunch has obtained pictures of the Waymo Chrysler Pacifica autonomous test vehicle on SF city roads, and Waymo confirmed that it is indeed bringing test vehicles back to one of the first spots where it ever tested AVs in the first place. A Waymo spokesperson provided the following statement about its… 
It’s rare that I pay much attention to automaker infotainment and multimedia system updates at CES – usually there’s too much going on with autonomy, electrification and mobility services to give it much thought. This year, however, Mercedes-Benz had one of the most interesting announcements at the show with its new MBUX smart multimedia system and in-car voice activated… 
Facebook is making a huge change to its News Feed algorithm to prioritize friends and posts that spark comments between them at the expense of public content, news outlets, and importantly, the total time spent and ads you see on the social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook today, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find… 
CES, the yearly bacchanal of tech and innovation, has outgrown its shell. Las Vegas has been home to the event since the late 1970s and, for better or worse, the city has survived and served the influx of technologists who flock to the event each year to see the latest and greatest. But two things are happening simultaneously that make Las Vegas the last place to find innovation. First,… 
Google is preparing to launch a new set of parental control features for users of its Chrome browser. The announcement was made in an email sent this week to users of its current system for parental controls and other restrictions called “Chrome Supervised Users,” which is soon shutting down. 
It’s been a long week since we first learned about the now infamous Spectre and Meltdown chip vulnerabilities. One of the issues with mitigating the danger these vulnerabilities pose is that they could result in serious performance degradation. In a blog post today, Google claimed their solutions resulted in no performance degradation across the different mitigation techniques they… 
Consistent access to clean water is something billions lack, and part of that is the inability to check whether one’s water is clean or not. Lishtot could help change this with a tiny device that instantly determines if water is safe to drink just by analyzing the electric field around it — no strips, no microfluidics, no toxic chemicals. 
