Engineering household robots to have a little common sense

From wiping up spills to serving up food, robots are being taught to carry out increasingly complicated household tasks. Many such home-bot trainees are learning through imitation; they are programmed to copy the motions that a human physically guides them through. It...

AI generates high-quality images 30 times faster in a single step

In our current age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate their own “art” by way of diffusion models, iteratively adding structure to a noisy initial state until a clear image or video emerges. Diffusion models have suddenly grabbed a seat at everyone’s...

Using AI to expand global access to reliable flood forecasts

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...

Computer-aided diagnosis for lung cancer screening

Posted by Atilla Kiraly, Software Engineer, and Rory Pilgrim, Product Manager, Google Research Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally with 1.8 million deaths reported in 2020. Late diagnosis dramatically reduces the chances of survival....

SCIN: A new resource for representative dermatology images

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...

MELON: Reconstructing 3D objects from images with unknown poses

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...