Google has launched an “AI for Social Good” program to support artificial intelligence research and engineering with a focus on developing solutions for a range of global challenges. From an October 29th Google Blog post by Jeff Dean (Google AI): For the past few years we’ve been applying core Google AI research and engineering to projects with positive societal impact, including forecasting floods, protecting whales, and predicting famine. Today we’re unifying these efforts in a new program called AI for Social Good. We’re applying AI to a wide range of problems, partnering with external organizations to work toward solutions. The program will apply these core research and engineering efforts to AI projects with the potential to create positive […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Internet-based services that we have all come to love (e.g., search, email, social networks, video/photo sharing) are all powered by large back-end data centers, designed and managed as large warehouse-scale computers. Emerging cloud computing workloads also use such warehouse-scale computers, making it even more important to understand and optimize this class of computer systems. But until now, such warehouse-scale computers have (true to their name!) been big black boxes, with very little insight about detailed performance characteristics of deployments at scale: What is the nature of workloads that run […]

Google announced the finalists for its annual international science fair. There are projects from all over the world covering a wide variety of fields, including computer science.  All the projects are by scientists under 18 years old. The projects will be exhibited and judged at an event on September 21 at the Google Headquarters. You can browse through all 20 finalists at the Google Science Fair website, but here are two that stood out. ALAIR (Assisted Living Autonomous Internet Robot) by Benjamin Lourdes Hylak from Oxford, Pennsylvania. Benjamin, age 17, built an assisted living robot for $1,250 that can preform the duties of an in-home nurse, such as: Healthcare/homecare monitoring Pill […]