Deep Learning - Community Launching Google +1 Recommendations Across the Web UPDATE (7/9/12): After a few productive weeks in platform preview, we're rolling out +1 recommendations to all users today. Thanks for your feedback at Google I/O, in the discussion forums, and on our Google+ page. We're always eager to hear from you -- so keep it coming. Working on +1, we often hear people say they want to see more of what their friends recommend. For example, when I go the the Chrome Web Store and look at +1 recommendations on the Gmail app, I see related apps and recommendations from friends. To keep these recommendations more relevant and on-topic, they will always refer to pages on the same domain or subdomain as the +1 button. If you’ve already added the +1 button to your site, there’s nothing more you need to do. If you want to see recommendations today, sign up for the developer preview group and tell us what you think. Join the conversation on Google+.
Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning | Wired Enterprise Geoffrey Hinton (right) Alex Krizhevsky, and Ilya Sutskever (left) will do machine learning work at Google. Photo: U of T Google has hired the man who showed how to make computers learn much like the human brain. His name is Geoffrey Hinton, and on Tuesday, Google said that it had hired him along with two of his University of Toronto graduate students — Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. Google paid an undisclosed sum to buy Hinton’s company, DNNresearch. Back in the 1980s, Hinton kicked off research into neural networks, a field of machine learning where programmers can build machine learning models that help them to sift through vast quantities of data and put together patterns, much like the human brain. “Deep learning, pioneered by Hinton, has revolutionized language understanding and language translation,” said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. You can watch Rick Rashid’s cool demo here:
Supporting entrepreneurship in France at Le Camping Entrepreneurs all around the world are building technologies that empower their communities and address both local and global audiences. Last week, a team of Googlers from 10 countries gathered in Paris to spend time with entrepreneurs and startups at Le Camping, an accelerator program that’s part of Silicon Sentier, an association focused on supporting promising digital projects in the Ile de France region. We celebrated the results of the first two seasons of the program and welcomed the new startups for season three. Le Camping’s program selects 12 new startups each season (one season lasts six months). They “camp” in what used to be the facilities of the French Stock Exchange, symbolizing the bridge between the old and the new economy. We’ve already seen great success from the program. This is just one of our efforts to support entrepreneurs in France. We believe that the Internet and entrepreneurship are key drivers of economic development.
'Chinese Google' Opens Artificial-Intelligence Lab in Silicon Valley | Wired Enterprise Kai Yu, of the Chinese search giant Baidu, discusses “deep learning” inside the company’s new Silicon Valley outpost. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired It doesn’t look like much. The brick office building sits next to a strip mall in Cupertino, California, about an hour south of San Francisco, and if you walk inside, you’ll find a California state flag and a cardboard cutout of R2-D2 and plenty of Christmas decorations — even though we’re well into April. But there are big plans for this building. It’s where Baidu — “the Google of China” — hopes to create the future. In late January, word arrived that the Chinese search giant was setting up a research lab dedicated to “deep learning” — an emerging computer science field that seeks to mimic the human brain with hardware and software — and as it turns out, this lab includes an operation here in Silicon Valley, not far from Apple headquarters, in addition to a facility back in China. Baidu calls its lab The Institute of Deep Learning, or IDL.
the playground is open (Cross-posted on the Official Android Blog) Last year at Google I/O, we talked about momentum, mobile and more. This year, we’re picking up right where we left off. More than 400 million Android devices have now been activated—up from 100 million last June. Jelly Bean: simple, beautiful and beyond smart Jelly Bean builds on top of Ice Cream Sandwich. We’ve redesigned search from the ground up in Jelly Bean, with a new user interface and faster, more natural Voice Search. Today’s smart devices still rely on you to do pretty much everything—that is, until now. Starting in mid-July, we’ll start rolling out over-the-air updates to Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S, and we’ll also release Jelly Bean to open source. Google Play: more entertainmentGoogle Play is your digital entertainment destination, with more than 600,000 apps and games plus music, movies and books. Now, you can also purchase movies in addition to renting them. Nexus Q: It’s a sphere!
The man behind the Google brain: Andrew Ng and the quest for the new AI Artificial intelligence (credit: Alejandro Zorrilal Cruz/Wikimedia Commons) There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm. The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks. About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI, Wired reports. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.” [...] More
Become a Google power searcher You may already be familiar with some shortcuts for Google Search, like using the search box as a calculator or finding local movie showtimes by typing [movies] and your zip code. But there are many more tips, tricks and tactics you can use to find exactly what you’re looking for, when you most need it. Today, we’ve opened registration for Power Searching with Google, a free, online, community-based course showcasing these techniques and how you can use them to solve everyday problems. Our course is aimed at empowering you to find what you need faster, no matter how you currently use search. Lessons will be released daily starting on July 10, 2012, and you can take them according to your own schedule during a two-week window, alongside a worldwide community. Power Searching with Google blends the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) learning format pioneered by Stanford and MIT with our social and communication tools to create what we hope is a true community learning experience.
The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI | Wired Enterprise Meanwhile, engineers in Japan are building artificial neural nets to control robots. And together with scientists from the European Union and Israel, neuroscientist Henry Markman is hoping to recreate a human brain inside a supercomputer, using data from thousands of real experiments. The rub is that we still don't completely understand how the brain works, but scientists are pushing forward in this as well. The Chinese are working on what they call the Brainnetdome, described as a new atlas of the brain, and in the U.S., the Era of Big Neuroscience is unfolding with ambitious, multidisciplinary projects like President Obama’s newly announced (and much criticized) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative -- BRAIN for short. The BRAIN planning committee had its first meeting this past Sunday, with more meetings scheduled for this week. "That’s where we’re going to start to learn about the tricks that biology uses. What the World Wants