Google Announces PAIR, a Project Aimed at Improving AI and Machine Learning

Google has made great strides in artificial intelligence in recent years. It has already shown the world its DeepMind AI can defeat humans in ancient board games. It has launched one of the most advanced AI assistants for smartphones and other Internet-connected products. But Google wants AI to have a humanistic side, to be more inclusive. And to help bring this, the tech giant has announced a new project called PAIR.

PAIR or People + AI Research initiative will bring together people across Google - from researchers to professionals - to look at all the different ways AI can be used and how people can interact with AI systems. According to the company's blog post, PAIR's research is looking at three key user needs - how AI can be used as a tool in everyday life, how it can work for professionals to make their jobs easier, and how practical AI development can be taught to engineers.

Apart from publishing research, Google is also open sourcing new tools, creating educational materials (such as guidelines for designing AI interfaces) to extend the reach of AI to as many people as possible. The two new tools include Facets Overview and Facets Dive, which are aimed at engineers to examine and understand data better. By getting the basics of machine learning right, Google hopes that AI will soon be able to get facial recognition and language processing with better precision.

Google says it will release more tools like Facets in the future, and the company will set up new grants and residencies to sponsor research. Such research in AI is also being undertaken by other organisations like Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and MIT Media Lab, as well as Elon Musk's own OpenAI, to name a few.