Google – Page 5 – Impact Lab

Artificial Intelligence, Google, Internet, Science & Technology News

Google just launched new AI-powered algorithms

December 1, 2018

Search engine now returns answers instead of just links.

Training The Network

Today, if you ask the Google search engine on your desktop a question like “How big is the Milky Way,” you’ll no longer just get a list of links where you could find the answer — you’ll get the answer: “100,000 light years.”

While this question/answer tech may seem simple enough, it’s actually a complex development rooted in Google’s powerful deep neural networks. These networks are a form of artificial intelligence that aims to mimic how human brains work, relating together bits of information to comprehend data and predict patterns.

Continue reading… “Google just launched new AI-powered algorithms”

App, Google, Internet

Google Earth’s New Feature Brings the Entire Planet to Life

November 27, 2018

The new feature allows users to take virtual, interactive tours of the world.

Via Futurism

Google, Internet, People Making a Difference

Sundar Pichai of Google: ‘Technology doesn’t solve humanity’s problems’

November 18, 2018

Growing up in India, he slept on the floor of a house without a refrigerator. Today, the chief executive is steering Google through the most turbulent period in its history.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, last week.CreditCreditErik Tanner for The New York Times

Google is facing more challenges today than at any time in its 20-year history. Employees are outraged over sexual harassment. Executives are under scrutiny for an effort to secretly make a censored version of its search product for China. Google will shut down its social network next year after a security vulnerability was discovered. Political and social debates, including one over building military-grade artificial intelligence, are roiling the work force.

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Amazon.com, Apple, Google, Healthcare

How Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are shaking up healthcare — and what it means for the future of the industry

November 16, 2018

The healthcare industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Costs are skyrocketing, consumer demand for more accessible care is growing rapidly, and healthcare companies are unable to keep up.

Health organizations are increasingly turning to tech companies to facilitate this transformation in care delivery and lower health expenditures. The potential for tech-led digital health initiatives to help healthcare providers and insurers deliver safer, more efficient, and cost-effective care is significant. For healthcare organizations of all types, the collection, analyses, and application of patient data can minimize avoidable service use, improve health outcomes, and promote patient independence, which can assuage swelling costs.

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Amazon.com, facebook, Google, Internet

Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

October 3, 2018

With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web hopes it’s game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads us into a sparse conference room. At one end of a long table is a battered laptop covered with stickers. Here, on this computer, he is working on a plan to radically alter how all of us live and work on the web.

“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this case, he is not joking.

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Analysis, Google, Money Talk

Google now provides a big data view of Etherium blockchain

September 4, 2018

Internet search giant Google has added ethereum to its big data analytics platform BigQuery.

Making the announcement in a blog post on Saturday, the company said that, while an API exists for commonly used functions such as checking transaction status or wallet balances, it’s not so easy to access all of the data stored on the ethereum blockchain.

The post continues to say that “perhaps more importantly,” the API doesn’t allow for viewing blockchain data “in aggregate.”

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Apple, Employment, Google, IBM

Apple HR couldn’t care less if you have a college degree

August 27, 2018

You can get hired at Apple even without a fancy piece of paper telling people you got a lot of book learning.

The traditional life plan includes four years of college then a good job. But not everyone takes this path, and sometimes the lack of a college degree keeps some people from getting a job they are otherwise qualified for. But not at Apple.

Following a non-traditional career path is no problem getting hired at Apple. And that goes for positions beyond working at its retail stores.

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Ecological Products, Google, Microsoft, New Inventions

Photos show how Microsoft took a big step forward in its crazy plan to power the internet from the sea

July 11, 2018

Microsoft has put a data centre in the sea in an experimental effort to see if it can provide internet services faster to coastal cities using renewable energy.

As part of its bigger Project Natick “moonshot,” Microsoft has put the data centre on the seafloor close to Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

The data centre is submerged 117 feet under the sea and is powered by a submarine cable running from Orkney. Microsoft picked the islands because it wants its data centres to run on renewable power, and Orkney is a major hub for renewable energy.

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City Planning, Google, Housing, Science & Technology News

Google is building a city of the future in Toronto. Would anyone want to live there?

July 8, 2018

It could be the coolest new neighborhood on the planet—or a peek into the Orwellian metropolis that knows everything you did last night.

TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city’s western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto’s eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada’s Parliament, “It’s this weird industrial land that’s just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one’s really known what to do with it.”

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Big Problems, facebook, Google, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

The web had failed to serve humanity: Tim Berners-Lee was crushed when Russia used Facebook to meddle in U.S. elections

July 6, 2018

World wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was “devastated” by recent abuses of the web, in an interview with Vanity Fair.

He is working on a new platform, named Solid, to re-decentralise the internet and take power away from monopolies like Google and Facebook.

He still has hope that the internet can become a something that serves humanity well.

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Alternative Transportation, Aviation, Google, Transportation

The flying car backed by Google’s cofounder just got a big update, and people can pilot it with less than an hour’s training

June 10, 2018

Kitty Hawk, the mysterious flying-car startup funded by the Google cofounder Larry Page, unwrapped its updated vehicle on Wednesday.

The Flyer is now open for test flights for prospective customers, and the CNN reporter Rachel Crane was the first journalist allowed to pilot the vehicle.

Kitty Hawk promises to get people in the air in less than an hour because of the Flyer’s simple control system, which comprises just two joysticks.

The startup’s CEO said that securing public acceptance for the Flyer is its biggest priority and that he hopes to learn a lot from the test flights.

Continue reading… “The flying car backed by Google’s cofounder just got a big update, and people can pilot it with less than an hour’s training”

App, Automation, communication, Google

Gmail can now autocomplete entire emails with a new feature called Smart Compose — here’s how to turn it on

May 18, 2018

One of the best announcements that came out of this year’s Google I/O was a new Gmail feature called Smart Compose, which can autocomplete entire emails for you.

Unlike many of the other announcements from Google I/O, Gmail Smart Compose can actually be switched on and used right now. It’s all part of the new Gmail experience that Google has been rolling out to customers.

Continue reading… “Gmail can now autocomplete entire emails with a new feature called Smart Compose — here’s how to turn it on”