Google Stretches Its AI Wings
December 19, 2016
Google has been very busy launching AI solutions. For example, ReCode tells us, “Pow! Bang! Google Uses Its AI to Bring Visual Punch to Digital Comic Books,” while the New Atlas reports, “DeepMind AI Slashes Cooling Costs at Google’s Data Centers.” Making comic books easier to read is nice, and reducing electric consumption is even better. We would be happy, though, to finally see more relevant search results; perhaps Google will tackle that side project soon.
Recode’s Mark Bergen describes Google’s comic-book enhancement tool, called Bubble Zoom:
The latest [AI] insertion is a neat visual trick to make it easier to read comic books within the Google Play Books app. Unfurled at Comic-Con International, it’s called Bubble Zoom and does just that — zooms in on text bubbles in comics with one touch. Last fall, Google introduced new mobile formats for digital comics, an attempt to get more comics readers, a devotee-heavy group, spending time and money within Google’s digital media store.
That could work. Meanwhile, Google is certainly seeing financial benefits from its AI-enhanced data center cooling project. Michael Irving at the New Atlas explains:
Now, Google has set its DeepMind system loose on its massive data centers, and drastically cut the cost of cooling these facilities in the process. Running Gmail, YouTube, and the all-knowing Google Search guzzles a tremendous amount of power, and while Google has invested heavily in making its servers, cooling systems and energy sources as efficient and green as possible, there’s always room for improvement. Especially when the industrial-scale cooling systems are difficult to run efficiently, given the complex interactions that occur between equipment, environment and staff in a data center. To account for all those factors that a human operator or traditional formula-based engineering might miss, the team put DeepMind to work on the problem, and the result was a drastic reduction in power consumption for the center’s cooling systems.
The article goes on to describe how the difference was measured, using the PUE metric and the record-breaking results they achieved. Naturally, Google expects to apply this successful tool throughout their buildings. We’re told they also plan to share the methodology with other organizations, so they can reduce their energy consumption, too. No word yet on how they plan to monetize that initiative.
Cynthia Murrell, December 19, 2016
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Google Stretches Its AI Wings : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search