Google initiates PAIR to focus on ‘human side’ of AI

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Google has now launched its all-new initiative called PAIR to study the ways people

interact with AI. The latest move introduces open source tools to help researchers

develop new AI experiences.

“The goal of PAIR is to focus on the ‘human side’ of AI: the relationship between users and

technology, the new applications it enables, and how to make it broadly inclusive,” Google’s senior staff research scientists Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas wrote in a blog post.

Google is supporting machine learning and improving its position in the AI world, developing more accurate speech recognition, better image search and improved translations over a period of time. But since human interactions are vital to succeed with an AI system, the search giant has now been working on PAIR, which is Google’s ‘People + AI Research’ approach. Research using the PAIR approach will be broadly divided into three areas — engineers and researchers, domain experts, and everyday users. 

While engineering teams can leverage the latest initiative to simplify their AI developments through tools and guidelines, augmented reality professionals, doctors, technicians,

designers, farmers, and musicians will receive appropriate solutions through some

operational PAIR research. Google has dedicated a team of 12 engineers to kickstart developments under PAIR. 

It has also brought out open source visualization tools to kickstart developer engagements for the newest initiative. Known as Facets Overview and Facets Dive, the two open source developments are specifically designed for AI engineers with an aim to ‘address the very beginning’ of machine learning. “The Facets applications give engineers a clear view of the data they use to train AI systems,” PAIR researchers report.

Facet Overview takes input feature data from data sets to analyse them, feature

by feature, and visualise the analysis. Facet Dive, on the other hand, helps to

interactively explore a large number of data points at once.

The first open source Facet series is just beginning. Google has plans to release

more open source tools in the future. Also, new grants and residencies will be set up to

support AI research. Harvard researcher Prof. Brendan Meade and MIT expert Prof. Hal

Abelson are also working with the PAIR team to intensify the developments