From smartphone assistants to image recognition and translation, machine learning already helps us in our everyday lives. But it can also help us to tackle some of the worlds most challenging physical problems – such as energy consumption. Large-scale commercial and industrial systems like data centres consume a lot of energy, and while much has been done to stem the growth of energy use, there remains a lot more to do given the worlds increasing need for computing power.Reducing energy usage has been a major focus for us over the past 10 years: we have built our own super-efficient servers at Google, invented more efficient ways to cool our data centres and invested heavily in green energy sources, with the goal of being powered 100 percent by renewable energy. Compared to five years ago, we now get around 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy, and we continue to make many improvements each year.Major breakthroughs, however, are few and far between – which is why we are excited to share that by applying DeepMinds machine learning to our own Google data centres, weve managed to reduce the amount of energy we use for cooling by up to 40 percent. In any large scale energy-consuming environment, this would be a huge improvement.Read More
Announcing DeepMind Health research partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital
We founded DeepMind to make the world a better place by developing technologies that help address some of society’s toughest challenges.So were excited to announce our first medical research project with an NHS Trust.Well be working with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, one of the worlds leading eye hospitals with a 200 year track record in clinical care, research and education.This collaboration came about when Pearse Keane, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields, contacted DeepMind to explore how we could work together on two specific conditions that cause sight loss: diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Together, these affect more than 625,000 people in the UK and over 100 million people worldwide.Read More