Google announced its own platform for the Internet of Things, called Android Things. In fact, it’s Brillo project, introduced in May 2015, in which the company included several new features requested by the developers who had the opportunity to test it. The presence of the Weave communication protocol is confirmed.
A few weeks after announcing that the Google Translate service would be upgraded to use an machine learning system called Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), the engineers who run it announced that the new system has made great progress. In particular, it showed that it can translate from one language to another without specific training through an interlingua created on its own.
Google unveiled the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) tailored for machine learning. The company has been experimenting with this type of solution in its data center for over a year and stated that its performance per watt are an order of magnitude better-optimized.
Project SkyBender to provide Internet access over a 5G wireless network through drones was suppsed to be a secret but various information on the tests conducted by Google – but perhaps it would be more correct to call it Alphabet – leaked. According to the news now become public knowledge, the Google team is working in New Mexico to a technology that uses millimeter wavelengths to deliver speeds up to 40 times faster than 4G/LTE mobile networks.
Boston Dynamics, a robotics company purchased almost exactly two years ago by Google, published a really special video of Christmas greetings. In the company’s interpretation, a woman Santa Claus is the less weird element because she’s driving a sleigh pulled by robot reindeer. This is obviously one of the Boston Dynamics models, specifically the BigDog.
