Google Inc. has its hand in nearly every type of artificial intelligence research, and today the company announced the launch of an initiative called People + AI Research, a new project that focuses on the developing relationship between AI and people.

According to Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, senior staff research scientists on the Google Brain team, the idea behind PAIR is to consider AI not simply as a technology, but as a material that can be used to build new types of tools and programs that benefit real people.

PAIR targets three main audiences for AI interaction, the first of which is the people actually building the AI in the first place: the engineers and researchers. Google said that it wants to make AI development easier and more accessible, and it is starting out by releasing two new open-source tools: Facets Overview and Facets Dive. These tools are designed to give AI engineers better insight into the early stages of machine learning by giving them a clearer view of the data they are using to train their AI agents.

Viégas and Wattenberg said that training data is “a key ingredient in modern AI systems,” but they admitted that it can also be a source of confusion, since engineers must sometimes debug their data as well as their code during the development process. The researchers believe that the Facets apps will make it easier for machine learning engineers to understand what exactly their AI is learning from the data they are inputting from the very beginning.

The second audience targeted by PAIR are domain experts, which are people who could benefit from AI in the workplace. These include doctors, designers, farmers and hundreds of other professions. Google already has a number of AI projects in these areas, such as DeepMind’s partnership with the U.K.’s National Health Service, but the company wants to find other ways to use AI to streamline and improve the workplace.

Finally, the last audience for PAIR are the everyday users who will ultimately benefit from the AI revolution. According to Viégas and Wattenberg, PAIR will look at ways to make AI more inclusive, and it will also seek ways to democratize the technology behind AI.

Aside from the Facets apps, Google did not reveal any other new tools to come out of PAIR just yet, but the company said that there will be more to come in the future.

Photo: Google