Meet a few of our machine learning makers

From reinventing your smartphone to helping you play rock-paper-scissors, AI is changing the way we use technology today. And while we hear about all the new things we’re able to do thanks to machine learning, we don’t always hear about the people shaping machine learning itself. Who are they? What inspired them to get into the field? And what do they geek out about when it comes to AI?

To answer some of these questions, we went behind the scenes with the Google Brain team, a research group that’s part of Google AI. The Brain team works on deep learning research, a sub-field of machine learning focused on neural networks. For the non-researchers among us, a neural network is a kind of machine learning model that uses raw forms of data to understand patterns and concepts. Neural networks tackle difficult problems in computer vision, speech recognition, language understanding, and many other areas.

You can experience some of the Brain team’s work for yourself by using products like Google Photos or Translate, or by trying out our open-source machine learning framework, TensorFlow. The team also does general research in the field of AI and explores how to apply this technology to new spaces like healthcare, robotics, and even music and art.

Watch below to hear more from the team about the basics of machine learning, puzzles, and one researcher’s hope for using AI as her back-up band.

To learn more about the Brain team, check out g.co/brain, or take a look at the team’s recent Reddit AMA ( "Ask Me Anything"), as well as their AMA from 2016.