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By Paresh Dave
SUNNYVALE, Calif. (Reuters) – Google, Alphabet Inc., announced Monday the award of a global grant of about $ 20 million next year to humanitarian and environmental projects seeking to use artificial intelligence to accelerate and increase their efforts.
"AI Impact Challenge" aims to entice organizations to ask Google for help with machine learning, a form of AI in which computers analyze large sets of data in order to make predictions or to detect patterns and anomalies.
Google's rivals, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc., also tout the "AI's for good" initiatives.
Focusing on humanitarian projects could help Google recruit and appease critics by demonstrating that their machine learning interests go beyond their core business and other lucrative areas, such as military work. After the backlash of employees, Google this year has said it will not renew its contract to analyze images of US military drones.
Google AI operations manager Irina Kofman told Reuters that the challenge was not a reaction to such a reaction, but said that thousands of employees are eager to work on projects. "common good" even if they directly generate income.
On Monday, at a media event, Google introduced existing projects similar to those it would like to inspire. Google's computers have recently learned to detect humpback whale singing with 90% accuracy over 170,000 hours of submarine audio recordings collected by the US government.
The audio file previously required manual analysis, which means "this is the first time this dataset has been thoroughly examined," said Ann Allen, ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Identifying the patterns could show how humans have affected whale migration, Allen said. Ultimately, real-time audio analysis could help ships avoid whale collisions.
The data are lacking because whales do not always sing, and requiring vessels to use animal tracking data may require new regulation, two experts said.
Julie Cattiau, Google's Product Manager for Whale Work, said Google is considering making whale protection software available to improve it.
Cattiau said Google will not charge for such tools, but users can choose to pair them with paid Google cloud services.
Jacquelline Fuller, vice president of Google.org, a non-profit organization for Google.org, said impact requests will be submitted by January 20 and will be judged by the total number of potential beneficiaries, feasibility and ethical considerations.
This year, Google.org has screened grant applications with its own machine learning tool for the first time, said Fuller, after receiving a record number of entries for a specific contest at http://www.google.org/. ;Africa.
(Report by Dave Dave, edited by Stephen Coates)
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