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A golden age for research: broader scope, faster cycles, greater impact

Oct 17, 2024

[[read-time]] min read

How the “magic cycle” between research and real-world application is shortening, yielding helpful technologies quicker than ever

We live in a golden age for research.

Never before have we had the opportunity to make such rapid advances in computer science, and apply them so quickly to global-scale challenges, in a way that can help people in their daily lives. Since the start of my career, I’ve been excited by the “magic cycle” of research, where real-world challenges motivate new foundational and applied research, which in turn has a positive impact in the real world. Today, with the right infrastructure, talent and approach, we’re able not only to make rapid breakthroughs in everything from AI to algorithms to computing infrastructure, but to put those technologies to work to improve people’s daily lives and have societal impact faster than ever before, sometimes in a matter of months.

I’m seeing this firsthand as I’ve recently stepped up to lead Google Research , so I wanted to share a perspective on the incredible progress we’re seeing — and how important research is in driving helpful innovation.

Our approach: impact-driven curiosity

Google itself in fact began with research. “ The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine ,” published in 1998, explored how PageRank could provide a fundamentally better way to find info on the web, But it didn’t stop with a research paper — it was applying that research that produced Google. Over the past 26 years, that approach to implementing research — quickly — has transformed not only our company, but also how people can interact with the world’s information. Indeed, much of the rapid progress in AI we see all around us today grew from Google Research’s invention of the Transformer .

In all of our research, we ask ourselves: How can we make a step change, not just incremental? What’s impossible today, that we could make possible? And what is the greatest impact we can have — how can this make a real difference in the world?

Google Research today includes fundamental and applied work in foundational machine learning and algorithms, computing systems and quantum AI, and science, AI & societal impact. And across all these domains, we run initiatives on efficiency in machine learning, factuality & grounding in AI systems, and new data techniques.

Breakthroughs for the benefit of people and the planet

We motivate our research by going after the biggest questions that matter to advance science and make a difference to people and to communities globally. What are the most effective ways to mitigate climate change? How can we help make billions of people healthier? How can we enable new experiences? And to do all this, can we break through limitations in computing and AI systems? Each of those becomes an inspiring research challenge — and in so many cases we’ve already translated research into solutions.

For example, to address climate change, in a trial with American Airlines we used AI to help reduce contrails by 54%, demonstrating that airlines can verifiably avoid contrails and thereby reduce their climate impact. To help address the growing wildfire crisis, we partnered with leading wildfire authorities to develop FireSat, an upcoming AI-powered global satellite constellation to detect and track wildfires the size of a classroom — within 20 minutes. And consider flood forecasting — when our team at Google Research began the project in 2018, experts I met with said it was likely impossible to forecast riverine floods. But by developing AI that can build a global hydrologic model , we’ve not only proven it’s possible, but applied it to provide communities accurate early warnings and help save lives.

Meanwhile, to support health and wellbeing, we’ve developed AI that can help screen for breast cancer and colorectal cancer , help prevent blindness at scale, spot potential skin conditions and detect diseases based on the sound of coughs . We’re still in the earliest days of AI breakthroughs and genomics research , and yet we’ve made progress with Large Language Models for the medical domain and we’re already poised to improve the health care for hundreds of millions of people.

But perhaps one of the biggest undertakings involves advancing computing itself, and how it can fundamentally alter the scope of problem-solving. We’ve developed state-of-the-art attention models and use graph mining to improve retrieval quality . We’re also working on approaches to grounding large language models, such as by training models to rely on source documents for summarization and evaluating factual consistency . This research has led to improvements like the double-check feature in the Gemini app. We’ve made AI more efficient with research on speculative decoding , efficient inference techniques , and cascades , and we’ve helped improve privacy with federated learning and differential privacy . And our quantum computing team just published new results in Nature affirming that as we reduce the error rate in our quantum processors, we reach levels of computation that can’t be matched by even the world’s most powerful classical computers — putting us on track to crack open an entirely new computational capability for the world.

These are just a few examples of the type of work done across Google Research.

Why partnership is crucial for turning research into impact

Of course, as we turn research towards impact, we’re acutely aware that technology is not automatically beneficial — you can't "invent it and forget it," simply releasing powerful technologies on the naive assumption that they will be helpful. It requires careful stewardship, partnership and a fundamentally human-centric view of how to design and guide emerging technologies. That’s one reason we do our research in partnership with a multitude of researchers in academia and many others, while creating tools and best practices that support a truly global research ecosystem with the aim of steering new technologies towards beneficial outcomes. We actively engage in advancing socio-technical research to bolster our AI principles — including on equitable datasets, interpretability, and algorithmic fairness — and there’s important work ahead to make our AI models even more efficient, factual, robust and safe.

We have the greatest impact when we’re working with research partners. Since 2005, Google has worked with more than 1,000 research institutions and invested over $400 million dollars in academic research worldwide, much of this led by Google Research. We find experts across disciplines, roll up our sleeves, dive into the research, and make scientific advances together. In our connectomics research, we’ve partnered with Harvard to use AI to make the most detailed mapping yet of neurons in the human brain , revealing newly discovered structures — all towards helping scientists understand fundamental processes such as thought, learning and memory. Google Research also engaged in a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Howard University and other HBCUs to build a high-quality African-American English (AAE) speech dataset that Google — and others — will use to improve speech products. This is related to our overall effort to reduce barriers and better serve communities by enabling technology to work in many more languages .

With our partners, and through Google’s own products, we use our research advances to benefit billions of people . For example, as populations swell and shift in the Global South , millions of people’s buildings aren’t represented on any map, and they risk missing out on essentials like electricity, healthcare and mail delivery. So Google Research in Africa has used AI to make big improvements to the Open Buildings dataset — transforming blurry, low-res satellite imagery into useful, high-res building outlines so partners like the World Bank, the World Resources Institute, UN Habitat, WorldPop and Sunbird AI can use it to ensure global development includes everyone. Along with our SKAI effort, this has helped our partnership with the UN to boost damage assessment .

In another sphere, our Operations Research team recently showed how cargo shippers could double their profit, deliver 13% more containers and use 15% fewer ships. This is not only helpful for businesses, but good for supply chains globally.

Finally, we of course partner extensively with product teams to drive innovation across Google — and our responsibility also includes keeping an eye on the horizon, exploring the art of the possible, and imagining how we can apply our breakthrough technologies for maximum benefit in years to come.

Towards the future

We feel great urgency given the scope of problems facing humanity — but also great optimism because of what we’ve been able to do already. Our multi-decade track record shows that Google Research is second-to-none in delivering helpful advances. We’ve delivered breakthroughs that have shaped Google's identity as a company, helped inaugurate new fields in computer science, and advanced the frontiers of innovation and technology with thousands of publications . The advances we’ve shared are already assisting people – from their everyday tasks , to their most ambitious and imaginative endeavors — and addressing society’s most pressing challenges , from healthcare to education to climate change and climate science .

We'll keep sharing our breakthroughs on our Google Research blog , at conferences and at other events. We're eager to explore — and invent — the future alongside all the partners and communities we work with.

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James A. Robinson shares 2024 Nobel Prize for research on global inequality

Economist and political scientist becomes 101st scholar associated with uchicago to receive nobel prize.

Prof. James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago has been awarded the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science, on Oct. 14 for his research on “how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” He shared this year’s prize with Profs. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of MIT.

The Nobel Prize-winning work of Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson aims to trace the historical roots of an age-old question: Why are some countries poorer and others more prosperous? And why do these inequalities persist? 

“James Robinson’s scholarship lays bare how much inclusive institutions matter to prosperity in a society,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “His work is in a deep tradition of University of Chicago scholarship that helps us to see the world anew and to shape it to the betterment of humankind.”

Robinson was sleeping, with his phone off, when the Nobel committee attempted to reach him in the early hours of Oct. 14. His wife Maria Angélica Bautista, a senior research associate at the Harris School of Public Policy, received a text from a friend and quickly woke him up. 

“It’s a little bit emotional. I’m super happy obviously, but very proud and honored,” Robinson said. “It hasn’t quite sunk in yet.”

‘A true intellectual’

At a UChicago news conference later that afternoon, Robinson was called “a true intellectual,” whose work has transformed numerous fields. An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research on the relationships between political power, institutions and prosperity. Robinson is the institute director of UChicago’s Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts . He teaches and conducts fieldwork around the world, including in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and has authored numerous best-selling books. 

“It's hard to think of a major question in politics or policy for which Jim's work is not kind of the first stopping point for anybody seeking a deeper understanding or answer,” said Prof. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. “His research on institutions and the political determinants of societal thriving set the agenda for a generation of scholars who are seeking to understand how to create peace and prosperity where there was conflict and poverty.”

Today, the richest nations in the world are around 30 times richer than the poorest nations. Scholars have long pondered why this disparity exists—and why it persists. 

“Economists understand what generates prosperity,” Robinson said in 2019 on the Big Brains podcast , “and so to me I’ve never been interested so much in rich countries ... to me, the puzzle has always been about poor countries and about why poor countries can’t take advantage of all this stuff which is in economics textbooks.”

Historically, scholars have attributed this entrenched inequality to factors like geography, weather or culture. However Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson argue that economic and political institutions—how they are organized and affect the citizens of a society—cause these extreme income gaps between nations.

To understand the tricky question of causality, the scholars traced swaths of history. They specifically looked at European colonization of large parts of the world, which began around the 16th century. As colonizers settled around the globe, they also set up new institutions that governed opportunities and wealth—access to education and land ownership. The differences between how these institutions operate, whether they are extractive or inclusive, have huge implications for the long-term prosperity of a nation.

“We were able to use a lot of techniques from labor economics, and other parts of economics, and import them into studying these issues of comparative development,” Robinson said. “It turned out to be very powerful.”

Robinson is widely recognized as the co-author of the best-selling Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), along with Acemoglu. Translated into 49 languages since its publication, the book offers evidence that nations which create incentives and allow everyone to participate in economic opportunities tend to thrive. 

He has also written and co-authored numerous books and articles, including the acclaimed Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2005) and The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty (2019, also with Acemoglu).

‘I just hope we can carry on’

While Robinson hopes his decades of research can help reduce global inequality, he understands that economists don’t have a silver bullet to solving the problem.

“I think maybe ideas are important in terms of giving people levers, or giving people ways to think about the problems in their society,” he said.

Though Robinson admits it’s probably naive to think nothing will change after receiving a Nobel Prize, which he described as a “rather surreal, out-of-body experience,” he looks forward to continuing his ongoing research—including two book projects and future collaborations with his fellow Nobel laureates. 

“We’ve been working together for 30 years, more or less. We’re still good friends, still talking about ideas nonstop. I don’t think that’s going to change,” Robinson said. “It’s a great recognition, and I just hope we can carry on doing the same thing. It’s what we’re good at; it’s what we like.”

In addition to Robinson, seven current UChicago faculty members are Nobel laureates in economics: Prof. Douglas Diamond (who won in 2022), Prof. Michael Kremer (2019), Prof. Richard Thaler (2017), Profs. Eugene Fama and Lars Hansen (2013), Prof. Roger Myerson (2007) and Prof. James Heckman (2000).

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James A. Robinson shares 2024 Nobel Prize for research on global inequality

Prof. James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago has been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored  Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science, for his groundbreaking research on “how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” He shared this year’s prize with Profs. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of MIT.

“James Robinson’s scholarship lays bare how much inclusive institutions matter to prosperity in a society,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “His work is in a deep tradition of University of Chicago scholarship that helps us to see the world anew and to shape it to the betterment of humankind.”

Robinson is the  101st scholar associated with the University to receive a Nobel Prize , and the 34th to receive the Nobel in economics. In addition to Robinson, seven current UChicago faculty members are Nobel laureates in economics:  Prof. Douglas Diamond  (who won in 2022), Prof.  Michael Kremer  (2019), Prof.  Richard Thaler  (2017), Profs.  Eugene Fama and Lars Hansen  (2013), Prof.  Roger Myerson  (2007) and Prof.  James Heckman  (2000).

Robinson was sleeping, with his phone off, when the Nobel committee attempted to reach him in the early hours of Oct. 14. His wife Maria Angélica Bautista, a senior research associate at UChicago's Harris School of Public Policy, received a text from a friend and quickly woke him up.

“It’s a little bit emotional. I’m super happy obviously, but very proud and honored,” Robinson said. “It hasn’t quite sunk in yet.”

An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research on the relationships between political power, institutions and prosperity. Robinson is the institute director of UChicago’s  Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts . He has conducted fieldwork around the world including Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. 

Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson are honored for work that aims to trace the historical roots of an age-old question: Why are some countries poorer and others prosperous? And why do these inequalities persist? Using both empirical and theoretical approaches the scholars have achieved, according to the Nobel committee, “a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.”

“Economists understand what generates prosperity,” Robinson  said in 2019 on the Big Brains podcast , “and so to me I’ve never been interested so much in rich countries ... to me, the puzzle has always been about poor countries and about why poor countries can’t take advantage of all this stuff which is in economics textbooks.”

Specifically, Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson study how economic and political institutions can cause these extreme income gaps. To do this, the scholars traced wide swaths of history, starting in the 16th century when European colonization of a large part of the world caused new institutions to spring up. The differences between how these institutions operate, whether they are extractive or inclusive, have huge implications for the long-term prosperity of a nation.

“It’s not about exogenous factors that condemn certain societies to poverty or bless them with prosperity,” Robinson said. “It’s really about how humans themselves organize their societies that makes the difference.”

Robinson is widely recognized as the co-author of  Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty  (2012) , along with Acemoglu. Translated into 49 languages since its publication, the book offers a unique historic exploration of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. He has also written and co-authored numerous books and articles, including the acclaimed  Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy   (2005)  and  The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty  (2019, also with Acemoglu).

Though Robinson admits it’s probably naive to think nothing will change after receiving the Nobel, he looks forward to continuing his ongoing research, including two book projects and future collaborations with his fellow laureates. 

“We’ve been working together for 30 years more or less. We’re still good friends, still talking about ideas nonstop. I don’t think that’s going to change,” Robinson said. “It’s a great recognition and I just hope we can carry on doing the same thing. It’s what we’re good at; it’s what we like.”

Robinson received his Ph.D. from Yale University, his master’s degree from the University of Warwick and his bachelor’s from the London School of Economics and Political science. Before joining the UChicago faculty, he previously taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. 

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Three Receive Nobel in Economics for Research on Global Inequality

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson shared the award for their work on explaining the gaps in prosperity between nations.

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Nobel Economics Prize Shared Among Three

Daron acemoglu, simon johnson and james robinson received the prize for their work on explaining inequality between countries..

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award Sveriges Riksbank Prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel for 2024 to Daron Acemoglu, MIT, Cambridge, USA. Simon Johnson, MIT, Cambridge, USA. And James Robinson, University of Chicago, USA. For studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.

By Jeanna Smialek

Jeanna Smialek is an economics journalist reporting from Washington.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on Monday to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and to James Robinson of the University of Chicago.

They received the prize for their research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.

The laureates delved into the world’s colonial past to trace how gaps emerged between nations, arguing that countries that started out with more inclusive institutions during the colonial period tended to become more prosperous. Their pioneering use of theory and data has helped to better explain the reasons for persistent inequality between nations, according to the Nobel committee.

“Reducing the huge differences in income between countries is one of our times’ greatest challenges,” Jakob Svensson, chairman of the economics prize committee, said while announcing the award. Thanks to the economists’ “groundbreaking research,” he said, “we have a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.”

According to the researchers, prosperity today is partly a legacy of how a nation’s institutions evolved over time — which they studied by looking at what happened to countries during European colonization.

Countries with “inclusive” institutions that protected personal property rights and allowed for widespread economic participation tended to end up on a pathway to longer-term prosperity. Those that had what the researchers called “extractive” institutions — ones that helped elites to maintain control, but which gave workers little hope of sharing in the wealth — merely provided short-term gains for the people in power.

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Diversity can be both a benefit and a challenge to virtual teams, especially those which are global. The authors unpack their recent research on how diversity works in remote teams, concluding that benefits and drawbacks can be explained by how teams manage the two facets of diversity: personal and contextual. They find that contextual diversity is key to aiding creativity, decision-making, and problem-solving, while personal diversity does not. In their study, teams with higher contextual diversity produced higher-quality consulting reports, and their solutions were more creative and innovative. When it comes to the quality of work, teams that were higher on contextual diversity performed better. Therefore, the potential challenges caused by personal diversity should be anticipated and managed, but the benefits of contextual diversity are likely to outweigh such challenges.

A recent survey of employees from 90 countries found that 89 percent of white-collar workers “at least occasionally” complete projects in global virtual teams (GVTs), where team members are dispersed around the planet and rely on online tools for communication. This is not surprising. In a globalized — not to mention socially distanced — world, online collaboration is indispensable for bringing people together.

• VT Vasyl Taras is an associate professor and the Director of the Master’s or Science in International Business program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. He is an associate editor of the Journal of International Management and the International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, and a founder of the X-Culture, an international business competition.
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Devastating floods that hit Germany last July were made more likely by the warming climate. Credit: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty

Late last year, the major climate summit in Glasgow, UK — the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations climate convention (COP26) — injected much-needed momentum into the political and business community in the fight to stop climate change. The year ahead represents an opportunity for scientists of all stripes to offer up expertise and ensure that they have a voice in this monumental effort.

Science is already baked into the UN’s formal climate agenda for 2022. In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is scheduled to release its assessment of the latest research into how climate warming is affecting people and ecosystems; a month later, the panel is set to provide an analysis of the options for curbing emissions and halting global warming. Combined with last year’s report on climate science , the governments of the world will have a solid review of the state-of-the-art of research on climate change. But the research community’s work stretches far beyond the IPCC.

At the top of governments’ climate agenda is innovation. Existing technologies such as wind and solar power, whose price has plummeted over the past decade, and more-efficient lighting, buildings and vehicles will help to reduce emissions. But if green energy is to push out fossil fuels and fulfil the rising demand for reliable power in low-income countries, scientists and engineers will be needed to solve a range of problems. These include finding ways to cut the price of grid-scale electricity storage and to address technical challenges that arise when integrating massive amounts of intermittent renewable energy. Research will also be required to provide a new generation of affordable vehicles powered by electricity and hydrogen, and low-carbon fuels for those that are harder to electrify, such as aircraft.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, such clean-energy deployments are unlikely to be enough to enable countries to keep their climate commitments. More innovation will also be needed — for example, in the form of technologies that can pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These have yet to be tested and demonstrated at any significant scale. Governments and funders also need to support scientists in efforts to understand the safety and efficacy of various controversial geoengineering technologies — methods for artificially cooling the planet, such as the addition of particles to the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space — if only to determine whether there is sense in even contemplating such alternatives.

Give research into solar geoengineering a chance

There are signs of renewed support for research and innovation in helping to address climate change. In Glasgow, 22 countries, as well as the European Commission (EC), announced plans to cooperate on innovation focused on greening cities, curbing industrial emissions, promoting CO 2 capture and developing renewable fuels, chemicals and materials. The EC has also announced efforts to drive new funds into demonstration projects to help commercialize low-carbon technologies. And China, currently the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is creating a vast research infrastructure focused on technologies that will help to eliminate carbon emissions.

China creates vast research infrastructure to support ambitious climate goals

In the United States, under President Joe Biden, the Democrats have also made innovation a linchpin of efforts to address climate change. A bipartisan bill enacted in November will expand green-infrastructure investments, as well as providing nearly US$42 billion for clean-energy research and development at the US Department of Energy over the next 5 years, roughly doubling the current budget, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC. Another $550 billion for climate and clean-energy programmes is included in a larger budget bill that Democrats hope to pass this year. Economic modelling suggests that the spending surge could help to lower emissions in the coming decade while teeing up technologies that will be crucial to eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of the century.

In addition to enabling green innovation, scientists have an important part to play in evaluating climate policies and tracking commitments made by governments and businesses. Many of the initiatives that gained traction at COP26 need science to succeed. That includes evaluating how climate finance — money that wealthy nations have committed to help low-income nations to curb emissions and cope with climate change — is spent. Research is also needed to understand the impacts of carbon offsets and carbon trading, for which new rules were agreed at COP26.

COP26 climate pledges: What scientists think so far

Climate science, too, must continue apace, helping governments and the public to understand the impact of climate change. From floods in Germany to fires in Australia, the evolving field of climate attribution has already made it clear that global warming is partly to blame for numerous tragedies. Attribution science will also feed into an ongoing geopolitical debate about who should pay for the rising costs of climate-related natural disasters, as many low-income countries seek compensation from wealthy countries that are responsible for the bulk of the greenhouse-gas emissions so far.

These and other issues will be discussed again in November at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where it will be crucial to make sure that everyone has a voice and that research supports climate monitoring and innovation everywhere, not just in richer nations.

A new agreement made at COP26 that requires governments to report annually on their climate progress should help to maintain pressure on them to act on climate change. But science and innovation will be equally important to driving ever-bolder climate policies.

Nature 601 , 7 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03817-4

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