• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 10, 2017

Google has launched a research initiative to help humans better understand artificial intelligence (AI), as search continues to rely heavily on machine learning and similar technologies.

The initiative is called PAIR; it stands for “People + AI Research.”

PAIR will focus on the relationship between people and technology, new applications it enables, and how to make it comprehensive for all. "The goal isn’t just to publish research; we’re also releasing open source tools for researchers and other experts to use," Martin Wattenberg, senior research scientist at Google Brain, wrote in a blog post.

Google will divide the research into three areas: engineers and researchers, domain experts, and everyday users.

The research geared toward everyday users aims to open a new world to consumers, so they can look at technology differently.

Wattenberg admits, Google doesn’t have all the answers. And many times, AI will get the answers wrong.

That's why PAIR was announced with two open-source tools: Facets Overview and Facets Dive. The goal is to make it easier for programmers to examine the datasets. The tools address the beginning of the machine-learning process.

Facets will also let engineers debug more easily, as well as understand what they are building.

Take the Facets Dive visualization tool, for example. The tool provides an interactive interface to explore the relationship between data across the different features of a dataset. Each individual item in the visualization represents a data point.

Google provides a link allowing those interested to try the platform.