Four ways Google Research scientists have been using Empirical Research Assistance

Google Research · 2 months ago

Google released Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), an AI system that helps scientists generate expert-level empirical software, which has been applied to four real-world problems: generating weekly forecasts for flu, COVID-19, and RSV hospitalizations that match or exceed CDC tools; deriving six general solutions for the unsolved cosmology problem of gravitational energy radiation from cosmic strings; developing a physics-guided neural network to map column-averaged CO2 every 10 minutes using existing weather satellites instead of the 16-day revisit cycle of specialized sensors; and discovering interpretable neural circuits in zebrafish by combining ERA with structural wiring information. Google has been submitting prospective forecasts to CDC challenges since November 2024 and performing at or near the top of public leaderboards for flu and COVID-19. The work demonstrates how AI-backed systems can solve open problems, democratize access to computational modeling, and extract additional value from existing observational instruments across diverse scientific fields.