Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. Spreadsheets are widely used by organizations of all sizes for all kinds of basic and complex tasks. While simple calculations and graphs have long been part of the spreadsheet experience, machine learning (ML) has not. ML is often seen as being too complex to use, while spreadsheet usage is intended to be accessible to any type of user. Google is now trying to change that paradigm for its Google Sheets online spreadsheet program.

While simple calculations and graphs have long been part of the spreadsheet experience, machine learning (ML) has not.

Google is providing a software development kit, called ML Kit, that offers the company's machine learning technologies to developers building Android and iOS mobile apps. Featuring a set of base APIs to build machine learning into apps, ML Kit is now in public beta. It works with the Firebase mobile development platform. ML Kit's base APIs cover: Due soon is a smart reply API, providing suggested text snippets to fit a context. ML Kit acts as an API layer to custom models to make it easy to use these models.

Slipping under the radar late last year was the potentially groundbreaking news that Google has come-up with a very clever way to deliver higher-quality versions of low resolution images. The technology is called RAISR (an abbreviation of Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution since you ask) and it uses machine learning to produce what Google believes to be comparable or better results than other current super-resolution methods, while being between 10-100 faster at rendering as well. Whereas upsampling demands a larger file size with more pixels to attempt to get a higher quality image from a low-res file, it can still be quite ineffective at improving detail. RAISR works differently, using machine learning to train on pairs of images - one low quality, one high. It then finds filters that when selectively applied to each pixel of the low-res image, manages to deliver results that Google reckons is comparable in quality to the original higher-res image.