Google Cloud Acquires Kaggle, Releases New Machine Learning Products

cloud

Google Cloud has acquired Kaggle, home to the world’s largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. More than 800,000 data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyze and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics.

Google Cloud is also releasing new machine learning products, including a Video Intelligence application program interface (API) that automatically recognizes objects in videos and makes them searchable and discoverable. Users can type in words such as “dog,” “flower” or human,” or verbs such as “run,” “swim” or fly,” and search within every shot or frame of every video file in their catalogs.

The API quickly annotates videos stored in Google Cloud Storage with video, shot and frame-level context. Here are some main features:

  • Label detection, identifying objects such as everyday items, places and things (i.e. elephants);
  • Temporal annotations: One can search for relevant entities across one’s entire video catalog and automatically aggregate one’s search by video and each frame location; and
  • Shot change detection: Detect scene changes within the video.

Some applications of this new technology include media archiving, allowing publishing platforms to recommend digital content to consumers, and video content discovery.

Google also revealed new capabilities for Vision API, as well as an Advanced Solutions Lab (ASL) training facility.

Vision API has added new capabilities that support new enterprise use cases for image search:

  • Expansion of video API’s metadata to recognize millions of entities from Google’s Knowledge Graph. Google is now using the same metadata that powers Google image search. This also enables the API to detect and group similar images.
  • Enhanced optical character recognition that can extract text from images of text-heavy documents such as books or legal contracts.

The ASL is a new Google facility in Mountain View, CA, that is designed for customers to directly collaborate with Google’s machine learning experts. Customers will be able to explore how machine learning can solve their specific use cases, while getting trained on the principles of machine learning and how to use Cloud Machine Learning Engine, which is Google’s fully managed service for building and training machine learning models at scale. The training is based on Google’s own internal education and training for machine learning.

Cloud Machine Learning Engine (CMLE, formerly known as Cloud Machine Learning Platform) is now generally available for all businesses. CMLE can create a rich environment across TensorFlow and cloud computing tools such as Google Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Cloud Datalab.

CMLE has been deployed by companies such as Airbus and Ocado.

Google announced these new products and developments at its Google Cloud Next conference, taking place today through March 10 in San Francisco.

For more information on Google’s new products and developments, visit Google Cloud’s Big Data and Machine Learning Blog.

About the Author

Richard Chang is associate editor of THE Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • data professionals in a meeting

    Data Fluency as a Strategic Imperative

    As an institution's highest level of data capabilities, data fluency taps into the agency of technical experts who work together with top-level institutional leadership on issues of strategic importance.

  • stylized AI code and a neural network symbol, paired with glitching code and a red warning triangle

    New Anthropic AI Models Demonstrate Coding Prowess, Behavior Risks

    Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, its most advanced artificial intelligence models to date, boasting a significant leap in autonomous coding capabilities while simultaneously revealing troubling tendencies toward self-preservation that include attempted blackmail.

  • university building with classical architecture is partially overlaid by a glowing digital brain graphic

    NSF Invests $100 Million in National AI Research Institutes

    The National Science Foundation has announced a $100 million investment in National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, part of a broader White House strategy to maintain American leadership as competition with China intensifies.

  • black analog alarm clock sits in front of a digital background featuring a glowing padlock symbol and cybersecurity icons

    The Clock Is Ticking: Higher Education's Big Push Toward CMMC Compliance

    With the United States Department of Defense's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 framework entering Phase II on Dec. 16, 2025, institutions must develop a cybersecurity posture that's resilient, defensible, and flexible enough to keep up with an evolving threat landscape.