The team behind Alphabet's Project Loon, which uses high-altitude balloons to provide internet connectivity to remote areas of the planet, has stumbled on a way to reduce their deployment costs by 90%. During testing, the scientists discovered some balloons remained in one place, sometimes for months, allowing the team to develop an algorithm to cluster the balloons in teams. A new study from researchers at MIT and Harvard University shows that it is possible to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help make sense out of huge amounts of data.
The team behind Alphabet's Project Loon, which uses high-altitude balloons to provide internet connectivity to remote areas of the planet, has stumbled on a way to reduce their deployment costs by 90%. During testing, the scientists discovered some balloons remained in one place, sometimes for months, allowing the team to develop an algorithm to cluster the balloons in teams. The breakthrough could make Project Loom commercially viable, though the team says there is still much testing to be done.