MIT Technology Review

For years we’ve been using the phrase “gone viral” to describe something that becomes wildly popular on the internet. But it strikes a different note in the middle of a global pandemic, especially when the viral content is about an actual virus that is killing people. It’s even worse when you’re talking about “viral” content…

Dozens of states across the US are pinning their hopes on contact tracing to control the spread of the coronavirus and enable regions to reopen without sparking major resurgences of the outbreak. Alaska, California, Massachusetts, New York, and others are collectively hiring and training tens of thousands of people to interview infected patients, identify people…

Technology Review is running a project to monitor and observe the development and deployment of automated contact tracing apps aimed at curbing the spread of covid-19. Each weekday we review submissions, source information and update our database. This page lists changes, documentation, and reasoning where it is required. If you have a change to submit…

Brian Pokorny had heard of AI systems for call centers before. But as the IT director of Otsego County, New York, he assumed he couldn’t afford them. Then the pandemic hit, and the state governor ordered a 50% reduction of all government staff, forcing Pokorny to cut most of his call center employees. Meanwhile, inbound…

Covid-19 is primarily a respiratory infection that attacks the lungs, making it harder for patients to breathe and get enough oxygen to the rest of the body. Pneumonia and other respiratory conditions can quickly set in, eventually leading to death if the body cannot fight off the infection. But after over four months of cases,…

The story of blockchain market adoption closely resembles the path taken by other disruptive technologies: an initial industry explores what is possible, others give form and substance to what is plausible, and the marketplace helps define what is practical. It’s no longer a question of whether the technology will work—it does work. What’s at play…

The news: Thousands of droplets from the mouths of people who are talking loudly can stay in the air for between eight and 14 minutes before disappearing, according to a new study. The research, conducted by a team with the US National Institutes of Health and published in PNAS Wednesday, could have significant impact on…

Like most children in the US, Juana* hasn’t been to school in two months. Her mother, Dilma, left school after first grade and doesn’t speak English. Until recently, the family in Oakland, California, only had a very simple cell phone they used to make calls home to family in Guatemala. Without a computer to connect…

Some people die from covid-19, and others who are infected don’t even show symptoms. But scientists still don’t know why. Now consumer genomics company 23andMe is going to offer free genetic tests to 10,000 people who’ve been hospitalized with the disease, hoping to turn up genetic factors that could point to an answer. While it’s…

In this week’s episode of Radio Corona, we explore why the US has no idea how to manage all the testing data it’s collecting. Last week, reporter Neel Patel wrote about how the US’s decentralized public health system means there are no common standards for reporting testing data. That could create chaos in attempts to fight the pandemic, especially when it comes…

The news: In its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, released today, Facebook detailed the updates it has made to its AI systems for detecting hate speech and disinformation. The tech giant says 88.8% of all the hate speech it removed this quarter was detected by AI, up from 80.2% in the previous quarter. The AI…

The amount of data generated by businesses today has reached unprecedented levels following successive waves of digitalization across products, services, operations, and supply chains, and as a result of ubiquitous cloud computing technology. Data volumes are set to increase further still, as 5G leads to exponential growth in connectivity and makes largescale IoT deployments a…

The news: Wuhan’s entire population of 11 million people will be tested for coronavirus after the city, where the pandemic started, discovered new infections for the first time since its lockdown was lifted. Each district in the city has been instructed to create a plan to test every resident within 10 days, according to a…

The country has the highest penetration of any automated contact tracing app in the world, but one senior figure says it “wasn’t a game changer.”

In the week of April 12-18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too—and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying…

America is hiring an army of people to track down coronavirus cases. What’s the job like? How do people respond? And how stressful is it?

This weekend I’m going to break my isolation for the first time in two months. Aside from occasional socially distanced bike rides and walks in the park with a handful of trusted friends, I haven’t spent time with anyone, much less touched anyone beyond a hasty (and sleeved) elbow bump. But now I’ve agreed with…

The news: A 25-minute clip of an upcoming documentary featuring a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist was viewed millions of times this week on social media, before Facebook and YouTube pledged to remove copies of it from their platforms. On Thursday, Facebook told reporters that the documentary violated its policies by promoting the potentially harmful claim…

Millions of Indian citizens are being forced to download the country’s tracking app—a line no other democracy has yet crossed in the fight against the coronavirus.

There's a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them.

For our Covid Tracing Tracker project, we are sifting files, documents, and interviewing sources to monitor the status of automated contact tracing apps all around the world. But we’re also asking for your help to make the database better and more accurate. There are many countries worldwide, documentation and information in many languages, and a…

When the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was kicked off YouTube and Facebook in 2018, the lesson was supposed to be that deplatforming works. Without access to his millions of followers on mainstream social media, Jones became an online ghost, diminished and shouting his dangerous unfinished business to a much smaller audience. But some people…

Imagine you’re an epidemiologist or public health expert in the US during the current crisis. Senior elected officials have just contacted you to ask your advice on whether it’s safe to ease some lockdown restrictions. To prepare your answer, you will need to take a closer look at what the covid-19 testing data says. Getting…

On Friday, March 13, the management of the large hospital in Sacramento, California, where Kate works as a nurse anesthetist announced the cancellation of all elective surgeries. Kate and her husband had been pursuing fertility treatments for nearly a year. She had an appointment the following Monday at a private clinic to prepare for her…

Information firehose: The standard practice for teaching a machine-learning algorithm is to give it all the details at once. Say you’re building an image classification system to recognize different species of animals. You show it examples of each species and label them accordingly: “German shepherd” and “poodle” for dogs, for example. But when a parent…

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas our editors and reporters are thinking about. Episodes are released every two weeks. We’re making this episode—like much of the rest of our coronavirus coverage—free to everyone. When it comes to the latest technologies for testing, treating, and preventing the spread…

On Saturday, after three hours of flirting and playing games, Katia Ameri got “engaged” to Ronak “Ro” Trivedi—and the whole thing was live-streamed on Zoom. “I thought that he was very sincere!” she told me on Tuesday. “And he just seemed like someone I would get along with in the real world.” The pair were taking…

A few years after Li Jinxing graduated from college, he returned to his rural hometown to become a flower farmer. The days were long but the routine familiar: rise early and tend to the blossoms in the morning; trim and package those in bloom during the afternoon; deliver the parcels, delicately stacked in trucks, to…

This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and…

Income inequality is one of the overarching problems of economics. One of the most effective tools policymakers have to address it is taxation: governments collect money from people according to what they earn and redistribute it either directly, via welfare schemes, or indirectly, by using it to pay for public projects. But though more taxation…

The news: The UK government has announced it will start inviting residents of the Isle of Wight to download its official covid-19 contact tracing app this week. The app launch will start with National Health Service and municipal staff tomorrow, with all of the island’s 140,000 residents set to get access from Thursday. If the…

In some ways, California is a US leader in grappling with the covid-19 pandemic. It enacted early and aggressive social distancing policies that slowed the spread the disease and kept the death rate low, particularly among areas hit early by the outbreak. But the state has lagged others on testing and must significantly expand its…

The two technology giants have laid out new rules for those using their upcoming exposure notification system.

In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss the future of our connected world with Vint Cerf, one of the people known as a “father of the internet.” Cerf owes that title to having co-created TCP/IP, the communication protocols that underlie everything that happens on the…

In Portland, Oregon, earlier this spring, a programmer named Ian Hilgart-Martiszus pulled out a needle and inserted it into the arm of social worker Alicia Rowe as she squinted and looked away. He was testing for antibodies to the coronavirus. He’d gathered 40 friends and friends of friends, and six homeless men too. As a…

The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of. How it works: Give it a genre, an artist, and lyrics, and Jukebox will…

In less than two months, covid-19 created arguably the world’s largest collective shift in social activity and working practices. Research firm Global Workplace Analytics estimated in a 2018 report that 4.3 million people in the US worked remotely, representing just 3.2% of the country’s workforce. In a March 2020 poll of 375 executives by MIT…

The covid-19 pandemic has shown us how much health care is in need of not just tweaking but radical change. The pressure on global health systems, providers, and staff has already been increasing to unsustainable levels. But it also illustrates how much can be achieved in times of crisis: for example, China and the UK…

Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote "zombie content" that avoids content moderators and fact-checkers.

AI is rapidly transforming the way that companies interact with their customers. MIT Technology Review Insights’ survey of 1,004 business leaders, “The global AI agenda,” found that customer service is the most active department for AI deployment today. By 2022, it will remain the leading area of AI use in companies (say 73% of respondents),…