MIT Technology Review

Building driverless cars is a slow and expensive business. After years of effort and billions of dollars of investment, the technology is still stuck in the pilot phase. Raquel Urtasun thinks she can do better. Last year, frustrated by the pace of the industry, Urtasun left Uber, where she led the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving research…

In May 11, 1997, Garry Kasparov fidgeted in his plush leather chair in the Equitable Center in Manhattan, anxiously running his hands through his hair. It was the final game of his match against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer—a crucial tiebreaker in the showdown between human and silicon—and things were not going well. Aquiver with self-recrimination…

In 2005, years before Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa came on the scene, two startups—ScanSoft and Nuance Communications—merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade—an average of 27% per year in sales. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Revenues…

DeepMind’s streak of applying its world-class AI to hard science problems continues. In collaboration with the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL—a university in Lausanne, Switzerland—the UK-based AI firm has now trained a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to control the superheated soup of matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor. The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature,…

A dementia diagnosis can instantly change how the world sees someone. The stigma has a long reach, too: family and friends of those with dementia might also find that the world has retreated from them. The internet, at its best, can help make the reality of living with dementia more visible. And for some, the…

A startup plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide. The facility, developed by Mote of Los Angeles, would rely on the mounds of agricultural waste produced on the state’s sprawling almond orchards and other types…

Areas of New York City with higher rates of “stop-and-frisk” police searches have more closed-circuit TV cameras, according to a new report from Amnesty International’s Decode Surveillance NYC project. Beginning in April 2021, over 7,000 volunteers began surveying New York City’s streets through Google Street View to document the location of cameras; the volunteers assessed…

Over the past few weeks, convoys of truckers and sympathizers protesting vaccination mandates and covid restrictions have cut off Ottawa’s busiest border with the US. The sounds of air and truck horns have filled the air at all hours, to the point where an injunction has been required. Some protesters are camping in parks and…

On February 4, a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun knocked up to 40 new SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit. Now experts are worried about whether mega-constellations planned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others will be resilient to such events in the future. SpaceX had launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites on…

I have spent a lot of my career, both in Silicon Valley and beyond, insisting that all our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings. The metaverse, which graduated from a niche term to…

Something has changed for the tech giants. Even as they continue to hold tremendous influence in our daily lives, a growing accountability movement has begun to check their power. Led in large part by tech workers themselves, a movement seeking reform of how these companies do business, treat their employees, and conduct themselves as global…

In the early days of the pandemic, all eyes were on potential vaccines. In May 2020, the US announced Operation Warp Speed, a plan to spend billions on vaccine development. But mostly out of sight of the news media, quieter efforts to custom-design a covid-19 pill were moving forward with similar urgency and hope. Chemists…

The news: People who’ve caught covid become infectious far more quickly than previously believed, according to the world’s first “human challenge” study in which healthy young volunteers were deliberately infected with the virus. The study, carried out by a team led by researchers at Imperial College London, is the first to watch what happens from…

It’s one thing to know whether an individual customer is intrigued by a new mattress or considering a replacement for their sofa’s throw pillows; it’s another to know to how to move these people to go ahead and make a purchase. When deployed strategically, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a marketer’s trusted customer experience ally—transforming…

For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States. Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate,…

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold. …

OpenAI has built a new version of GPT-3, its game-changing language model, that it says does away with some of the most toxic issues that plagued its predecessor. The San Francisco-based lab says the updated model, called InstructGPT, is better at following the instructions of people using it—known as “alignment” in AI jargon—and thus produces less offensive…

Lisa Levy is a housing case manager at Columbus House in New Haven, Connecticut, where she oversees residents in a complex of 25 apartments. Each of her clients has a dual diagnosis of severe mental illness and a substance use disorder, and all have been homeless. “They’re among the most vulnerable people,” Levy says, “and…

Last month, I attended the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, where 26,000 geoscientists convened in person and virtually to share the latest Earth and climate science. Maybe a hundred of those people were there to talk about research on solar geoengineering—the idea of reflecting a fraction of incoming sunlight to cool a warming…

Moving to the cloud is all the rage. According to an IDC Survey Spotlight, Experience in Migrating Databases to the Cloud, 63% of enterprises are actively migrating their databases to the cloud, and another 29% are considering doing so within the next three years. This article discusses some of the risks customers may unwittingly encounter…

For organizations in today’s complex business environment, data is like water—essential for survival. They need to process, analyze, and act on data to drive business growth—to predict future trends, identify new business opportunities, and respond to market changes faster. Not enough data? Businesses die of thirst. Dirty data? Projects are polluted by “garbage in/garbage out.”…

Russia has sent more than 100,000 soldiers to the nation’s border with Ukraine, threatening a war unlike anything Europe has seen in decades. Though there hasn’t been any shooting yet, cyber operations are already underway. Last week, hackers defaced dozens of government websites in Ukraine, a technically simple but attention-grabbing act that generated global headlines.…

If you can recognize a dog by sight, then you can probably recognize a dog when it is described to you in words. Not so for today’s artificial intelligence. Deep neural networks have become very good at identifying objects in photos and conversing in natural language, but not at the same time: there are AI…

This story has been updated after charges were officially dismissed, and to include statements from Dr. Gang Chen, Rachael Rollins, the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and MIT president L. Rafael Reif. A judge has approved the government’s motion to dismiss all charges against MIT mechanical engineering professor and nanotechnologist Gang Chen, nearly…

The internet can feel like a bottomless pit of the worst aspects of humanity. So far, there’s little indication that the metaverse—an envisioned virtual digital world where we work, play, and live—will be much better. As I reported last month, a beta tester in Meta’s virtual social platform, Horizon Worlds, has already complained of being…

Artificial intelligence helps build physical infrastructure like modular housing, skyscrapers, and factory floors. “…many problems that we wrestle with in all forms of engineering and design are very, very complex problems…those problems are beginning to reach the limits of human capacity,” says Mike Haley, the vice president of research at Autodesk. But there’s hope with…

Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai, an underwater volcano off the coast of Tonga, has erupted several times in the last 13 years, but the most recent, on January 15, was likely its most destructive. The blast has had global consequences: more than 6,000 miles away, waves caused by the eruption drowned two people in Peru. But the effect…

Biologists at several startups are applying the latest advances in genetic engineering to the age-old problem of baldness, creating new hair-forming cells that could restore a person’s ability to grow hair. Some researchers tell MIT Technology Review they are using the techniques to grow human hair cells in their labs and even on animals. A…

On January 14, federal prosecutors recommended that the US Department of Justice dismiss all three charges against MIT nanotechnology professor Gang Chen, ending a two-year ordeal stemming from accusations that he hid funding from Chinese entities on grant disclosure forms. Chen had pleaded not guilty to all charges, while his employer had indicated that the…

In December, researchers reported that huge and growing cracks have formed in the eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-size mass of ice that stretches 75 miles across western Antarctica. They warned that the floating tongue of the glacier—which acts as a brace to prop up the Thwaites—could snap off into the ocean…