MIT Technology Review

The second quarter of 2020 launched many digital transformation projects that didn’t necessarily happen at the behest of chief innovation officers, but because of the wrecking ball of disruption known as covid-19. Even if companies did succeed at rapidly orienting operations and services to digital, the transformation journey is far from over—and that means procurement…

It’s troubling, though not surprising, to see covid-19 cases spiking across the American South and Southwest, where public officials delayed lockdowns, rushed to reopen businesses, or refused to require people to wear masks. But what’s the matter with California? The nation’s most populous state was the first to enact statewide shelter-in-place rules, took decisive steps…

The covid-19 pandemic has unleashed changes that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago. In February, it seemed unthinkable the entire white-collar workforce of many countries would soon be working solely from home. It seemed unthinkable air travel would plummet by 96%, or millions of migrant workers in India would be forced to undertake a…

Covid-19 has been disruptive and bewildering for everyone, but especially for children. In the UK and in most US states, schools closed in March. Many of them will keep their doors shut until the fall. That’s six months without the normality of a school day, not to mention a significant break without any formal education…

The news: Early on Monday, Reddit banned r/The_Donald, a once-notorious pro-Trump forum, for repeated rule-breaking. CEO Steve Huffman announced that it was just one of 2,000 subreddits banned by the site as it institutes rule changes designed to make the platform less accommodating to hateful and abusive communities. The other news: Later in the day,…

On Monday, India banned TikTok and dozens of other apps made in China, escalating tension between the countries two weeks after a long-simmering border dispute in the Himalayas turned deadly. The news: In a statement, India said the apps “engaged in activities which [are] prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security…

The coronavirus pandemic has led to enhanced health-care collaboration, innovation, and increased use of digital technologies. Telehealth enables doctors to safely connect with patients virtually and monitor them remotely, whether in different cities or down the hall. And smarter and smaller medical devices are producing better outcomes for patients—a disruption is sensed, like low blood…

“We have the greatest testing program anywhere in the world,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on June 23. “We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases.” Trump went on to say…

Astronomers from Caltech have reported that they’ve observed a collision between two black holes. Normally such an event is invisible, but this time a more massive black hole sitting nearby helped illuminate the other two as they collided. If confirmed, the findings, published in Physical Review Letters, would be the first optical observations ever made…

The virus “I am very wary of simplistic projections about the ongoing outbreak based solely off of its current growth patterns” —Maimuna Majumder, SM ’15, PhD ’18, faculty, Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, and research associate, Harvard Medical School (ABC News, March 16) “Closing schools, bars, and movie theaters are good measures, but not…

Even before president Trump’s executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly skilled technical people, the US has maintained—and even restricted—its immigration policies, creating a bottleneck for meeting domestic demand for tech talent. Now…

The news: US Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies. Specifically, it would make it illegal for any federal agency or official to “acquire, possess, access, or use” biometric surveillance technology in the US. It would also require state and local law…

When it comes to supporting DevOps initiatives, mainframe technology—introduced in the early 1950s—isn’t likely to be the first to come to mind. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. Yet combining the processing power of mainframe computing with…

In 2015, alarmed by an escalating civil war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia led an air campaign against the country to defeat what it deemed a threatening rise of Shia power. The intervention, launched with eight other largely Sunni Arab states, was meant to last only a few weeks, Saudi officials had said. Nearly five years…

It’s an old story by now—cloud is the computing of the future. What has become evident in recent years, however, is cloud has established itself as the computing of the present—and the agile IT architecture it has enabled is critical to any organization’s efforts to increase efficiency and business resilience. In other words, transitioning IT…

Generals always fight the last war, runs the military aphorism. Politicians have also drawn heavily from battlefield lexicon in framing the fight against covid-19, but they too are at risk of leaning on outdated concepts and responses based on past crises that bear limited resemblance to the pandemic. With a vaccine likely to be many…

Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing that if artificial intelligence is going to help in a crisis, we need a new, faster way of doing AI ethics, which they call ethics…

Amazon launched a $2 billion venture fund to invest in companies developing ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, marking the latest corporate effort to allocate major resources to combating climate change. Investment areas: In a press release, Amazon said the new fund would focus on startups that could help it and other businesses achieve “net zero”…

The news: An open letter from a growing coalition of AI researchers is calling out scientific publisher Springer Nature for a conference paper it reportedly planned to include in its forthcoming book Transactions on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence. The paper, titled “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing,” presents a…

In the space of a few months, covid-19 has upended economic and social activity worldwide, sending billions of people home for months on end and causing productivity to tumble. In Asia, the first region to be affected, huge disruption occurred across what have been the world’s fastest-growing economies. The Asian Development Bank forecasts that productivity…

After a poorly-attended Trump rally, older liberals are celebrating online movements that they don’t really understand.

Jess Fong was feeling restless. Black Lives Matter protests stemming from the death of George Floyd were spreading, and she wanted to help. So she started scrolling through the plethora of lists that appeared online in the days after Floyd’s death of resources on how to fight racism. She found the advice limiting, particularly for…

AI is driving industrial transformation across a variety of sectors, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities. Some industrial innovations are barely noticed, such as forest inspection for fire hazards and prevention, but the benefits of AI when coupled with deep learning have a wide-ranging impact. In Southeast Asia, AI-powered forest drones have…

The roar inside a packed stadium is felt more than heard, a kind of whole-body buzz. As the announcer on the PA brings the crowd to a crescendo, techno music pumping and lights strafing our heads, distant figures file onto the stage, sit in front of keyboards and PC screens, and fit helicopter-grade headphones over…

Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just passed 800,000 tickets,” he wrote. “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” Parscale’s numbers for the rally—originally scheduled for Juneteenth and still set to occur…

There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them. Its Recovery Trial, launched early in the coronavirus outbreak to collect information from across the system, has led to the discovery of dexamethasone as one of the…

We’re still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up communities again, the uncertainties will only get more pressing. Here’s a look at some of the biggest questions we’re still trying to answer. How much…

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…

Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive tests in volunteers. But there’s another approach to battling the virus—one that hasn’t won much attention, but which in the future could become the fastest way to beat back a pandemic.…

The news: The UK is going to abandon its current contact tracing app in favor of one based on technology built by Apple and Google, the BBC reports. Tests of its existing app among residents on the Isle of Wight found it had trouble recognizing iPhones. The app had been supposed to launch for the…

The discovery that led Nir Shavit to start a company came about the way most discoveries do: by accident. The MIT professor was working on a project to reconstruct a map of a mouse’s brain and needed some help from deep learning. Not knowing how to program graphics cards, or GPUs, the most common hardware…

Jacob White, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was invited by Dean of Digital Learning Krisha Rajagopal to share the details of his teaching-from-home set up with the Academic Continuity Working Group. In this short video during one of the ACWG’s 8 a.m. calls, he walks through how he devised a makeshift lecture hall…

We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has transformed more familiar settings, like grocery stores and hospitals, into potentially hazardous environments as well. Erika Hayasaki, a writer and journalism professor in California, learned…

After students in 12.307 left campus, they were able to study atmospheric wind patterns using a virtual laboratory created from video of a real experiment using animation software. The above video shows a can of icy water placed at the center of a circular tank of warm water on a slowly rotating platform, creating flow patterns…

Watch a sample lecture: This clip from a “new and improved” 2.00b lecture covers goals for the students’ CAD milestone and provides tips for designing under constraints. It’s part of a 1.5-hour lecture that also includes a tutorial on using electronics components. The 2.00b teaching team wrote, filmed, and produced the full-length version of the…

The screen read ## result null set as expected but above the crash were strings of phrases Krishna couldn’t explain. ## Dog. Drinking water in a kitchen. A woman in a house at night. ## City, palace, god, priest. In the court of the Lord, slave, gold sword. ## A story in a book. A…

Inside a Schnucks grocery store in St. Louis, Missouri, the toilet paper and baking ingredients are mostly cleared out. A rolling robot turns a corner and heads down an aisle stocked with salsa and taco shells. It comes up against a masked customer wearing shorts and sneakers; he’s pushing a shopping cart carrying bread. The…

Learn other people’s languages NABIHA SAKLAYENClass of 2018 Cofounded Cellino Biotech, which uses lasers to “program” stem cells. I became an entrepreneur without knowing what it meant. My collaborators at Harvard Medical School saw how my physics perspective could solve challenges in biology and pushed me into entrepreneurship. However grueling my PhD years in a…

In early March I started getting calls from people trying to respond to what was clearly turning into a global pandemic. A government agency that funds R&D wanted help connecting its research teams with experts on scale-up and manufacturing. An academic lab was searching for folks in government or industry who knew about the ventilator…

I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said. It’s the founding tale of his startup, Ophelia; he’d already told part of it in his commencement speech at Wharton, and to potential investors. “There was a girl in my life,” he started. “I call her my girlfriend.…

As we learn more about how the coronavirus spreads between people, there’s more evidence to suggest that most infections are transmitted by a select few individuals we call “superspreaders.” Here’s what a superspreader is, the role these people play in transmitting the virus, and what we’re trying to do about it. What is a superspreader? The…

The news: Norway is halting its coronavirus contact tracing app, Smittestopp, after criticism from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, which said that the country’s low rate of infections meant that the app’s privacy invasions were no longer justified. As a result, the app will cease collecting new data, all data collected so far is being…

In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing face recognition technology to governments. As part of an increased focus on the role that tech companies were playing in enabling the US government’s tracking and deportation of immigrants, it called on…

Deepfakes⁠ have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didn’t. With tools for making deepfakes now widely available and relatively easy to use, many also worry that they will be used to spread dangerous misinformation.…

The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site. The…

It was a surge unlike any other, even for Amazon. In the first quarter of 2020, the e-commerce giant’s net sales increased by 26% over the same period a year earlier. It was panic-buying on a grand scale. Amazon.com search rankings from mid-March awarded top billing to toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and Clorox wipes, but…

The news: Twitter is testing a new feature on Android phones that prompts people to read articles before they share them. Someone who goes to retweet a link on Twitter without having clicked through to the story it leads to may be shown a pop-up message saying “Want to read this before retweeting?” It’s currently…

Demands for climate action have largely faded into the background as the covid-19 pandemic, the economic meltdown, and widespread protests over police brutality have seized the world’s attention. But for Rhiana Gunn-Wright, the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute and one of the architects of the Green New Deal, the issues are inextricably…

On board the International Space Station since May 2018 is a mini-fridge-size facility called the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), capable of chilling atoms in a vacuum down to temperatures one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for all intents and purposes, one of the coldest spots in the known universe. And…

After months spent battling covid-19, the US is now gripped by a different fever. As the video of George Floyd being murdered by Derek Chauvin circulated across social media, the streets around America—and then the world—have filled with protesters. Floyd’s name has become a public symbol of injustice in a spiraling web of interlaced atrocities…