MIT Technology Review

The news: Researchers in the UK have calculated that its contact tracing app may have prevented around 600,000 cases of covid-19. The announcement is good news for the system—which underwent serious teething problems—and a step forward for exposure notification systems more generally. What they found: The study, by a team of Oxford researchers, modeled the…

I’m at home playing a video game on my computer. My job is to pump up one balloon at a time and earn as much money as possible. Every time I click “Pump,” the balloon expands and I receive five virtual cents. But if the balloon pops before I press “Collect,” all my digital earnings…

Israel was originally praised for its approach to covid-19 vaccine distribution, and was hailed as a model for how to get things done. But the picture that has emerged since is a lot more complicated. Covid-19 infections have reached record highs, and a new lockdown has been extended until the end of January. Meanwhile, there…

Miriam was only 21 when she met Nick. She was a photographer, fresh out of college, waiting tables. He was 16 years her senior and a local business owner who had worked in finance. He was charming and charismatic; he took her out on fancy dates and paid for everything. She quickly fell into his…

An official with the US covid-19 vaccine initiative says anyone in the country who wants a vaccine will be able to have it by June, seven months from now. The confident projection was made by retired Lieutenant General Paul Ostrowski, director of supply, production, and distribution for Operation Warp Speed, during an appearance on MSNBC…

On March 19, 2019, Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s largest producers of aluminum, faced a systemic, worldwide network ransomware attack. Its response strategy was built upon two principles: pay no ransom, and admit the breach. In this session, you’ll hear directly from Halvor Molland, senior vice president at Norsk Hydro ASA, about how their response resulted in unprecedented transparency and a distributed workstream that…

The modern AI revolution began during an obscure research contest. It was 2012, the third year of the annual ImageNet competition, which challenged teams to build computer vision systems that would recognize 1,000 objects, from animals to landscapes to people. In the first two years, the best teams had failed to reach even 75% accuracy.…

International organizations and corporations are racing to develop global guidelines for the ethical use of artificial intelligence. Declarations, manifestos, and recommendations are flooding the internet. But these efforts will be futile if they fail to account for the cultural and regional contexts in which AI operates. AI systems have repeatedly been shown to cause problems…

For years, North Korea’s Kim dynasty has made money through criminal schemes like drug trafficking and counterfeiting cash. In the last decade, Pyongyang has increasingly turned to cybercrime—using armies of hackers to conduct billion-dollar heists against banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, such as an attack in 2018 that netted $250 million in one fell swoop. The…

Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, intelligence services in both Beijing and Washington have vied to uncover secrets in one another’s countries, and to safeguard their own secrets, in pursuit of military, economic, and technological advantage. Many bona fide spies on both sides have been caught; many innocents have been…

2020 has brought global disruption of societies, customer behavior, and economies. The businesses that survive and thrive will need to make fast, smart decisions about how to pivot in today’s world. In this session, you’ll hear from Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, global vice president for block and object storage at Amazon Web Services, about how those smart…

Is AI at an impasse? The growth of AI to date has been fueled by massive amounts of data and exponential gains in processing efficiency. But are these gains sustainable and if not, what is going to take us to the next level? Join us virtually at EmTech MIT as we look at the status quo…

Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, seems to have liquid water seeping onto its surface, according to a new paper in Nature Astronomy. Data from NASA’s Dawn orbiter, the study suggests, show signs that it may be harboring an ocean deep underground. The background: Ceres, a dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt…

If contact tracing apps are following Gartner’s famous hype cycle, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion they are now firmly in the “trough of disillusionment.” Initial excitement that they could be a crucial part of the arsenal against covid-19 has given way to fears it could all come to nothing, despite large investments of money…

Last week, Alessandro Bogliari wouldn’t have imagined that anyone posed a serious threat to TikTok. Yes, there were imitators and competitors out there, but Bogliari, who runs a social media agency called the Influencer Marketing Factory, thought the app was so successful that there was no way it would be overthrown in the near future.…

Space junk isn’t going away anytime soon—and neither are the problems it causes. We’re poised to see more satellite launches with every passing year, which means more pieces of rocketry and spacecraft getting loose and zipping around at over 22,000 mph. At those speeds, even an object just a few centimeters long could instantly destroy a satellite,…

SpaceX successfully flew a prototype of its next-generation Starship vehicle for the first time ever on Tuesday, a major step forward in the company’s quest to eventually send people to Mars. What happened: Around 8:00pm Eastern Time, from its testing site at Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX flew the prototype about 500 feet into the air…

The news: The UK Home Office has said it will stop using an algorithm to process visa applications that critics claim is racially biased. Opponents to it argue that the algorithm’s use of nationality to decide which applications get fast-tracked has led to a system in which “people from rich white countries get “Speedy Boarding”;…

Researchers have demonstrated that they can fool a modern face recognition system into seeing someone who isn’t there. A team from the cybersecurity firm McAfee set up the attack against a facial recognition system similar to those currently used at airports for passport verification. By using machine learning, they created an image that looked like…

The news: Maryland biotechnology company Novavax has announced encouraging results from a preliminary study of its experimental coronavirus vaccine. The trial enrolled 131 healthy volunteers in Australia, gave them either a placebo or one of four escalating doses of its vaccine, and found that everyone who received the vaccine produced a high level of antibodies…

The context: Studies show that when people and AI systems work together, they can outperform either one acting alone. Medical diagnostic systems are often checked over by human doctors, and content moderation systems filter what they can before requiring human assistance. But algorithms are rarely designed to optimize for this AI-to-human handover. If they were,…

Quantum computers could make encryption a thing of the past, but 15 contenders are trying to prove they have what it takes to safeguard your data.

The news: A covid-19 vaccine candidate being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca proved safe and provoked a strong immune response in its first clinical trials. Participants’ systems produced both antibodies and T cells, and only relatively mild side effects were observed. The results were described today in a paper in The Lancet. The study:…

What do Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have in common? Dozens of high-profile verified Twitter accounts were hacked on Wednesday, seemingly to push a cryptocurrency scam that may have netted upwards of $100,000 in a matter of minutes. These kinds of scams are old hat on Twitter, but never have so…

We may think of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care in terms of scientific advances, such as a cure for cancer or a science-fiction tricorder-like device. But in the real world, AI is making its initial impact in workflow and administrative tasks. That’s not to say AI technologies aren’t being used for genuinely exciting work…

On May 4, a slick, 26-minute video was released, alleging that the coronavirus was actually a laboratory-manipulated virus deployed to wreak havoc so that a resulting vaccine could be used for profit. None of that was true, and Plandemic’s claims were thoroughly, repeatedly debunked. Still, it went viral, getting liked on Facebook 2.5 million times.…

The numbers tell the story. US venture capital firms have $444 billion under management, including $121 billion in “dry powder” waiting in reserve—all in pursuit of the next “unicorn” startup that will grow to be worth billions. But about three-quarters of the industry’s cash goes to support software innovation—a habit that’s looking particularly short-sighted at…

The context: One of the greatest unsolved flaws of deep learning is its vulnerability to so-called adversarial attacks. When added to the input of an AI system, these perturbations, seemingly random or undetectable to the human eye, can make things go completely awry. Stickers strategically placed on a stop sign, for example, can trick a…

Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: Can we go to Jupiter? Once we move past the asteroid belt, is it realistic to assume there is a chance humans could ever explore any of the gas giants, like Jupiter, really close…

5G cellular technology, which has been promised to provide a connective fabric that will cover the globe in a seamless digital experience, is starting to take shape. But the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 that has forced hundreds of millions of people to work and socialize remotely has made it clear that the connective fabric is…

Businesses today have a wealth of information to draw upon. It comes from customer touchpoints, mobile interactions, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, e-commerce transactions, and many more sources. And corporate governance has made it easier to comply with data privacy rules, so organizations can be confident about the data quality. But usefulness? That’s a major challenge that…

A pair of palm-tree-fringed coves form two narrow notches, about a quarter of a mile apart, along the shoreline of an undisclosed island somewhere in the Caribbean. After a site visit in early March, researchers with the San Francisco nonprofit Project Vesta determined that the twin inlets provided an ideal location to study an obscure…

Virgin Galactic announced it has signed a deal with NASA to develop a “private orbital astronaut readiness program” that trains and supports private astronauts for missions to the International Space Station. The background: Last year NASA announced it was accepting bids from private companies for missions to the space station, both as a tourist destination…