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 and vendor management...

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 to build up the...

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 herculean exodus, walking thousands of miles to their...

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 still missing a few stitches. This article was produced by Insights,...

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 for the many children who cannot access online classes. It’s a global...

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, live-streaming video service Twitch...

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 of state and public order.” Messaging and...

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 of a black hole merger. What happened:...

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...

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 lawmakers have introduced a bill which 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 enforcement to bring in similar bans in order to receive...

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 one of today’s leading...

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 later, it still hasn’t stopped. By some estimates, the coalition has since...

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 months and possibly more than a year away, they have to...

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 for urgency.  JESS WHITTLESTONE For Whittlestone, this means...

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” emissions by 2040. It will...

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 face recognition...

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 in Asia-Pacific could shrink between...

The great TikTok teen and K-pop fan plan to embarrass US President Donald Trump at his rally last weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, began with a grandmother named Mary Jo Laupp. Two weeks ago the 51-year-old from Iowa made a TikTok video for her 1,000 followers encouraging people to protest against Trump by signing up for his rally online and then not showing up.  The idea wasn’t exactly new....

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 the Asian-American community. “We’re not Black and we’re...

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 capabilities to the cloud is seen as a (if not...

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 many brands...