At a typical annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the program is a parade of titles like “A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection.” The same technical flavor permeates the papers, the research talks, and many hallway chats. At this year’s conference in July, though, something felt different—and it wasn’t just the...

In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining magnate who had gifted the land on which the university was built, had committed genocide against Africans and laid the foundations for apartheid. Under the rallying banner of “Rhodes Must Fall,” students demanded that the statue be...

Last week, European Union leaders approved the most aggressive climate-change plan in history. The eye-catching part was the $600 billion dedicated to green measures, spread across a massive economic recovery package and the seven-year EU budget approved in concert. All of it will be directed toward achieving the previously announced European Green Deal goal of becoming “climate neutral” by...

The European Union imposed its first-ever sanctions for cyberattacks on Thursday, targeting Russian, Chinese, and North Korean groups connected to several major hacking incidents. The action, which includes travel bans and asset freezes on individuals and organizations connected to ransomware and industrial espionage, follow earlier sanctions put in place by the United States. Retaliation...

In the past few weeks, a new vocabulary has emerged in parenting groups on social media: pandemic pods, copods, microschools, homeschool pods. All describe cobbled-together groups of students who plan to study at home together this fall as the pandemic creeps into a new academic year.  Homeschooling, this is not. As local and federal governments continue to squabble over the risks of...

Rising tides and storm surges will devastate economies and communities around the globe, if we don’t dramatically cut greenhouse-gas emissions and bolster shoreline protection. By the end of the century, increased coastal flooding driven by swelling ocean levels will endanger more than 250 million people and nearly $13 trillion worth of coastal buildings and infrastructure, according to a new...

Computer programming has never been easy. The first coders wrote programs out by hand, scrawling symbols onto graph paper before converting them into large stacks of punched cards that could be processed by the computer. One mark out of place and the whole thing might have to be redone. Nowadays coders use an array of powerful tools that automate much of the job, from catching errors as you...

Deep down, our drive to explore Mars has always been about figuring out the story of life in our solar system. Are we alone? Were we always? Or is life on Earth descended from Martian progenitors? NASA is now on the verge of launching its most ambitious effort ever to chip away at those questions, in the form of a high-tech rover called Perseverance and a scheme to return some of the samples it...

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was…

Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canada’s capital of finance and technology—and naturally, the region’s leaders want to set an example for the rest of the world. That’s part of the reason why in 2017, municipal organizations in Toronto tapped Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs to redevelop a…

Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval. What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer. Estep swirled together the mixture and…

The ongoing battle between social-media companies and covid-19 misinformation pushers—including US president Donald Trump—stepped up again this week thanks to a new viral video. And it has exposed, once again, how difficult addressing conspiracy theories is for Facebook, Twitter, and others. The latest video comes from a group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which is sponsored by the...

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The news: In a new white paper about its plans for AI, translated by China scholars Jeffrey Ding and Caroline Meinhardt, Tencent, the owner of WeChat and one of China’s three largest tech giants, emphasizes that deepfake technology is “not just about ‘faking’ and ‘deceiving,’ but a highly creative and groundbreaking technology.” It urges regulators to “be prudent” and to avoid...

In the depths of a downturn that has wiped out millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth, a wide range of voices in the US are calling for a green stimulus to kick-start growth and lay the foundation for a more sustainable economy. That sentence could have been written a decade ago as…

Biotech company Moderna has been making some pretty promising strides in developing and testing its covid-19 vaccine. The company just announced it was working with the US National Institutes of Health to launch what will be one of the largest covid-19 vaccine trials, a phase 3 study enrolling tens of thousands of American volunteers to assess whether the vaccine could truly protect people from...

Twitter recently announced it would take action against accounts posting information related to the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents follow the “breadcrumbs” left by a mysterious figure known as Q in cryptic messages posted about the Trump administration on anonymous online message boards. In response to their spread of misinformation and harassment, more than 7,000 accounts will be...

The European Union’s economic recovery plan is notable for its focus on climate action, sustainable investments, and a just transition fund. As part of this deal, the EU is also proposing a carbon border adjustment, also known as a carbon border tax, on imports by 2023. In the simplest terms, a carbon border adjustment is a tax on imported goods such as steel or cement, where the amount of tax...

Twitter is perfect as a megaphone for the far right: its trending topics are easy to game, journalists spend way too much time on the site, and—if you’re lucky—the President of the United States might retweet you. QAnon, the continuously evolving pro-Trump conspiracy theory, is good at Twitter in the same way as other successful internet-native ideologies—using the platform to...

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other evaluations to help companies determine which candidates to give an interview.  While activists and scholars warn that these screening tools can perpetuate discrimination, the makers themselves argue...

When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed.  Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today, has shown...

The US Space Command has announced it’s found evidence that Russia recently conducted a test of anti-satellite weapons , albeit one that did not destroy or harm any objects. SpaceCom claims that on July 15, Russian satellite Kosmos 2543 deployed a new object into its own orbit, similar to a previous anti-satellite demonstration in 2017.  What does that mean? A US SpaceCom...

The news: China’s Tianwen-1 mission to Mars successfully lifted off shortly before 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, July 23, Chinese media reported. The mission, which includes a lander, rover, and orbiter, is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in February 2021. China is the first nation to try to transport all three components to Mars at once. If the landing is successful, it will become the...

The first time the US went to the moon, it put down an estimated $283 billion to do it alone. That’s not the case with Artemis, the new NASA program to send humans back. Although it’s a US-led initiative, Artemis is meant to be a much more collaborative effort than Apollo. Japan is quickly emerging as one of the most important partners for this program—perhaps the most important....