California’s electricity system is buckling under the strains of a blistering heat wave that may have established the highest temperature ever reliably recorded. As residents cranked up air conditioning en masse to keep cool, the state’s primary grid operator ordered a series of rolling blackouts that have left millions without power in recent days, at least briefly. These were...
Mongolia shares the world’s longest land border with China, but its early and highly centralized pandemic response has been so effective that not a single person in the landlocked country has died from covid-19. A former army colonel turned public health official recounts how Mongolia enacted its extensive quarantine and testing regime under a state of emergency. We first heard about a new...
Any researcher who’s focused on applying machine learning to real-world problems has likely received a response like this one: “The authors present a solution for an original and highly motivating problem, but it is an application and the significance seems limited for the machine-learning community.” These words are straight from a review I received for a paper I submitted to the NeurIPS...