Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to expand to power everything from security and facial recognition software to autonomous vehicles and mobile apps. In “Women leading the future of mobile AI,” a video series sponsored by Qualcomm Technologies, MIT Technology Review CEO Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau explores the latest AI advances on software tools, mobile platforms, and algorithmic...
This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as “miracles coming down from God.” If that’s true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue. The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the...
The president is running a disinformation campaign, and too many people won’t call it what it is. “The simplest disinformation is explicitly false or misleading information disseminated for political ends,” says Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who led a team that recently dissected the way disinformation is amplified. Take President Trump’s claim that voting by mail...
As of Tuesday evening, 18 people who’ve worked at the White House had tested positive for covid-19. That count is likely to tick upward. Now the White House strategy to prevent such an outbreak is coming under scrutiny—in large part because it hinged mostly on the use of daily rapid testing and nothing else. In March, medical-device maker Abbott Labs unveiled a new version of its ID NOW...
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded today to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing” called CRISPR. Genetic scissors: The Nobel Committee cited Doudna and Charpentier for an “epoch-making” experiment in 2012 in which they determined how to use CRISPR to cut DNA at sites of their choosing. Since...
“5G and the enterprise opportunity: How leading operators are developing ecosystem, cloud, and AI strategies for winning in 5G” is an MIT Technology Review Insights report that examines how operators are transforming their business and technology environments to deliver 5G enterprise services, particularly focusing on cloud, automation, and the ecosystems that are emerging to drive…
In middle school and high school, Nora Tan downloaded the big three of social media. It was only natural. “I grew up in the age when social media was really taking off,” says Tan, a Seattle-based product manager. “I created a Facebook account in 2009, an Instagram account in 2010, a Twitter account after that when I was in high school.” By the time she reached college, Tan was...
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead in a pandemic, and one of the infected is the President of the United States. But not even personally contracting covid-19 has stopped him from minimizing the illness in Twitter messages to his supporters. Meanwhile, suburban moms steeped in online health propaganda are printing out Facebook memes and…
The news: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it will remove “any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content.” QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory centering on the belief that the president of the United States is at war with a secret satanic pedophile ring run by liberals, has grown into an “omniconspiracy” in recent months....