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5 articles from Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories

Twitter’s ban almost doubled attention for Biden misinformation

The news: When Twitter banned, and then unbanned, links to a questionably sourced New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, its stated intention was to prevent people from spreading harmful false material as America heads into the final stretch of the election campaign. But thanks to the cycle of misinformation—and claims from conservatives that social-media platforms are...

AI that scans a construction site can spot when things are falling behind

Construction sites are vast jigsaws of people and parts that must be pieced together just so at just the right times. As projects get larger, mistakes and delays get more expensive. The consultancy Mckinsey estimates that on-site mismanagement costs the construction industry $1.6 trillion a year. But typically you might only have five managers overseeing construction of a building with 1,500...

A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data

Machine learning typically requires tons of examples. To get an AI model to recognize a horse, you need to show it thousands of images of horses. This is what makes the technology computationally expensive—and very different from human learning. A child often needs to see just a few examples of an object, or even only one, before being able to recognize it for life. In fact, children...

Facebook and Twitter’s no-win situation over Biden

After months of experts expecting another hack-and-leak operation in the lead up to Election Day, a strange story appeared in the New York Post on Wednesday morning. It claimed to maybe contain emails belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, that could possibly indicate that Hunter introduced his father, then Vice President, to a Ukrainian energy executive.  Despite a headline claiming it...

Congress was warned over QAnon. Hours later, Trump boosted it.

The news: In a 90-minute virtual US Congressional hearing hosted by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, representatives took stock of the state of misinformation in America and sought advice from some of the leading experts in the field. What they heard were urgent, alarming warnings about the state of truth, political fragmentation and spread of conspiracy theories, specifically...